Bling, blobs, burgeoning: problems of figure; Architecture has become more and more gestural in its searches for monumentality and the race for iconic status.

Next door to the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie is the city's music school and theatre academy, designed a little later by the same architects. Unlike the earlier building, which gently resonates with the topography, the school is tough, even strident. Stirling used to say that he had removed the cork from the drum (the spatial focus of the building) and had erected it on the adjacent site. The functional reason for the extraordinary difference between the two was that the younger building has many spaces that need daylight, so to make a tower with windows was practical.

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But equally important must have been some of the criticisms of the earlier building. Almost immediately, virtually everyone recognized it as a masterpiece, but some (particularly Colin Rowe, Stirling's mentor and friend) argued that it did not have enough figure--urban presence--to signal the institution's importance in the city's cultural life. Stirling was prone to dramatic gestures, in architecture as in life, and the assertive, obviously monumental tower was his response. At first sight, it is similar to several PoMo buildings built in the same years, but it is a great deal more graceful and learned than most of them: intrusive and flashy urban insertions that draw attention to themselves with smeared-on Classical surface patterns. Stirling and Wilford's second Stuttgart building politely grows out of a striped stone plinth that continues the materials and levels of the Staatsgalerie. Its upper parts are clearly derived from Stockholm City Library, with the tower, like Asplund's, originating from Ledoux's Barriere de La Villette that has echoes of the Castel St Angelo, which was of course Hadrian's Mausoleum, itself based on prehistoric archetypes. Few architectural figures could have more resonance with history.

During the '80s and '90s, there was an increasing demand for figure. It came about for several reasons. First of all, the general dislike of the mediocre morass of late clapped-out Functionalism, and a need to make statements--almost any statement or gesture that could differentiate a particular building from the mass was welcome after so many years of greyness. Second, gestures could become more and more dramatic because computers allowed the potential of new geometries, new materials and new structural techniques to be explored, offering possibilities of making buildings never previously imagined (except in dreams and the sketchbooks of the Expressionists and Constructivists).

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The possibility was a powerful temptation to both clients and architects. At a time when branding is one of the essential components of almost all endeavour, both public and private, hiring a well-known architect is often seen as brand-enhancement. Architects have found branding to be an extremely effective means of drumming up business. Of course, this is by no means new--after all, Palladio set up one of the most long-lasting and most successful brands in history, and good practices have always carefully built up their reputations to make themselves attractive to clients.

But the game is changing. We live in a world permeated by the cult of celebrity and dominated by the electronic media, which demand constant novelty. The more unusual the gesture, the more enhanced an architect's brand. The cult of celebrity has been so successful that most of the limited (1) international competitions are open only to a small group of celebrated architects--perhaps no more than 100--who are almost forced to become increasingly demonstrative and outre to ensure that they retain their place in the hierarchy of the celebrated.

Anti-humanism

Architecture cannot help being a commentary on human life, but a large number of architects seem determined to demonstrate how indifferent to ordinary human concerns they are. Future Systems' Selfridges store in Birmingham is an obvious example (AR October 2003). A huge blue slug slimes its way toward the city's chief pedestrian piazza. It is covered with shiny metal discs like scales or molluscous scrofula and it pays no attention at all to its surroundings (dim as those are, they surely deserve better than the amorphous blue intrusion). One of the saddest things about the Birmingham building is that Jan Kaplicky (one of the founding partners of Future Systems) used to be an adventurous and often poetic interpreter of High-Tech. Computers were needed to generate the amorphous shape of Selfridges, but its construction is dull and the discs (which have no function) are applied in the crudest fashion like giant drawing pins, offering multiple birds' nest sites and causing questions about their thermal behaviour. Future Systems have created a flashy monument to Bling--is that what Selfridges really wanted?

The Birmingham building is a form of blob, and blobs are becoming increasingly common these days. They are easy to design with computers (though they look difficult and novel). Almost everyone is playing with blobs, Foster, for instance, seems to have become fond of them of late in buildings like the recent Gateshead music centre, and even the Swiss Re (Gherkin) tower (AR November 2003). The latter is a quite civilized form of blob, in that it has been carefully designed to come down to the ground with grace, and to have decent relationships to nearby buildings. The same applies to the cultural centre in Graz (AR March 2004) by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier; it makes a proper contribution to the street at ground level, and somehow, the bulging upper storeys insert themselves into a very dense urban texture without too much trouble. But Gherkin and Graz are exceptions: in general, blobs and Moebius writhings are indifferent to their surroundings, and to any notion of human scale.

Such indifference to scale and civic propriety is common in the work of many would-be avant-garde architects. But it can be difficult to criticize them effectively because many of the buildings with which they have made their names are galleries or other buildings for cultural activities, so criticism of them can be presented as philistinism, and in the case of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin (AR April 1999), anti-Semitic to boot. Yet Libeskind's technique of deriving the slashed lines on the walls is derived from drawing lines on plan between places where famous Jews lived, then elevating the plans. Looking through the slit windows you can have no understanding of any of the connections envisioned by the architect. Only he has the key to the patterns, and by now, perhaps he has forgotten it.

Inside, the slit windows generate glare that has caused the galleries to be very difficult to hang. The celebrated voids in the plan, intended to denote the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust, are indeed strange and potentially moving, but they are mean and underwhelming. It is not a good building, but one that has been endlessly praised largely because of the astonishing amount of public relations effort poured out on it.

In the quest to achieve novelty at all costs, few expedients are ignored. Bigness, for Koolhaas, is the key phenomenon of our age. 'The humanist expectation of "honesty" is doomed: interior and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the other--agent of disinformation--offering the city the apparent stability of an object.' (2)

For Koolhaas, the global market rules and its incessant demand for urban change makes the content of building and concerns about quality irrelevant. Coupled with his method of 'panic design' (last minute solutions to enormous programmes), Koolhaas's work is predictably almost always flashy, imposing, cold and image-obsessed, almost totally lacking in tenderness and understanding of the complexity and range of human experience. There are occasional exceptions, where humanity sometimes shines through, such as the Dutch Embassy in Berlin (AR May 2004) and to some extent the great Seattle Library (AR August 2004), but they are rare.

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Koolhaas has had direct influence on a generation of Harvard students, and his overblown book S,M,L,XL has proved to be a bestseller among students and young architects. His influence is particularly strong in the Netherlands, where the Super Dutch have been making living quarters for the poor (social housing) into architectural monuments for a decade. MVRDV's WoZoCo housing for old people in Amsterdam, is held by many to be a praiseworthy example of the new thinking. Here, site restrictions and planning requirements determined the envelope of the slab-block, which turned out to be too small to accommodate all the units required by the client. Therefore, five 11m long cantilevers were created to allow the total number of dwellings to reach 100 while keeping to the planners' preferred footprint. Anyone with the most vestigial knowledge of construction and structures knows how expensive such a strategy must be, and how scraped the main slab (complete with prison-like metal bars) has had to become as a result of the five gestures. Even given Dutch tolerance for living in highly organized groups, life here must be a bit grim for the majority.

As humanity is swept from the centre of the stage of architectural activity by the new avant-garde, one of the sources of imagery is the new sciences. By generating form from these, architects can claim to be in touch with the inner structures of the universe, or even the music of the spheres. Charles Jencks has pointed out that Peter Eisenman 'feeds off one nuova scienta after another using devices drawn from fractals (self-similiarity, scaling, superposition), from DNA research ... from Catastrophe Theory (... the fold), from rhetoric (catechresis), from Boolean algebra (the hypercube) and from psychoanalysis (too many theories to remember).' (3) From the first, Eisenman has had a disdain for human values, (4) so much so that years ago in his House VI, he drove a cleft through the marital bed in the name of abstract geometry. Jencks believes that Eisenman's antihumanism 'in an era when opinion and anthropocentrism dominate culture ... returns us to a non-human standard for architecture that used to be the preserve of religions'. (5) In its latest manifestation, Eisenmanism is rather less brash than usual: the generating diagrams of his cultural centre at Santiago de Compostela are produced by conflating images of the old city, the site and a St James's scallop shell, and have helped produce a building that promises to respond to its site and provide much inner sublety.

Eisenman's exploratory and constantly shifting architectural position has proved fascinating for younger architects. One of the most extensive and powerful explorations of fractals in architecture is Federation Square in Melbourne by LAB with Bates Smart (AR May 2003). Its dramatic exterior is covered with shards of glass, sandstone and metal. As the AR remarked, 'In plan, the new piazza is really excellent. It might almost be an example of Camillo Sitte's late nineteenth-century recipe for picturesque city making, complete with square, alleys and streets ... all a bit bent and wobbly. And there are some excellent moves in section'. Because of its basic three-dimensional organization and mix of functions, the place is plainly popular, but 'the whole Flinders Street front is anti-urban. It completely ignores the city which so generously gave it being'. The facades lack any notion of urban and human scale because they attempt to copy an abstracted notion of nature.

One of the architects associated with the new avant-garde is Frank Gehry, whose architecture in the last 25 years has become more and more geometrically complex, to the extent that he now has to use computer programs invented for aerospace design to express his forms and to have them built. But unlike many of his contemporaries and emulators, Gehry is as concerned with interiors as exteriors, with life as well as form. Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim (AR December 1997) is one of the most famous buildings of the twentieth century; its glittering interlocking dimpled titanium curves are known throughout the world, and its execution has planted Bilbao, previously a rundown Basque industrial port, firmly on the cultural map of the world. Yet his spaces are designed to evoke age-old human emotions: uplifting joy when you enter the soaring atrium to aesthetic empathy with the objects in the collection displayed in the relatively low-key galleries. The range of aesthetic and social experiences was elaborated in the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (AR March 2004), where Gehry shows himself to be a master of route as well as space. Paths range from the winding external way that leads up and through the gardens to arrangements of stairs and foyers for the audience that begin to offer the complexity and range of human experience of Scharoun's Philharmonie in Berlin.

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Gehry is unusual in using the new geometries to create focal buildings that can appeal to human emotions other than the shock and awe with which so many other members of the avant-garde seem satisfied. More moving than their efforts are those of architects who continue to work with more conventional materials and geometries. At quite the opposite end of the physical scale from Gehry's great constructions is Peter Zumthor's little chapel high on a mountain flank at Sogn Benedetg in eastern Switzerland (AR January 1991), a shingled bastion of faith in which light and wood create a tiny, forest-scented numinous space. Not so far away are Zumthor's thermal baths at Vals (AR October 1998), almost totally inconspicuous from the outside, but internally a monument to the age-old rituals of public bathing celebrated in light, stone, scent, bronze and water which symbolically and physically engage all our senses (see p101).

In Finland, Juha Leiviska has created equally moving spaces in his churches, particularly at Myyrmaki (AR June 1987) where he manipulates planes of light and colour, fabric and concrete, subtle reflection and direct illumination to create a place as powerful as the one at Sogn Benedetg. Also from the north is the Bibliotheca Alexandrina by Snohetta, the Norwegian-based firm that won the open (6) international competition in 1989. The architects were very young, but when the library opened over a decade later, it was very similar to the original drawings (AR September 2001). A great glass disc (likened by some to a symbol of the sun god Ra) rises over the sea looking north over Alexandria harbour. It fills the library's huge circular interior with luminance, so all readers, who sit on an internal landscape of terraces in a grove of columns, work in carefully modulated light from the sky, which is enriched by patches of blue and green that slowly move following the sun's path. Externally, the granite curves of the building's toroidal form are carved with all the scripts of the world. Completely original, the library is a monument to scholarship and history, to Egypt and to the international effort that made it possible. It has far more real practical and symbolic meaning than the slobs and writhings of the avant-garde.

1 Open competitions become rarer and rarer, because they are held to be wasteful of professional talent, and expensive to mount (both are true). But lack of open competitions makes it difficult for young architects to achieve recognition, and it restricts originality.

2 Koolhaas, Rem. S.M.L.XL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1995, p501.

3 Jencks, Charles, The New Paradigm in Architecture, Yale, 2002, p209.

4 With some French philosophers, he holds that human values have been for ever exposed by Auschwitz.

5 Jencks, Charles, The Architecture of the Jumping Universe. Academy Editions, London, 1995. Reviewed in September 1995, p85.

6 One of the few that worked.

RELATED ARTICLE: excerpts

A TALE OF TWO MUSEUMS

Peter Davey, April 1999

Both buildings are post-modern in the best sense. Their differences are between the ideal and the phenomenal, the metaphorical and literal.

Between the production of the isolated artist, determined to make what is almost his first building tell his multiple stories no matter what its content, and the responsive and thoughtful approach of mature architects, so confident in their handling of materials, light and space that they can afford to allow the exhibits to speak, and yet make a building of great power and complexity. Both museums have been created with passion and commitment. Perhaps their differences are inevitable because of the history of their subjects, but they offer the most dramatic illustration possible of extremes of architectural approach to one of the most important building types.

CAPTIVITY AND TIME, Juhani Pallasmaa, May 2000

Focused on visual imagery and detached from social and contextual considerations, the celebrated architecture of our time--and the publicity that attempts to convince us of its genius--too often has an air of self-satisfaction and omnipotence. Buildings attempt to conquer the foreground instead of creating a supportive background for human activities and perceptions. Architectural projects of our day are often impudent and arrogant, and our age seems to have lost the virtue of architectural neutrality, restraint, and modesty. Authentic works of art, however, always remain suspended between certainty and uncertainty, faith and doubt. The task of responsible architects is to provide resistance to current cultural erosion and to replant buildings and cities in an authentic existential and experiential soil. At the beginning of the new millennium, architectural culture would do well to nurture productive tensions between cultural realism and artistic idealism, determination and discretion, ambition and humility.

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HOW BIG IS BAD? Charles Jencks, August 2002

From an abstract point of view it is impossible to say when big becomes too big, when the law of diminishing architecture sets in. Size and scaling are matters of structural and social invention as well as urban transport and a host of other things. All one can say with surety is that there are always limits to size. Biologists make this point with respect to the dimensions of animals, to brain size and leg length. They formulate laws, or rather measurable hypotheses, of why most animals are about the size of a rabbit, why not too many dinosaurs evolve and so forth. Aviation engineers have come up with equations and optimize the size/speed ratios of passenger jets like Concorde. Maybe the angle and the measurement of my graph is off by a factor of two, but that some power law of diminishing architecture sets in a certain point I have no doubt, nor that my figures can be much improved.

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THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Peter Davey on Charles Jencks' Architecture of the Jumping Universe, September 1995

To achieve some semblance of depiction of his Cosmological preoccupations, Jencks has had to turn to some very strange sources. Though he says that he is concerned with getting beyond 'the provincial [in the Universe] concerns of the moment, beyond anthropomorphism and fashion', he uses two of the most fashion-conscious architects in the world today (Koolhaas and Eisenman) as exemplars of the new thinking. Rem Koolhaas' method of 'panic design' (last-minute responses to huge programmes) is praised as a method of representing discontinuity and non-linearity. The results are almost always flashy and image-obsessed, detracting from the richness of human use and experience. Much more worrying is Jencks' Eisenman worship. Peter Eisenman is held up as an example because 'in an era when opinion and anthropocentrism dominate culture, [his work] returns us to a non-human standard for architecture that used to be the preserve of religions'. Can Eisenman's Nunotani Headquarters in Tokyo, built to look like a tower collapsed after an earthquake (a representation of punctuation to disturb the dreariness of equilibrium--as if that were a threat in the contemporary world), or his Columbus Convention Center ... really be considered to be our answers to the Parthenon, Chartres or Ronchamp?

The dark side of Jencks' new preoccupations is the dislocation of humanity from the centre of the stage. Eisenman and his friends have been going on about this for ages. The holocaust and Hiroshima have shown, they say, how fallible is our belief in the centrality of human values. Now Charles Jencks brings up the physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer to announce that 'in the twenty-first century, the atom will replace man as the measure of all things'. The prospect is terrifying: once you remove human values, what's left? Dear Charles Jencks is a kindly, charming, often intentionally funny man. He believes, with Ruskinian intensity, 'that there is a convergence of the good, the true and the beautiful': that nature has only 'occasional nastiness'. Yet the one thing that emerges with the greatest clarity between the lines of his tour of popular science is that universe is totally indifferent to any individual or species. Stephen Hawking may say that developments in physics may enable us to see the mind of God. But, on his measure, either God is a monster devoid of compassion and feeling, or we will have explored only a very small part of His mind. In either case, we have to try to generate decent ways of living with each other and with the biosphere without much guidance from Above. Within an indifferent nature, the making of buildings has a vital role in creating places and sanctuaries for us as individuals and societies. Love, human understanding and generosity are the essence of this activity--and attempts to understand and represent the cosmos help us not a wit in three-dimensional interpretation of them.

GARDEN OF DEATH AND DREAMS

Peter Buchanan, September 1985

Architecture? Sculpture? Landscape? The unclassifiable nature of Carlo Scarpa's cemetery for the Brion family and the fragmented, highly personal vocabulary of forms, led many architects and critics to admire it, yet simultaneously dismiss it as a beautiful but much too mannered irrelevance. Now, nearly a decade and a half after completion, its enchantments seem more potent and topical than ever. Instead of Modernism's abstract and immaterial concerns with concept and space, here is physical mass and sensual matter. And, without resorting to a figurative vocabulary, here is a powerful commemorative monument that is both a meditation on death and an evocation of a particular magical city, Venice,... home of Scarpa. Italian cemeteries are traditionally necropolises, idealized and miniaturized cities of the dead, street grids of paths flanked by diminutive temples ... and squares flanked by [columbaria] ... Brion cemetery is instead a garden folded round a corner of the cemetery of the village of S. Vito. But it is a highly formalized garden in which every part of the composition is locked into place geometrically.

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HERO TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: THE LIMITS OF ARCHITECTURAL EXALTATION, Edward Robbins, August 2001

The focus on heroes and their work narrows our vision and pre-empts our thinking about or looking at other possibly noteworthy and interesting work, this is unfortunately especially the case in our schools of architecture where often the only architects discussed are the heroes of the month. By engaging architecture through heroes we focus on an exegesis of particular cases rather than a hermeneutic that tackles the more crucial issues of what criteria should be applied to the evaluation of architecture and why adoration and veneration may be the stuff of religious vision. What the exaltation of heroes gives architecture is open to serious question, a question that itself is barred by the very exaltation that it interrogates.

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We need to escape the self-restricting limits imposed by the exaltation of heroes. Instead we should be addressing and publicizing the diverse possibilities that architecture offers, developing and discussing criteria for why we value what we do provides greater room for debate as to whom architects should serve, how and why, and what is important and why. Heroes would have no place in these debates about the criteria of evaluation, standards of effectiveness, and aesthetic and moral good. Exaltation of heroes does not honour architecture, it debases the contribution architecture as a whole offers us all.

POETICS OF MODERNISM: SPAIN, Peter Buchanan, May 1986

The hallmark of all the best Spanish architecture is a fastidious concern for, and sensual enjoyment of materials, construction and detail. Without these, the other shared feature, the restrained Minimalism, would fall flat. The austere forms are never dull because the materials they are built with are used in a way that highlights their inherent character and beauty, and they are put together with an unfussed directness that is easy to understand, empathize with and enjoy. In this way restraint becomes rich, for the attention is always oscillation between abstract form and spatial idea, and the physical facts of material and construction--which are revealed and revelled in standing out from this background, exquisitely minimalist detail contrasts with both abstract composition and the substantial materials that compose it. More than that, by paradoxically threatening, in both its scale and subtlety, to be too insubstantial, to be emphatic or even noticeable, it arrests attention and adds aesthetic tension. In their approach to construction and detailing the Spanish prove once again that the most potent poetry results from understatement. But understatement achieves nothing without suggestive content. For some this lies in what they interpret a natural architecture to be, and with others in what they see as an appropriate cultural statement.

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PROFESSIONAL HUBRIS? Peter Davey, November 1999

Why have twentieth-century architects been so consistently nasty to the working class, indeed to anyone less privileged than themselves? Architects searching for ever-more extreme personal expressions of technology and art have had the most disastrous consequences for many poor and disadvantaged people.

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Throughout the earlier part of the twentieth century, making social housing was one of the key tasks of the profession. In the '20s, huge amounts of architectural effort were poured into the notion of Existenzminimum: the creation of a (pseudo) scientifically agreed minimal flat in which decent family life could be conducted with the least expense of money and space, and maximum profit for the contractors and maximum fame for the architects who were trying to manipulate the building process.

SCOTLAND THE BRAVE

Catherine Slessor, November 2004

As a historical type, parliament buildings are notoriously fraught. Kahn's Dhaka parliament was put on hold for over ten years as Bangladesh emerged from Pakistan, the Reichstag was burnt and bombed, but the Scots, to their credit, have held their nerve in the face of public scepticism and opprobrium. Their courage has been rewarded with the spoils of a Catalan enlightenment that rekindles a sophisticated national consciousness and delivers a building that would have been impossible to conceive of in Edinburgh twenty or even ten years ago. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the MSPs are thrilled with their new surroundings, but, ever wary of the predatory press, do not want to appear too vocal in their enthusiasm. The true measure of both the building and the institution it houses, however, is yet to come--how it will wear, weather and work. And though Scotland is not yet a mature parliamentary democracy, Miralles' imaginative and dignified new seat of government should give it every chance to become so.

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Packed into a very narrow Manhattan site, the Museum of Folk Art by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, wonderfully explores internal spatial connections using beautifully expressed simple materials. Penny McGuire wrote 'Design of this museum celebrates with grace, without pomposity or condescension, the inventions of ordinary people'. Photo: Peter Mauss/Esto. February 2002.