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architects
What does it say that I can't think of a single architect by name that I like, yet three that I despise jump instantly to mind? What is it about architecture that attracts such profound depths of wankery? It seems like other industries manage to combine function and aesthetics with at least some success and only a very small fraction of the pretension.
(For the record: Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry and Le Corbusier, in order of increasing bile.)
(For the record: Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry and Le Corbusier, in order of increasing bile.)
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Now I'll give you Gehry, he seemed to be trying to work half-ideas as art. But FLW? The Guggenheim and the Robie house? And the glass? The interior work is, dare I say it, devine.
The Ozenfant House by Le Corbusier almost redeems the rest of his lackluster catalogue.
Of course as a great man once said, "you are entitled to your opinion, even if it's wrong." Actually I commend you on actually having an opinion on such an important topic. I find contemporary common American architecture so uninspiring when it's not actually bad that I imagine it creating some sort of negative societal feng shui which is the root cause of many of our problems today.
Of course I may just be crazy. My ire is reserved for the likes of I. M. Pei so what do I know?
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And yeah, I sometimes find contemporary architecture bland to the point of depression. Possibly that's why pretentious artiste architects get me so angry -- they give interesting designs a bad name. If I were a corporate board looking at designs and the choice was between bland-but-functional and a melted Gehry funhouse that goes out of its way not to have right angles, I'd go with the low risk, low interest level, low inspiration option as well.
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Robin Hood Gardens (http://www.hughpearman.com/articles5/smithsons5.html) (and why on earth would you name such a building such a thing, anyway?)
Another link about modernist high-rises with crime problems (http://www.kunstnerneshus.no/news_article.html?news_articles.nid=15)
And a quote from the latter:
The reason for discarding this ideology as a social experiment for building renewal has to do with experience that has proven the experiment unsuccessful in placing socially unfit citizens on the straight and narrow path merely by having the possibility of living in modern apartments in regulated residential areas. On the contrary, evidence suggests that such experiment perhaps encourage crime. Charles Jencks mentions several examples in his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture from 1977. By way of introduction, there is an illustration of the demolition of such a housing project in St. Louis, with the accopanying text: "MINORU YAMASAKI, Pruitt-Igoe Housing, St. Louis, 1952-55. Several slabs of this scheme were blown up in 1972 after they were continuously vandalized. The crime rate was higher than other developments, and Oscar Newman attributed this, in his book Defensible Space, to the long corridors, anonymity, and lack of controlled semi-private space. Another factor: it was designed at variance with the architectural codes of the inhabitants."(20)
Peter and Alison Smithson were British architects known for designing large housing projects in a New-Brutalist style. An illustration of the open corridors in front of the uniform entrance doors in a Smithsons-designed project show Paul Goldberger with his hands over his head, criminal-style, being lead off to jail. This is a deliberate gesture, as the text declares outright: "Here architectural critic Paul Goldberger mimes an act that often occurs."(21) The description of Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens is as follows: "SMITHSONS, Robin Hood Gardens, street in the air, and collective entry. The long empty streets in the air don’t have the life or facilities of the traditional street. The entry ways, one of which has been burned, are dark and anonymous, serving too many families."
And, of course, our local Freeway Park (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=11685)
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Gehry designed the new building (http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/peterblewis/index.htm) at my college. Beside the lack of artistic merit and the fact that the spaces were utterly inappropriate for their intended uses, he wouldn't let them install cat5 jacks because they were unaesthetic. Seriously.
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>
They dropped it :)
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You're not a fan of the Domes?
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I think I can answer this one: architects design objects that are so big they're impossible to ignore. The profession attracts sculptors with ego issues who are prone to forget who's paying their commissions.
For the record, though, I like some of FLW's & Gehry's work.
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I don't think the wankery itself goes to greater depths, so much as people have to live with the costly mostrosities for decades. Perhaps it's wankery to take money up front to indulge one's design fantasies, though.
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The architects, too, never had to study how a building stresses in an earthquake, or wiring codes, ergonomics, plumbing, or how much things cost in the industry. Such mundane, "trivial" details were the province of the architectural engineers.
Once, I was watching an architect senior rant - she showed me her designs for a five-story senior center shaped like a U (with no connecting points on the legs of the U). The bottom curved portion was to be a open atrium. The subject of her rant was that it was incredibly unfair than all the architectural engineers she had to work with told her she couldn't use a single sheet of glass for the five-story high, several hundred feet long curved outer wall "and it'll totally ruin the asthetics, not to mention I have to redraw everything!"
If we don't train them that a single-pane five-story curved window is unfeasible by the time they're ready to graduate in the working world, how can we expect them to figure out that stairs should not be huge or tiny, roofs should not leak, and buildings in earthquake-prone areas should be able to withstand earthquakes?
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As for Fuller, I didn't even think of him. I don't classify him primarily as an architect in my mind.
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I know architects, I work with architects, let me tell you about architects . . .
First, their education is all about learning to tear each-other's work apart critical. Because it is essentially an aesthetics standard, the "best" is determined by how well you can trash the other guy or gal's work. Seriously, they spend much of their educational career "critically" evaluating piers' work.
So, big difference between engineers and architects:
Tell an Engineer, "hey, I think there might be a better way to do this" or "did you consider xyz in the design yet"? and they will say "really? what are you thinking?" or give a factual run-down of the design considerations and process to date. In engineering, there are often significant differences in design approach/theory, but some basic stuff is either right or wrong, and one has to present some objection reasons for doing something.
Start to question an architect on something and they go into massive defensive mode and immediately counter-attack. It's how they are trained.
Second, architects are frustrated artists. And the way they are employed in their early career just makes them even more frustrated, so that the bad mood they got started with in college just is deepened. Entry level architects (called Interns, I kid you not) are given all the shit detail work that is not all creative or engaging. And they get paid poorly for the privilege, as architecture is still a glamorous profession.
So, third, architecture is a considered a glamorous profession. Look at how many movies feature trendy hot-architects as protagonists. Compare that to engineers. So, few people become engineers out of hope for glamour, or riches, or opportunity to "express their inner (artistic) vision." Architects expect glamour, and money, and get very little of either. They are bitter people. How many people know FLW by name, compared to a famous (?) civil engineer? But only the architects that claw and con their way up into dominance have anywhere near that kind of individual expression or hope of fame. Can you imagine the pressure of being a "big" architect knowing that there is no objective way to demonstrate your designs are "better" than Joe Blow's? The less understandable or approachable your work, the easier it is to dismiss critics as "not getting it." Also, it's flamboyance that makes an architect famous, not solid staid design.
When I was in NY, did see one guy at MoMA that I liked, Santiago Calatrava. Maybe I like his stuff because he’s also a civil engineer and a lot of is some very clever engineering.
http://www.turningtorso.com/
http://www.calatrava.info/
-B.
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