Rooms and spaces for sculpture within the dynamic city. (Academy Forum).

NOISY AND MOVING. Art is for most people a luxury to be indulged after we have completed the necessities of living. This distinction between necessity and luxury is reflected in the way we spend our time. In broad terms, there is committed time and uncommitted time. The latter offers us the chance to be at leisure. But in modern consumer society, it is difficult to convince developers, highway engineers and others of the social value of places and spaces that are not recognized as an intrinsic necessity to the way of life. Design is for the most part a useful tool to enhance 'sales'.

Our firm is designing an urban environment of 17 hectares at White City in west London. Its raison d'etre is shopping, which for many is now a leisure activity. As such, it has entered the world of uncommitted time where most art seems to reside. The development also includes affordable housing, offices, a library, a nature reserve, two tube stations, a railway station and a bus station. At its centre is a covered space the size of a football pitch.

Our approach drew on a design programme I ran at the Technical University in Vienna which was based upon the notions of 'a space before, a space between and a space after'. The essence of this programme dealt initially with the designer's own memory of what constitutes space by asking them to design a space to be made. Then with the investigation of the late twentieth-century architectural space invader -- advertising -- and finally with an attempt to synthesize these two investigations to create a future architectural space.

At White City, the 'space before' has two characteristics, the local physical and social memory and the preconceptions of what characterizes a 'shopping centre', most clearly communicated through the views of our client, Chelsfield. The 'space between' is that part of the design process through which we are currently travelling, the design and planning process. The media world, promotion and advertising, and its inevitable invasion of the 'space after' is not yet at the forefront of our minds, probably because we feel nobler than others when it comes to creating 'space'. We know that the advertising teams and interior designers will arrive later, and we hope that our 'architectural space' is strong enough to keep its identity and character, and remain exciting no matter what the changing world of fashion and commerce puts into it.

Memorable spaces are usually exciting, unique and of recognizable quality. They are not static. People and events move through them like light and sound. They continually change with time and the varying density of human activity within them, but they do not surrender their intrinsic and enduring qualities. Such spaces have immense potential to attract visitors. In a highly competitive marketplace, the creation of such spaces must be of value not only to the development itself, but also the locality and, in this case, London as well.

So we have come full circle. Architectural space is not in conflict with the commercial world, for ultimately, a measure of its quality is that it will attract the consumer. Architecture is, at a very different scale, to be consumed and hopefully retained in the memory. It is genuinely capable of transformation which gives it spatial sustainability.

When architects removed the places for sculpture on their buildings, sculpture found itself upon the city plinth, the pavement and the piazza. The piazza was designed to create space and distance to appreciate the architecture, not to create extra space for sculpture. Since most sculpture is silent and still, it became an apt companion for the piazza, an area a little 'removed' from rushing metal and the dynamic of the city. When not in a piazza or park, sculpture finds itself occupying quirky left over spaces, such as Elizabeth Frink's Horse and Rider. However, new piazzas of varying scale are becoming a luxury within the city, and as the densified city emerges, they will probably be fewer and smaller. Canary Wharf's Cabot Square is 'filled' with 'urban' water at its centre. There is no real sense of place, and the sculptures of Lynn Chadwick are edged out without relationship to the Square. Tinguely/Niki de Saint-Phalle's approach above IRCAM in Paris is both apposite and happy and contrasts with the corpo rate world's approach to space and sculpture.