Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The Prince of Wales’s stinging attack on modern buildings in 1984, when he called a planned museum annex a “monstrous carbuncle,” still rankles many British architects. Not David Chipperfield.

“I don’t think it was completely wrong,” says the 55- year-old, who doesn’t mind his profession being “kicked up the” backside when “the quality of modern architecture is poor -- and certainly in the ‘80s in this country, it was really poor.”

Chipperfield stands out in other ways among his British peers. He gets little work in his home country, and substantial commissions abroad: Last weekend saw the opening, after 70 years, of Berlin’s war-ravaged Neues Museum, which he rebuilt. His new exhibition at London’s Design Museum, “Form Matters” (through Jan. 31, 2010), is his first big show in the U.K.

“I think everybody in Berlin knows who I am at the moment, but I don’t think many people in London know me,” says the quiet-voiced, straight-talking architect, as he sits among large maquettes of Berlin’s Museum Island in his London exhibition. He is youthfully clothed, in white jeans and a black jacket, and wears dark designer frames.

Chipperfield has brought a typically nuanced touch to the Berlin project. He has preserved the ruins of the bombed-out edifice, yet avoided replicating what was destroyed. Next on his Berlin to-do list: an entrance building that will funnel visitors into each museum and allow the complex, due to complete in 2015, to become Germany’s Louvre equivalent.

Is Berlin his best work? “I don’t imagine I’ll do anything as important or as significant as that again,” he replies. “It means something to the whole of Germany, and it’s somehow taken on a life beyond being just a piece of architecture.”

Spain to Alaska

As the retrospective shows, Chipperfield’s 25-year-old practice has many projects to its credit: the America’s Cup building in Valencia, Spain; sculptor Antony Gormley’s London studio; and the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, Germany. U.S. projects include museum extensions in Alaska, Iowa and Missouri.

U.K. recognition has been slow in coming. Chipperfield won the RIBA Stirling Prize (his profession’s highest U.K. distinction) in 2007, and last year became one of the governing artists and architects of the Royal Academy of Arts. His few U.K. projects include transforming the Royal Academy’s annex at 6, Burlington Gardens; and building the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in West Yorkshire, northern England, a cluster of irregular hexagons of which the maquette is on show.

German Subsidies

Chipperfield started his career 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 says architecture in the U.K. “gets tied up so much with business.”

He speaks admiringly of Germany, where the arts and architecture are generously subsidized, and disagrees with “the Thatcherite notion that you just let people optimize wealth, and from that we’ll become a sophisticated society, and from that you will have culture.”

The U.K., he says, must find a way of directing the energy from private investment into “making sure that it’s feeding our collective and civic structure” -- in other words, ensuring that business is contributing to the city environment.

Princely Protests

How does he view Prince Charles’s recent intervention to stop the building of an apartment complex designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners in London’s Chelsea district? (The development is on land purchased by the Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co. -- a unit of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund -- and by the property-developing brothers Christian and Nick Candy.)

“I think he was wrong to do it,” says Chipperfield. “To single out a building, I think, is unfair; to single out an architect is unfair.” He was even more disappointed that, 25 years after Charles’s famous architecture speech, the discussion remained just as basic.

“It was still football supporters: One side saying architects are arrogant, and the other side saying whatever,” he recalls. “It was a shame that the debate didn’t get more sophisticated than that.”

With the Neues Museum now open, does Chipperfield think he’s any closer to clinching the Pritzker Architecture Prize?

“I suppose at least I could be in the spectrum,” he says, “but I still think I would put many people way above me.”

“Form Matters” is at the London Design Museum through Jan 31, 2010. For more information, go to http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2009/david-chipperfield

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

Last Updated: October 22, 2009 19:00 EDT