14 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Monday5 August 2019ARTS
Fuglsang Art Museum, Denmark— Peter Cookconstruction worker who dug the Picca-
dilly Line. When I said I wanted to be an
artist my parents were crestfallen.
Later, when I changed to become an
architect, they were quite happy.”
In between, however, there was a stint
of manual labour. “I worked for three
years on construction sites as a hod car-
rier and doing scaffolding. We’d had a
child and had to support a family. When
I arrived at the AA [London’s famed
Architectural Association school] they
thought I was extraordinary.”
He retains something of the demean-
our of a labourer. He is a burly man with
big hands and a powerful presence, and
you can see why he might have stood out
in the effete, upper-middle-class world
of architecture.
After the AA, “I worked for about 10
years in various offices and when Post
Modernism arrived I became disen-
chanted with architecture. It didn’tseem as exhilarating as film or art
or photography.”
He returned to architecture in the
mid-1980s, slowly building a reputation
for urbane, intelligent interventions,
often getting lumped together with the
emerging wave of minimalism. Archi-
tects hate to be pigeonholed, but it was,
for a while, a useful indicator, albeit one
that came to represent a kind of glo-
balised image of a luxury lifestyle. Fret-
ton went in a different direction.
“There are a lot of ways of being an
architect,” he says, “Not everyone needs
to emulate the star names. In a way,
their reputation distorts our culture. We
operate in a field that’s obscured by
starchitecture. Paul Rudolph [the US
modernist and head of Yale’s Depart-
ment of Architecture] said that Mies
van der Rohe could be such a brilliant
architect because he didn’t do half the
things that architecture needs to do. But
we do them. Perhaps it doesn’t generate
such immediate imagery, but it lasts.”
Fretton’s early, unbuilt workwas
hugely influential on a generation of
British and European architects.Then,
in 2004, came the superb Camden Arts
Centre, a reimagining of a pivotal local
and cultural facility and former munici-
pal library into a much-loved and pro-
foundly elegant new space.
There were also houses for artists,
including one in Chelsea for Anish
Kapoor. “Anish said he could never
encompass it in one thought,” Fretton
says, looking pleased. “It eludes that
kind of thinking.” There was the Euro-
pean Red House in Chelsea (2001), one
of the vanishingly few outstanding
newly built houses in the capital. And
there were housing schemes designed
more as background than foreground.
Slowly, more and more of Fretton’s work
shifted to Europe. He was teaching at
the Technical University at Delft, andR
ecently I wasasked what I
thought the best new build-
ing in London was. I was
taken by surprise and
blurted out “the Lisson Gal-
lery”, without thinking. It was later gen-
tly pointed out to me that the Lisson’s
“new” space opened 27 years ago.
Sometimes the blurted-out answers
are the best. When I was asked to think a
little more carefully, it was too late to
change my mind. The idea had stuck
and I think it was right.
The Lisson Gallery was designed
by Tony Fretton, Britain’s most
unsung architect. He has been a
presence on the scene sinceI was a
student three decades ago — at least.
He is a cult figure, much admired and
internationally respected.
I went to talk to Fretton at his office in
Kentish Town, north London, a sparse
space in a big old industrial building
turned business centre. I told him my
story about the Lisson. “Well,” he said,
“we could just talk about thedurée,
about buildings that last. If you think
about buildings a lot, you might get
buildings that last for a long time. They
can be reinterpreted, come to mean dif-
ferent things.” And he clearly does think
about buildings a lot.
If you wander past the Lisson, it
remains an almost mesmeric building.
If it had been built last week you
wouldn’t blink.
Except it couldn’t have been — it has
just influenced so much that has come
since. Its offset windows, so unusual
at the time, have become a virtual
cliché of contemporary façades. Its
huge planes of glass were unusual for
a gallery at the edgier end of Maryle-
bone (it was a lot edgier then), and for
one displaying sculpture. The paneswere designed to allow artworks to
be lifted in through the front, and, Fret-
ton says, to create a more direct rela-
tionship between the street and the inte-
rior. It’s a building which is open,
engaged. And from inside, with its gal-
lery set slightly below street level on one
side, it appears to use the window as a
screen, treating the street as a spectacle,
an ongoing artwork.
“It’s unusual to talk about a building
from 27 years ago,” Fretton says, “and
the Lisson is not a big building. But in its
way it was as influential as the Neues
Museum [in Berlin, restored and rede-
signed by David Chipperfield].”
Fretton is in many ways an unusual
character with an eccentric career and
is, perhaps, a product of his time. For
a start, he is that still-rare beast, a
working-class architect.‘Like bees, we are
building a world’
Belgium and the Netherlands proved
more receptive to his practice’s work.
The Fuglsang Museum in Denmark
(2008) is sublime, a museum about its
landscape as much as about the art.
Then, in 2009, came the brilliant,
stripped-down British Embassy in War-
saw (with a blast screen façade made,
incongruously, of glass) and a stream of
northern European housing projects
including the Solid 11 mixed-use block
in Amsterdam (designed to last 200
years) and the striking Westkaai Towers
in Antwerp.
These are not particularly high-
profile projects, but they exert a major
impact on their particular urban sur-
roundings. “What we’re doing is not the
norm anywhere,” Fretton says. “In the
absence of spectacular projects we are
making bits of city, places with a kind of
reward that will, over time, make the
place better.”
Some architects might resent being
under-appreciated at home. Chipper-
field certainly went through a grumpyTony Fretton is Britain’s most unsung architect, but widely
admired internationally. He talks to Edwin Heathcote
The year is 1518 and there are strange
goings-on in Strasbourg. An epidemic
of dancing has gripped the city.
Hundreds have taken to the streets
where they flail, jump and fling
themselves about with abandon.
Rather than clamp down on the antics,
local authorities encourage them by
building a platform and providing
musicians, hoping it will boost morale
after a period of famine and disease.
But after several weeks the dancers
begin to drop, dying from heart
attacks, stroke and exhaustion. The
“dancing plague” was, historians later
deduced, a case of mass psychogenic
illness, or “hysteria”.
In the new Audible seriesHysteria,
the actor, film director and presenter
Alice Lowe examines the phenomenon
in all its forms, looking at how it is
gendered, stigmatised and feared.
These six episodes, which have been
released at once, yield extraordinary
tales of meowing nuns, apparitions
on the battlefield and mass fainting
in schools and factories. We hear
about the Salem witch trials, a
sickness outbreak in 1990s Belgium
falsely blamed on a drinks
company, and the spread of the
anti-vaccination movement.
These stories can seem frightening,
bizarre or far-fetched, though, as wediscover, they are invariably rooted in
rational explanation.
The series explores hysteria on a
mass and an individual level, and looks
at how we understand the word itself:
to laugh hysterically is acceptable, but
to act hysterically is not. Hysteria hints
at wild or frenzied behaviour and
uncontained emotions. It is used
pejoratively about women — the term
comes from the Greek wordhysterika,
meaning uterus — but it can also be
attached to stock market crashes,
morality questions, public health
concerns, viral videos, myths and
folklore. As Lowe points out, “Hysteria
is as old as time.”
Lowe is excellent, blending wryness
and curiosity as the narrative
hopscotches across the centuries, and
draws on the testimony of historians,
sociologists, psychiatrists, journalists
and a modern-day witch. The
production is overzealous at times — a
discussion about a carnival in the 18th
century in which cats were put onbonfires brings with it the sound of
crackling flames, while a description
of two young Salem girls screaming
and crying is accompanied by the
sound of actual screaming and
crying. These moments leave little
to the imagination.
It’s a minor quibble, however, in an
illuminating series that is part history
lesson and part portent of future
calamity. While the stories of past
outbreaks are merely entertaining, the
reflections on present-day fake news
and how our modes of communication
encourage wild conspiracy theories are
enough to make the listener themself
hysterical. “With the advent of the
internet and mass communications,”
says the sociologist and author Robert
Bartholomew, “we are vulnerable to a
global outbreak of mass psychogenic
illness given the nature of our intra-
connected global village.” As with the
best historical pods,Hysteriashows how
the past can teach us about the future.
Right now, it doesn’t look too rosy.Tales of death-dances and meowing nuns
PODCASTS
Fiona
Sturges
A 1642
engraving by
Hendrick
Hondius after a
1564 drawing by
Pieter Bruegel
the Elder
depicting
dancing mania
Alamyphase, complaining that his best work
was all elsewhere.
“You might argue that our not work-
ing in the UK is a deficiency,” says Fret-
ton “But it’s not. We’re doing work in
placing British architecture in a Euro-
pean context and earning foreign cur-
rency. We’re an export business!”
What he is keen to emphasise, and
keeps coming back to throughout
our conversation, is the idea of practice.
“I wanted towork quietly towards
a cultural contribution. We were
concerned with social practices and
wanted to prove you could make inter-
national architecture for the people at
every level.
“And if we’re talking about sustaina-
bility,” he continues, “then it’s impor-
tant to give an emotional attachment to
buildings. On one side of architecture
you have the fame and the glamour,
but on the other you have an architec-
ture that might rebuild a society. Like
honeybees or spiders, we are building
a world.”“I’m from a progressive working class
family who’ve been in Hackney for 200
years, with deep roots in east London,”
he says. “My father’s father was a glass-
blower, my mother’s father was aClockwise, from
main: the Lisson
Gallery, London;
British Embassy,
Warsaw; the
house of artist
Anish Kapoor
in London;
architect Tony
Fretton
Peter Cook/View/
Shutterstock; David
Grandorge
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