In 1960 Banham wrote in Theory and Design -
“We have already entered the Second
Machine Age” and look back at the First one as a period of the past. He
challenged the functionalist and/or rationalist assumptions and recovered other
imperatives that were neglected. In doing so we advocated a Futurist imagining
of technology in Expressionist terms – that is in forms that were often
sculptural and sometimes gestural as the prime motive in advanced design in the
Second Machine Age ( or First Pop).
Far from academic, his revision reclaimed
an “aesthetic of expandability”, first proposed in Futurism, where “standards
hitched to permanency” were no longer relevant. More than any other figure
Banham moved design discourse away from a modernist syntax of abstract forms
towards a Pop idiom of mediated images. If architecture were adequately to
express this world – where the dreams of austere 50’s were about to become the
products of the consumerist ‘60s – it had to match the design of expendabilia
in functional and aesthetic performance- it had to go Pop.
For Banham, it was imperative that Pop
design not only express contemporary technologies but also elaborate them into
new modes of existence. Here lies the great difference between Banham and the
Venturis. Venturies shunned both expressive and technophilic tendencies: they
opposed any prolongation of the modern movement along these lines. For Banham
modern architecture was not modern enough, while for Venturies it had become
disconnected from both society and history precisely through its commitment to
a modernity that was abstract and amnesiac in nature. According to Venturis,
modern design lacked “inclusion and allusion” – inclusion of popular taste and
allusion to architectural tradition- a failure that stemmed above all from its
rejection of ornamental “symbolism” in favour of formal “expressionism”.
To be sure, Venturis also endorsed Pop
imagibility: “ We came to the automobile –oriented commercial architecture of
urban sprawl as our source for a civic and residential architecture of meaning,
viable now, as the turn of the century industrial vocabulary was viable for a
Modern architecture of space and industrial technology 40 years ago.”
Yet in so doing they accepted – not only as
a given but as a desideratum – the identification of the “civic” with the
“commercial”, and thus they took the strip and the suburb , however “ugly and
ordinary”, not only as normative but as exemplary.”Architecture in this context
becomes symbol in space rather than form in space” the Venturis declared. “The
big sign and the little building is the rule of route 66”. Given this rule Learning
from Las Vegas could then conflate corporate trademarks with public symbols.
It could also conclude that only a
scenographic architecture (i.e one that foregrounds a façade of signs) might
make connections among many elements, far apart and seen fast”.
This move naturalized a landscape that was
anything but natural; more, it instrumentalized a sensorium of distraction, as
they urged architects to design for “a captive, somewhat fearful, but partly
inattentive audience, whose vision is filtered and directed forward”.
The
built environment, ‘which for most of us is the environment’, recognizing that
the world we inhabit is the result of our own practices.
Our environing
world is something we build for ourselves, but we do not build it from nothing.
Vogel
calls this a ‘philosophy of practice’ and he reflects that the realness and
resistance of the world, the difficulty of labor, call us toward a modesty with
respect to our practices, deriving from them a sober and even chastened
recognition of the inevitable limits to planning and of the essential
unpredictability of the consequences of our actions.
In the call for architecture to “enhance
what is there” , the Venturis cited Pop art as a key inspiration. Yet this a
partial understanding of Pop, one cleansed of its dark side, such as the
culture of death in consumerist America. A more salient guide to Learing from
Las Vegas was the developer Morris Lapidus, whom the Venturis quote as follows:
“People are looking for illusions… Where do they find this world of the
illusions?... Do they study it in school? Do they go to museums? Do they travel
to Europe? Only one place-the movies. They go to the movies. The hell with
everything else.”
However ambivalently, Pop art wanted to
explore this new regime of social inscription, this new symbolic order or
surface and screen. The postmodernism prepared by the Venturis was placed
largely in its service – in effect, to update its built envinronment. One might
find a moment of democracy in this commercialism, or even a moment of critique
in this cynicism, but it is likely to be a projection.
By this point, then, the Pop rejection of
elitism became a postmodern manipulation of populism. In practice served as a
double coding of cultural cues that reaffirmed class lines even as it seemed to
cross them (“allusion” to the architectural tradition for the initiated,
“inclusion” of commercial iconography for everyone else).This deceptive
populism only became dominant in political culture a decade later, under Ronald
Reagan, as did the neoconservative equation of political freedom with free
markets also anticipated in Learning from Las Vegas.
With commercial images thus cycled back to
the built environment from which they arose, Pop became tautological in the
postmodern: rather than a challenge to official culture, it was that culture,
or at least its setting (as the corporate sky-lines of countless cities still
attest).
Pop design after the classic moment of Pop
was not confined to visionary moments and sensational happenings – that is to
paper architecture and art events. In fact, its emblematic instance might be
the Center Pompidou designed by Richard Roger and Renzo Piano which is at once
technological (Banhamite) and popular (or Venturian) in effect. Indeed, they
can be detected, albeit transformed, in two of the greatest stars in the
architectural firmament of the last 30 years: Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry.
Along the way, Gehry seemed to transcend
the Venturian opposition of modern structure and postmodern ornament,
architecture as monument and architecture as sign, but in fact he collapsed the
two cathegories.
The Fish market his initial use of CATIA,
or “computer aided three-dimensional interactive application”. Because CATIA
permits the modeling of non repetitive surfaces and supports, of different
exterior panels and interior armatures, it allowed Gehry to privilege shape and
skin, the overall configuration, above all else: hence the non-Euclidian
curves, swirls, and blobs that became his signature gestures in the ‘90s, most
famously in the Guggenheim Bilbao.
In Bilbao, Gehry moved to make Guggenheim
legible through an allusion to a splintered ship. Yet the image does not work
as a Pop version of sited connection (Bilbao as an old port), for one cannot
read them at ground level. In fact one can see them in this way only in media
reproduction, which is the primary site of such architecture in any case.
In fact, Gehry’s buildings remain modern
ducks inasmuch as they privilege formal expression above all; on the other
hand, they remain decorated sheds inasmuch as they often break down into fronts
and backs, with interiors disconnected from exteriors in a way that sometimes
results in dead spaces and cul-de-sacs in-between. But the chief effect of this
combination of duck and shed is the promotion of the quasi-abstract building as
Pop sign or media logo. And, on this score Gehry is hardly alone, there is a
whole flock of “decorated ducks” that combine the willful monumentality of
modern architecture with the faux-populist iconicity of postmodern design.
In some cases, the duck has become the
decoration; that is, the form of the building serves as the sign, and sometimes
at a scale that dominates the setting, as the Guggenheim Bilbao dominates its
surroundings. In other cases the decorated shed has become the duck; that is
the surface of the building is elaborated, with the aid of high tech materials
manipulated by digital means, into idiosyncratic shapes and mediated envelopes.
The first tendency exceed the ambition of the Venturis, who wanted only to
reconcile architecture with its given context via signs, not to have it become
a sign that overwhelms its context (the latter is also a “Bilbao effect “, one
not often acknowledged). The second
tendency exceeds the ambition of Banham, who wanted only to relate architecture
to contemporary technology and media, not to have it become a “mediated
envelope” or “datascape” subsidiary to them.
Today decorated ducks come in a variety of
plumage, yet even as the stylistic appearance is varied, the logic of effect is
often much the same. And, despite the attacks of September 2001 and the crash
of September 2008, it remains a winning formula for museums and companies,
cities and states, indeed for any corporate entity that desires to be
perceived, through an instant icon, as a global player. For them, and perforce
for us, it is still –it is evermore- a Pop world.
In 1971 one of the architectural surprises
of the last century occurred: two yound designers, neither French, won the most
important commission in Paris since World War II, the design for the Centre
Pompidou, and became famous overnight.
Yet, the project was contradictory as well:
a Pop building designed by two progressive architects for a bureaucratic state
in honor of a conservative politician (the Gaullist Georges Pompidou), a
cultural center pitched as “a catalyst for urban regeneration” that assisted in
the further erasure of Les Halles and the gradual gentrification of the Marais.
As one of the prominent Pop and high tech
buildings to see the light of day, it was received as a manifesto. First, it
made clear the renewed importance of innovative engineering for contemporary
architecture. Second, it offered one response to the open question of what
postindustrial design might look like: “Most of us wanted it to look as something” .“We don’t want form to
follow function into oblivion”.
Roger and Piano did convey the unlikely mix
of communitarian and the consumerist that came to pervade much 1970s culture.
The service tubes function as a
contemporary form of ornament – they give the Beaubourg both detail and scale-
and the movement of people across the piazza into the ground floor and up the
escalator not only enlivens the Center but connects it to the city as well.(The
favored form of architectural imagery at RRP might well be “the mass ornament”
of the occupants of its buildings – in circulation, in meetings, and so on).
Lightness, flexibility, economy,
efficiency: these are all architecture values, but most companies are pleased
to be associated with them as well. In other words, there is an abstract
symbolism at work here. Technology serves as both the driver of spatial
arrangement and the source of the iconic power of the building.
Roger has designed terminals as symbolic
gateways as well as practical ones; “like London’s great railway stations of
the past”, Mike Davis, a longtime Rogers partner remarks, “Terminal 5 has a
civic role to play”.
Like other celebrated offices, RRP
benefited from the post-1989 push to use architecture to develop institutional
images for the “New Europe” (the early, optimistic version of this figure, not
the divisive, debt-ridden one on stage since the 2008 crash)- a program in
which cities and regions also participated eagerly. On this front Rogers is
seduced by the dubious analogy between architectural transparency and political
transparency (Foster and Piano are too – even more so). Thus Bordeau Law Courts
glass is meant to suggest “the accessibility of French judicial system”;
similarly, the National Assembly of Wales “seeks to embody democratic values of
openness and participation.
These buildings point to an important
question in contemporary architecture: What is the relationship between its
civic role and its iconic power? Often today iconic buildings are asked almost
to stand in for the civic realm, sometimes with the effect that they then
displace whatever residues of this realm might be left, as if imagistic
promotion were all that citizens can safety expect from politicians and
designers today.
Roger, like Foster and Piano, emerged in
the interregnum between the engineered abstraction of modern architecture and
the decorated historicism of post-modern architecture. In different ways all three designers have
refined the former and refused the later, and for the most part, they have
fought shy of the sculptural iconicity of contemporaries like Frank Gehry and
Santiago Calatrava.
However, like these other architects,
Rogers and company are also asked to brand their clients distinctively. For
example, RRP was commissioned to design a bridge for Glasgow meant to be an
“icon for the city”, one that would mark its desired metamorphoses from old
industrial center to “European business and cultural capital”. Here, in effect,
an old building type of function and labor became a new spectacular symbol of
leisure and display.
Announced in 2003, it was abandoned as a
bridge too far three years later.
For the most part, RRP has worked seriously
on the question of civic architecture in a consumerist age, yet the
contradictions return. Rogers has acknowledged our mass cultural society with
the Pop and high tech aspects of his architecture (in a sense, RRP holds
together the Banhamite and Venturian lineages of Pop); at the same time he
insists on the humanist notion of the city as “meeting place”.
Finally, RRP steams ahead with huge
developments; at the same time it rightly promotes the sustainability of
architecture and the regeneration of cities. RRP works well with such
contradictions, but is that an expression of strength or a function of
compromise or both? To design a public space is not, ipso facto, to work for the
public good, and to offer an iconic building is not, ipso facto, to play a
civic role. Indeed, it might be that the controversies with the prince, over
the Millennium Dome or Heathrow Terminal, and so on, have the most use value in
this regard: they demonstrate a society that is more antagonistic than RRP
otherwise allow.
Often in the architecture of Piano the
principle of transparency shades into “an aesthetic of purity” in which a
fusion of the organic, the mechanical, and the classical it is essayed, and
“technology” it is treated as a leitmotif.
Sometimes, his exquisite designs disclose a
fetishistic side. Consider his Jean Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Noum. For
Piano enthusiasts the result is a successful negotiation of the local and the
global; for others it might evoke a contemporary version of primitivist Deco,
as though a village were first simulated, then abstracted, and finally sized to
the scale of a theme park.
The notion of “light modernity” is
suggestive here. There is one theme that is important for me,” Piano remarks
“lightness (and obviously not in reference with only to the physical mass of
objects).”
For Piano, lightness is thus a value that
bears on the human as well as the architectural: it concerns graceful
comportment in both realms. As a practical imperative, lightness confirms the
drive, already strong in modern architecture but now this refinement seems
pledged to decorous touches and atmospheric effects – to an aesthetic value in
its own right. A light architecture, then, is a sublimated architecture, one
that is particularly fitted for art museums and the like.
This lightness is bound up not only with
the fantasy of human disembodiment but also with the fact of social
derealization. Perhaps, in the end, the two notions of lightness – the dream of
disembodiment and the nightmare of derealization- must be thought together
dialectically.
For his advocates, the lightness featured
in Piano is driven by historical
necessity as well as by technological advance. For Buchanan, in the hands of
designers like Piano, “the lines of the grid will etherealize into intangible
conduits of energy and information, or take tactile biomorphic form.
Perhaps this beatific notion of a “light
modernity” must be countered with the less sanguine notions of “liquid
modernity” and a “second modernity”. Bauman calls our present stage of
modernity liquid because the force of capital that courses through it is so
powerful as to uproot any other social formation or economic mode in its way
and carry them along in its flow (the fantastic vision of “all that is solid
melts into air”).
In our modernity, structures for
performance and show are much in demand, as are stadia for sports and
entertainment, as well as the usual malls, office towers, banks, and business
complexes. In an economy desperate to sustain consumer spending, display
remains all important, and here architecture serves as both stager and staged,
both the setting for fine commodities and the fairest commodity of all.
Yet infrastructure is imperative,
especially for transport, and designers like Piano are at work in this area as
well, with innovative airports, train stations, and subway systems. If modern
architecture was “international style” then such neo-modern architecture must
count as “the global style” and, like the second modernity that it serves, it
often exceeds national containers. Frequently, local references appears in
global architecture as a souvenir of the old culture, a mythical sign: hence
the allusion to the floating world in the Herm s store in Tokyo, the village
huts in the cultural center in New
Caledonia and so on. This phenomenon is called “banal cosmopolitanism”, another
affective token or atmospheric effect and, like Rogers and Foster, Piano is
adept at its architectural expression.
In this regard, lightness appears able to
sublimate not only material nature but historical culture as well, and here
fetishization is once more at work. Apparently, too, can operate at a global
scale.
Suprematist painting was once seen as a
radical flattening of the picture plane; Hadid motivates it instead as a
dramatic break into an indefinite space-time, in an attempt to “crack open” her
objects, to “compress and expand” her spaces, to intensify and liberate her
structures, all at once.
The turn to abstract painting was a
striking move, but it rendered her designs pictorial, even weightless. Hadid
points to this tendency in her own account of her early projects, where she
writes of “floating pieces” of architecture “suspended like planets.” Where is the subject, let alone the object in
this floating?
As with other architects in this new period
of computer-aided design, her formal ambitions expanded with her technical
capabilities, and this conjunction soon allowed Hadid to imagine walls that
emerge in all directions, and to propose skins that “weave and sometimes merge
with each other to form floors, walls, and windows”.
Hadid pushed familiar modes of
architectural representation – not only isometric and axonometric projections
but also single point and fish-eye perspectives- into strange explosions of
structure and “literal distortions of space”. At this time too, architects like
Frank Gehry had developed the form making of avant-garde design to such a point
that it had to confront (once again) its
own modernist dilemma: how, given this apparent freedom, to motivate
architectural decision?
The vertical-horizontal play became central
to her architecture, and it made her folds, ramps, and spirals appear as
structural elements as well as stylistic flourishes – elements that mediate not
only between interiors and exteriors and among structure, site, and city.
No one would confuse Hadid with a
functionalist; often in her practice function follows structure, and structure
follows imagination. At the same time, despite her eccentric shapes, she is not
a formalist either.
Other historical precedents, obscured by
her interest in Suprematism and Constructivism has obscured in the reception of
her work: Futurist and Expressionist architecture. Sometimes she intimates
these affinities in her language: “ The whole building is frozen motion.” she
remarks of the Vitra Fire Station “ready to explode into action at any moment”;
and generally she has called for a “new image of architectural presence” with
“dynamic qualities such as speed, intensity, power, and direction.”
“Which features of the graphic manipulation
pertain to the mode of representation rather than to the object of
representation?” Schumacher asks. Despite the formal complication of the two,
Hadid tends to collapse her representation into her objects. Indeed she seems
to use digital technology to minimize material constraints and structural
concerns as much as possible, and so to jump from drawing to building as directly
as she can.
Hadid manipulates perspective even more
extremely; yet, however distorted and multiplied her perspective might be, it
still privileges the subject: artist and viewer remain at the center of the
representation-become-building.
Finally, what are we to make, in political
terms, of the rapport here with Futurism and Expressionism? As for futurism, its sexist celebration of
power and nihilistic attack on culture are not easily forgotten and not always
far away. Expressionism seems also weirdly close today: its expressive values
are condoned, even encouraged, in a world of neo-liberal capitalism.
Her relation to all these modernisms is
less deconstructive than decorative - a
styling of Futurist lines, Suprematist forms, Expressionist shapes, and
Constructivist assemblages that updates them according to the expectations of
the computer age. She is finally closer to postmodernist architecture than to
postmodernist art. The difference is that her pastiche are not traditional
styles but modernist forms.
A paradigmatic designer of our own Third
Machine Age of the computer, along with Gehry she is presented as a prime
architect of the digital period. “The model for her work”, Betsky writes, “is
now the screen that collects the flow of data into moments of light and dark”. Is
this all that it means to further “the incomplete project of modernism”? One
hopes that this is not the first and last context for “new fields of building”.
Has any contemporary architect signed as
many cityscapes as Norman Foster? Born in 1935, Foster has a right to be
immodest, and he punctuates his accounts of his buildings with adjectives like
“first” and “largest”, and verbs like “reinvent” and “redefine”.
Like some of its clients, Foster is
international in its reach; indeed many corporations and governments are
smaller operations. Technologically advanced, spatially expansive, and formally
refined, its designs are abstractly rational to the point of cool objectivity,
yet somehow distinctive, relatively easy to identify, nonetheless; along with
Rogers and Piano, Foster has achieved a global style. No wonder corporate and
political leaders seek out this stylish office: there is a mirroring of self
images, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm alike.
Foster offers an architecture with sleek
surfaces, usually of metal and glass, luminous spaces, often open in plan, and
suave profiles that can also serve as media logos for a company or state. As a
result high-tech and high-design corporations are drawn to the practice.
In this business of architecture as brand,
other famous architects have relied on idiosyncratic forms that brand them as
well: to make buildings stand out from often dismal surroundings, Gehry has
used baroque twists, Koolhaas Cubistic folds, and Zaha Hadid futuristic
vectors. In comparison, Foster favours relative restrained geometries.
Even when Foster employs irregular volumes
– ovoid and elliptical ones sometimes appear, they are just odd enough to be
distinctive. This abstract symbolism is less explicit than the kitschy images
of postmodern architecture yet more declarative than the semiotic gestures of
deconstructivist design. All that is certain about this ambiguous abstraction
is that it conveys a great faith in advanced technology and international
business alike. In the end it is this dual enterprise, which is abstract and
ambiguous in its workings, that the symbolism of such buildings suits and
celebrates.
“The Reichstag has become a ‘living museum’
of german history” he claims, and “The Great court is a new kind of civic
space-a cultural plaza- that has pioneered patterns for social use hitherto
unknown within this or any other museum”. Yet what sort of civic space is
projected here, and what sort of social use solicited? For all the reanimation,
real or apparent, of either institution, the original structure is treated as a
museological object: it is literally put under glass like an old artifact
polished up. This combination of historical building and contemporary
attraction can tend toward spectacle: a political assembly becomes a
spectator-sport at the Reichstag, a distinguished museum becomes its own
marvelous display at the British Museum. It is this space civic or touristic,
one of social use or mass distraction- or is the distinction now quite blurred?
Like history, nature is also put under
glass by Foster, literally so in the National Botanic Garden of Wales, which is
“the largest single-span glasshouse in the world”. As one might expect from the
practice, the technology is superb. Yet what does such a project convey about
the status of nature in the Foster universe? The office contains a
Sustainability Forum that investigates new green materials and techniques. This
concern with sustainability is praise worthy in a world where buildings consume
more energy, and emit more carbon dioxide, than either transport or industry.
There “are no technological barriers to
sustainable development,” Foster concludes,” only ones of political will”.
The bravado of this assertion is telling.
Nature is abstracted in the Foster universe: it has become “ecology”,
“sustainability”, a set of synthetic materials and energy protocols – that is,
a fully acculturated category. Foster
frames this acculturation in benign (sometimes Zen) terms, and insists,
rightly, on holistic thinking when it comes to “sustainable strategy”, yet
sometimes the holistic slips into totalistic.
Certainly the dialectic of modernity has
shown that the prospect of nature humanized can flip into the reality of a
world technologized, and there are indications of this condition already within
the Foster oeuvre.
In such Foster designs, both history and
nature appear abstracted, even sublimated, and the same might be said of
industry.
One aspect of the look of modernity today
is found in the signature element of the Foster practice: its diamond grids of
glazed glass, “the diagrid”. It is an architectural meme for Foster: once one
looks for it in the work, it appears everywhere. It is a structural unit, but
it also serves as an ideological form – one that signals technocratic optimism
above all else.
Yet the diagrid produces problems of its
own, especially ones of scale. Expanded in size, it can threaten to go on
forever, as it is the case in the World Trade Center . As much as any other
candidate for the site , Foster appeared to be in synch with the popular (that
is the imperial) call to build the towers “higher than before”. Such is his faith in modernity that Foster
did not alter his design profile after 9/11. Indeed, for all its sensitivity to
ecology, Foster does not seem much affected by any disaster, natural or
manmade; history too, appears abstracted in his work. In the post 9/11world
this unshakable confidence is welcomed by the shaky powers that be, and like
Santiago Calatrava and a few others, Foster delivers it: the office offers
moral uplift in beautiful forms at a grand scale. Go, new millennium, Foster
seems to proclaim with each new project. Go, modernity.
