Not that it is your average static exhibition. Coates has made it a freestanding building – a transportable, inflatable version of his Sheffield pop centre with its four steel-framed drums placed round a covered courtyard. As if to emphasise the Palladian symmetry of the design, he has placed it bang in the middle of Horse Guards Parade, on the axis of William Kent’s sublime Horse Guards building of 1760. This is the joy of temporary, portable structures: no architect in the world would normally be allowed to build here. Since Powerhouse UK is designed to be transportable (Glasgow has already put in a bid for it for its 1999 festival of architecture and design, and the DTI wants to send it on a world tour) no objection was made to placing such a wild object in the heart of historic London. For which, many thanks. The contents, however, are another matter.
Inside, each silver drum with its inflated skin (lit blue at night) will contain a different "creative" theme – lifestyle, communicating, learning, and networking. These are largely meaningless buzzwords, but Coates the unconventional exhibition designer, working with the curator Claire Catterall, doesn’t let them cramp his style. "Lifestyle" will features a constantly-rotating airport luggage conveyor, complete with suitcases – on which are mounted the products, fashions and so forth. The "Learning" drum will place its university and college displays inside five glass hothouses (geddit?) while "Communicating" will boast advertising hoardings, videos, product designers and architects. There will be an abstract cityscape made out of packaging materials, round which Scalextric-type red buses and black taxis will run. As for "Networking", which is to do with what is described as the British culture of collaboration, expect electronic globes to flash seemingly random messages as you move among them.
This last drum seems entirely superfluous to me – there is plenty of overlap even between the other three, though a case can be made for each. However, the strict quadrilateral symmetry of the building means that there must be four rooms with four themes, no matter how contrived. The presentation, as so often with such tub-thumping patriotic events, will matter more than the content.
Before Powerhouse UK opens in April, we shall have a chance to see Coates’s "Oyster House" at the Ideal Home show. Now this, I [m4really[m0 don’t like. Another quadrilateral design – Coates picks up the model and places it over the plans of Powerhouse to prove the point – it is stylistically uneasy, a cross between early Le Corbusier and the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright or his disciple John Lautner. Put another way, it looks not so much like an oyster as a giant hamburger on stilts. That curving, copper-clad timber top deck also looks a trifle expensive for what is meant to be virtually a kit home. Inside, however, it is a clever, simple design, allowing parents and children, for instance, to have their own stairs and their own self-contained part of the house.
Despite my reservations, it is enough of a curiosity to make me want to go to the Ideal Home show to see it full-scale – and wild horses would not usually drag me there. You really must hand it to Coates. He proves that it is really not such a long journey from Blair’s Cool Britannia to the Middle England of the suburban housing estate.
