When Nigel Coates—the British architect, furniture designer, and master storyteller of urban scenes suffused with sensuality—was a young man, he invited a journalist over to the apartment he had refurnished with his lover at the time. Peter York, the writer, described the place in a 1980 article in Harpers & Queen as such:
“The owners’ favourite ideas [are] monumentality and squalor, Pier Paolo Pasolini [the Italian director of rather lascivious movies] and Andrea Palladio held together in a sort of conceptual membrane. The mood is “classical”—sacred and profane. It bears thinking on because it makes smart English interiors at whatever level look really crass.”
It seems like a pretty astute way to sum up the work of Nigel Coates, not only then but ever since. You certainly get that sense in reading his autobiography—Lives in Architecture: Nigel Coates—which was just published by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Though enamored of classical and baroque forms, as well as all things Italian (he has lived in the Tuscan countryside for at least half the year for decades), he also remains a British queer post-punk who in the book proclaims his pride in having brought provocation, grunge, and elegance, patched together from whatever is to be found in the streets of London, into the mainstream of architecture.
Coates was a central part of the London architecture scene starting in the late 1970s. This when he and his classmates and friends were, in turn, part of a larger revolution in music, fashion, and lifestyles that morphed from groovy and mod to punk and then into a fusion of historical forms and popular forms coalescing as a collage slithering into a flamboyant unity. Pioneered in the music scene (think Fine Young Cannibals and Boy George) and developed in fashion by the likes of Vivienne Westwood and later Alexander McQueen, this line of inventiveness was eventually appropriated as “Cool Britannia” under Tony Blair and sold to the rest of the world. Coates grew up in and rode the crest of this wave, with his most famous “building” being the “Body Zone” exhibit inside the monument to that movement, the Millennium Dome.
Note the quotation marks around “building.” Though Coates was trained as an architect, apprenticed in the design services of the London Council housing office, and has designed a few stand-alone structures, he very quickly realized that his interest was not in make big monuments. As he says:
“Rather than dreaming of the stand-alone masterpiece, my attention was shifting towards how to nudge what already existed. Developers were already on it. Warehouses were being carved up into lofts and banks were becoming pizzerias. These were the first signs of radical repurposing of existing urban fabric, which squared with my own taste for the warts-and-all city. Instead of being bulldozed, I knew buildings could be converted and would be all the better for it.”
Instead, Coates made his career designing the interiors (which sometimes bled to the outside) of shops, restaurants, and nightclubs, both in London and, during the roaring 1980s, in Tokyo. The spaces were marked by a fusion of furnishings and structure, with an emphasis on intertwined tendrils and melted versions of whiplash curves, all of which often wrapped themselves around industrial spaces whose bare bones remained visible. Consisting of elements that were pieced together and overlapped, Coates work yet had a sense of being an organic outgrowth of its rough and ready surroundings. It was the spatial equivalent of high fashion pieced together from historical elements and mylar strutting down the street on high heels attached to army boots.
Coates thinks of his design as narrative, favoring that strategy’s ability to evoke, if not exactly describe, fantastic worlds over the abstractions of geometry and structural expression. As he argues: “Narrative can puncture ‘architecture for its own sake’. It can easily draw in symbols and metaphors from everyday life … People could see and feel what we did, and seemed to enjoy its eclectic array of willful, contradictory references. Narrative design was knocking at the doors of perception.”
The designer’s narrative extended beyond physical forms from the very beginning of his career. He published a punkish and collage-based magazine, NATO, together with his students at the Architectural Association, the London school that was at the heart of the architecture scene during the 1970s all the way through the turn of the millennium. He also created a series of projects that were exhibitions, installations, and publications rolled into one. The most notable of these, A Guide to Ecstacity (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), reimagined the city as a continuous set of overlapping experiences you would have in a continually changing and living body that was somehow a metropolis. It was like a great nightclub where bodies, outfits, and music had merged into a spectacle:
“Ecstacity concept of renewal…evolved from the city where we already lived. Experimentation and preservation could work hand in hand, and reach towards the city as a complex paradigm of the human body, complete with its own bone structure, muscles, organs, metabolism, and circadian rhythm. This symbolic, collective body was also our body, your body, my body. It should never be superficial or wasteful, but could, and should, sustain sensual rewards and emotions. As though reimagining Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man for our times, the human condition, and not buildings, should always be the driving force behind the metropolis.”
In many ways Coates work and vision has long been the sensuous and even sexy mirror of that of his close friend, near classmate, and fellow tutor at the Architectural Association, the late Zaha Hadid. Against or within the explosions and later slithering forms Hadid threw out into the world, Coates has made forms that were like the bones, flesh, and costumes of that architecture. It is a queering—both in a sexual sense and as a deformation and “strange-making” of forms—in which Coates’ own life as a gay man play an important role. “I invest all my work with erotic nuance,” the architect coyly lets on. Coates work wound up being not just a combination of Palladio’s unified architecture and Pasolini’s explorations of erotic underbelly of society, but an effective fusion of them into narratives of urban life realized as places to shop and party.
Coates has been tremendously influential not only through his work—much of which happened to be stage sets for stores and nighttime that were hotspots of culture in both London and Tokyo during the boom years at the end of the 20th century—but also as a teacher and later the head of the architecture and design programs at the Royal College of Art. He also has designed furniture for both mainstream Italian manufacturers and more off-beat lines, and contributed to the cultural icons in surprising ways, such as by being the draftsman of the 1982 film The Draughtsman’s Contract, one of director Peter Greenaway’s stranger and more influential movies.
Since the advent of the pandemic, Coates and his husband have been living fulltime in their Tuscan aerie, and the book feels valedictory, especially as he no longer teaches and admits to have more or less given up on the idea of designing anything like a building or an interior, concentrating instead on the design of furniture. It is hard to believe, however, that someone whose imagination produces forms as beautiful and strange as Coates will ever stop writing his narrative of ecstatic architecture.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
