The irony is that as an internationally lauded purveyor of no-style architecture he is at considerable pains to

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The irony is that, as an internationally lauded purveyor of "no-style" architecture, he is at considerable pains to define what "no style" is. His opinion of other architects is the nearest he comes to a soundbite definition: "It's as if avant- garde architects deliberately want to limit themselves by only one way of communicating. Style, to me, is not interesting."He is an architect to watch: Britain and Ireland are going Dutch in certain key architectural projects. Herzog de Meuron broke the ice with commissions at Bankside and Lewisham; and now van Egeraat is taking on the Photographers' Gallery. He is also at work in Cork, where his design for the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery features an extraordinary wave-form roof made of brick.Van Egeraat talks about his "no-style" approach in idiosyncratic terms: buildings are cool, medium or hot; they should radiate a sense of solace, or silence, or temptation; they should be layered, soft - a new baroque for the millennium. Post- modernism? It's too often a commercial gimmick as far as van Egeraat is concerned.

Norman Foster and Richard Rogers are "commercially interesting, very clever, because this way your clients know your profile so they can select you or dump you for it Of course," he adds disingenuously, "I'm sometimes envious. But I'm too quickly bored to do the same thing twice."Van Egeraat's approach to a brief is tangential. His solution to the redevelopment of the ING-Baring bank in Budapest is revealing. He took one look at the elegant facade of the 19th-century neo-classical building, and "the first idea was that I would like to make a new building on top of it and hope that the whole thing would collapse.

There was no more intelligent thought than this."There was, of course, but the key to his work is instinct. In Budapest, the desire to crush and start again ultimately produced an inverse solution. The building was gutted and a central full-height clear space created. Above it all - "people in the building experience something but never completely see it" - is a glass roof; and half sunk into it is a huge glass-and-laminated-wood pupa which contains the boardroom.Van Egeraat is noticeably at home linking the drama of his architecture to the work of artists such as Greenaway, Canaletto and, particularly, Hockney's designs for the sets of Tristan and Isolde. Van Egeraat's use of cinematic inter-cutting methods is evident in the Budapest building, where he tried to mimic the layering of "a lot of different types of unclear things on top of one another" in the same way as Coppola had in the overlapping imagery of Kurtz's death in Apocalypse Now.And van Egeraat's subtle dramas are in demand. He is currently designing Holland's new embassy in Delhi ("It will be superb"), and he's excited by another recent challenge: to come up with something sizzling for his country's Ministry of Waterworks.