Big blue

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1994 by Colin Davies

Will Alsop's first major commission is a regional government headquarters in Marseilles that combines civic grandeur and political symbolism in a bravura interplay of form and technology.

Will Alsop likes to make out that his design method is completely irrational; that the strange forms of his buildings -- all those cigar-shaped objects on legs -- arise directly from his imagination rather than from the problems posed by brief, site and available technology. This is true, up to point. His first instinct when starting work on a project is not to set about collecting and analysing data but to paint a painting, or a sketchbook full of paintings. The paintings are then translated into buildable form and adapted to accommodate the brief. The method is radically subjective. Alsop paints what pleases him on the principle that if at least one person is satisfied there is a chance that others will be too. There is no attempt to derive form from function in the time-honoured Modernist manner, no appeal to an imagined objective realm in order to justify design decisions.

For Alsop, the idea that architectural form can arise naturally from the solving of practical problems is a myth. Architects conspire to keep the myth alive by a series of elaborate post-rationalisations, but they know in their hearts that the basis of creativity is ultimately irrational. Alsop simply ignores the myth and accepts the reality.

The method has now been put to the test in a really big building for the first time. The Hotel du Departement in Marseilles is the headquarters of the local authority for the region around the city known as Les Bouches du Rhone. Occupying a site to the north of the city centre, next to an elevated motorway junction and served by a metro station, the building is a startling presence in an otherwise shabby and characterless district. Two features scream for attention. First, its colour -- a deep, vibrant ultramarine like a distilled concentrate of the Mediterranean sky. Second, its shape, or at least one of its shapes -- a long, thin, curved and tapered object, not so much a cigar as a half eaten fish, lifted above the parapet of the motorway on seven splayed pairs of legs. This shape obviously doesn't have much to do with traditional upright, rectilinear architecture. It is a pure sculptural invention.

Or is it? The separation of this object from the rest of the building is actually justified in straightforward functional terms. The object has a name -- the Deliberatif -- which denotes not its shape or its colour or its resemblance to any other object but simply its intended use. A basic analysis of the brief has already taken place. Two main functional categories have been identified: political and administrative. The Deliberatif accommodates the political functions -- two council chambers, a function room and a club -- while administrative functions are housed in the rest of the building, known, appropriately enough, as the Administratif. This has a much more conventional form -- two parallel, upright, rectilinear office blocks on either side of a big top-lit atrium.

One other main formal element completes the ensemble, an object like a squashed Swiss roll with an outer crust of profiled metal, hovering over the taller of the two office blocks. Once again the separation of this form is justified in functional, or at least territorial terms: it houses the offices reserved for the politicians and an apartment for the president of the council.

Despite all the apparent irrationality then, at a strategic level the building actually articulates its functions in a fairly straightforward manner. There is also a time, dimension to this functional analysis. The Deliberatif is intended to be a permanent setting for the political functions of the building -- assembling, debating and making decisions -- whereas the Administratif is conceived as functionally flexible and changeable. The Administratif is basically just an office building, after all, and there is no guarantee that the decision to centralise the administration of Les Bouches de Rhone, which is the raison d'etre of the building, will not be reversed at some time in the not too distant future.

But there seems to be a contradiction here. If the Deliberatif is intended to be permanent, one would expect the form to be tailor-made to fit the function. In fact the fit is very loose. The main interior spaces were not even designed by Alsop himself but by Andree Putman (the council chambers) and Charles Bove (the members' club). Putman's interiors especially seem determined to ignore the shape of the object they inhabit, hiding the wrap around section behind flat suspended ceilings and stepped auditorium floors. Conversely there is nothing about the fish-on-a-plate external form that gives any clue to the nature of the spaces within. The clear implication is that the interiors might one day be ripped out and replaced and that the function of the building might easily change.

But this is a rational, Modernist way of thinking and it simply doesn't interest Alsop. For him the precise relationship between form and function is irrelevant provided the form does not actually impede the function. The Deliberatif is not meant to display or symbolise its function by referring to a conventional repertoire of forms. Rather it is the very strangeness of the form, its weird animal quality, that is important, marking the site as a special place like a tribal totem.