I told them: everything you own is just asking for rooms and the right, controlled light, not to be shown off in big, open spaces.”In the gap where the bomb took out an entire wing, Frank Gehry proposed building a whole new exhibition space with curvaceous stairs, in direct contrast to the restored old building. Chipperfield looked upon the whole as one continuous project, without any interventions that would oppose it. As he explains, “Don’t yin and yang it.”Having resolved the critical reconstruction and talked them through in sequences, he explained what he calls “soft restoration”, for which four years’ work at the Leipzig Bank proved a dress rehearsal for his practice “Keep everything that is original. When restoring, make sure there is nothing synthetic about it. Don’t take off the render on the facade and redo the whole thing. Keep it, patch it in the same colour, but make sure it is seen to be new Not glaringly evident, but not faking it. To understand the fragments, you need to understand the surrogate form and maintain that authenticity.”This vogueishly palimpset approach lets fragments and traces of the past shine through It is more subtle than mere collage.

This is no cut-and- paste job, any more than it is a painstaking reconstruction.A palimpset is a parchment on which an earlier manuscript has been erased to make a clean surface for a new page. Having been written upon twice, the original writing sometimes shows through. The philosopher Jacques Derrida first used the word to explain the Post-Modern condition. The trendspotter Gore Vidal called his autobiography Palimpset, and architects such as Peter Eisenman, who designed Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin when the wall was still there, used it to explain “site-related geometry”.David Chipperfield avoids any -isms, confining himself to the belief that Modernism is now ready to accept the past and that Modernists are not ideologically against historicism.

“Modernists who made the brave new world had to make sure that it looked like that We don’t. We have the freedom to admit memory and to acknowledge that figure, and form, and texture are important. It’s not an ideology, all this debate about knocking down or preservation. Keep the evidence, use the traces.”They applauded Chipperfield at the end of the presentation, and as he landed in London four hours later his mobile phone was ringing He had won.Now Frank Gehry must be nursing a bit of jet-lag. But when he was pacing the waterfront outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao before its official opening, admiring the titanium burnish of his brand-new building, I asked him about his stated ambition to submit competition entries to build the Laban dance centre in London. He is famously sore about the fact that nobody in Britain ever commissioned a building from him ” Oh no, I withdrew,” he said.

“Leave it to one of the young architects who really needs it.”I hope that he can console himself with that now.. Barclays admitted yesterday it had raised only pounds 100m from the sale of BZW’s equities and corporate finance operations to CSFB, much less than original expectations. Tom Stevenson and Lea Paterson examine how the bank was outmanoeuvred by its Swiss rival. Martin Taylor, chief executive of Barclays, said he was far from disappointed by the pounds 100m the bank will receive from CSFB for its its European investment banking operations.

To everyone else, however, yesterday’s disposal appeared to have been badly bungled.
“Its a fair price”, said Mr Taylor, who has been widely criticised for the way he put BZW up for sale without first finding a buyer. “A lot of analysts over-estimate the attractiveness of the businesses, partly because they work in them. They can’t believe anyone had the temerity to sell an equities business”.Few agreed with his gloss, however. “It’s a very disappointing disposal”, said one analyst, who declined to be named. Another said: “The price is as bad as it looks, although the early expectations that Barclays would raise pounds 400m-500m from the disposal of all of BZW’s equities and corporate finance arms were probably over-optimistic.”Barclays admitted yesterday that the price tag represented only two-thirds of the net asset value of the businesses to be sold, which stands at around pounds 150m, and rather less than the operations’ turnover in the first six months of 1997.”I was very surprised to see it sell at less than net asset value,” said Kathryn Newton, banking analyst at UBS. Another was less diplomatic: “To sell at less than net asset value is a bad disposal”, he said.Mr Taylor was unrepentant, however, adding: “CSFB was the most credible buyer from the start and the fact that they have only bought what they wanted to buy means that will minimise the degree of waste.”CSFB, which has reserved pounds 50m as a “sweetener” for Barclays’ staff, was positive yesterday.