More and more, the local administrations
task is to achieve a more attractive urban framework for potential investors.
Marketing and urban branding are the main
mechanisms through which the image of the urban city becomes central to its own
success in a competitive market on a global scale.
The global cities strategy to produce
spaces for cultural hegemony compels a new manner of regarding the urban
landscape. It becomes internationalized, shaped by the taste of global elites,
by the circulation of images that influence climates of opinions and
mentalities. It is understood as a projection of biases about form and faces of
success.
The trend seduced all major cities, even
the secondary urban centres. This mechanism calls for high costs and efforts,
with the sole purpose of luring volatile international capital.The spread of transnational
economy to all geographical areas lead to the replacement of historical
competition between nation states with a more acute competition among cities.
As new objects of iconic architecture and
as new BIG, Gehry and Zaha Hadid productions appear in the cityscapes around
the world, they cancel each other out. The striving for more and more powerful
local images eventually produces uniformity and commonplace and feeds the
appetite for urban fetishism.
Turists travel around the world with
previous expectations around a chosen destination.These are built most often
through the means of photographic images.
Google hits are used to 'measure' the
degree of celebrity status: "to establish a precise mathematical
definition of fame, both in the sciences and the world at large".
Monograph recently released a data-driven
starchitect ranking to show how popular famous architects are. Created by
digital product designer Moe Amaya and Monograph's data team, the project
utilizes the STAR system ranking algorithm to determine the relative popularity
and value of an architect's brand.
As the team at Monograph states,
"Whether you're a client looking to bring on a talented architect or a
student building your education, the value of a starchitect's brand in business
and academia has been fairly opaque. The Starchitect ranking system is the
beginnings of a data-centric take on architectural brand value." According
to the team's ranking, Zaha Hadid tops the list, followed by Norman Foster, Le
Corbusier, and Bjarke Ingels.
Excluding the classics like Le Corbusier I
have searched for images of contemporary
buildings produced by the first five architects in this list. These
photographs, that I have bought from Shutterstock are one side of this project.
The other are images of ornaments from the Civic Center in Bucharest which I
shot and printed, only to fixate them on tar later on.
After the 1977 earhquake Ceausescu decided
to build a political-administrative complex in the seismically safest area, the
Dambovita south-western cornice between Arsenal Hill and Unirii Square. The
targeted area was marked by a chaotic but charming urban tissue. The
architecture varied greatly, from architectural monuments and houses with
ambient value to improvised and unsanitary constructions. By the mid 80's most
of these buildings were demolished, translated from their original positions
or, at best, hidden behind the block of flats risen between 1984 and 1989, in
deconstructed and residual spaces.
One part of the urban rewriting operation
in order to meet Ceausescu's vision of a historic North Korean European capital
was the approval of Bucharest' Systematization plan. Almost a fifth of the
urban territory (an area equivalent to Venice) was reconfigured to make room
for the new Civic Centre which was to include the offices of state's supreme
institutions: the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the State Council,
the Government and various ministries located in a monumental and authoritarian
assembly. Fifty-seven thousand homes in the Uranus district were destroyed,
seven hundred hectares of land were leveled by bulldozers to build a forty-four
thousand square meter building and an over three kilometer long and eighty meters
wide boulevard.
For the entire Civic Centre assembly, an
estimated number of over seven hundred architects were involved in drafting the
"precious indications" and exhausting modeling. Spaces, entire neighborhoods,
the history of Bucharest's identity are swallowed by the "forbidden
city".
The Civic Centre together with its epitome-
the People's House, were not made for the people, but only for the power's
close circle. The traffic was closed, and the blocks overlooking the People's
House were evacuated.
After 1980 the Socialism's Victory
boulevard underwent typical Euro-Balkan processes of image transformation,
however the totalitarian architecture flickers embodied with timeless ornaments
and kitsch cornices.
In addition to the above short presentation
I am also adding two additional reading materials that detail further the
topics discussed. The first is from a book by Augustin Ioan and the second from
one by Hal Foster.
images
passages from augustin ioan
fragments from hal foster
images
passages from augustin ioan
fragments from hal foster
