Architects should not speak: Herzog & de Meuron: natural history.

HERZOG & DE MEURON: NATURAL HISTORY

Edited by Philip Ursprung. Montreal and Baden: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Lars Muller Publishers. 2002. $65

This is not a book about buildings, but some kind of catalogue that will accompany an exhibition on the work of Herzog & de Meuron that has been shown in Montreal and will be trundling around the world over the next year or so. And the exhibition is not about buildings either, apparently, for the eponymous pair do not believe in anything so conventional. They prefer strange displays of old conceptual models of buildings, or things that could have been old models, and various odd bits and pieces that they like the look of. It sounds astonishingly uninteresting.

Why do architects think that what they have to say is as valuable as what they actually do? They talk here in interviews with Ursprung in the most wonderfully over-inflated platitudes, and they are encouraged in this nonsense by their collaborators. Kurt W. Forster says, for example, of their Dominus Winery in California that 'the shape of the building ... affirms its separateness from the internal distribution of spaces, while subtly modifying them. Passage-ways and fenestration mediate between them and between overall symmetry and function'--an observation which could surely be made of almost every rectangular speculators' bungalow you ever saw. There is however some decent writing, including entirely sober pieces by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Gernot Bohme, and one by Carrie Asman on Semper. Some of the Minimalist artist-collaborators sound not entirely unreasonable.

These architects have done some wonderful things. There is no evidence of it here: this is Herzog & de Meuron at their worst. Approaching this book and reading it is like being attracted from a distance by the gaunt splendour of the Tate Modern, but emerging from it irritated by its labyrinthine, badly-lit galleries in idiotic places, leaving one with the impression of a second-rate power station tarted up by fashionable shopfitters. They likewise do themselves here a terrible injustice. All the buildings in this book are merely reproduced in tiny vignettes, and many of the sketches are simply nasty.

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