HITTING THE HEADLINES.

Architecture, like painting, sculpture and the electronic media, is beginning to writhe gesturing with lewd glee, cashing in on the reflected glory of the popular media. In so doing, it neglects its essential purposes, and our calling.

There is something wrong with a lot of contemporary art. Perhaps particularly in Britain, the most Fashionable new art is judge by two interrelated criteria its potential for generating headlines and its ability to accrue value as radically as possible. There is, it seems, a desperate need to generate an avant-garde as exciting as the painters and sculptors who so radically altered the nature of art and its relationship to humanity just before and after the First world War. But this time, the underlying motive seems to be not epater les bourgeois as les enrichir.

In London, New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo, the centres of the world's hot money economy, artists are encouraged by galleries, collectors, and indeed governments to produce works which will achieve as many headlines as possible in the popular media. Art must make an impact on society if it is talked about, and if a work is famous, so it must accrue value. So artists are encouraged to be as outrageous possible, to challenge conventional boundaries by elevating everything possible to the status of art: shit, used condoms, unmade beds, biological specimens, retail mannequins distorted to have a spurious, sanitized shock echo of Goya's really terrifying guerrilla war drawings the more apparently absurd or horrid, the better. Artistic production becomes ever more frenetic, because there is a desperate need for novelty to keep artists on the crest of media attention, a problem when most of the ideas were first explored by the Dadaists and Surrealists three quarters of a century ago. Anyone who questions the results i s absurdly old-fashioned, thick, insensitive and possibly a fascist and racist to boot.

Architecture emulates unfine art

Art has become what its creator says it is - or rather what the organizations that promote and control the artists decide it should be. Successful artists have become brands, and their outputs are manipulated with all the skills of the marketing industry. How proud the father of so many of them, Salvador Dali (avida dollars as he was anagramically known to this contemporaries), would have been. But nowadays, you do not have to be a competent craftsman as he was; you just have to have an ability to shock, to want the dollars and to achieve the right marketing contacts.

Much fashionable contemporary architecture tries to emulate the achievements of the unfine artists. But, there are problems in translating such caperings to architecture because architecture can rarely aspire to being an autonomous art. It is anchored in practicality by mundane matters such as gravity, building regulations and the depth of clients' pockets (and for that matter their goodwill). From the eighteenth century onwards, there has been a vigorous tradition of exploring visionary architecture on paper, which continues today largely on computer screens. And, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were follies, in which architects and rich patrons experimented with architectural effects with little relation to practicality.

Sheds and follies

At present, architectural production often seems to be of two quite dissimilar kinds: sheds and follies. The largest sector by far is increasingly dominated by systems of procurement and production that are concerned with maximizing enclosed space and minimizing cost. They have little time for traditional architectural concerns such as human scale, memory, gentleness, exaltation, appropriate expression, even functionality in other than strictly measurable terms -- and certainly none for more modern ecological concerns. Hence the paucity of good commercial buildings in the US, where architecture has so often been reduced to a kind of exterior decoration for the products of ruthlessly efficient construction and real estate industries. Where the US leads economically, the rest of the world tends to follow, in both commercial and public work. In Europe, particularly Britain, systems such as the PFI (Private Finance Initiative similar to BOOT), appear to have little prospect of delivering decent public buildings, for all the well-meaning expressions of commitment to good architecture on behalf of the cultural (as opposed to the procurement) branches of government.

The other sector of architectural production is in part a reaction to the growing bulk of dull, bland decorated sheds turned out by the standard system. Its practitioners attempt to achieve the status of their new avant-garde contemporaries in the other arts. Their works are intended to hit the media hard by gesturing: making buildings look as strange as possible, wrenched into their contexts and apparently difficult to build (and in fact often really so). Patrons prepared to pay for such work range from cultural institutions (many headline buildings are museums or galleries) to capitalist organizations concerned to enhance their brand images. In the Netherlands, some authorities seem happy to have social housing created by young architects aiming for headline status.

The drawbacks of such work are, oddly enough, similar to those of the other sector. The buildings tend to be indifferent to traditional architectural concerns such as human scale, memory ... even functionality. The great Finnish critic Juhani Pallasmaa has argued that 'the celebrated architecture of our time and the publicity that attempts to convince us of its genius -- too often has an air 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'. [1]

Marchitecture

Restraint and modesty are scarcely attributes of the architects who grab the headlines. Just as the new avant-garde is propelled by the disciplines of the marketing industry, its products seem more and more to aspire to the status of advertisement for patron and architect alike. For instance, during the production of this issue, Santiago Calatrava demanded that his new work in Valeneia should be on the cover, or else he would not release the visual material. We refused to accept, but I am sure that you will find it on the covers of several of our contemporaries.

There are exceptions of course. For instance, Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim museum is certainly a powerful iconic advertisement for the city, and has done a great deal to put it on the cultural map of the world, but it also offers a range of spaces appropriate for the objects it contains, and it fosters a spectrum of human emotions ranging from welcome to awe. Similarly, the work of Gunther Belmisch often looks wild initially, but is in fact almost always generated by very careful consideration of context and human feelings. The buildings of Gehry and Behnisch also demonstrate that the problems are not to do with size or scale of the project -- Bilbao is a big building by any measure. And they show that there is a place for appropriate figure in contemporary architecture. Of course some buildings should be dramatic to emphasize their social importance, but not at the expense of human concerns.

Flashy gestures

Humanity is not usually high on the priorities of the new avant-garde. Rem Koolhaa's vastly overrated book S,M,L,XL is largely an uncritical hymn to the totally impersonal values of the global market. Charles Jencks welcomes some of Peter Eisenman's work because "in an era when opinion and anthropocentrism dominate culture, [it] returns us to a non-human standard for architecture that used to be the preserve of religions'. [2] But if we abandon human values in architecture, what have we got? Dollars, of course, the more available to the priesthood of the new art and architecture because they conduct their rituals in arcane language, work so-called miracles and guard inner mysteries techniques of priestly enrichment hallowed since the emergence of organized religions.

None of this would matter very much, were it not for the power of the new priesthood and its marketing acolytes. They have to a great extent seized popular imagination, and the admiration of students. They win commissions, competitions and awards, particularly when there is a large proportion of lay representation on juries. It is much easier to understand flashy gestures as design stage than the complexities of buildings that can touch subtler and deeper levels of the psyche. Now, it looks as it we are in for a generation of gestural buildings, nudging and elbowing each other for prominence in front of a lumpen mass of PFI-produced mediocrity.

Perhaps we shall grow out if it, just as (at least in the West) we grew out of PoMo in the '90s. In the mean time, the vital flame of real architecture, concerned with human not marketing values, must be tended and fostered. Most of the buildings shown in this issue demonstrate how this can be done, even with projects of the largest size.

(1.) Pallasmaa Juhani. AR May 2000, p84.

(2.) Jeneks, Charles. "The Scientific American". AR September 1995, p81, from The Architecture of the Jumping Universe.