Nov. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The global financial meltdown is likely to have one unintended side effect, predicts David Chipperfield: Fewer attention-seeking buildings will go up.

``It's an architecture of excess, a consequence of there being too much money around,'' says the British architect. ``At a time when people are worried about other things, those things become really irritating, and probably less relevant. So I think we will see a mood shift -- a certain sensibility coming back.''

While peers are busy putting up signature towers with nicknames -- the cheese grater, the walkie-talkie, the shard -- Chipperfield makes work that is hard to identify, often touching up what is already there. His best-known project is Berlin's bombed-out 19th-century Neues Museum, where he is preserving what is left, and not replicating what was ruined.

After years of having little work at home and much outside, Chipperfield is finally getting U.K. validation, too. He won the RIBA Stirling Prize last year, and just became one of the governing artists and architects of the Royal Academy of Arts. He is transforming the RA annex at 6 Burlington Gardens, and plans to ``use the rooms without knocking them around much -- follow the building.''

We meet at his crowded, self-designed studio, tucked away in a car-choked mews in Camden, north London. The visitor walks straight into rows of desks with staff working at laptops.

Baggy Trousers

Chipperfield, 54, is quiet and articulate, pauses for nuance, and has a cool, deadpan humor. He is youthfully outfitted in olive-green frames, baggy trousers, and suede sneakers. Guarded at first, he sits with arms crossed tightly across his chest, and speaks reluctantly in the first person.

The former Harvard University visiting professor has an explanation for the iconic-building frenzy. Architects, he says, are under pressure to deliver structures with ``the `wow' factor'' that will attract funds and visitors. While the search for new form has been ``liberating for the profession,'' it also ``produces a lot of rubbish,'' he says bluntly.

Where does Chipperfield fit in? ``I am highly suspicious of doing the extraneous and the superficial, of doing things for effect, of doing things that look silly after a few years,'' comes the unequivocal reply.

At the Neues Museum -- where a wing, a courtyard, and the central staircase were destroyed during World War II -- he has kept the traces of damage visible, like scars half-hidden by plastic surgery. Resisting full restoration, he has replaced the wrecked staircase with a modern concrete-and-marble structure.

Berlin Protests

The project has had its critics. Annette Ahme, who started a petition campaign called ``Save Museum Island,'' has protested against his preservation of war damage. The Gesellschaft Historisches Berlin, or Society for a Historic Berlin, wants the city to be restored as closely as possible to its prewar look.

Chipperfield's 24-year-old practice has many other projects to its credit: the America's Cup building in Valencia, Spain; sculptor Antony Gormley's London studio; the Stirling-winning Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, Germany. U.S. projects include museum extensions in Alaska, Iowa and Missouri.

Chipperfield started out working for U.K. architects Richard Rogers and Norman Foster in London, then left for Japan after getting nothing but fashion-store jobs at home. He describes the U.K. as a ``commercial economy'' where developers want architects they already know, and remembers being asked during a South Bank Centre architecture competition in London if he had ever worked in the surrounding borough.

``We're suspicious of things that are in any way abstract,'' he says of the British. ``We don't talk about ideas: We talk about delivery.''

Gehry, Hadid

Among peers, Chipperfield defines Frank Gehry as ``probably a genius'' in his ability to ``work outside the conventional boundaries.'' Zaha Hadid, with whom he studied, has ``contributed enormously,'' though as her buildings ``get bigger and more fanciful,'' he finds them ``less convincing.''

Unlike Gehry and Hadid, Chipperfield has never won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and feels he's not ready yet. ``There are lots of people who are in the queue first,'' he says, naming Peter Zumthor of Switzerland, who built the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria; and Japan's Kazuyo Sejima, of Tokyo's SANAA practice, who co-designed the New Museum in New York.

Not until he completes Berlin, which will also involve a glass entrance building to the museums and a link between them, will he consider himself eligible.

``When the Neues Museum opens, then I will have contributed something serious,'' he says. ``That's a serious piece of urban architecture, it's a serious contribution to a city, and to the history of architecture, I think.''

To contact the writer on this story: Farah Nayeri in London farahn@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 3, 2008 19:06 EST