There's a place for everything

Though he is in the first rank of architects, Terry Farrell has been derided for having no signature style. But far from being a weakness, versatility is his greatest strength, says Jay Merrick

Hot off the press is a book called Place, and it may turn out to be British architecture's most earthily significant wake-up call since the start of the millennium. Is it packed full of cool images of iconic buildings? Not exactly. Does it contain a text riddled with brilliantly ironic, deconstructionist insights? Absolutely not. Instead, the collages of time and location in Terry Farrell's unusually resonant memoir of his "early years to 1981" give us architecture by way of paper rounds for Harry Ebletts of Gosforth Road North in Newcastle; juvenile watercolours of terraces in Bedlington and Wigan Pier in the late Forties; and even an architectural tour of northern Europe in a putt-putting BMW bubble-car.

Hot off the press is a book called Place, and it may turn out to be British architecture's most earthily significant wake-up call since the start of the millennium. Is it packed full of cool images of iconic buildings? Not exactly. Does it contain a text riddled with brilliantly ironic, deconstructionist insights? Absolutely not. Instead, the collages of time and location in Terry Farrell's unusually resonant memoir of his "early years to 1981" give us architecture by way of paper rounds for Harry Ebletts of Gosforth Road North in Newcastle; juvenile watercolours of terraces in Bedlington and Wigan Pier in the late Forties; and even an architectural tour of northern Europe in a putt-putting BMW bubble-car.

Place has only one humble, but loaded, pretention: to Superglue architecture to memory, brick dust, beautiful landscapes, fading photographs and the ghosts of the tens of millions of people who made Manchester, Newcastle and London what they have become in the modern age. And what, in Farrell's urban-masterplanning hands, places such as Margate, Preston, Hull, Newcastle and chunks of the Thames Gateway will become. Place fronts up the gleaming fantasies and presumptions of architecture based on iconic buildings, rather than on the unruly and often politically soiled strata of the subtopias that are the real drawing-boards of architecture.

Farrell has been a much-debated figure for about a decade, despite his place in the top rank of both British and international architecture. I recall a heated conversation in New York two years ago, in which two of my fellow-critics joined battle on the éminence grise of Hatton Street, just off London's Edgware Road. One of them admired Farrell for his combination of architectural vision and masterplanning skill; the other insisted, scathingly, that Farrell was compromised because he "reinvents himself every few years".

On the face of it, it might seem hard to reconcile the richly coloured postmodern interiors of Farrell's mirror-glassed water-treatment plant in Reading, built in 1982, with, say, his recent iceberg-ish submarium in Hull, The Deep; and then to compare those with the architectural contents of his new mixed-use Paddington Basin redevelopment. There is a certain restless exploration to it all, regarded as perfectly normal by Farrell: "Why are artists respected for changing, and architects so often condemned for it?"

In Britain, one must stay in one's box. Farrell is paying the price for being one of Britain's architectural pioneers in the 1970s and 1980s, when his desire to deliver an architecture of evolution and, sometimes, very sharp change was partly rooted in a visceral and intellectual objection to the brutal modern architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, which gashed towns and cities with socially divisive inner ring-roads, and wrenched town centres into soulless abstractions in concrete.

Farrell's desire to innovate remains, but the ease with which younger architects can replicate or improvise architectural styles at computer-aided will is beginning to make the very idea of originality faintly ironic. Architecturally, we're in a motley age of technocrats, metaphorists and shape-makers whose buildings are as willfully jagged as the cadences of Walt Whitman's poetry, or Frank Stella's scrapyard art. Farrell - the architect rather than the masterplanner - is out on a limb because he doesn't possess a signature style.

The limb, though, is part of an extraordinary tree of assiduous effort and exploration across more than three decades. And it's a limb that developers, city councils and planning authorities are usually happy to share with him. Farrell is undoubtedly Britain's most respected urban masterplanner. He reminds us that there's no meaningful future without a meaningful past - and that even the most rapid change cannot afford to jettison previous evidence of time and place. Farrell is a postmodernist who keeps his rear-view mirror spotlessly clean.

And if we glance into it, we find a rich, humanist mulch of architectural cause and effect. Farrell's strength - if not his psychological default setting - is founded on the tensions of one or two dynamic ambiguities. He's a loner, a distruster of clubbish groups, yet committed to socially inclusive architecture. He is an acute observer and critic of political and administrative processes who, nevertheless, pursues their possibilities doggedly. And he's famous for producing architecture whose apparent distinctiveness often turns out to be founded on eclectic collage. It's possible to look at Farrell's Reading water- treatment plant, for example, and find brilliant strands of Bauhaus modernism, industrial postmodernism and art deco.

His perception of the world was always eclectic. He grew up on council estates in Sale, Manchester, and in a steel-and-asbestos prefab in Newcastle. The young Farrell loved menageries, and that yen produced his first mini-masterplan: a "town" made of intersecting boxes and cages in which to keep his rabbits, mice, guinea pigs and tortoises. He collected sticklebacks in jam jars, and studied wildlife at Seaton Sluice and Holy Island. Habitats - "worlds within worlds" - engrossed him.

Farrell the collector, then, the singular observer who turned against the order of Catholicism and anything that carried any whiff of the dictatorial. Once, infuriated by "a nightmare of unfeeling leadership", he deserted a Scout camp in the Cheviots and legged it home across the hills. However, his creative talent - his future as an architect, in effect - was unlocked by Maurice McPartlan, the art teacher at his Catholic grammar school. "I grew up exploring the edges and opposites," he says, "invariably turning against predictability."

Farrell's architecturally potent partnership with Nick Grimshaw, which lasted for more than a decade, produced riveting results in the Seventies; hi-tech solutions bolted on to innovative makeovers of existing buildings - architectural montages that were hard to classify. Farrell still seeks the transformation of urban "found objects", and the exploitation of accidental connections between old and new. "How", he wondered very early on, "could the modernist dictum, 'form follows function', be correct if a building designed for one purpose could be successfully turned into something radically different?"

That question must resonate for any architect faced with urban manipulation on a notable scale - and it can only grow in importance as the population and mixed-use pressures in our towns and cities increases. Architectural and urban makeovers cannot be scientifically achieved. They depend on the creation of identity, which comes, says Farrell, "as much from an intense and personal interpretation of the ordinary as from building huge cities or novel architecture". And from the ad hoc, too: even pragmatic or accidental change can deliver "a particular kind of harmony and beauty".

The harmonics of urban change are produced in a Britain in which "nobody plans. But the public realm, our urban places, cannot be left to hang," Farrell says. "Development control only effectively addresses the landholdings of the private sector, and no one considers the bits in between. All the post-war governments had seen our urban areas as problem areas and, while investing heavily in public projects, did not invest in the existing infrastructure of towns and cities." The Thatcher years, he adds, fuelled the vainglorious bonfire of private-sector development, giving loser status to the difficult leftover public "places and spaces" that brindled our urban expanses.

"Constraints in life there are aplenty," says Farrell, "but as we are merely existing in a snapshot of time, it is these very constraints and contexts that make us what we are, and our places what they are. Cities and towns are brilliant and extraordinary expressions of the human psyche in this search for personal and collective identity. They are statements about who we are, right now - and yet we know the city, the town, the village, the neighbourhood are all part of an accumulation from others in the past that we have added to, and that will be adapted and added to by our successors."

How many of us think of our habitats, our places, in this directly engaged way? How many of us are locked, instead, into the detail-stripping slipstream of a present awash with what the great Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas refers to as "the violent surf of information"? Terry Farrell is a figure in a landscape of possibility, and he has issued the first notable architectural polemic in Britain since the start of the new millennium. The idea of "place" - simultaneously real and fugitive - is back on the agenda.

'Place: A Story of Modelmaking, Menageries and Paper Rounds', by Terry Farrell, is published by Laurence King (£29.95)