Coates, Nigel

   b. 1949

   Architect

   Born in 1949, Coates’s extravagant humorous architecture first took off in Japan in the late 1980s, where he became the guru of club owners, retailers and restaurateurs. More British clients followed in the 1990s. Partnered since 1985 by Doug Branson in their Clerkenwell practice, Coates later seemed to become the architect of New Labour in 1997: he was invited to 10 Downing Street, asked to work on the Body Zone human figures in the Greenwich Millennium dome, and commissioned to design Britain’s national exhibition at Expo 1998 in Lisbon. Known for his offbeat, largely anti-establishment ‘narrative architecture’ in the 1980s (for example, Jasper Conran’s (1985) and Katherine Ham-nett’s (1987) shops in London), Coates was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal College of Art. In 1998 he has commissioned to design a temporary building to accommodate ‘Powerhouse: UK’, an exhibition of British creativity organized by the Department of Trade and Industry. A maverick of the ephemeral and inflatable, Coates’s other projects include the organic, glass-clad domesticity of his Oyster House, presented at the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1998, and exhibitions at the Royal Academy’s Living Bridges show, the Design Museum’s Erotic Design, and the Sheffield pop centre.

   See also: restaurants and bars

   PETER CHILDS