So what next for Wilford? His staff is now split 50:50 between London and Germany, but that does not give the whole picture; most of the work is now in Germany. Like Nicholas Grimshaw, he sings the praises of the German company culture, often family-run, and the craft culture that still thrives in Germany. Builders know how to build there, masons know how to dress stone properly, buildings are made rather than thrown together, there is a shared sense of pride in a building project. Wilford has faithful clients in the Brauns and the Stotmeisters, owners of large industrial dynasties for which he is commissioned for building after building. His Stuttgart arts district just keeps on expanding - a new museum and library, plus new public spaces between it and surrounding buildings, are now in hand. And in Berlin, there's the embassy.
That, being British, was a Public Finance Initiative project and, one gathers, got a bit sticky at one point. But Wilford did not let go. Now, the notoriously hard-to-please German planners love him for the way he decided to make a wholly 21st century building out of the given dimensions of a 19th century Berlin block: something many British architects find restrictive. Not Wilford, who has carved his block in such a way as to make a dialogue between exterior and interior, public and private. One would be surprised if there were not more Berlin commissions to come.
Wilford refuses to declare himself an adherent to any one style - that, he says, is for others to decide. But he drops clues. "I feel passionately that the Lowry expresses exactly what it is. There's no pretence. Space, progression, sequence. They're all traditional concerns of architecture - something you learn from studying and appreciating history. You overlay that with modern techniques and materials. You extend the lineage into the future. It's a kind of collage, if you like, of old and new."
In Stirling's case, there was a conscious rejection of the blandness of international modernism, and this went right back to his earliest projects in the post-war years. It is one reason that the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Bauhaus to his finger' ends, smelt treason in the British architectural scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, detected a cult of personality around its more celebrated exponents such as Stirling, Denys Lasdun and the Smithsons, and decided, earlier than anyone else, to describe this phenomenon as not only "anti-pioneering" but also "post-modern". Jim never accepted the post-modern tag, from Pevsner, later from Charles Jencks, or anyone else. No more does Wilford, who though he may reject Stirling's historicist phase, certainly has not rejected the lessons of history.
What you are left with, at the Lowry, is a residue of cultures and attitudes, piled up heroically. No high-tech merchant would ever countenance Wilford's titanic, industrially scaled perforated stainless-steel entrance canopy, for instance. They just could not do anything so huge and so crude. Frank Gehry would maybe understand it, but he wouldn't be able to do it, either. The taste merchants might just be able to stomach Wilford's palette of hot interior colours, from bright orange to imperial purple, but they will certainly draw the line at the jaunty decoration of the lavatories, derived from the funnel markings of the ships that used to ply these docks. It all smacks of a kind of showmanship. Which is rather suited to what is predominantly a theatre complex, but which - combined with cladding of a Gehry-ish fish-scale nature and some tilting foyer glazing a la Gunter Behnisch - does not help the architectural categorisers very much. And then there's that very classical plan...
However you cut it, the Lowry complex is therefore more of a memento mori to the concerns of the late 20th century than a manifesto for the 21st. But let the architectural historians sort that one out. In the meantime, you have two rather good theatres (one large, one small) back to back, an art gallery wing on each side, a tower with storage and administration for the Lowry collection, and lots of places to promenade and hang out. Arguably not since the Opera Garnier in Paris has so much public foyer space been wrapped around an auditorium: appropriate that the Paris Opera-Ballet will inaugurate the building. Will the crowds flock to Salford Quays to throng these spaces? I would imagine not. But if they do, then Wilford has triumphed.
Wilford (centre) with partners Laurence Bain (left) and Russ Bevington, 1999.
