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Ein umfassender Überblick zu dem Werk des renommierten Londoner Architekten Tony Fretton (1945 geboren). Nach seinem Abschluss 1982 an der angesehenen Architectural Association hat Fretton sein eigenes Büro eröffnet. Erste Beachtung fand er mit der Lisson Gallery und dem Red House in London. Seine räumliche Gestaltung und die Einbindung in den städtischen Kontext sind von subtiler Meisterschaft. Mit seinem Entwurf für das Camden Arts Centre, dem Fugelsang Museum Dänemark, dem Londoner Stadthaus für den Künstler Ansih Kapoor und der britischen Botschaft in Warschau zählt Fretton zu den bekanntesten zeitgenössischen Architekten. Die vorliegende Monographie ist die erste umfassende Publikation zu seinem Oeuvre. Seit 1999 hat Fretton Gastprofessuren an verschiedenen Universitäten: Technical University Delft, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne, Berlage Institute Amsterdam, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich.

[Tony Fretton] talks of space itself becoming vivid, and of how 'buildings, vehicles and objects collide with enormous frankness and no detail, and the fiction of the city is revealed'. The idea of a fictional condition binds Fretton's quest for an architecture of almost Zen-like bareness; rooms and spaces where the soft scrape of a shoe, or a cough, or the thump of one's pulse might be accentuated; small dramas that highlight the larger ramifications of lives and spaces. And so, not quite empty architecture after all, but milieux thronged with alt.phenomena emphasising human engagement rather than a self-regarding presence of form. We might think of Fretton's extreme architectural clarity as modernist, but it must lie somewhere else; between the idea of Platonic archetypes, the physical rigour of the Bauhaus, and the performance space. It has nothing to do with either architectural minimalism or postmodernism. Fretton dares us to exist in spaces, or lean against walls, or pass from one plain room to another, without comforting props or progressions. To scenographically inclined architects, he must seem a shadowy and faintly unnerving priest, a detached conscience, a walking absolution with attitude. The studio spaces are simply finished and whitewashed; light falls into them from the glazed, north-facing juts in the roof. In these rooms \" still, monastic \" we're completely cut off from the heather, the ferns, and the stag standing stock still a quarter of a mile away, beyond the 13 oaks in the shade of Holton Clump. Fretton's simply achieved complexities have produced a striking architectural moment here that recalls the abstractions of both Ben Nicholson \" his 1935 White Relief, for example \" with the positive- into-negative solid forms of Rachel Whiteread.

At the Camden Arts Centre his task was to make an amiable, vaguely Tudor building, originally built in the late 19th century as a public library, into a place with 21st century standards of facilities and access for the disabled. It has been an arts centre since the 1960s, offering both memorable exhibitions and studios for drawing classes and crafts. It is placed in somewhat anonymous territory on the edge of the Finchley Road as it rushes towards the motorway, the last point of culture, as [Tony Fretton] puts it, until you get to Birmingham. Fretton has opened it up with a new, glassy entrance at ground level, that allows you to look right inside. Around here, where everything else is impermeable and buttoned-up, the effect is telling. It also makes the old staircase redundant and strangely romantic, like a folly in a Georgian garden Inside, the opening-up of the building reveals a mature garden at the back, of which visitors would previously have been only dimly aware, while materials and details are chosen with acute sensitivity to their effect. A counter is made of leather \"so that its newness will wear off \". At the same time Fretton is at pains not to improve too much on the \"certain crudeness\" he found in the original building, with its old radiators dating back to its days as a library. \"There's a lot of cultural history here,\" he says \"which we wanted to preserve. A lot of people like it.\" Fretton's is a brave approach, which runs the risk of achieving nothing very much in particular. There are moments when the arts centre comes perilously close to this fate, but in the end Fretton has created something that is powerful without being ostentatious, and intelligent without being precious.

As it turned out, the supposedly biased jury didn't choose [Tony Fretton]'s shortlisted entry, the Fuglsang art museum in Denmark. Instead they opted for Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre in Hammersmith, London, by Richard Rogers's practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour. This is a nice building, but it wasn't pushing any boundaries to reward a small project by a 76-year-old already amply recognised. Rather than Nottingham and Warsaw, the shortlist this year's prize includes two schools, and a house and studio built by an architect couple for themselves. All are good buildings, designed by lovely people, and it's possible that the jury wanted to send a message to the government by including the schools. Look, they seem to be saying to the school-axing Michael Gove, the design of places of learning does matter. But the house doesn't open up new ideas the way Nottingham does, or have its public importance, while the prize's role is to recognise the best architecture rather than send messages. The good thing about this year's list is that it includes the two projects that were always the most likely and deserving winners, [Zaha Hadid]'s MAXXI (Museum of 21st Century Arts) in Rome, and the Neues museum in Berlin by David Chipperfield with Julian Harrap. The latter is a beautifully poised, meticulous, but also creative shaping of a new museum out of the bombed-out ruin of an old one. It is a smash hit in its home city. It represents a way of doing architecture, where the signature of the architect is not always apparent, that breaks with the icon-building of recent years.

The Stirling is awarded to \"the building which has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year\". But if you asked 50 of Britain's most talented younger architects which buildings these were, most would surely cite projects, and architects, from other parts of the world as their inspirations. The Stirling Prize shortlist has rarely, for example, contained a building of such urban, spatial and material brilliance as the Kolumba Kunstmuseum in Cologne by Peter Zumthor. The Swiss designer is a hero to many of Britain's most thoughtful young architects, but the only architects on the 2009 Stirling shortlist who have comparable status in this respect are [Eric Parry] and [Tony Fretton]. They are architectural explorers. They take risks. Parry's ability to untangle the complexity of historic sites and urban situations and layer 21st-century presence into them with artistry and subtly surreal provocation is unmatched in Britain. On a horribly herniated site in the City, Parry's Aldermanbury Square building may be an office tower, but it's richly engaging. Fretton, a burly and taciturn ex-performance artist, has become legendary for pared-down surfaces and details that create strangely tense confrontations between people and spaces: his interiors might almost be stage sets from a existential crisis filmed by Ingmar Bergman. It takes a brave architect to strip away comforting details and set up scenes that question the very meanings of space, surface and physical narrative - a compelling subject in a world dominated by controlled \"public\" realms, surveillance, and branding. Rogers Stirk Harbour's Protos winery in Spain, and their [Maggie]'s Centre, a support unit for cancer patients at Charing Cross Hospital, London, are highly accomplished modernist buildings. But the extraordinary structural virtuosity of the winery almost belongs in a vast display case; and despite the calm elegance of its spatial connections, the Maggie's Centre has the unmistakable ambience of an architect's dream home in Fulham Palace Road.

W here [Anish Kapoor]'s sculptures are often richly coloured and sensuously formed, his new home works around a limited palette. At first glance, it is as cool as a cucumber. \"I am naturally playful,\" Kapoor agrees, \"while [Tony Fretton] [Fretton], though he has a dry sense of humour, can be almost comically dour.\" The principal rooms have been designed for books and artworks. These, and family life (the Kapoors have two children), will provide all the colour needed. Fretton has worked with Hopton Wood limestone and Mandale Fossil stone, two materials much loved by British sculptors and architects since the 1930s. Hopton Wood limestone, quarried near Matlock, Derbyshire, is creamy, warm and studded with fossils; Mandale Fossil limestone, from a quarry close by, comes in shades of grey and is immensely hard-wearing. Kapoor and Fretton have known each other for years, since the artist's work was first shown in the Fretton-designed Lisson Gallery, in London. \"We've enjoyed a healthily detached relationship,\" says Kapoor. \"As a client, you need some sense of distance from your architect. I thought of keeping out of the way while he built the house - he's a craftsman by nature and very involved in construction - but I couldn't help myself, and ended up coming down nearly every morning on my way to my studio in Camberwell.\" Fretton has designed homes and studios for artists throughout his career. From the Lisson Gallery in Marylebone, through the Camden Arts Centre (in 2004), via modest and beautiful spaces including the Holton Lee Studios on the Dorset coast, Fretton's subtle designs have been handmaidens to modern British art. Each is quietly powerful; none gets in the way. Kapoor describes his own home as \"a reflection of a quiet modern vernacular\". \"It has traditional rooms, even if some are pretty big. And, look, we've even got skirting boards! They're made of strips of stainless steel rather than traditional timber, but which modern architect would put skirting boards in a new house? They hate them.\"

LONDON IS a city that has woken up to contemporary design in a big way. The city's aesthetic has long had a nice line in kitsch - Formica cafe interiors, brass-bedecked pubs and down-at-heel pie- and-mash shops - but it has never really set the agenda in terms of contemporary interior design. For decades, London lagged behind Paris, Milan and New York as a place where avant-garde interiors were commissioned and designed. There was always something conservative about interior design in 20th-century London. In the 1990s, the city saw a positive shift in its profile as a cultural and style capital. British artists such as Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread became global celebrities, London Fashion Week briefly rivalled Paris and New York, and British designers were praised around the world. Around the same time \"London minimalism\" emerged, referring to the work of such architects as John Pawson and David Chipperfield, whose meticulous expanses of white surfaces defined cool interiors. This aesthetic became, in a sense, London's own, and minimalism entered the popular lexicon as a catch- all label for contemporary interior design. This house is the most in-depth project yet for [TONY FRETTON] and his long-time friend and collaborator, artist [MARK PIMLOTT]. It was Pimlott who introduced Fretton to the client, a prominent art collector, and a collaboration between architect, artist and client took shape. Pimlott designed everything from balustrades to bathrooms, each one treated as an artwork. Perhaps the most beautiful of all his contributions is in the hallway. The hall is proportionally grand, but materially modest, punctuated only by the sculptural steel balustrade. Pimlott is to continue working on furniture and other interior pieces for the house - it will remain a work in progress f

[Gunnar Asplund]'s secret lay in stripping classical architecture of its rich ornament and laying bare its satisfying geometry. He freed it from 19th-century pomposity while retaining its grave and silent profundity. Approaching [Tony Fretton]'s more modest temple, you feel much the same way. Asplund's late-flowering masterpiece, it turns out, has been a significant influence on Fretton in Dorset. The architect's belief is that such buildings should be an open book. Planned meticulously, Fretton's buildings never bully their users, who are invited to find their own ways through them. They are, he says, quoting a fellow architect's review of Faith House, \"in a positive sense, an 'emotional blank canvas': you take from them what you want\". They are unassuming. \"I would go to any length\", says Fretton, \"to avoid architecture as self-portraiture.\" \"For me,\" says Fretton, \"both the architecture of the past and present exists in the present, always revealing its radicalness and capacity to talk about the heart of the human experience.\" It was this sense of radical timelessness, and his love of art, that led Fretton to his most uncharacteristic commission to date, the handsome and costly red-stone house for Alex Sainsbury, an art collector, alongside the Thames at Chelsea. Sainsbury's mother is a key figure in the Post Green Community, and here in Dorset, Fretton has returned to the design of low-kew, low-cost buildings.

This remarkable new red marble house in Chelsea, designed by Tony Fretton, is the closest I have seen this side of the Channel to the work of Adolf Loos, the Viennese master. Loos (1870-1933) was a proto- modernist, the author of the unforgettable 1908 Ornament and Crime, in which he fumed: \"Modern man, the man with modern nerves, does not need ornamentation; it disgusts him.\" Fretton, professor of architecture at the University of Delft in the Netherlands, has made his name as a thoughtful designer of modern homes and art galleries, including the Lisson Gallery in London and the Quay Gallery at Newport on the Isle of Wight. His portfolio is not extensive, yet, like Loos, he pours himself into his work. Where Fretton differs from the early European modernists - from the lush yet rigorous Loos to the strict school of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - is that he is, above all, a pragmatist rather than a rationalist. He listens carefully to his clients to create a fluent architecture that is intellectually and artistically refined but easy to use and full of unexpected twists and turns.

Triumphalist architecture will lead New Britain plc into the privatised new millennium. There's the Dome, of course, sitting in aggressive isolation on the north Greenwich peninsula, a monument to what a newly published pro-government essay - In Defence Of The Dome - describes in Orwellian terms as `a massive human resources project in New Labour groupthink'. Or what the rest of us know as corporate sponsorship and the celebration of private enterprise (the only way forward for the British economy, Peter Mandelson, the horny-headed Dome secretary told a cringeing Labour Party conference last week). And yet those of us with memories that stretch back to, ooh, 1997 will recall earnest New Labour discussions with certain politicians and ambitious members of labyrinthine quangos in which the idea of bringing art and culture to the plebs, especially those unfortunate enough to have been spawned in the provinces, was to have been rooted in a happy garden of small-scale, high-value (cultural value, that is) arts buildings. In those far-off days when New Labour was an untried and untested brand, it promised us a New Jerusalem, and many of us wanted to believe that the cultural crassness of the Thatcher years was to have been allayed. Art and culture are now the product lines of corporate desire and sponsorship. `It doesn't pay for architects to speak out today,' says Tony Fretton, a thoughtful and inspired British architect who has designed some of the finest small art galleries in Britain. `They're expected to keep their heads down. And, in any case, few younger architects are ideological in any way today. I think they're lucky. They're seemingly free from political agendas, from history and the old arguments of morality and design that beset my and older generations.'