Globe: Lisa Rochon - High Time for a Monumental Rethink

[AlvinofDiaspar]

From the Globe:

CITYSPACE: GOODBYE ONE-OFF, DOWNTOWN FOLLIES: HELLO SCALED-DOWN POETRY FOR THE CITY'S TROUBLED EDGES

High time for a monumental rethink

LISA ROCHON

March 21, 2009

Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano are architects, geniuses, stars - and old. They're children of the Depression, the last one and the current one, and are all well past 70, with Gehry having just turned 80. Happy Birthday, Frank! And welcome to the harsh new reality of the minimalist economy.

For our newest city halls, opera houses, museums and galleries, for the airports and public parks, university buildings and bridges - for unleashing the art of architecture, we have the superstars to thank. It's hard to imagine a more scintillating version of urbanity than the one they delivered.

But the currency of the old avant-garde has become a difficult commodity. Many of their monumental projects have crashed - Gehry's highly anticipated Beekman Tower in lower Manhattan was this week chopped in half from 76 to 38 storeys. Besides that, their fees are outrageous; it's becoming increasingly uncomfortable to ask clients to indulge them. It could be that the glorious, creative outpouring of the iconic ones is destined for an inelegant dead end.

Until recently, Foster + Partners (whose works include London's gherkin-shaped Swiss Re Tower) employed 1,300 architects in 17 offices around the world. Last month, the firm announced that it was firing 300 of them. And figures from Britain's Office of National Statistics, released this week, reveal the number of architects claiming employment benefits rose from 150 to 1,290.

Work has tanked in Russia, forcing Norman Foster to close his Berlin office, where much of the work for the moneyed oligarchs was being drafted. Lord Foster was known to travel in his private jet, and is said to have charged $2,500 an hour for design consulting. His buildings have accomplished startling things with glass and high-tech wizardry. But they're hardly cheap - his remodelling of Europe's biggest football stadium, Camp Nou in Barcelona, involved recladding the exterior with a skin of colour-changing glass panels, estimated to cost upward of $400-million. Now delayed indefinitely, the project pushed architecture to heady heights, but alas, it's produced the kind of price tag that's difficult to rationalize these days.

In the Catalonian capital, considered a Mecca of exquisite architecture, work has dried up. Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (creators of Heathrow's Terminal 5) had conjured a way to insert a shopping centre into an old bullring. Five years ago, Las Arenas might have been pushed through, but in these troubled times, the project stands silent and half-built. And a much-anticipated 34-storey tower by Gehry + Partners (which has cut dozens of architects at the firm's Los Angeles studio) has also been put on hold.

Back in North America, in the once-searing-hot city of Chicago, the Spire by world-renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, proposed by Irish billionaire Garrett Kelleher as the tallest residential tower in North America, is a gaping hole in the ground - and going nowhere fast.

In Canada, too, the superstars came, designed and built, working their magic over the country's ambitious downtowns. Projects conceived 10 years ago have survived. They include all seven of the major cultural makeovers in the City of Toronto, including the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts by Diamond + Schmitt Architects; Daniel Libeskind's makeover of the Royal Ontario Museum; and Gehry's sumptuous if slightly leaky Art Gallery of Ontario.

The University of Toronto's Leslie Dan Pharmacy Building, by Foster + Partners, with its surreal lecture pods suspended in a gigantic atrium, slipped in under the wire. But, over the last year, Foster's design of the Bow - a commercial glass tower with impressive sustainability, spearheaded by oil-and-gas producer EnCana - in Calgary has suffered a scaling back of the original design vision. Vancouver's proposed Jameson House, a series of glass cylinders rising 37 storeys, was cancelled last month.

For the masters, the past few decades have been a wild ride. After enduring creative fits and starts, they got up their nerve to create mind-altering architecture in the 1960s. In Paris, the youngsters Piano and Rogers imagined the unforgettable Centre Pompidou (1977). Jean Nouvel's L'Institut du Monde Arabe, with its wall of mechanical oculi, opened in 1987.

By the 1990s, the established stars were reigniting a faith in downtowns around the world. But their change-making architecture, which lit fireworks in the metropolis, is set to radically change. And it's about time. Architectural and landscape poetry is desperately needed to help heal the disaffected suburbs. The work may be subtle, but there's an urgency to address the societal discontent lurking on the city's edges.

In North America, the biggest challenge will come in reinventing a suburban landscape marred by boarded-up houses, old-style shopping malls and big-box retailers. The stars obsessed over one-off, showy works of architectural sculpture. A new generation is required to consider new questions: How to negotiate the future of the bloated suburban house in light of changing demographics and a desire for intimate communities? How to accommodate smaller families, gay couples without children, and single parents who live alone half the time?

In Europe, the challenges will take on a different shape. Paris, for instance, is a model of urban elegance. But its suburbs are places of deep unrest, where immigrants are often housed in dehumanizing apartment blocks, and where public amenities and parks are scarce. To address the disaster of the Parisian banlieues, President Nicolas Sarkozy has commissioned 10 architects - famous and not, old and young - to imagine a vision for a new Grand Paris. The emphasis is not on standalone, audacious architecture that requires buying a ticket to enjoy.

Parisian architect Roland Castro has presented a sweeping green, Central Park-style space for the otherwise unhappy suburb of La Courneuve. Besides that, he radicalizes his vision by suggesting that the Élysée Palace be moved to the city's tough northeastern suburbs. In another scheme, by Italian architects Bernardo Secchi and Paola Vigano, waterways, rather than roadways, would be Paris's new connective tissue. Richard Rogers recommends reinventing disused railway lines as a network of walkable greenery, something already happening in downtown Paris and New York.

Culture follows money. Besides that, vanity inspires reckless desire. Maybe there was too much of a good thing in the moneyed cities of the world. With a push and shove by a new world order, and by the likes of Sarkozy, the suburbs might just get their chance at a greater livability. The challenge should be one taken up by young, passionate designers. And who knows? The young might make some room for the superstars to weigh in, too, in their golden years.

lrochon@globeandmail.com

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090321.AROCHON21/TPStory/?query=lisa+rochon

_____

Didn't know that Foster's Jameson House in Vancouver got cancelled.

AoD

 

[Archivist]

And a counterpoint (sort of) from Gehry ...

And more on the same theme, today, from Jack Diamond:

Beauty in Economy
JACK DIAMOND

Globe and Mail
March 23, 2009

Architecture is an expression of its time and place. It reflects the values, power and dominant elites of the prevailing social structure and the relevant position of nation states in the global context. It even demonstrates the attitudes of imperial powers to their subject peoples.

The most obvious example is the pyramids of Egypt. In a hierarchical culture in which the disparity between pharaoh and fellaheen was immense, so was the difference in scale between royal monuments and the hovels of the poor.

The power of the church in Europe from the 11th to the 17th century was equally clear. Cathedrals were the largest, most elaborate structures at the centre of most European cities. In the 20th century, bank buildings reflected the importance of a mercantile culture: They became the new temples, the dominant structures. It was clear where the power lay.

And what of our time? The excesses of the late 20th and early 21st century are only too apparent. The extremes of individualism, and its accompanying greed, have ruined financial systems and left chaos in its wake. And once more this is reflected in architecture. The so-called iconic buildings (more egonic than iconic) were monuments to ego and extreme individualism. The emphasis was on the dramatic exterior: the way the building looked, rather than how it worked. The interiors could be perfunctory or dysfunctional.

Now is the time to reshape our cities
Many iconic buildings are a direct reflection of conspicuous consumption. Instead of exploring engineering, electrical, mechanical and materials technologies to determine the most economic systems, there is a flagrant disregard for cost. Excess is celebrated: the highest, most expensive, most dramatic. The pick-a-shape school of architecture. It isn't simply the money unnecessarily spent on construction, but the energy necessary to heat and cool the building, the steel used to build it.

You can build structures that are both dramatic and sustainable. Consider Buckminster Fuller's domes that were designed to have the smallest ratio of structural steel to the area enclosed or load supported. He was looking at an elegant way to use the least amount of material. Fifty years ago, he explored a dramatic and sustainable path to the future, a path followed by relatively few.

The world is changing quickly and industry has been slow to adapt. The automobile industry, with all its resources, and research and development, was suddenly, and perhaps fatally, revealed as a dinosaur, unable or unwilling to adjust. The building industry should not follow suit.

There isn't a shortage of technologies. The automobile industry had dozens of alternatives that were either ignored or tentatively explored (Henry Ford had intended the Model T to run on ethanol; the electric car is more than a century old). The building trade has dozens of options that are underutilized or deemed too experimental or expensive. But the cost of a building has to be considered, not just in its initial construction, but in its maintenance, and the resources it consumes.

There is recognition that the resources of the planet are not inexhaustible, that the environment's ability to replenish itself must not be pushed beyond a point of no return. It is now an existential question.

Banks have been caught out investing in poorly understood and inadequately researched instruments that ultimately benefited very few while devastating millions. It was a short-term strategy designed to satisfy the pressures of quarterly results. In this new climate of value, banks could assume a leading, progressive role. They could, for example, peg their financing to the sustainable value of projects.

Architecture, in the new era, should exhibit commensurate responsibility. Buildings that were conceived essentially as advertisements for a company or a museum or a city are now advertising an outdated and unfortunate ethic. We need new standards for beauty, one that is gratifying environmentally, technically and functionally. Economy, a word that is re-entering our vocabulary with a vengeance, carries a stigma, but it shouldn't: There can be beauty in economy.

Evolution has shown us such economies: the amazing cantilevered branches of trees, the strength of a spider's thread, the streamlined form of fish, the intricate and delicate strength of plant life. These have survived by being responsive to the forces to which they are subject, using the least - not the most - material in that effort. Man-made objects such as Shaker furniture, a racing yacht, or a geodesic dome, fuse form, function and technology. And we marvel at their beauty.

Jack Diamond is principal of the firm Diamond and Schmitt Architects Inc.

--------------------------

In my opinion, Fuller's dome is completely impractical - any round building will create a lot of unusable space inside which nevertheless must be climate controlled at considerable expense. The accompanying photo of Fuller's remaining dome in Montreal shows the dome (lovely) with the squat bunker inside (which actually houses useful space of some sort or another). As someone doing a lot of research on sustainable houses, those kinds of shapes are not in the offing, since you want to minimize the wasted space inside.

 

[Whoaccio]

Architecture, in the new era, should exhibit commensurate responsibility. Buildings that were conceived essentially as advertisements for a company or a museum or a city are now advertising an outdated and unfortunate ethic. We need new standards for beauty, one that is gratifying environmentally, technically and functionally. Economy, a word that is re-entering our vocabulary with a vengeance, carries a stigma, but it shouldn't: There can be beauty in economy.

I guess I agree that in the near term architecture might become more muted. In its own way though, environmentalism has become a new excuse for architectural ridiculousness. The most absurd example I can think of is the WTC in Bahrain. There is zero economic reason to graft 3 wind turbines onto a building. Period. But in this magical age of environmentalism, the most absurd examples of conspicuous consumption are justified as being environmentally responsible.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Whoaccio:

In its own way though, environmentalism has become a new excuse for architectural ridiculousness.

Economic reasons, the costing of which is woefully inadequate, cannot be used by itself to justify whether environmental gestures are relevant or not. Just because something has a high upfront cost doesn't mean that the relative cost of doing nothing is low - it could very well be that such a cost isn't captured well in the first place.

AoD

 

[Tewder]

Does this mean that Diamond is going to pare down his design even further during this recession?

Diamond's new condo design:

Diamond designs a daycare centre:

An animal shelter:

A new performing arts centre:

... but no shortage of 'colour' in these tough times:

 

[Urban Shocker]

On the subject of 'thinking outside the box', cardboard has been used for temporary shelters for the homeless, and for chairs, and for many other useful designed objects for decades. One of the most impressive little mass-produced cardboard boxes I ever did see was designed from one sheet of material, and artfully folded.

Love the colour ... and texture ... of that wall!

 

[TonyV]

Lmao !

 

[Urban Shocker]

Well, a die-cut box made from one piece of cardboard can not only have the beautiful proportions of a TD Centre tower ( as opposed to the dumpy shape of a Star of Downtown ) but it has the same sort of economy of means that Diamond refers to when he talks about the amount of structural steel involved in building a geodesic dome ( as opposed to, say, the enormous amount of steel used in the Crystal ), and the combination of function and beauty in a Shaker chair or a racing yacht.

Here's another recent take:

ARCHITECTURE: It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: December 21, 2008


WHO knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?

Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.


Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Mr. Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.

But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich, like private jets and spa treatments.

Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.

Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Mr. Koolhaas and Norman Foster.

Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.

Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.

This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Mr. Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.

And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Mr. Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.

Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.

Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.

 

[Urban Shocker]

And another:

Marking the end of 'The Bilbao Decade'
Times dictate a shift away from vanity projects

By Robert Campbell
Boston Globe Correspondent / January 11, 2009

Have we reached the climax and termination of a whole era in architecture? An era you might dub "The Bilbao Decade"?

I'll explain about Bilbao later. But first two news items. Between them, they bracket the present moment.

"The downturn is spreading. It's getting worse. It hasn't hit bottom yet," says Kermit Baker, the American Institute of Architects' chief economist. Another journal suggests that for American architects "there may be nothing to do but wait and pray."

The AIA maintains an index of prosperity for architects. That index has now fallen to historic lows in every category - commercial, residential, industrial, institutional, whatever. Projects of all kinds are being halted and put aside, for nobody knows how long. Architects are told by their clients to stop working until further notice.

Usually institutional work - especially hospitals and universities - holds up best in a recession, which can be good news for New England architects. But that sector too has hit an all-time low.

OK, the American news is too gray and depressing. Let's focus on an item from the other side of the world.

In the emirate of Dubai, over there on the Arab peninsula, the sun is still shining. In fact, it's shining so brightly that the Palazzo Versace, a hotel due to open next year, plans to offer its guests a beach of artificially cooled sand.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, reports that pipes filled with coolant will be installed beneath the beach to prevent it from stinging anyone's toes. "We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool," says the hotel's president.

Huge fans, too, will maintain a gentle breeze on the beachgoers. These will be wind machines, but instead of generating energy, like windmills or wind farms, they'll be expending it. Not only that: The new Versace plans also to refrigerate the water in its enormous acre-and-a-half swimming pool.

Why would anyone want to visit such an unnatural beach? Why not just stay in your air-conditioned hotel suite with a sun lamp? I have no idea. Perhaps part of the attraction for a tourist is the sheer pleasure of knowing that you have the power to waste the earth's resources.

The Dubai tale goes on and on. Just one more detail: Thirty thousand mature trees are being shipped to the emirate to landscape a new golf course. In Dubai's climate they will, of course, be artificially irrigated.

Severe architectural recession on the one hand, grotesque architectural luxury on the other. The two stories are the yin and yang of this moment in time. They mark the end, perhaps, of what we'll call the Bilbao Decade. It's been a boom, a clearly defined epoch in the history of architecture.

By Bilbao I mean, of course, the Guggenheim Museum in that Spanish city, designed by American architect Frank Gehry, which opened in 1997. With its billowing curves of shiny titanium and its powerfully massive sculptural presence, it was instantly perceived as a masterpiece. Tourists flocked to it. This one building put the city of Bilbao on the cultural map of the world.

Suddenly architecture was in. Every city, it seemed, wanted to be like Bilbao, wanted its own daring, avant-garde iconic building. Usually that building was an art museum or a skyscraper. Every few months, someone announced plans for the new tallest building in the world. (The current candidate is Burj Dubai, still under construction, which when complete will be approximately twice the height of the Empire State Building.)

Buildings took on crazy forms, largely because the computer made it possible for structural engineers to figure out how to make almost any shape stand up. Students at schools of architecture, influenced by the work of Gehry and others, played with their new computer programs to invent amazing shapes. Every work of architecture, it seemed, sought to be an original icon. A few leading international architects became, for the first time ever, media celebrities.

Architecture critics were not immune. Some of them, during this decade, perceived architecture as an elite activity, an art form of spectacle created by maybe 20 major architects around the world for an audience of a few thousand aficionados. There wasn't a lot of attention to everyday building types like schools and housing.

All that fever now feels passe. Architecture students, I'm told, are more interested in so-called "green architecture," work that responds to the global crisis of climate and resources, than they are in artistic shape-making. They're interested in urbanism, in the ways buildings gather to shape streets and neighborhoods and public spaces. They research new materials and methods of construction. Increasingly, they're collaborating with students in other fields, instead of hoping to produce a private ego trip.

As others have pointed out, there's an upside to recessions. They give people time to step back from the frantic pace of a boom economy and think hard about what it is they want to do. In a time of limited resources, architects and their clients will focus again on solving the practical problems of making an environment that is, in every sense of today's overused word, sustainable.

Some day, the tourist vogue will fade in Dubai. The emirate will cease to be the latest toy for the jet-setter. There will be a big empty pool and a forgotten beach. A moment of selfish insanity will have passed.

The Bilbao Decade produced some wonderful buildings, but it was a time when the social purposes of architecture were sometimes lost. Architecture is supposed to be about making places for human habitation - rooms, streets, parks, cities - not merely skyline icons or beachfront palaces.

Just as one feels a page turning with the arrival of a new American president, so a page is turning, once again, in the history of architecture.

 

[ganjavih]

Marking the end of 'The Bilbao Decade'
Times dictate a shift away from vanity projects

We didn't even get to fully benefit from the era of vanity projects. Our Foster, Gehry, Libeskind, and Alsop all suffered from budget cuts.

 

[Archivist]

I also look forward to what comes next. When I look at buildings in Toronto that went up in that slow period after the shock that was WWII, I see a period of hesitancy and uncertainty amongst architects. Some continued with vaguely art-deco plans, but stripped down to their essentials. Quite a few buildings were built that were vaguely classical, but not emphatic in that. Eventually, modernism became the unchallenged style of the new era, unfettered as it was by the encumbrances of the past. It makes perfect sense.

When we have built out the last bunches of buildings happening now, and presuming there is a sustained downturn (which seems all but inevitable now), what will happen afterwards? Surely the showy pieces will disappear, as these authors suggest. But I wonder as well about modernism, perhaps our glassy towers, too, will become as dated as anything else. I suspect US's posts, above, reflect a modernism-uber-alles belief that supports his prejudices.

That seems possible, but if I had to bet on it, I'd suggest that the "style" of future might encompass a lot more energy-efficient elements, eschewing the huge glass plates of today that give us such beauties as the Four Seasons or or Telus in favour of smaller windows, greater insulation, and maximization of the utilization of interior space. I think whatever comes next will owe a huge debt of gratitude to the stripped down aesthetic of modernism, while bending away into a new form, as yet unknown to us.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Personally I think Modernism (and the various Neo-flavours of such) will be around for a long time - not because of the aesthetic superiority of the style itself - but because of the fact that it is one of the styles that is most amenable to mass production of building components at the lowest cost, ersatz Victorian homes notwithstanding. The particulars, such as window coverage, may vary as environmental concerns lead to building code changes - but at the end of the day, efficiency rules.

AoD

 

[Urban Shocker]

I agree completely. Modernism is the practical, workhorse, default model - despite whatever those who push the fashion of the moment decree.

 

[Archivist]

I personally doubt that Modernism is the style to which all other styles have been striving towards, end of architectural history, as it were.

The extremely decorative late 19th Century styles came after that stripped down Georgian. Even if modernism lives on, and I suspect it may, it may well be in forms and shapes that surprise us all.

Anyways, time will tell, even if not all of us are around. Even if modernism lives on, it will inevitably be by different names and different forms, just as a 1964 apartment block in West Hill differs pretty much completely from Spire. I doubt it's very accurate to speak of "modernism" per se, but different branches of it.

Evolution is the only constant.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Archivist:

No doubt there will be other styles (recycled or completely new ones) in the future - what surprised me was that Modernism is still around even after three-quarters of a century. Perhaps it's more accurate to refer to it as a philosophy than an actual building style. Somehow, we didn't seem to outgrow the values the style implies (e.g. minimalism, simplicity, etc.) - in fact, the drive to attain those values seem to be just as strong as before (think Apple industrial design as an example).

I suspect that until we develop building technologies that allow for mass produced but individually tailored components at a low cost, Modernism in some form will remain a dominant architectural style.

AoD