FutureTrends'Starchitect' David Chipperfield fuses Modernism with realism about what people want for their cities. Emma Cullinan talks to him about the shape of buildings to come

"It was probably naivety," says architect David Chipperfield of his decision to set up in practice only six years after he'd finished studying at the AA (Architectural Association) in London, having worked with both Richard Rogers and Norman Foster in the meantime. "I certainly had no work."

In the 22 years since then, he hasn't had many significant commissions in his native England, yet he is world famous and has offices in Berlin and Shanghai as well as in London.

Much of his work abroad - and many of the projects he showed to an audience of 700 at CHQ (the nicely converted tobacco warehouse in Dublin's Docklands) on Monday night - were won through competition. "We have three or four competitions on the go at any one time," says the architect. "We enter so many that you'd have to be an idiot not to win some of them."

In the past, competitions were treated as something extra in the office and - in a manner many architectural practices will recognise - the phone came off the hook during the later stages and staff stayed up all night working on submissions. Now, at Chipperfield's office in Camden Town, they have been incorporated into the working process. "They have to be treated as a normal part of work."

He has become known for his elegant, pared buildings which are informed by Modernism but they have something extra, something which he learnt early on, on two very different jobs: one in Japan and one in Henley, England. His early work, after setting up in 1984, was on shops in London for designers such as Dolce and Gabbana, Kenzo, Joseph and Issey Miyake. The latter took him to Japan where he designed an art gallery heavily influenced by Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

"This was my first opportunity to build a medium-scale project; an opportunity I would never have had in England," he says. "Ando was someone who built in an unashamedly Modern way but, at the same time, was interested in history and in cultural traditions."

Chipperfield's freedom to design in Japan was contrasted with the Rowing Museum he worked on in Henley. "Henley is an extremely conservative town and this was at the point when Prince Charles was at his most vociferous in his campaign against architects. It gave a legitimacy to more conservative tendencies, whether that be among taxi drivers or senior planners. I was in this very strange position - on the one hand being in Japan having few restraints, and England where we were absolutely constrained.

"This building became quite an important experience for me because, as I was struggling with this problem, I started to see that, as Modern architects, we thought that it was somehow our birthright to start with a clean sheet and operate within the tenets of the Modern movement. It is clear that the Modern movement had run out of steam. We had forgotten the significance of form and the need to communicate.

"Simply put, I asked myself why it was not possible to do a Modern building with a pitched roof. Planners would not accept a building without some historical reference. I had to borrow from history to find ideas that I wouldn't see as a compromise."

He took away from this the lesson of the significance of a building's meaning and the need to understand the public's disappointment with Modern architecture. This was something partly to do with form, Chipperfield says, and architectural language. "It motivated me to believe that it was possible to create a fondness for a project if it had a strong physical presence."

What appealed to people about the Henley building, he says, is its silhouette (it has a pitched roof) - so it was recognisable - and its use of material (chunky timber and glass), "which tried to break away from the synthetic tendencies of Modernism".

His buildings certainly have a strong presence and form lifted by materiality - there's his redbrick office building in Dusseldorf, the copper mesh covering the Des Moines Library in the US, the bronze façade of a Hamburg hotel and the glass at the Figge museum in Iowa, where he fought against commercial rigidity. "It's easy to talk about materiality with bricks, concrete and timber, the question is how to maintain materiality in a construction-driven commercial environment."

Having found an elegant style that expresses the building's function and surroundings and takes into account Modernism and tradition, Chipperfield sees the irony in the current fashion for unusually shaped buildings. "This is a unique moment for architecture: there is so much general interest. There seems to be a strange appetite for the unusual and a new desire for architecture to be novel.

"Some of us have been beaten up by English planners for so long, where any sort of innovation has been a struggle. It seems a paradox to find ourselves in a situation where there is a desire for something that is weird and wonderful."

He has criticised some of the weirder buildings in the past but he is philosophical: "I don't think this is a completely negative situation. I think the work of many of our colleagues such as Zaha and Rem has been an enormous boost to our profession."

Driving around Dublin, he says the quality of architecture here has really improved over the past 10 years, as it has universally. Cities do face difficulties when trying to generate a large amount of construction of high quality. You need to be realistic and get developers on board, he says. "When planning cities, you need a strong plan with intelligent rules that has the ability to grow and modify - which is true of all design. It gets very fragile if it's all about features and gimmicks."

He remembers London's Docklands before it was developed, and being aware of the huge opportunities the area offered: "And then they f***ed it up. I wish it was still an opportunity.

"Maybe it should be done in a more piecemeal way: cities should not try to do everything all at once. It is difficult to turn down investment, but it would be good to make a set of rules. And if people don't like those rules, then they can go and build somewhere else."

David Chipperfield's visit to Dublin was organised by Dublin Docklands Development Authority, in partnership with the RIAI (Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland) and the Town Planning Institute