When Buildings Try Too Hard (refs to ROM and 4SC)

[adma]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122731149503149341.html

NOVEMBER 22, 2008 When Buildings Try Too Hard
Architects and developers are focused on erecting icons. Why most fall short
By WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

In a devastated real-estate market, builders and developers are clinging to an ambitious word with magical properties. In New York, a proposed 56-story luxury residential tower, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, though as yet unbuilt, already claims to be "iconic." A Brooklyn condominium high-rise with a textured façade of jagged, light- and dark-colored glass designed by SOM, the same firm that designed Chicago's Sears Tower, promises "iconic design within reach." A Seattle developer, taking no chances, has simply named his forthcoming residential tower The Icon. Apparently, everyone would like their building to be an icon, but it's not that easy.

Traditionally, a building is an icon when it is a popularly-recognized symbol of something larger than itself -- like the White House, the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. Architectural icons are generally anointed by the public, and sometimes a long time after they are built. So why do developers think that they can create instant icons? Frank Gehry and the Bilbao Guggenheim, that's why. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, an industrial city in northeast Spain, opened in 1997. Using innovative computer technology, Mr. Gehry designed and built a structure of striking originality and formal inventiveness. The swirling shapes covered in highly reflective titanium were not only astonishingly original, they were like no other building that people had ever seen. Moreover, unlike most avant-garde creations -- one thinks of atonal music, or Nouvelle Vague cinema -- the Bilbao Guggenheim was fun.

The Bilbao museum is not the first modern architectural icon; it was preceded by the Sydney Opera House. Jørn Utzon's stunning waterside building, which reminds many people of sails or seashells, became an international sensation when it was completed in 1973. Gehry has been quoted as saying that his Basque clients wanted the Guggenheim "to do for Bilbao what the Sydney Opera House did for Australia." In fact, Mr. Gehry's museum succeeded so well at attracting visitors -- millions of them -- that the phenomenon of iconic architecture acting as a tourist draw became known as the Bilbao effect.

However you interpret Gehry's museum, as billowing sails, an extraterrestrial object or a silver artichoke, it has unquestionably become an internationally recognized icon -- for travel to Spain, and for tourism generally. It is the built equivalent of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon: a place that you must visit at least once. That is the chief promise of the Bilbao effect, whether for a concert hall hoping to attract patrons, a downtown luring tourists and conventioneers, or a real-estate developer looking to draw buyers: People will come.

Despite the success of the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Bilbao effect has not proved easy to replicate, not even for Frank Gehry. His Experience Music Project for Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, was supposed to put Seattle on the architectural map. Despite its unusual architecture, consisting of colorful, rounded forms said to be inspired by electric guitars, the museum of rock music and Jimi Hendrix memorabilia has not proven to be a success. Attendance has been poor, and recently a part of the building was converted into a science-fiction museum. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which had not built a significant modern building since Eero Saarinen's Kresge Auditorium, commissioned Gehry to add a landmark to its campus. The Stata Center is an eye-catching structure, all slipping and sliding shapes, but the intended iconic effect has been severely compromised by a public furor (and a lawsuit) over cost over-runs and functional failings, allegedly including mold growth, leaks and falling ice and snow from the building. Daniel Libeskind is another architect who, following his universally acclaimed Jewish Museum in Berlin, was considered to have the Midas touch when it came to signature buildings. Yet his recent crystalline addition to the Denver Art Museum has failed to attract the expected number of visitors, and another crystalline -- and slightly scary-looking -- extension to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has not exactly set the architectural world on fire. None of this bodes well for cities that are counting on instant icons to save them in a looming recession.

Perhaps the Bilbao effect should be called the Bilbao anomaly, for the iconic chemistry between the design of building, its image and the public turns out to be rather rare -- and somewhat mysterious. Herzog & de Meuron's design for Beijing's Olympic Stadium is ingenious, for example, but instead of the complex engineering it was the widely perceived image of a bird's nest (a nickname that did not originate with the architects) that cemented the building's international iconic status; the woven steel wrapper seemed to symbolize both China's ancient traditions and its rush to modernization. The so-called Water Cube, housing the Olympic pools, also became an iconic hit, although since the illuminated box is chiefly effective at night it is something of a one-trick pony, and it will be interesting to see how long the iconic effect lasts.

But for every Bird's Nest, there are scores of costly iconic failures, buildings that fail to spark the public's imagination. Of course, failed icons don't go away, which is a problem. Since the Bilbao effect teaches -- I believe mistakenly -- that unconventional architecture is a prerequisite for iconic status, clients have encouraged their architects to go to greater and greater lengths to design buildings that are unusual, surprising, even shocking. But the shock will inevitably wear off, and 100 years from now, all those iconic wannabes will resemble a cross between a theme park and the Las Vegas strip.

 

[adma]

[cont'd]

Although the term iconic is increasingly used to mean simply prominent or attention-getting buildings, architectural icons embody specific messages. The White House, for example, signifies the office of the presidency, just as that other iconic big house, Buckingham Palace, represents the British monarchy. During the Cold War, the Kremlin, a walled citadel on the Moskva River, stood for the Soviet regime -- and gave us "Kremlinology." Icons are not only national. Some, such as the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, symbolize cities; "Black Rock," the spooky granite skyscraper in New York that is the headquarters of CBS, represents a corporation. Icons can have more than one meaning; the Washington Monument, for example, not only commemorates the first president but also symbolizes the capital city that bears his name and, because it's overlarge and self-confident, American-ness itself.

The Washington Monument is an obelisk, a traditional commemorative device that dates back to ancient Egypt, so we know it's a memorial, but the relationship between the form of an architectural icon and its meaning is not always direct. The fairytale onion domes of the Kremlin have always struck me as an odd symbol for a totalitarian regime. The Argentine presidential palace, the Casa Rosada or Pink House, was given its color and its name by a 19th-century president, but some buildings become icons by accident. Because the porous sandstone walls of what was originally known as the Executive Mansion in Washington, D.C., were painted with a protective coating of whitewash, people started calling it the "white house." The name was formally adopted -- by Theodore Roosevelt -- only in 1901. The Pentagon got its nickname from an unusual five-sided plan that was the result of an awkward site; in another location it might just as easily have been a square or a rectangle, and we would not have the delicious irony of the Department of Defense being symbolized by a secret cabalistic sign.

The famous clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, popularly known as Big Ben after its main bell, is a widely recognized symbol that also happens to be part of an important work of the British Gothic Revival. The White House, on the other hand, which was modeled on a Georgian mansion in Dublin, is handsome enough, but it breaks no new architectural ground. I've always liked the iconic Empire State Building, but it's a less interesting skyscraper than the rambunctious Chrysler or the soaring RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. As for the Pentagon, it has few architectural merits, and is impressive chiefly for its great size -- and, of course, its shape. The truth is that iconic buildings don't have to be great architecture.

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened in 1939, Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone's design, with its white walls, ribbon windows and perforated roof canopy, was hailed as the fresh harbinger of the forward-looking International Style. Not quite an icon, perhaps, but definitely a portent of the future. Two years later, the National Gallery of Art in Washington opened its doors. Its architect, John Russell Pope, had died a few years earlier, so he was spared the scorn and ridicule that modernist critics heaped on his neoclassical design. "The last of the Romans" they called him. Yet, 67 years later, it is the restored façade of the Museum of Modern Art that looks quaint -- nothing ages faster than today's idea of the future -- while Pope's pile of Tennessee marble looks as grave and implacable as the year it was built.

Most people would call the National Gallery a "classic," referring not to its style but to its stylistic durability -- that is, its quality of timelessness. Colleges and universities, in particular, are concerned with architectural longevity, and with extending -- not compromising -- their built legacy. That was presumably why Yale picked Robert A.M. Stern to design its two new residential colleges. Stern has built student residences at Columbia, Georgetown, and the Hotchkiss School, all in distinctly traditional styles. His dormitory at the Taft School, in Watertown, Conn., for example, is part of a campus designed in the early 1900s by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in the Arts and Crafts Gothic style, and later added to by James Gamble Rogers, who built many of the colleges at Yale. Stern's building, which exhibits his characteristic "hearty material physicality," in Vincent Scully's happy phrase, deploys a large-scale high collegiate Gothic vocabulary of red brick, limestone trim, slate roofs and leaded windows to great effect.

Timelessness does not necessarily mean glancing backward. At Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Boston-based William Rawn Associates was commissioned to design a new center for theater and dance. While the architects of putative icons concentrate on exterior effects, Rawn was more circumspect. "We usually tell our clients that they can chose three or four special things to spend extra money on," he says. Following consultations with the college, these "special things" turned out to be the main performance space, a dramatic glass-enclosed dance studio, and a striking wood-lined lobby facing the town's main street. These highlights take their place in a nuanced composition of glass, brick, limestone and wood that feels vaguely Scandinavian. While iconic buildings stand apart, the Williams theater and dance center is visually connected to its surroundings, contributing to a broader sense of place.

Another example of a building that responds to its setting is Toronto's new opera house, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, designed by Diamond & Schmitt Architects. The traditional horseshoe-shaped auditorium is situated within an unprepossessing blue-black brick box whose chief feature is a glazed lobby facing one of the city's main streets, University Avenue; dramatic, but hardly iconic. "It's easy to do an iconic building," says Jack Diamond, "because it's only solving one issue." The Four Seasons Centre addresses several issues: On the exterior, the building responds to a busy downtown site with transparency and openness; on the interior, it creates a multi-use lobby that includes an informal performance space and a remarkable all-glass stair; and in the 2,000-seat hall, it provides intimacy, excellent sight lines and exemplary acoustics. At $150 million, the cost of the Four Seasons Centre is relatively modest as opera houses go, but more important is how the money was spent -- on the hall and the interiors rather than on exterior architectural effects. There is something very Canadian about this hard-headed reticence.

Buildings such as the Taft dormitory, the Williams College arts complex and the Toronto opera house seek to fit in rather than stand out, and to enhance rather than overwhelm their surroundings. While hardly shy, they don't stand there shouting, "Look at me!" Being in it for the long haul, they approach fashion gingerly, leaning to the conservative and well-tried rather than the experimental. They are handsome, beautiful even, but they don't strive to knock your socks off. Anti-icons, you might call them. Or just good architecture.

Witold Rybczynski teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book, due this spring, is "My Two Polish Grandfathers."

 

[Hypnotoad]

Good read, thanks for posting that. The growing wave of criticism over "icon" creating or crash architecture is not so much refreshing as it is primary. It should go without saying that not every building will be iconic. In fact, it is actually moronic to think that instant icons will just catch-on using the band aid recipe of shock-and-awe, wishful thinking and heroin.

 

[Tewder]

Icons are a product of the meaning that people come to confer on them. There has to be a collective understanding of or willingness to believe in the icon itself. We do have icons in Toronto, though they are largely only recognized as so locally which may in part explain the desire/obsession in Toronto for something that would be internationally recognized as so (the Bilbao effect?). All great cities have their well-known icons so I understand the desire for one here but you have to wonder which comes first! My sense is that great cities breed icons, rather than the other way around.

 

[Ramako]

Icons are a product of the meaning that people come to confer on them. There has to be a collective understanding of or willingness to believe in the icon itself. We do have icons in Toronto, though they are largely only recognized as so locally which may in part explain the desire/obsession in Toronto for something that would be internationally recognized as so (the Bilbao effect?). All great cities have their well-known icons so I understand the desire for one here but you have to wonder which comes first! My sense is that great cities breed icons, rather than the other way around.

We do have an internationally recognized icon in the CN Tower. It's easy to forget because it just seems to be so much a part of the city now.

 

[SP!RE]

I'm not going to lie on here-- the CN Tower still fascinates and enchants me. Most evenings I watch its lighting out my window, looking south right down at it. I will never get over that building, or the way that it engages people-- especially now that it's lit so strikingly and beautifully.

 

[TO City of Light]

We need an icon

Our friend Witold is so right - creating a contemporary icon is not a slam dunk. Bilbao is relatively unique. Either your city is old (a relative term), in which case you have a Forum, or a Parthenon, or a Statue of Liberty or a David, or an Eiffel Tower, or you have to build new. With the exception of Bilbao, itself rather old and helped by given European city of culture status at the time and the Guggenheim name, the answer is build up or build a wheel.

The CN Tower is without a doubt the number one icon of Toronto, and indeed of Canada. But it is dated. If we want to update we need another even taller tower or a big wheel. London is now defined by the London Eye. Singapore has the Singapore Flyer. It's even better if it can be the site of a chase in a James Bond movie - e.g. the Millennium Dome - which is not a wheel, of course, but is also a building with no discernable purpose.

So Toronto, we need the biggest observation wheel in the world, preferably along the lakeshore. I am afraid museums will not do it. ROM will become a continuing embarassment. AGO will be a Toronto icon but hardly global.

Is Toronto ready to spend millions, perhaps tens of millions, on a structure that has no function other than to be a contemporary icon?

I hope so.


.

 

[SP!RE]

Disagreed. We don't need another "icon"-- and we definitely should not be putting our taxpayers' money into building some giant ferris wheel that copies London's et al....

 

[Archivist]

I've never been that fond of Witold's conservative analysis of buildings or of cities, though I've read his books and would read more of them. He has a decided preference for workaday buildings that fit in, so naturally he would prefer to the Four Seasons Centre to the ROM, that was entirely predictable. And I don't really appreciate his snide reference to the Bilbao Guggenheim as a silver artichoke - that's the kind of bitchiness that makes architectureal critics so often painful and boring to read.

In my view, the polarity that he proposes in this article is a fales one. Cities are robust enough to hold -- even require -- buildings of dramatically different forms and purposes. I have room in my heart for both forms - the Gardiner is a fantastic example of an almost shy building, standing back from the street, most of its mass hidden, yet so handsome that you just want to tweak his little cheek. Right across the street we have the ROM exploding out over Bloor Street, demanding attention. I have no need to criticize one to praise the other - I am happy with both (though I have more reservations about the ROM).

Buildings like Philadelphia's or Buffalo's art museums, though conservative architecturally, play exactly the same role as the ROM does within their cities - they are meant to stand out from the crowd and signify their importance, even from a distance. Since Toronto's cultural instututions find themselves on such tiny lots they don't have the option of a huge expanse of land to reveal their purposes, other methods must be found. Thus, we have both the ROM and the AGO bulging out over their respective sidewalks, a particularly Toronto solution to the cultural need to distinguish these buildings.

 

[Pinkie]

The CN Tower is Toronto's icon, and the installation of the LED lighting brought it into the 21st Century and made it more dynamic than New York's Emprie State Building.

I feel like the ROM, and I know it's been said before, suffered from poor materials. Even the black framing on the windows is ugly. The only angle I turly like the ROM is driving West down Bloor on a very sunny day. From other angles it looks dull and bulky. Different windows with stainless steel frames, better cladding (frosted glass?, Gehry aluminum?, the cladding Libeskind used in Devner?), and a more seamless connection to the original museum would improve the Crystal 10 fold. Unfortunately that's not gonna happen any time soon unless one of us takes over.

I think Toronto's growing at a rapid enough rate that we're gonna see some spectacular architecture built across the city. We can't force icons to be built, but if we continue to be place-making across the city we will see unexpected icons spring up from the Don Lands to the Waterfront.

 

[digi]

Gehry aluminum?,

Titanium!

 

[wyliepoon]

So Toronto, we need the biggest observation wheel in the world, preferably along the lakeshore. I am afraid museums will not do it. ROM will become a continuing embarassment. AGO will be a Toronto icon but hardly global.

An observation wheel is less of an icon than either the ROM or the AGO. The London Eye may have turned heads when it first came out, but nobody these days care about Singapore's bigger wheel, and certainly nobody would visit Singapore just to ride the wheel. I wonder how many people know, or even care, that Beijing is currently building a bigger wheel than Singapore.

As for the subject of 'icons', I think there are two different categories of 'icons'. There are some 'architectural' icons, and there are some 'public' icons. In the first category are buildings that are the talk of architecture fans such as ourselves, shortlisted for architecture awards, but the public rarely knows about them. I'd put places like the Gardiner Museum in the first category. Buildings in the second category are landmarks that everybody knows, make it in most tourist guides as must-sees, but are not necessarily good-looking, such as the CN Tower, Eaton Centre or the SkyDome. The ROM and the AGO fit nicely between these two categories.

 

[wyliepoon]

http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/542822

Tome lauds Canada's architecture



Nov 25, 2008 04:30 AM

Christopher Hume

There are heavy volumes and weighty tomes, then there's the Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture. This 5,000-image, 800-page, 6.6-kilogram monster is so big it comes with its own plastic carrying case. Just as well, too, otherwise lugging it around would be even harder.

But propped up on the coffee table – actually this book could be the coffee table – open and perused, it turns out to be a fount of information. The century isn't yet a decade old and already we have produced a seemingly endless parade of architectural wonders. And not all are the crowd pleasers, the landmarks and monuments meant to set people chattering. As the dozen or so pages devoted to Canada make clear, there's plenty of room in the book for smaller domestic projects, the sorts of things the rest of us rarely get to visit.

Thus we see a guest house designed by Toronto's Shim Sutcliffe, one of a handful of tiny perfect practices that take on few commissions, but ensure each is exquisite. And there are houses by Brian MacKay-Lyons in Nova Scotia.

Closer to home, and better known, are a clutch of works that came to life as part of Toronto's Cultural Renaissance: Daniel Libeskind's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, Will Alsop's Sharp Centre at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg's masterful Canada's National Ballet School.

Though Torontonians themselves have not always reacted positively, these buildings are fast becoming the icons by which we are known around the world. Given the current interest in all things architectural, that goes a long way.

Like it or not, these are the projects that will create the new image of Toronto, and Canada. For the most part, it's a good thing. To those from away, the ROM's much-unloved Crystal is the very symbol of a city that thinks big and takes chances. It is bold and exciting; therefore we must be too.

If anything, Alsop's flying tabletop at OCAD has become even more iconic. Though Phaidon misspells the name – it's Sharp not Sharpe – there's no missing the outlandish charm of this structure.

Also mentioned is the remarkable Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. Designed by Montreal's Saucier + Perrotte, this is a building that would stand out in any city through its sheer brilliance.

Not surprisingly, Ray Moriyama's War Museum in Ottawa made the lineup. The culmination of a long and distinguished career, this extraordinary building contains some of the most powerful interior spaces in Canada. Indeed, one of its few rivals is Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, another example of a building where the narrative is embedded in its structure.

Despite the inclusion of a country house or two, the Canadian examples paint a portrait of a decidedly urban nation; these are city projects, many of them remakes and expansions of existing institutions. Some worry that no mere addition could match the spectacle of the stand-alone landmark. Not only is this wrong, but we also mustn't forget that city-building allows for a different sort architectural beauty, more nuanced and sensitively fitted into its surroundings.

Whether readers agree Phaidon's editors have correctly chosen "the greatest buildings of the 21st century" is hardly relevant. The book gives ample evidence that through it all, architecture matters.

Few would regret the passing of an age in which architects saw themselves as social engineers, even saviours. The emphasis now is not so much on changing the world as enlivening one tiny part of it. And as a famous practitioner once noted, less is always more.

 

[adma]

I've never been that fond of Witold's conservative analysis of buildings or of cities, though I've read his books and would read more of them. He has a decided preference for workaday buildings that fit in, so naturally he would prefer to the Four Seasons Centre to the ROM, that was entirely predictable. And I don't really appreciate his snide reference to the Bilbao Guggenheim as a silver artichoke - that's the kind of bitchiness that makes architectureal critics so often painful and boring to read.

To me, his "conservative analysis" made him the perfect critic for a Fukuyamaesque End Of History, i.e. when everything seemed to be settling to a perfectly good-mannered post-post-modern entropy.

He'd probably also wonder why you've all got your dandruff up over Jack Diamond's Corus project...

 

[Jayomatic]

Screw giant ferris wheels. Let's build the worlds largest, glass enclosed roller coaster along the waterfront. Take the same looking pods you'll find on the london eye, attach those to some tracks and have them speed through the downtown skyscrapers. No there's an attraction!