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| Amanda Levete in her London office. Photograph by Peter Guenzel. |
HOME editor Jeremy Hansen met Levete at her office in London last June. Here's his profile of her from the current issue of the magazine:
Amanda Levete almost didn’t become an architect. Expelled
from school for sunbathing naked on the roof when she should have been at
biology class, she had no idea what she was going to do next. “I got so
embarrassed that all my friends were going to university that I did an A-level
in art and art history and a foundation year at art school,” she told Stuart
Jeffries of The Guardian. “That’s when architecture came across my radar, and
when it did, I realised that I work best when I’m doing something creatively,
but have a boundary to push.”
Levete (pronounced Lev-eet) has been pushing boundaries to create remarkable
buildings ever since. For 20 years she was one-half of the innovative firm
Future Systems with her then-husband, the late Jan Kaplický. Together they designed
the Media Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground, a curvaceous pod of white aluminium
that almost bankrupted them but then won the 1999 Stirling Prize, Britain’s
most prestigious architecture award. Their subsequent design for Birmingham’s
Selfridges store, a swoop of a building covered in circular aluminium discs,
was hailed as a symbol of the city’s regeneration. Kaplicky stormed out of the
Selfridges opening because the finished structure wasn’t as pure as their
original design. Levete was more pragmatic. “I don’t devalue the power of
conceptual thinking, but for me the thrill of architecture is to see your ideas
realised – to struggle against the problems out there and overcome them,” she
told Jeffries.
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| An aerial rendering of what the EDP Cultural Centre in Lisbon will look like on completion. |
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A rendering of the EDP Foundation Cultural Centre in Lisbon, Portugal, designed by Amanda Levete Architects and currently under construction.  |
| The EDP Cultural Centre is a dramatic swoop on the Tagus River with a rooftop walkway. |
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| A rendering of the cultural centre's exterior and its specially designed tiles. |
Levete and Kaplicky had a son, Josef, but divorced in 2006 –
“a very public falling out,” according to Levete. Kaplicky, who was Czech, died in
Prague in 2009 at the age of 71, just after visiting his second wife, Eliska,
and their newborn daughter in hospital. He and Levete had continued working
together after their divorce, but had agreed to separate their architectural
practice four months before his death, which is when Levete established Amanda
Levete Architects.
Anyone who wondered if she had been riding on the coattails
of Kaplický’s genius (a word Levete uses to describe him) has since been
thoroughly silenced. In 2011, Levete won an international competition to build
an extension to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. The 1,500-square-metre
gallery for temporary exhibitions will be the biggest new art space in London
since the Tate Modern; the project also involves the design of a new entry to
the building from Exhibition Road. An earlier scheme by Daniel Libeskind was
abandoned seven years earlier after encountering a storm of public option. “It
was an iconic building, but the time for iconic buildings has passed,” Levete
told The Guardian. Her design is currently under construction.
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| A rendering of Amanda Levete Architects' competition-winning scheme for a new entry and gallery space for London's Victoria and Albert Museum. |
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| Another rendering of the V&A project, which features a courtyard connected to Exhibition Road. |
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| Two views of the new subterranean gallery spaces that are currently under construction at the V&A. |
Other major projects are nearing completion:
a waterfront cultural centre in Lisbon that reads as a dramatic bulge in the
landscape; a shimmering high-rise hotel and shopping centre in Bangkok which Levete
will attend the opening of on her way home from helping to choose our 2014 Home
of the Year. She has also designed furniture for London’s Established &
Sons and writes regularly about architecture, design and urbanism for The New
Statesman (you can read her articles here). Her office, a non-descript semi-industrial building in London’s
northeast, now employs more than 50 staff, who pad around on the immaculate
space’s bright carpet in socks (the office’s no-shoe office rule means you are greeted
by an archipelago of footwear when you arrive at reception).
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| Two views of Amanda Levete's London home, photographed by Gidon Fuehrer. |
This will be Levete’s first visit to New Zealand. Her
husband Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival, will accompany her.
She has already reviewed the entries in the 2014 Home of the Year with us, and
will help choose a winner when we visit the shortlisted homes in person.
First
impressions? This year’s entrants are notable for their “modesty in scale and
materials and technology, and within that they’re searching for something quite
profound and poetic,” she says. That seems promising.
We’re looking forward to showing her the best New Zealand
homes of the past year. Please come along to Levete's Auckland and Christchurch lectures: it’s
a rare chance to hear a remarkable talent reveal more about her remarkable
work.