Hayes Davidson image of Wilkinson's Stratford Market depot
(copyright Hugh Pearman: unpublished article intended for the Sunday Times, mid 1997)
It was a good moment, and an unplanned one. Just arrived through the doors of Norman Foster's American Air Museum at Duxford, I was staring at the sinister nose of a B-52 "Stratofortress" nuclear bomber. Then from outside came the crackle of what I now know to be a Merlin engine at full throttle. A Spitfire - worryingly tiny and fragile - swooped low right in front of the glass wall of the building, pulled up vertically, rolled casually sideways, and vanished.
Architecture does not often get chances like this. The problem with housing collections of moving objects is just that the objects no longer move. Nothing could be less dynamic, for instance, than Duxford's prototype Concorde, shoved into a dumb windowless shed at the far end of the airfield, jostled by so many other aircraft that you can scarcely make it out. Foster has to contend with the same problem and adopts a time-honoured solution - hanging as many planes as possible from the ceiling - but it would all still be lifeless if the building did not also act as a framing device for the action around the airstrip outside.
I am no uncritical admirer of Foster's work - it can at times seem formulaic and self-absorbed, there are about three distinct levels of aesthetic quality in the output of his huge office, and there's just too much of it, all over the world - but the air museum at Duxford near Cambridge, a branch of London's Imperial War Museum, shows him doing what he does best. Which is, to enclose space seemingly effortlessly, to manipulate light as if it were a tangible substance, and to refine a welter of ideas and references down to a simple, multivalent, image.
As the world must surely know by now, Foster is a pilot. Not just a weekend flyer, either, but a man qualified and able to fly just about any aeronautical machine in the world. Not since Antoine de Saint-Exupery has pilotage merged so seamlessly with another art form. Foster, of course, designs airports, from modest Stansted to Hong Kong's latest - the biggest single building project in the world, destined to be larger than Heathrow and Kennedy combined. But the museum at Duxford, tiny in comparison, offers more: the appreciation of the aeroplane as art object, in an architecture informed by the experience of flight.
Thus the building is a kind of blister-hangar, its curved form merging into the landscape at the rear to disquise its bulk. However its big service hatches, flush with the complex curve of the ground, open like giant pressurized cabin doors, so implying a fuselage. The sweep of the ground up and around the building also gives it the exact profile of a cockpit canopy, to the extent that its silver top looks as if it should slide open.
Along this implied sliding joint, where roof meets grass, Foster inserts a strip of glazing which, inside, acts as clerestory lighting. The trick is all the more impressive since the curving roof - which you would imagine would be a delicate, latticework affair - is in fact made of precisely-moulded, beautifully-finished concrete panels. You think of those American bombproof "hardened shelters" built at the height of the cold war, and then you see that Foster has floated his version on glass - a magician's trick.
