Independent, The (London): Bexhill's brave new bandstand

A small and very beautiful architectural coup has taken place on the south coast. The De La Warr pavilion, arguably Britain's most graceful example of full-on 1930s Modernism, has been fronted up, quite literally, by a small, shell-like thing made of plywood and fibreglass in which, two Sundays ago, the uniformed musicians of the Bollywood Brass Band parped and oompahed while watching their sunlit reflections in the pavilion's steel-framed bay windows.

Modernism meets post-Imperialism meets neo-Modernism. And all because of a bandstand that posed an acid test to its young architect, Niall McLaughlin. Could he deliver something that was original and that echoed the rhyme and reason that, in 1933, informed the original design of Erich Mendelsohn's sinuous essay in concrete, steel and glass?

When the pavilion, commissioned by the ninth Earl De La Warr, rose above the beach at Bexhill-on-Sea, Huxley's Brave New World seemed at hand. Even as Edwin Lutyens' classically derived masterpiece, the government buildings at Delhi, was completed, Mendelsohn's pavilion arrived like a spaceship time-warping backwards from the 21st century.

Now McLaughlin has, in effect, done a Mendelsohn, by delivering a bandstand whose form, though vaguely shell-like, seems avant-garde, something on a visit from the future that Disgusted of Bexhill may well take some getting used to. The same thing occurred to a Professor Reilly in 1935. He told The Manchester Guardian that, "when one looks at the plain cream surfaces, divided by long vertical lines, to define the inevit- able gradations of colour, one wonders whether we are yet ready, and particularly whether Bexhill is yet ready, for such elegance".

The bandstand re-invokes that quest for elegance without recourse to pastiche or the cherry-picking of any detailed references from the pavilion's delightful seaward facade. It does, however, tap into the building's two most obvious aesthetic vibes: an extreme feeling of lightness, in both senses, and the perfectly scaled finesse of its raking horizontal lines.

Unlike the pavilion, McLaughlin's bandstand is an architecture that edges into sculpture. And there's another fundamental difference. Mendelsohn's creation, Britain's first large welded- steel framed building, was an early manifestation of Vorsprung durch Technik: new materials, new technology, new engineering; a streamlined Audi TT in a landscape of chuntering, four-square Daimlers.

The bandstand, though, is more craft work than Kraftwerk. Computer modelling may have been vital in refining its form to meet structural and sonic requirements, yet only the finest carpentry skills could have brought the bandstand to life. It has a lightweight, steel- tubed sub-frame, but the final article, in three seamlessly joined sections, took many weeks to complete as single plies of wood were laid and glued, one by one, on to plywood profile-formers.

The precision of this work, by Michael McHugh of Bristol, is exceptional: the subtle geometrical variations of the bandstand's expanding wave form required millimetre-fine moulding accuracy; the slightest "wander" would have magnified into warps that would have ruined the delicately sprung poise of the overall form.

That form was unknown to McLaughlin when he pitched for the job in a competition set up by the De La Warr Pavilion Trust two years ago. Unlike the other architects involved, he arrived without a drawn-up concept. But he knew that he was perfectly suited to one of the Trust's requirements - that the design of the bandstand should take input from local schoolchildren; McLaughlin had worked on similar, community-based projects before. Even so, when he left that interview, he says, "I didn't have a bloody clue what to do".

On the other hand, he knew his Modernism - and the author of the pavilion, in particular. "Mendelsohn talks a lot about buildings having an inner spirit, expressed through their structure," he says. "And he writes about it quite musically. So the idea of rhythm is quite important. We also adopted a strategy that the physics should shine out of the construction, and be elegant in terms of projecting sound and deflecting wind - that it should evolve in response to these resources."

And in response to the six teams of three schoolchildren involved. Set 20 questions about the potential form and requirements of the bandstand, the teams produced schemes - and two or three latched on to shell-forms straight away. Then the engineers, Price & Myers, turned up with weighing scales and an electric fan to demonstrate what might work and what might not, aerodynamically.

"Part of the conversation we were trying to have is that it's more important what a building is than what it looks like. There was a letter printed in the local paper from somebody who said that he didn't care if the new bandstand had been designed by schoolchildren - it was bloody ugly. I knew then that we were on the right lines and doing the right kind of thing."

The Pavilion Trust loved McLaughlin's eventual submission. So did the planning officer involved, Geoff Dudman. "Suddenly, we were dealing with a planning officer who was very open about a building that could have gone horribly wrong," recalls the architect. "The planning department was tough in a way that could make the project better. We were impressed."

So, when the Bollywood Brass Band struck up its opening chords a few days after the official opening of the bandstand, it was a moment of both closure and the reawakening of a dream that had begun in 1933. At that time, the ninth Earl De La Warr had been stung by a New Statesman article that he had read that did not mince its words: "You could not find a stronger argument in favour of town planning than Bexhill-on-Sea, which is not so much a town as a chaotic litter of hideous houses sprawling higgledy-piggledy along a lovely coast. Lord De La Warr, whose ancestors were responsible for this muddle, has now made an act of reparation."

So, too, has the current Rother District Council, which seemed, until a year ago, to be playing some kind of civic roulette. Despite provisional support for renovating the pavilion from the Arts Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund, the council entered into negotiations with the pub-chain operators Wetherspoons. The idea was that Wetherspoons could run the De La Warr Pavilion as a pub and entertainment unit, in return for maintaining it to Grade I- listed standards.

The plan was patently absurd and a dead duck, from the beginning. The council had failed to grasp the obvious - that most of the people living in Bexhill simply wanted the pavilion to continue more or less as it had always been. The council has since done what it should have done two years ago, that is, to fully support the Pavilion Trust's quest for Lottery and other cash. Now, with more than pounds 6m in the bank, the pavilion will be redeveloped by the master-planning architect John McAsland and Partners, under overall project director Alan Haydon.

Thus, the "social" purpose of the De La Warr Pavilion, so much at the heart of Mendelsohn's original idea for Modernism-super-Mare, remains untainted - and Bexhill-on-Sea now finds itself the proud owner of not one, but two architectural icons. Niall McLaughlin's super little bandstand may be a potent glint from the future, but it also serves to glorify the past.