Jan Kaplicky: visionary architect of Selfridges in Birmingham: TImes Online

architect/artist: Jan Kaplicky
obituary title: Jan Kaplicky: visionary architect of Selfridges in Birmingham
obituary compilation no: T-02
format: Text
date: January 18, 2009
appeared in: Times Online
writer:
photo by:

courtesy: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5541540.ece

Obituary Details:



Jan Kaplicky was one of the most original and visionary architects of the modern era. His free-flowing organic forms were realised in such celebrated buildings as the Lord’s cricket ground media centre and Selfridges in Birmingham. His practice, the aptly named Future Systems, pushed the boundaries of architectural form and use of technology with bold, sometimes outlandish proposals that were hailed as years ahead of their time.

Kaplicky was a pivotal figure in the high-tech “future modernist” revolution that transformed architecture in the late 20th century by exploiting new materials and industrial processes to produce buildings in the Modernist aesthetic. He worked closely with some of that genre’s best-known exponents, such as Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, and contributed to some of the movement’s totem buildings.

He worked closely with the studio of Rogers and Renzo Piano (1971-73) on developing their Pompidou Centre in Paris (1976). He later worked with Foster, on the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank skyscraper (1986). But while Rogers and Foster were prepared to make concessions to the commercial vernacular style of the day to win the big commissions and expand their practices, the more avant-garde Kaplicky refused to compromise. As a result most of his designs remained unbuilt for many years.

Kaplicky was hailed by his contemporaries as an architect possessing that rare combination of exceptional drawing ability and a fervid imagination. The futuristic world for which he had been designing in his head for years became a reality in the mid-1990s when he won his first big commission — the NatWest media centre at Lord’s cricket ground. It won the Stirling Prize, Britain’s most prestigious architectural award, in 1999.

The curving white shell stands boldly as a piece of space-age futurism and a defiant counterpoint to the traditionalism of the members’ pavilion directly opposite. The aluminium shell was fashioned by boat builders to achieve the quality of curvature that Kaplicky wanted. He worked with the Arup engineering consultancy to achieve a monocoque structure in which the shell carries most of the loads and supports itself with little need for structural elements within.

His Selfridges building at Birmingham’s redeveloped 1960s Bullring shopping centre, completed in 2003, quickly became the icon of that city’s regeneration, and was praised by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, as “wow-factor architecture”.

The building, described as a bluesequinned “extraterrestrial blob”, turned conventional retail design on its head by having hardly any windows in which to display the goods. However, the structure created such interest that the store was inundated with shoppers. It won the RIBA Award for Architecture in 2004.

For all his admirers within the profession, Kaplicky also had many detractors, particularly among those who said that his work was showy “blob architecture” that did little to relate to its surroundings. He represented the worst excesses of what the Prince of Wales derided as the “surrealist picnic” of “vegetable-shaped” modern architecture.

Controversial to the end, his international competition-winning design for a Czech National Library in Prague caused uproar in 2007. The Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, denounced the design — whose blobby, pyramidal form earned it the local nickname of the Octopus — as a potential blot on the folksy skyline of the city centre.

Kaplicky fought to preserve his original design, even cancelling his honeymoon to concentrate on his crusade to get the project built. He considered the building, which would have been his first in his home country, as his magnum opus. The strain of getting the library design accepted by politicians is said to have taken its toll on his health. He collapsed and died on a Prague street just hours after the birth of his daughter.

His design for the soon-to-be-built Antonin Dvorák Congress and Concert Hall Centre in the Czech Republic city of Ceske Budejovice is likely to be the architectural legacy he will leave to his homeland.

Jan Kaplicky was born in 1937 and grew up in the Prague suburb of Orechovka in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. His passion for architecture was awakened by looking at pictures of modern architecture and aircraft on the pages of Life magazine that his godfather used to send him.

He qualified as an architect from the College of Applied Arts and Architecture, Prague, in 1962 and settled into private practice in the Czech capital during which time he was already designing proto-versions of the buildings that would make him famous.

He left for London in September 1968 after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the liberal reforms of Alexander Dubcek. He escaped with only $100 and a few pairs of socks. Accompanied by his girlfriend, Eva Jiricna — who would go on to forge her own glittering career in British architecture — Kaplicky settled in London and found work with Denys Lasdun and Partners in 1969. He then joined the studio of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, but left when the practice relocated to Paris because he did not have a British passport. He later worked for Foster Associates (now Foster & Partners) in 1979-83.

Meanwhile, he founded his own practice — Future Systems — in 1979 with David Nixon. The practice did not win any commissions of note for 15 years. It became known as a provocative architectural think-tank — in the mould of the great Cedric Price’s studio — producing influential competition designs such as Grand Buildings in Trafalgar Square (1985). With its curved geometry and photovoltaic cells, the proposal did much to raise Kaplicky’s profile in architectural circles but he still lived in a world where there was little chance of his designs getting built. Despite this, the respect in which he was held was demonstrated by the fact that he taught at the world-famous Architectural Association in London in 1982-88.

In the late 1980s he was said to have been close to winning one of President François Mitterrand’s grands projets — the Bibliothèque National de France in Paris. The project was subsequently awarded to the French architect Dominique Perrault amid fierce political pressure that it should not go to a foreign designer.

Kaplicky’s first wife, Amanda Levete, joined Future Systems as a partner in 1989. Levete had built up a reputation in five years working for Rogers as his maturing practice saw the realisation of many celebrated designs such as the Lloyd’s Building in London. She is credited with bringing the more rational, practical nous required to realise Kaplicky’s visions in built form.

After the breakthrough commission to build the Lord’s media centre, there followed the “floating” bridge linking Canary Wharf and West India Quay in London (1996) and an underground Teletubbies house built into a Welsh hillside for the Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews (1996).

Kaplicky’s Enzo Ferrari Museum in Modena, northern Italy, is expected to be completed this year. Future Systems recently won a commission to design the redevelopment of the headquarters of News International, publisher of The Times, in Wapping, East London.

The description of the visionary who was years ahead of his time did not always wear well with Kaplicky and he could be taciturn, gloomy and embittered that his great talent had not led to more great works. His belief that his career had gone largely unappreciated is belied by the warm tributes that have poured in from Rogers and Foster, among others.

Kaplicky is survived by his second wife, Eliska, their new-born daughter, and the son of his first marriage.

Jan Kaplicky, architect, was born on April 18, 1937. He collapsed and died on January 13, 2009, aged 71

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