Architecture's Evil Empire?
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Architecture's Evil Empire?

The Triumph and Tragedy of Global Modernism

Miles Glendinning

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eBook - ePub

Architecture's Evil Empire?

The Triumph and Tragedy of Global Modernism

Miles Glendinning

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About This Book

From Chicago to Toronto to Shanghai, cities around the world have sprouted "iconic" buildings by celebrity architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind that compete for attention both on the skyline and in the media. But in recent years, criticism of these extreme "gestural" structures, known for their often-exaggerated forms, has been growing. Miles Glendinning's impassioned polemic, Architecture's Evil Empire, looks at how today's trademark architectural individualism stretches beyond the well-known works and ultimately extends to the entire built environment. Glendinning examines how the global empire of the current modernism emerged—particularly in relation to the excesses of global capitalism—and explains its key organizational and architectural features, placing its most influential theorists and designers in a broader context of history and artistic movements.

Arguing against the excesses of iconic architecture, Glendinning advocates a vision of modern renewal that seeks to remedy the shattered and alienated look he sees in contemporary architecture. Mingling scholarship with wry humor and a genuine concern for the state of architecture, Architecture's Evil Empire will raise many heated debates and appeal to a wide range of readers, from architects to historians, interested in the built environment.

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Information

Year
2010
ISBN
9781861899811

1

Architecture of Alienation

‘An architect ought to be jealous of novelties, in which Fancy blinds the judgement.’
Sir Christopher Wren, Tracts1

Public or private? A parable of architectural excess

On the site of a redeveloped bus station in the English Midlands town of West Bromwich, a strange, huge new building has recently heaved its way into view above the straggling, low-rise skyline of the once industrial Black Country. A 300-foot (91-metre) long blank box clad in dark aluminium, it looks a bit like an IKEA store – except for the fact that the vast facades are randomly punctuated with squiggly windows in pink surrounds, and one side has sprouted two glittering, silver, blister-like pods.
Contrary to first appearances, this is not a commercial development, nor a utility structure. Actually, it is a major new public cultural institution, even called The Public, to avoid any ambiguity. Although it looks a bit like a cinema or a swimming pool, it contains nothing as ordinary as that – although West Bromwich, a socio-economically deprived area, currently has neither. Instead, it houses a ‘digital arts centre’, spreading over nearly 6,000 square metres of floor space and costing the vast sum of £63 million to build.2
The Public represents a completely new type of ‘public’ building on the urban scene. In the past, most new institutions, like the countless Carnegie Libraries or Board Schools built at the turn of the twentieth century, tried to integrate themselves into and ennoble the streetscape of their host towns. The Public adopts a very different approach. West Bromwich has a modest, rather than monumental townscape: low, sprawling shopping streets adjoined by a cluttered public transport interchange. Rather than setting out to tie all this disparate urban fabric together more coherently, The Public simply ignores it all, standing in glorious isolation, as grandly as a cathedral.
But whereas a cathedral normally, in a consistent way, combines its splendid isolation with stately dignity inside and out, The Public plays the court jester. It does this not just in its Pop Art-style windows, but even more in a wildly anarchic internal arrangement, supported by a free-standing giant steel frame, with a 1,100-foot (335-metres) long ramp spiralling down through an extravagantly contorted sequence of digital interactive displays and snaking fluorescent ceiling lights. You could imagine you were in a national pavilion at a world’s expo or an avant-garde Archigram scheme of the 1960s – something like architect Cedric Price’s renowned but never built 1960 ‘Fun Palace’ design for a participatory arts culture centre, except that in the case of West Bromwich the building was actually designed to be built, and to be permanent.
Architecturally, the relationship of The Public to West Bromwich is one of sharp estrangement, even of alienation – the complete opposite of ‘public’ engagement. And despite the building’s aspirations to populist zaniness, this alienation is not just a visual problem, but also one of practical use and, frankly, of social justice in a poor borough that could have done so much else with the vast sums spent here. It is not even as if the building’s alien presence is a necessary and unavoidable precondition for something at the cutting edge of the digital revolution. It’s the opposite, really: in a society where the real public is surging ahead into a new world of web-based, interactive technology, the fixed digital displays of The Public risk instant obsolescence. Raised up in the middle of a deprived community, The Public would be a colossal practical joke if it weren’t so serious: this building, far from being funny, is actively wrong and even unjust.
How could something like this have happened? It is an important question, not because The Public and West Bromwich are exceptional or freakish in any way, but because the case is so typical: this could almost be anywhere, in any city or any country. Some writers today, such as Anna Minton, point to an alienating climate of privatization and commercialization of space in our cities, a climate that (she argues) stems ultimately from American notions of social control through gated communities, and allows private corporations to corrupt the European tradition of public urban liveability.3
But The Public, however jazzy and superficially populist its styling, is not the product of some kind of raw, ‘American’ capitalism. Even a cursory glance at its history emphasizes that, in fact, the project was steered throughout its controversial history exclusively by public organizations, community participation groups and professionals – and fuelled by the vast, at times even megalomaniac public building programme of the UK National Lottery. The original, laudable vision for the building was dreamed up by local community leader Sylvia King, who saw Lottery funding as an opportunity to give her organization, Jubilee Arts, a permanent home. Following a modest 1994 feasibility study, King’s ambitions expanded, and she engaged Will Alsop, one of the most nationally prominent of a new generation of modern architect-personalities, or so-called ‘starchitects’. He duly responded with a vision vast in scale and flamboyantly individual in its ‘iconic’ styling and ‘fun palace’ interior design.
From that point, in its combination of monumental scale and exuberant planning, the doom of the project was sealed. Work began on site in 2002, as ever more public money cascaded in, with Arts Council England contributing over £30 million and promising to underwrite a £500,000 annual running cost. But in 2004, Alsop’s firm ran into difficulties, followed two years later by the folding of Jubilee Arts, and after a year-long stoppage of work the local municipal council took over the project, setting up an arts trust and engaging a local architect to salvage it as economically as possible. Eventually, after withdrawal of the Arts Council running subsidy, the project opened uncertainly in 2009, amid much local disquiet that it could not long be sustained: one influential columnist in the Birmingham Post branded it ‘a part-time conceptual centre and a full time waste of space’.4
All very sad, no doubt – but does this vignette point us to any wider lessons about today’s built environment? At first glance, it certainly seems to. With all its excessive ambition, detachment from everyday reality and eventual downfall, it looks initially like a microcosm of the wider trajectory of architecture in the recent years of boom and bust – a classic tale of hubris and nemesis. Its forcefully populist stylistic features seem to echo the mass media excesses of global capitalism. Right across Britain, other large Lottery-supported projects – The Lowry performing-arts complex in Salford, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and the Millennium Dome (The O2) in London – have suffered the same problems of grandiose initial scale and inadequate resources for running costs. And all over the world, ‘iconic’ architectural mega-projects, some even more stridently disconnected from their visual and social context than The Public, have ground to a halt during the global recession.5
First glances can sometimes be deceptive, and when we look a little closer, what is in many ways most striking about the West Bromwich saga is its obstinate lack of obvious connection with capitalist excesses of any kind. Far from being a brainchild of speculators in the City of London, The Public was indeed an exclusively ‘public’ project, conceived and financed in the traditional manner. The decisive role in its expansion into an ‘iconic’ project, gigantic yet socially detached from its host community, was played by well-intentioned professional and community leaders. And, more telling still, the entire saga also happened in an economically ‘counter-cyclical’ manner: as the economy and the property market soared, The Public crashed!
The same pattern of steroid-fuelled building of ‘gestural’ architectural set pieces by public authorities has been repeated in many other countries and cities – at first, in the years around 2000, to the accompaniment of often fulsome professional and public praise. For example, in Los Angeles, an ordinary public school was inflated into a vastly expensive prestige project, at a cost of nearly $1,000 a square foot. In 2001–2, local civic leaders and culturally minded philanthropists persuaded the school district to abandon a modest scheme by local firm AC Martin Partners, costing only a third as much, and commission the avowedly ‘avant-garde modernist’ (and oddly named) Austrian firm of Coop Himmelb(l)au, following a competition, to design a grand show-piece building. This included a swirling, 43-metre (140-foot) high tower shaped like a number 9 and topped by a dramatically cantilevered but never used ‘special events room’, and classrooms lit by outsize porthole windows. The enhanced school was intended as a planned extension to the city’s burgeoning arts district, which included show-pieces by other prominent architects such as Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki and Rafael Moneo. As its name emphasizes, High School 9, like The Public in West Bromwich, was an essentially civic project, initiated by a public authority that saw itself in expansive terms of enlightened arts patronage (although phil anthropists contributed only a relatively small proportion of the cost of the architecturally ‘enhanced’ school complex). Predictably, the project experienced the sharp acrimony typical of a prestige public building when the cost, inevitably, overran, eventually reaching no less than $232 million.6
In its ‘iconic’ disconnection from anything around it, High School 9 could have been anywhere in the world. In fact, it could equally have been in Akron, Ohio, where the years 2004–7 saw the emergence of a project by the same architects that was almost identical to its cousin in both its public patronage context and its hyper-extroverted architecture, sharply alienated from everything around. There, Coop Himmelb(l)au were engaged to design an extension to the Akron Art Museum, a sober redbrick classical block of 1899, originally the main post office. The juxtaposition of this modest block and its three-times-larger extension is extra or dinary. Rather than follow any kind of conventional rectilinear form, the architects designed the new block as an explosion of violently contrasting glazed and metal forms, each with a brand-type name, including The Crystal, a jagged, three-storey wedge of glass, and The Cloud, a 100-metre long cantilevered steel slab stretching out, bizarrely, just above the roof of the 1899 building. Himmelb(l)au’s chief designer, Wolf Prix, argued that The Cloud embraced the old building ‘like sheltering arms or wings’ in a ‘dynamic dialogue between old and new’. But by 2007 this kind of building was beginning to attract growing professional and media criticism. Commentators savaged the Akron project as soon as it was completed: author James H. Kunstler compared it to ‘a mechanical alligator snarfing down a Beaux-Arts post office’; and Martin Filler argued that ‘the formally chaotic, haphazardly detailed, instantly dated-looking’ complex showed that ‘just as there are fashion victims whose gullible tendencies blind them to how comical they appear, so there are architecture victims’.7

Money and architecture: semi-detached neighbours

West Bromwich, Los Angeles or Akron: in a way, the location of buildings like these is irrelevant as, for all their ‘special’ aspirations, they are in many ways the same all over the world. But, however typical The Public or High School 9 might be, if they are to tell us anything meaningful about the wider world of architecture, the message has to be a more complicated one. It seems to point not to architecture’s slavish dependency on the wider economy and society, but its rather complex, semi-detached relationship to the world. Architecture, it suggests, is certainly something that – given the huge cost and collaborative efforts involved in constructing buildings – must inevitably respond, chameleon-like, to the stimuli of the outside world, especially to the wishes of its ‘ruling powers’. It also suggests that architecture is something with a great deal of autonomy, with its own conventions and traditions, more than capable of striking off wildly on its own.
Because of the complexity of architecture’s semi-detached relationship with society, the story of how it could have ended up in the state of alienation and fragmentation epitomized by The Public is a complex one. This is partly because society is now not just national but global – yet tied together with a new rapidity of communication, with innumerable ideas, images and constraints surging around the world almost instantaneously.
Of course, anyone can spot egregious cases like these a mile away. But the problem has other, less obvious aspects. In particular, the spectacular icons are not alone: many of the ideas they trumpet, the values of stand-alone individualism and urban fragmentation, also more subtly condition the wider urban environment. And we must not neglect the time factor: the alienated condition of much contemporary architecture has developed gradually, over a long period, and with many meanderings along the way.
In previous years, strong international or universal movements swept through architecture, but its production was effectively split up between countries or cities. Now all that seems to have broken down, and what we seem to be faced with is a veritable global ‘Empire’ of architecture. Its parts are superficially different, but all seem to share a common dependence on values of individualism and competition, and veneration for the symbols of capitalist commercialism. This Empire, like those before it, has set about breaking down all barriers to the spread of its values and power, and has pushed aside any alternatives. Architecture’s fundamental role has also been swept away in the process, throughout the centuries, as a stabilizing and anchoring agent. What is left, as at West Bromwich or Akron, often seems just as ephemeral in its meaning as commercial advertisements.
Contemporary architecture, for all its flamboyant excesses, is not a simple extension of capitalist commercialism. It is strongly bound up with capitalism, as architecture must always be with the governing system, but it is not the same thing as ‘savage capitalism’ itself. The sickness of contemporary architecture is linked, at the very least, to the general sickness of global capitalist society. Yet today’s architecture culture, such as it is, has not been spawned by the blind forces of the global market, or by base commercialism. Well-intentioned architec ture and well-intentioned architects have substantially contributed to the creation of this global Empire – often aided by well-intentioned, culturally enlightened lay actors and idealist philanthropists. Because of its multi-layered complexity, architecture acts as a veil or as an obscuring mirror, rather than directly expressing power or the marketplace in the way that political propaganda or commercial advertisements do. And, at the same time, it functions as a set of defences in depth, its complex and (to the outsider) impenetrable debates acting as a mystifying agent and distorting external interface at times of crisis.
This means, of course, that we cannot simply expect that the economic slump will have permanently purged architecture of all its excesses. This global Empire, as we will see, is no flash-in-the-pan child of the boom-and-bust market, but a multilayered cultural and ideological enterprise, built up out of a century-old tradition of architectural modernity. Acquiring its own momentum, it has eagerly echoed and amplified successive extremes of political and economic climate, cumulatively heaping up ideas and images, each in turn literally set in concrete in built projects.
Of course, not all architects have thrown themselves into the pursuit of hyper-individualism. Far from it – most have been, as always, mainly concerned with everyday, practical matters. But most architects are touched by some of the values of the Empire. Everyone is at least slightly, potentially, implicated, and so rectifying the situation is an implicit concern of all architects. Architecture’s own culture of ideas and debate is, as we will see, not well fitted to make sense of an extended, multi-stranded phenomenon of this kind. Architectural debate, for almost two centuries, has been dominated by polarized conventions of cut and thrust and of sudden, radical shifts in opinion that render it incapable of getting to grips with trends over the longue durĂ©e.8 So among contemporary architects, the last five years (significantly, a period stretching well back before the start of recession) have seen an upsurge in blistering attacks on the excesses of iconic or ‘gestural’ buildings, but no attempt to put their emergence in any kind of wider context. The result is to sensationalize, trivialize and ultimately render incomprehensible a complex and pervasive cultural phenomenon. As we will see later, contemporary architecture is like an iceberg. The excesses of signature icons are just the bit that sticks above the surface, whereas the really intractable part is the great mass that lurks beneath, invisible to public scrutiny.
It is no use simply condemning without understanding. Any judgement of the excesses of contemporary architecture, if it is to mean anything, must be put in a properly nuanced setting, including an awareness of how our present position has come about. Analysis needs above all to be grounded in a proper historical context, teasing out both the roots of today’s trends and also the differences between them. What has been lost or rejected along the way will also help explain where we are now – and it also might just help get us out of our current mess by showing us some alternative ways of doing things.

History and tragedy

This book is written in the conviction that one key element in any rescue programme must be to trace how this structure of values came into being. The ancient Athenian historian, ...

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