Bigness: Bigness is one of the greatest problems of contemporary architecture. While programmes have become larger and larger, architectural imagination has scarcely grown to reply to them. (Comment).

Bigness is inescapable. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, civilization has been inexorably set on a course to increasing size. Cities become ever larger and more land-hungry; transport systems become more capacious; corporations have to become bigger and bigger so that they can compete with a hope of success in the global market. We cannot go back. As E. F. Schumacher said, small is beautiful. But a return to the small and disjunct societies of the pre-industrial age would plunge even more of the world's population into poverty and probably vastly increase violence, famine, disease and intolerance.

In architectural terms, if bigness is inevitable, how do we deal with it? We have not done well so far. Models for big buildings have scarcely changed for nearly a century and a half. Tall, we have the tower. Low, there is the potentially endless shed. The theory of design of towers has not altered from the moment when Sullivan decreed that they should have a bottom and a top with an infinitely extensible shaft between. The endless shed is not even lucky enough to have such a primitive proposition. We may not yet have the first mile-high skyscraper so longed for by architects as wildly different as Wright and Foster, but mile long sheds have long been commonplace, though they are little known because they were factories designed by engineers in most utilitarian fashion. The sheds we are brought up to respect are ones like the Behrens buildings in Berlin which have obvious architectural input, or the vast, (though unbuilt) hangars of Konrad Wachsmann. But the Classical pseudo masonry elements of Behrens's AEG turbine hail never seemed convincing in the context of walls of glass and concrete portal frames. And Wachsmann's suggestions were simply terrifying.

Rem Koolhaas was at least partly right when he said that the approaching end of the second millennium saw an all-out rush to reorganisation, consolidation, expansion, a clamouring for megascale an entire profession was incapable, finally, of exploiting dramatic social and economic events that, if confronted, could restore its credibility'. (1) The trouble with Koolhaas is that, while he clearly perceives the problems, he only too readily throws himself into wallowing in them. For instance, he argues that the 'city no longer exists. The concept of city is distorted and stretched beyond precedent, each insistence on its primordial condition ... irrevocably leads via nostalgia to irrelevance. For urbanists, the belated rediscovery of the virtues of the Classical city at the moment their definitive impossibility may have been the point of no return, fatal moment of disconnection, disqualification. They are now specialists in phantom pain: doctors discussing the medical intricacies of an amputated limb'. (2)

Decency?

Koolhaas has designed (but not as yet built) vast buildings and urban settlements. But the designs do not give much hope that he will be able to inject much decency into life, even though he uses humanistic arguments to justify his approaches: 'If there is to be a "new urbanism" it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects, but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields ... it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries ... it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions--the reinvention of psychological space'. (3)

The notion of a new liberated architecture, responding to a new understanding of humanity is backed up in Koolhaas's book with examples like Singapore and Lille. The south-east Asian city state is certainly a great success economically but it is one of the most rigidly organized societies in the world, and has some of the most soulless mass-produced housing. The huge housing programme has certainly provided conditions for decent living in quantifiable terms, but to outside eyes it appears to be only marginally better than the most dismal productions of the former USSR and its satellites. Like the CBD in Singapore, the business centre of Lille, invigorated by the French government's policy of regionalization, and by the Channel Tunnel rail link, has become a disparate collection of architectural gestures, each dumbly shrieking to attract attention to its developers or owners. Scarcely a recipe for endless shortcuts and redistributions.

Suddenly, many of Koolhaas's arguments seem very dated. They smack of the high conservative political climate of the early '90s when the market was deemed to rule all, and environmental issues were very much of secondary importance. Now, even George Bush II has accepted that global warming is really happening (though he strongly disagrees with the rest of the world on how it might be counteracted). With increased cases of chicanery in giant corporations, the market as it was worshipped for such a long time and with such fervour is suddenly seen to be less omniscient than it was.

Sustainable human scale

Sustainability has become the watchword of architecture and construction in the new millennium. Society has become a respectable concept again after the savage attacks on it by people as different as Margaret Thatcher, George Bush I and French post-modern theorists.

But the problems of bigness remain. As Charles Jencks remarks on p66, there seems at the moment to be a law of diminishing human returns that correlates directly with the size of buildings. There is little hope that matters will improve in the short term. We have few paradigms for large-scale developments that offer a sense of urbanity and human scale. I totally disagree with Jencks about Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, where Renzo Piano has generated a new piece of city that looks as if it may really have a successful social life--even though many of its elements, like Arata Isozaki's absurdly mannered long block and Helmut Jahn's vast circus (AR January 1999), are ostentatious and overscaled.

More common is the approach adopted by London's Mayor Livingstone, by which he hopes to Texify Europe's biggest and most complex city by encouraging towers to be put up on an almost random basis to emphasize individual areas. (4) Problems arise not just from the scattering of the towers (which should surely be grouped densely like those of the CBDs of Sydney, Manhattan and Hong Kong), but from the nature of most of the towers themselves. For instance, Foster's much discussed Swiss Re building, likened by many to a gherkin, is actually like nothing so much as a fat banker in a latticed body stocking. It is not an urban shape. (5) No one can build close to it--or would even want to: it clears space round itself because of its presence. And so do many of the other new tower proposals for not just London but most other cities in the world.

Huge sheds are just as destructive of urbanity as brash towers. We seem to have lost the art of integrating huge shed-like buildings into urban fabric as Reed and Stem and their colleagues did at Grand Central in New York, or Thomas Cubitt at King's Cross in London.

We need new geometries to restore human scale to primacy in architecture. As our ancestors who built the cathedrals knew, a huge building does not necessarily have to ignore the experience of the body in space; nor does it have to generate the sense of anomie so common in the biggest developments of the last 100 years. Perhaps the rise of sustainable technologies will help us regain senses of scale and place. The Behnisch bank in Hanover (p40)--though many will find it heavy--is perhaps one example of a way forward.

(1.) Koolhaas, Rem and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, Monacelli Press, New York, 1995, p508.

(2.) Ibid p963.

(3.) Ibid p969. The arguments are somewhat similar to those of dedicated political worshippers of the market who argue that it (and society in general) must he as little regulated as possible to offer everyone maximum choice and potential freedom. This is of course true for the rich but few others.

(4.) His behaviour is not entirely arbitrary. He has to allow large commercial buildings to be built because money for social projects can be raised from few other sources.

(5.) Round plan forms are not: even the Pantheon has a formal portico in front.