11 January, 2008
Bar Code Buildings
For your light, uplifting Friday reading I direct you to this article. Very sad, but unfortunately very true in my mind. And to add to the sadness I heard that Paris is considering removing its height limitations on new construction. I can't wait to see SOM's contribution to the new and improved Paris skyline of tomorrow...
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6 comments:
Too right. If architectural details communicate culture, what does a flat-fronted slab divided into precisely equal mirrored rectangles say about us as a people?
I don't like to think about it.
Of course, a building made of mirrors would be appropriate to our vain and narcissistic culture. We just can't get enough of looking at our own reflection.
Matt,
I didn't have an email.
Sorry that you have had such a hard go of it of late on a certain site. You might follow the others over to Evangelical Catholicity.
http://evangelicalcatholicity.wordpress.com/
You will find a much warmer welcome there.
Apparently I always want to be the guy that says these things.
Georgian and Victorian buildings of such “…ambition, of cultural depth”, have wonderful detailing and form. However, they are not small and cute for depth of cultural significance but because, it was the maximum build able space at the time. Waddle and dub building are smaller still. Also you can build nice delicate ins and outs of elevation depth if you have a wage slave population. The pyramids are nice, and some amazing things are being built in Dubai. You can do cool thing if you have cheap cheap (basically free) labor; no unions or anyone who cares about the safety of your workers helps also.
You have phenomenal costs if you have to have expensive elevations and living wages for your builders. So what we get is detailing that lacks some visual interested. But I think I would rather have a barcode building than workers who can’t buy bread or clothe their children. It would be nice to have both, this would require building half as much new construction, which I have little problem with, even though it would probably put me out of work when it tanks the economy. Paris building high might put more homes in the central city; this might cut down on strife in the rings of ghettos so again I might take a crap HOK tower if it cuts down on the riots. Also it’ll give BoBo Europeans lots of conversation topics in the cafes.
I guess I'm reminded of Chesterton's conclusion at the end of What's Wrong With the World. He spends the whole book talking about how circumstances cause us to hack away at the ideal rather than changing circumstances to suit and support the ideal. In the conclusion he just kind of lets it all out in this huge manifesto that makes you realize just how much we let circumstances dictate to us. I'm pretty fed up with the architectural system right now and I'm using this outlet to speak my mind sans capitulation to the tyranny of the now.
I deal with the necessities of "real" architecture every day, though I refuse to stamp certain economical or circumstantial restraints as good simpy because they are at present unavoidable. It is precisely because I encounter "value engineering" every day that I write so stridently against it. If economics makes it impossible to obtain a humanistic, culturally significant, and truly beautiful building - then the economics must change to suit the ideal. It's not that we can't achieve that, it's that the companies making that decision prefer to spend their money elsewhere, often on even larger salaraies and bonuses for management.
I have no delusions of being able to change Capitalism and the mindset behind it, but I'll be damned if I back off on my assertion that current corporate culture is killing anything of beauty that man would choose to build. If the system tells me I have to choose between decent buildings and a living wage for workers, then I say screw the system...preferably screwing the golden parachutes first.
I would agree; current corporate culture is killing most things of beauty that man choose to have. But are we seriously to lament the fact that towers built to aggrandize the men and women of power who pay for their construction are not as nice looking as those built by the same self interested sods that came in the generations before them. Versailles is an amazing place but the French government can only afford to run all the fountains at one time only a hand full of times a year it is amazingly cost prohibitive. Where as the king had them all going most days the price be darned because, he could say as; Mel (that’s Brooks not Gibson) has shown us “F&*% the poor.” Most of what the educated architecture fetishist, of which I count myself a part, hold up building as paragons of virtue, when their histories tell the story of vice, and personal idolatry.
I don’t see the big deal; those who build a monument to themselves are spending less on the look because the labor is so expensive. These are products of capitalism. I view the dancing elevations to be a morality wash, at least these ugly buildings are designed with a level of truth…Price sells cars. Now when it comes to housing, people want as much floor space as they can have, so cheap buildings prevail. It is consumer choice, they choose this garbage, because the nice building cost too much. We lived in a turn of the century load bearing masonry apartment building, that we loved, but the rent got raised and we couldn’t afford it, so we moved down in quality. Did we want to? No. However, we made an economic decision to have lower standards in order to save, and so my wife would not have to work. It’s what has to be done from time to time. And I think one of the nice side effects is that every once and a while you run a across a building that is good and artful. They become gems, the highlight of the walk to work, that which is looked forward to. If everything was high end it gets boring like a nude beach, everything is on display so who cares anymore. Take a look at Dubai, too many building are topless and at the same time easily forgotten.
The problem with Dubai is exactly as you said, it is all flash with very little fabric to weave into. Obviously we can't have a city of unique buildings, it doesn't work. It becomes an amusement park. The point about early urbanism is that there was a level of quality to the background, fabric level buildings that makes for a pleasant environment in which real talent can pop out every once in a while. As I've mentioned before my huge beef with architectural education is that the vast majority of schools never teach their students to design the pleasant fabric buildings, they all teach the innovative and "topless" buildings. You can only achieve innovative architecture with real talent, but you can achieve pleasant architecture with training. We don't have this training anymore, it's all about the flash.
I also think that the real disconnect from the older urban fabric and the innovative new fabric is the lack of any human scale. Like the corporate culture it represents, our urban buildings are representative of the organisation rather than the people involved. We are celebrating our capacity to condense the corporate entity into built form while ignoring the much more pleasing feat of condensing the human condition into built form. It's the proportions that bother me, not so much the cost. We should be designing for people, not faceless corporations. Corporations don't inhabit buildings, people do. We need to stop letting the corporations dictate our environment. We are the corporations, our environment should cater to the human scale rather than the corporate one.
If the only response against that line of thinking is that the system makes it too expensive to build to the human scale then the system has to change.
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