Frank Gehry and the land of the Prince Regent.

The Regency seafront of Brighton and Hove has seen nothing like this since the mad oriental domes of the Brighton Pavilion in the early 19th century. Now the Sussex seaside city, always torn between gentility and decadence, is about to get a 21st century equivalent. America's world-famous architect Frank Gehry, responsible for Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum, will on Tuesday unveil the final designs for his first big British project - an exotic £290m confection of billowing seaside apartment towers and multi-coloured pleasure dome.

Text © Hugh Pearman, images courtesy of Karis/ING. A fuller version of the news story published in The Sunday Times, 11th September 2005, as: "Brighton's towering makeover". Critical appraisal added at the end.

Gehry has been one of the world's most in-demand architects since his startling titanium-clad design for the Guggenheim made industrial Bilbao into a worldwide tourist destination in 1998. The equally daring 2003 Disney concert hall in his adopted Los Angeles confirmed his global reputation. Canadian-born, he has long wanted to build in the mother country but so far has only a small "Maggie's" cancer-care centre in Dundee, opened in 2004, to show here.

If his Brighton scheme gets the nod from the planners - and deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, if it is called in for government scrutiny - then Brighton and Hove, these days a boom city rather than a fading resort, will have its new architectural icon. Built on the site of what is at present the run-down King Alfred Leisure Centre towards the Hove end of the seafront, it will cover more than four acres.

A new £46m sports centre beneath an irregularly domed roof of jagged multi-coloured metal panels, will be surrounded by 754 apartments in two typically unorthodox towers and several lower blocks. There will also be shops and cafes around a sequence of small squares and alleys, which will include artworks by Anthony Gormley, sculptor of the "Angel of the North".

Now 76, Gehry can afford to pick and choose his work around the globe. He designed the tiny Dundee Maggie's Centre for free because he was a friend of its founder, the late Maggie Keswick Jencks. He was approached by Brighton-based developer Josh Arghiros from the Karis/ING consortium, helped by British architect Piers Gough, a friend of Gehry's. Arghiros says: "I think Frank has captured the spirit of this city - that was his intent. We are a multi-culltural, energetic, vibrant and liberal city. We are all about freedom of expression and that is what his architecture has so effectively captured."

Gough, whose own work includes a former house for U.K. media celebrity Janet Street-Porter, acts as Gehry's UK consultant for the project. The scheme has changed radically since Gehry first beat leading British architects Richard Rogers and Wilkinson Eyre in a competition for the site nearly two years ago. Then he proposed four, taller towers but, according to Gough, he was not happy with that. "Frank has shuffled it all around," says Gough. "There's now a carapace of mid-rise buildings around the perimeter. I really think he's paid attention to the context of Brighton. He doesn't just build his first idea. It's the architecture of the pleasure principle, exuberant like the seaside."

Speaking from Los Angeles, Gehry said that he had never wanted very tall towers, but that he was urged to do so by the Government's architecture watchdog, CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment). However, he chose to slash the height after winning the competition. "From the beginning, I thought that higher buildings were out of scale with the community," he said. "Then we discovered that there was a price premium on building taller anyway because of ground conditions on the shoreline. So in the end God had the final say, which is comforting." Now the scheme is only 10 per cent more dense than the city's Regency squares and terraces, he says - "so we're in the ballpark."

He had also designed a more subdued colour scheme for the central sports centre but again was urged to be more extreme by the government's advisors, he says. Either way, the explosion of colour is intended to reflect the lively, slightly louche nature of the seaside city.

Gentility gets a look-in, though: he has remained true to the idea of Victorian ladies being blown along the seafront with billowing dresses. "One thing that impresses me is the Victorian character of the town," he says. "I've got this picture of the maidens in their floating dresses in Brighton on the wall of my office. It's a kind of inspiration and the towers now do look as if they relate to that." The towers are each 24 storeys and 250 feet high.

However, he does not see this as a platform to launch himself in Blighty. "I have no yearning desire to invade England," he chuckles. "I think you're well taken care of by Richard (Rogers) Norman (Foster) and the boys." If he does another British project, he says, it might be another Maggie's cancer care centre, a cause he feels strongly about.

Gough has another take on this. "I think Frank would love to build something of a good size in Britain," he says. "He's Canadian, there's a bit of Britain in him. I think that he wants to show the British big boys that it is possible to do a different kind of architecture."

Not everyone is a fan, however. The city's two main conservation groups, the Regency Society and the Brighton Society, both objected to the first, taller, scheme. "I think the whole thing is totally crackpot," says Selma Montford of the Brighton Society. "It's marginally better, but its appearance is absolutely wrong on this site. The council wants it to be a tourist draw like Bilbao, but that's ridiculous. We are absolutely overrun with tourists here already."

Montford complains that the sports centre will not have all the facilities that the council wanted, and that the mix of luxury apartments and 40 per cent "affordable" homes will cut out people on average incomes. "We do have a severe housing shortage in Brighton, but these schemes do nothing for these people," she says. "Many of them are likely to go to investors".

Duncan McNeill of the Regency Society welcomes Gehry as an architect, but questions the brief. "I'd love to see Gehry build something," he says. "The developers and Gehry have done nobly. But you have to question why the council has so arranged it that you need to build 700 flats to pay for the leisure centre. It's a political issue."

Brighton City council has a policy of paying for new public buildings through the private sector: its acclaimed new Jubilee Library, built as a Private Finance Initiative project, is on this year's Stirling Prize shortlist. But objections to Gehry's project are likely to focus both on its high density and the fact that the city has a financial interest because it owns the site - as it also does the Brighton Marina at the other end of town, where a far taller development of skyscraper apartments is planned by Gehry's rival architects Wilkinson Eyre.

"The more they build on these sites, the more the council benefits," says Montford. "How can they be objective? Just because Frank Gehry is a famous architect doesn't mean that this scheme is appropriate to its site."

Gough, however, denies that Gehry is playing the big-name game. "He's uncomfortable with the idea that because he's famous he can impose solutions. He's passionate about context. At first I was encouraging him to do something even more spectacular. To start with he went along with it, but then he said, 'Don't you think we should do something more modest?' You can tell when he's not happy. He prowls around the room. It's only when he finally resolves the problem that he lights up."

Next month (October 5) Gehry will fly over to run through the project for a final time with CABE - a measure of how the Government's advisors see it as being nationally important. If the project overcomes all its planning hurdles, it could start to be built in 2007 and will take four to five years to complete. What would "Prinny", the Prince Regent, later King George IV, make of it all? Well, he commissioned John Nash to build the deeply eccentric Brighton Pavilion as his summer retreat, thus inventing the seaside holiday as we know it in 1820. He'd probably wonder what all the fuss was about.

Footnote: this was a news story, not a critical appraisal. I'll add one here. This is not vintage Gehry because he has been obliged to work to an over-dense brief. The towers are good, the indicated sports centre element works well between them and in front of them. These elements need more elbow-room, however: the conventional blocks crowd too closely around them.

It is a simple financial diagram, expressed architecturally: if all those apartments have to pay for the city's sports centre, and 40 per cent of them are "affordable" which means not terribly profitable, then you really have to stack 'em up to make the equation work.

Interestingly in my conversation with Gehry he casually mentioned that in his view those perimeter blocks could be a couple of storeys lower.

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