Architecture in an Age of Uncertainty

Benjamin Flowers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409445753
• eBook ISBN: 9781317179139
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

In the past two decades economic bubbles inflated and architectural spending around the globe reached fever pitch. In both well-established centers of capital accumulation and far--flung locales, audacious building projects sprang up, while the skyscraper, heretofore more commonly associated with American capitalism, seemed as if it might pack up and relocate to Dubai and Shanghai. Of course, much has changed in the past couple of years. In formerly free-spending Dubai, the tallest building in the world is now is named after the president of Abu Dhabi after he stepped in with last--minute debt financing. In cities across the United States, housing prices have nose-dived and cleared lots sit ready for commercial redevelopment that likely won't take place for another decade. Similar stories are not hard to find in many other nations. Architecture firms that swelled in flush days are jettisoning employees at a startling rate. In the context of economic instability (and its attendant social and political consequences), this edited volume brings together scholars, critics, and architects to discuss the present state of uncertainty in the practice and discipline of architecture. The chapters are organized into three main areas of inquiry: economics, practice, and technology. Within this larger framework, authors explore issues of security, ecological design, disaster architecture, the future of architectural practice, and the ethical obligations of the social practice of design. In doing so, it argues that this period has actually afforded architecture a valuable moment of self-reflection, where alternative directions for both the theory and practice of architecture might be explored rather than continuing with an approach which was so nurtured by capitalist prosperity and affluence.

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Architecture in an Age of Uncertainty: Tales from the Recent Architectural Past

Benjamin Flowers

“There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this. Unbelievable chutzpah.”¹

How does one make sense of the last decade and a half of architectural production? It is an era characterized by a series of seemingly paradigm shifting experiences: 9/11, ecological disaster on a growing scale, the explosion of architectural projects in places expected and otherwise (Kazakhstan anyone?), and capped by a global recession second in severity only to the Great Depression (and one that 5+ years on shows no sign of abating, with Europe recently slipping back into economic contraction). Financial speculation, a seemingly endless deluge of petro dollars, and vast sums of capital from points East and West seeking physical expression spawned vast building projects and even entirely new urban landscapes around the world.

Perhaps one way to assess the state of architecture in our present condition of uncertainty is to look at some of the signal projects of this recent era. How did clients and architects respond to the grand challenges of the time? What overarching formal and expressive characteristics took hold? Which individuals, nation-states, and corporations were the wealthy patrons of this era and what building types did their patronage favor? In sum, how did the social practice of architecture respond to and likewise shape our understanding of an era of unprecedented change?

We could start with one project in order to begin answering the above questions: Herzog & de Meuron’s 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage in Miami. Set aside the formal curiosity of the return of Brutalism after decades of public hostility to the style—the real point of interest here is the deployment of 10,000-watt star-architecture luminosity to sex-up a common urban eyesore. It seems at first like a kind of generosity—rather than gazing at the standard pre-cast slabs of concrete canted at angles to ease drainage and with head clearances of less than a foot you get a muscular structure—“all bodybuilder without the cloth” according to Jacques. It is such a spectacle that the upper floors are let for weddings and parties and on Saturday nights people with fabulous wheels vie to park their rides there. But the heart of the matter is utterly non-architectural—the developer of 1111 Lincoln built the parking garage in order to secure approval for construction of the retail space at the ground level. Architecture here was a means, rather than an end. This is instructive for our survey.

A second informative project is the recently completed Moshe Safdie design for the Crystal Bridges Art Museum in Bentonville, AK. Cast as an act of public altruism (“free admission!”) by its benefactor, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton (estimated net-worth: $23 billion), the structure (whose cost has not been made public) cloaks the origins of the capital that built it in a veneer of high art and cultural respectability. Poke a bit further, however, and the morphed simple geometries so characteristic of Safdie’s design vocabulary lead to far less architecturally auspicious venues like the Tazreen Fashions and Rana Plaza factory buildings in the garment district of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Both produced cheap clothing for Wal-Mart (and other discount retailers). In 2012 a fire broke out at Tazreen Fashions, killing 112 workers. Many died behind metal gates at staircases the factory owners kept locked to control the movement of workers. A century earlier similar conditions in New York City were responsible for the death of 146 workers in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. In 2013 the Rana Plaza factory collapsed, killing 1,129 garment workers (mostly women) earning an average of $38 per month.² These (as-yet unprosecuted) acts of international corporate malfeasance are a reminder that Crystal Bridges, far from being an act of benevolence, is a poor effort at atonement from a family and corporation that were and remain global leaders in the development of business models (widely mimicked by other multi-national enterprises) dependent on extracting vast amounts of wealth from the surplus labor and lives of third world workers and mean wages of working-class consumers everywhere.

Of course guilt and insecurity have long been hallmark motivations for the construction of great architecture. Anxieties about class status and image motivated many of the clients who hired Richard Morris Hunt in the late 19^th century. Hunt built his “cottages” (as he called them with classic understatement so popular among the outrageously wealthy) not to his client’s specifications. Rather they came to him so that he might dress them in the language of distinction of which architects are understood to be arbiters. As Robert Hughes aptly noted: “At all times in America, the poor have wondered how the rich live. But more to the point, the rich have always wondered too.” It was R.M. Hunt who showed the rich how they should live. In the twentieth century, the architect continued to provide clients with desired social status. The clients for the Empire State Building and the Seagram Building—two of the great NYC skyscrapers—were motivated by their exclusion from the upper echelons of society (due to religious and class status) to build tall. It is also the case that on occasion, building for clients of colossal wealth and power is part of an architect’s quest for status (and redemption). Such was the case with Minoru Yamaskaki and his work on the World Trade Center (coming as it did while his early work at Pruitt-Igoe was being dynamited).

An exchange of crass cash for laundered elite cultural capital also animated building across the globe over the past 15 years. Tyrants, economic, political, and otherwise, turned to designers to provide them buildings that spoke of legitimacy, modernity, and all the values associated with an appreciation for fine architecture. If one were to map the congruence of human rights with ambitious architecture, a curiously inverse relationship emerged in this period. A City-state imported indentured servants paid $4 per day to construct the tallest building in the world. Nations that criminalize the full expression of a person’s humanity (gender rights, the freedom to declare love to whom one chooses, the freedom to avoid genital mutilation) brought the necessary amount of capital to the table and were rewarded with the architecture for which they paid. An equally curious metric could be drawn on the relationship of corruption to grand building. The corruption index and the building index walked hand-in-hand. We witnessed an era of design increasingly yoked to the absence of freedom and democracy rather than its presence. At one time modern architects imagined their task as implicitly political. Describing the ambitions of his generation the architect, writer, and design journal editor Peter Blake wrote: “we believed that we could slay the automobile, defeat fascism, and abolish disease.”³ What would he make of 1111 Lincoln and its submission to the tyranny of the internal combustion engine? By the start of the 21^st century, however, it was clear that similar ambitions rarely held for many Pritzker Prize winners. As one architect on audacious projects for wealthy but suspect clients told me, “it is just a business.”

The architecture of the past 15 years illustrates an important but often unstated reality: it is never a bad time to be rich. The bubble economies of the late 1990s and early 2000s produced a range of projects satisfying the yearnings of the newly rich and the long-since rich. When the recession came about, the fictive-rich found themselves in trouble, and projects tied to them did indeed wither on the vine. But for the wealthy, the recession only added to their buying power, as global demand for building materials and labor declined, and declining real estate values overall made investment in that sector increasingly desirable. Thus, even during a period of economic decline and contraction –not to mention vicious cuts in public spending—record-setting real estate deals closed in cosmopolitan metropolises around the world. In one city, New York, the real estate market is now fundamentally deformed by the declining fortunes of the strangled middle and working classes (who can afford very little) and the vastly rising wealth of the super-rich (who can afford anything). There are at present 49 buildings in New York City with apartments selling for $15 million or more. That is a nearly 50 percent increase since 2009. Plans for some 20 additional projects are in the planning stages or under construction. One building, 432 Park Avenue, has a penthouse that sold for $95 million, as well as 4 and 3 bedroom units selling for $45 million and $32 million respectively. The architect of that project, Rafael Viñoly, notes that there are now only two markets in New York City: “ultraluxury and subsidized housing.”⁴ Total sales at 432 Park are expected to surpass $3 billion.

At 15 Central Park West, designed by Robert A.M. Stern, total sales exceed $2 billion. Aside from providing an index of the canyon-like gap in wealth in NYC (where median family income has declined by 8 percent since 2008), these buildings operate as commentaries on the mindset of economic oligarchs. Much has been written about the role of the banking and financial services sector in eviscerating the global economy. An examination of sales records of 15 CPW in 2005–2006 offered a warning flare (little heeded at the time) that bankers and financiers lacked the basic competence to be trusted as stewards of our collective economic well-being. It was that year Sandy Weill, CEO of Citigroup, paid a then-record price for his unit in the building: $XX million. At $XXX per square foot, this was a price utterly unmoored from any reasonable economic or geographical reality. The real estate pages heralded the sale, as expected from the booster arm of the fourth estate. But the business pages should have been able to connect the dots and realize that anyone willing to over-pay so egregiously for an apartment could not possibly discern between a clever credit default swap and a toxic asset in disguise. As one broker whose record of trading was profitable before it was revealed to be fraudulent put it about his bank’s executives: “they never dared ask me any basic questions, since they were afraid of looking stupid about not understanding futures and options.”⁵ Between 2005–2006 the hedge fund executive Daniel Loeb bought an 8-bedroom unit for $5 million (or $4200/sq. foot) and Lloyd Blankenfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, bought an apartment for $26 million, suggesting that Weill was not an outlier among financiers in his irrational exuberance.

It is more than the financial absurdity of these real estate prices that offer a glimpse into the mindset of the titans of Wall Street and global capitalism. There are the aesthetics of these projects to consider—these are after all buildings intended to help the rich understand themselves, Richard Morris Hunt-style. At 15 CPW, the great and powerful are sheltered in a building whose massing recalls the setback buildings of Candela. The structure is divided into two parts, a lower, symmetrical 19-story portion referred to in the casual understatement of the truly wealthy as “the house.” Rising behind the house is a tower of 43 stories whose final 10 or so stories are disposed asymmetrically. A formal court that runs the length of the site divides the two units. Amenities include a private driveway to elude photographers. Formally conservative, and with an air intended to stroke the egos of residents and impugn the standing of passers-by, the whole structure is clad in 85,000 pieces of limestone. It is a building whose ambitions are almost entirely financial, with little about its formal characteristics to describe as novel, innovative, generous (in the public sense), or noteworthy (perhaps beyond the scale of the entry lobby). It is a building that embraces monumentality for its own sake unambiguously and without hesitation. This is a building for people who wish to be reassured that no matter what changes in this world, they will still occupy its uppermost echelons. It feels a bit like one of the Seven Sisters has been repurposed for a new generation of tyrants, and so perhaps it is not so surprising that when Sandy Weill decided to sell, he did so to a Russian billionaire, Dmitry Rybolovlev. Rybolovlev, who made his fortune in the fertilizer industry after the break-up of the Soviet Union, paid $88 million for the apartment. A titan of finance sells to a titan of fertilizer—it is hard to know which business is more full of it.

Where 15 CPW strives for a nostalgic echo the work of Candela and the era of the setback tall building (and attendant Gatsby-like era of excess), 423 Park employs a divergent formal strategy, opting for an organizing system of rectangles. The building has a square 93 by 93 foot base, with each façade of the 84-story tower divided by six 10 by 10 foot windows. It is a pattern language of wealth and authority somewhat less accessible to the general public than Stern’s limestone bacchanal, and therefore requires contextualization in order to be marketed to the target audience of nomadic globetrotting billionaires. To that end, Harry B. Macklowe, the developer, spent over $1 million on a four-minute promotional film for 432 Park Avenue. As reported in the New York Times, “the movie consists of a series of dreamlike sequences, rife with images of wealth and privilege, and loosely plotted around a stunning brunette as she travels from her home at 432 Park Avenue from her country Estate in England. She is shown leaving the manor in the backseat of a 1957 Rolls Royce and then flying across the Atlantic in her Learjet.” Later in the film, Philippe Petit, who famously tightrope walked between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, is shown walking a tightrope from the Empire State Building to the tip of 432 Park Avenue. Canonical architecture is yoked to the task of promotion: the film compares the building’s lap pool to Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion and its gridded façade to the ceiling of the Pantheon.⁶ The film includes a party at which the mysteriously resurrected specters of Le Corbusier and Al Capone, of course, dance with Harry Macklowe wearing a King Kong costume.

It feels all like someone is trying just a bit too hard to make out hyper-expensive speculative real estate ventures (both their creation and their consumption) as something fun. The self-doubt underlying the need to compare a lap pool to the Barcelona Pavilion is particularly revealing. Mies was no stranger to luxury, or vast architectural expenditures, but anyone who has spent some time in Houses Farnsworth and Tugendhat or the Seagram Building knows that this whatever else Miesian luxury is about it’s not fun. Vinoly’s building, like Stern’s, is invested in references to work from the 1920s, only Vinoly is looking to Italy rather than New York. The insistence on a single organizing geometry—the square—disposed in white recalls (albeit at a smaller scale) Terragni and his civic buildings for the Fascist government. For much of the post-WWII era architects struggled with monumentality, as in the wake of Fascism in Germany and Italy, and pushed by the heightened political tensions of the Cold War, monumental architecture necessitated a robust socio-political framing. Otherwise, one risked having a monumental structure’s sensitivity mis-read. Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, architects and clients no longer seem to require that their monumental buildings speak in with such precision. The result is a moment in which the super-rich purchase both nostalgia and discarded ideologies in the same time and same city. The inherent anti-individual and seemingly inhumane dimensions (10 × 10) of the window aperture at 432 Park Avenue might have been cause for pause in an earlier era. Those dimensions might fit in a department store façade at street level or perhaps an office tower, but would hardly be thought scaled to the demands of domesticity much less the dimensions of an individual. After all, as we were in the west told time and time again, it was capitalist democracy that favored the heroic individual and communism that sought to devalue the same. Today, with tall buildings scrubbed of their need to situate themselves within any framework other than that of consumption, no one seems to much care that the tallest residential building in the western hemisphere looks like a monument to faceless, nameless, unknowable, and endlessly repeated authority.

The impression 432 Park gives of authority unmoored from the regulatory regimes that guide and confine the aspirations of the mass of men and women who build, maintain, serve, and clean the city around it is no accident. While working-class and middle-class residents of New York and other major cities in the United States struggle with an unprecedented wave of foreclosures and declining real estate values, the ultra-luxury market is the recipient of government largesse in the form of tax subsidies. One57—another tower residential project, this one designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Christian dePortzamparc—has apartments under contract for $90 million. But it also received at least $50 million in tax credits under a program designed to encourage—yes—affordable housing.⁷ The impact of the purchasing power of the ultra-rich extends beyond the ultra-luxury market. Real estate is the largest asset class in the world, and this means a variety of institutional actors (real estate investment trusts, hedge funds, and other arms of investment equity) are buying housing across the nation, often in markets hit the hardest by the financial crisis of 2008. The hedge fund managers living in $50 million dollar apartments in NYC are also buying tens of thousands of houses at a time in Florida and California. Just two examples are Blackstone Capital, who recently bought 26,000 homes and Colony Capital, which owns 10,000. In Florida and California in 2012 investors, many of them large firms and many paying in cash, made 35 percent and 25 percent respectively of all home purchases. The paradox is that these investors are pricing out private actors—individuals looking to buy housing primarily as residences rather than investments.⁸ Thus, although it might be tempting to dismiss the high-end apartment bubble in NYC as an isolated condition, the capital supporting those sales prices is directly linked to the financialization of housing markets across the nation, affecting cities and states far removed from New York City and unlikely to ever have a Vinoly or de Portzamparc project of their own.

The scope and breadth of the financial and regulatory manipulation at the core of these NYC projects is replicated at other scales and other locales. Rather than isolated examples or outliers, the cozy relationship of architecture to fundamentally inequitable economic actors is the norm for the past decade and a half. We’ve already touched on Crystal Bridges, an edifice completed less than 18 months before the collapse of a factory in Bangladesh producing clothing for Wal-Mart. Two corporat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Architecture in an Age of Uncertainty: Tales from the Recent Architectural Past
• 2 Architecture and the Vicissitudes of Capitalism
• 3 Faster Better Cheaper: Social Process for a Modular Future
• 4 Re-defining Architectural Performance—Survival Through Design and the Sentient Environmentalism of Richard Neutra
• 5 Lightweight, Impermanent, Recycled
• 6 On Enterprising Architecture
• 7 Certain Uncertainties: Architecture and Building Security in the 21st Century
• 8 The Uncertainty of Authority
• 9 Upstream Imagination
• 10 Value Engineering and the Life Cycle of Architecture
• 11 The Architecture of Innovation
• Bibliography
• Index