Much too grand designs

Clissold Leisure Centre in Hackney is a thing of grace and beauty. Its two swimming pools have high ceilings, ample proportions and glass walls that make you think you are swimming out of doors whatever the weather. Its materials have a satisfyingly solid feel that is rare in this age of flat-packed, Ikea-inspired flimsiness. Its dignity is offset by a few playful touches, such as big Yshaped columns holding up an undulating roof.

Unfortunately, it is also fast becoming London's most notorious Lotteryfunded project since the Dome. Its cost, once set at £7 million, is now somewhere over £30 million, but no one seems to know for sure. The lovely roof leaks. The glass walls, while allowing views out, also allow voyeuristic views in. The nice, solid materials are cracking. As a result, after a brief span - February 2002 to December 2003 - as one of the finest places in London to swim, it has closed, the local council says, indefinitely. This is a loss, not only to connoisseurs of fine municipal architecture, but more importantly to those people in Hackney who will no longer have a place to practise their crawl.

Once described by its Manchesterbased architects, Hodder Associates, as "a sustainable sports centre" and "a catalyst for regeneration", it now looks anything but. Exactly what went wrong is a topic of robust discussion between the firm, the London Borough of Hackney, some other parties and their lawyers. The mayor of Hackney blames "serious defects in the design and construction of the building". Stephen Hodder, who before Clissold had a reputation as a dependable, decent, if unspectacular architect, has told the trade newspaper Building Design that no one at Hackney "would take responsibility for the building" at "the critical inception stage".

WHOEVER wins the argument, it is a heartbreaking story of good intentions gone awry, but it is also one with a familiar ring. Acclaimed architecture and leaky roofs, not to mention exploding budgets and other pitfalls, seem to be strangely attracted. The Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh is inching towards completion, the splendour of its design matched only by its spectacular busting of time scales and budgets. Last week Tony Blair opened a handsome new school in Brent, amid stories that its teachers were threatening strike action over problems with sound insulation and other faults.

Sometimes these stories simply illustrate the Chinese proverb that a nail that sticks up is hammered flat. In other words, mediocre projects also suffer defects, but they are never reported because no one is interested in them in the first place. There are, for example, schools built under the Government's Private Finance Initiative, supposedly a no-nonsense, businesslikeway of delivering efficient, if boring, buildings, where classrooms are too small and electric lights have to be left on all day in gloomy interiors. But these make less satisfying headlines than high-flying projects that fall flat on their face.

The high-profile flops also distract attention from the majority of ambitious buildings that are successfully completed on time and budget, including the still-reigning icon of architectural aspirat ion, the Bilbao Guggenheim. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that great architecture is accident-prone. Just consider the wobble on the Millennium Bridge, the cracking glass on the Gherkin, and that mother of all budgetary catastrophes the Sydney Opera House, whose cost progressed from seven million Australian dollars in 1962 to 102 million in 1974.

There is, in fact, a reason. It is the same reason why mountaineers break their limbs, or Formula One drivers crash, or great composers write near-unplayable music. It is because ambitious architects are straining at the limits of the possible, and sometimes exceed them. If they want to make a roof or a window that is not exactly like thousands of others, they are in the realm of experiment, and experiments can go wrong. There is nothing new in this: in the Middle Ages Beauvais cathedral, aiming to be the highest, collapsed. English cathedrals, including Wells and Salisbury, have extra arches inserted when their structures started to bend and warp.

These failings are soon forgotten. The Sydney Opera House, now 30 years old, is up there with the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal as one of the world's best loved icons. As writer Peter Murray puts it in a recent book on the opera house, "It has repaid its cost many times over as a tourist attraction and as a cultural centre. As a brand it is priceless." Londoners have forgiven the Millennium Bridge its wobble, or perhaps even feel increased affection for it, having witnessed its very public display of frailty, like a sinning star on Oprah.

The projects that are hardest to forgive are those which go horribly wrong without the compensation of inspiring us. (Step forward the Millennium Dome.) It should also be said that the very finest buildings are those which raise the spirits without inducing nervous breakdowns and financial ruin in the their clients.

So, is the Clissold Leisure Centre the Sydney Opera House of Hackney? Last year, another extravagantly designed swimming pool, the century-old Victoria baths in Manchester, won a national vote in the BBC's Restoration series as the building most deserving of funds for its restoration. Assuming it ever reopens, Clissold might one day inspire similar affection. It should also be mentioned that of the many ways Hackney has found to waste money in recent years, the leisure centre is not the only or even the most serious example.

But this does not excuse the centre's recent catastrophes. It ought to have been possible to build a beautiful swimming pool without them. Hackney, the second most deprived borough in the country, needs something that works. The fault may lie with the notoriously chaotic borough, or it may lie with an architectural practice aiming higher than it could manage, or with the light-headedness that sometimes accompanies Lottery projects. It may be any combination of the above, but whoever is to blame should still be deeply ashamed.