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SUSTAINABILITY AND SUPERSTARS MAKE FOR AN ANIMATED UIA CONGRESS IN BERLIN; AIRPORTS COME ON AGE WITH BENTHEM CROUWEL'S NEW MINI ART MUSEUM AT AMSTERDAM SCHIPHOL; MACCORMAC JAMIESON PRICHARD GET BBC JOB; SURF'S UP WITH SUTHERLAND LYALL IN BROWSER; VIEW FROM DHAKA; LETTERS -- LAST WORDS ON RAMALLAH.

VEGAS ON THE SPREE

In Las Vegas (alarmingly one of the fastest growing areas in the US), someone once had the idea of designing a casino hotel with Berlin as its theme, Eschewing Sally Bowles stereotypes of 'divine decadence' it would, instead, involve the illusion of constant change and rebuilding. It was eventually unrealised, but it shows how the 'Berlin effect' has transformed the city almost into a parody of itself -- a mutating scenography of historical bricolage, as maps and boundaries are redrawn and its dead heart is gradually Disneyfied.

Following Beijing in 1999 (AR August 1999), Berlin was the setting for the UIA Congress which came to town at the end of July. Held in the International Congress Centre (a hulking late 1970s megastructure which is in danger of becoming fashionable again -- AR June 1980), the UIA is a massive curate's egg with its Byzantine programme of forums, plenums, talks, resolutions, lectures, exhibitions and general architectural carryings on. It takes instinct and luck to ferret out the good parts, but the risk of staging something so logistically huge is that it might implode under its own weight. (It has been reported that the Bund Deutsche Architekten has been obliged to take out a loan to meet organizational debts.) It also tries to sustain the impression that architects can change the world, which they patently can't: politicians, developers, real-estate salesmen, building contractors and clients have all seen to that.

Underpinning this year's congress was a strong current of environmental awareness. Germany is impressively advanced in this regard, not only through formal legislation, but also in general cultural consciousness. Karl Ganser, head of the UIA's Scientific Committee suggested that every building should have a 'deconstruction plan' and that 'everything we build should be gently returned into the cycle of nature', In an early plenum devoted to 'The Built and the Natural', Thomas Herzog, one of Germany's most active and evangelizing eco-architects, looked at lessons drawn from tradition and history, exploring vernacular architecture from Venice, Tunis and the Yemen. According to Herzog, there are only 40 years of oil reserves left and 50 years of gas, giving an uncomfortable sense of urgency to the quest to develop more environmentally responsive planning and architecture. Jorge Leirnur from Argentina considered the effects of increased flooding in the pampas which is permanently changing the landscape, destabiliz ing agricultural development and intensifying the country's economic crisis. Images of gauchos speculatively transformed into fishermen struck a wry note in an otherwise disturbing account of man's increasingly uneasy relationship with the planet. Nature is no respecter of livelihoods or balance sheets.

It was a theme that returned in a session on 'Architecture and Emergencies', which looked at how agencies respond to disasters, both natural and manmade. The latter tend to be far more destructive than the former, however. According to Daniel Biau, deputy director of UN-Habitat in Nairobi, civilians accounted for only 10 per cent of casualties during the First World War; in Mozambique's recent civil conflict, they accounted for 90 per cent of fatalities. In the wake of September 11th, Peter Marcuse, a sociologist and planner from New York, described how the city was trying to rebuild itself -- physically, economically and symbolically -- after thc attacks. The economic loss can never outweigh the human toll, but while large corporate players such as American Express were offered incentives to stay in the area, the needs of smaller businesses were largely ignored. Proposals for the site were unveiled to almost unanimous criticism (12 million sq ft of office space distributed over towers of varying heights from 32 to 85 storeys) and it has subsequently been announced that the rebuilding will be the subject of a major new international competition.

'An architect must be a provider of services, builder of peace and an occasional nay-sayer,' declared Frei Otto, introducing the plenum on 'Innovation and Tradition'. Canadian architect Richard Kroeker gave an engrossing account of his work in the Gambia, devising flotation kits for fishermen out of water bottles and inventing ways of getting water out of wells. (Sometimes the most inspiring solutions come from the margins of life.) Kroeker's world is far removed from the superstar posturings of Peter Eisenman, who dropped in to plug his Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, due to begin construction in early autumn on a site behind Frank Gehry's DG bank (AR August 2001). Eisenman pondered on the difficulties of building a 'monument in the media age' (we are so saturated with media images -- the Twin Tower atrocities, for instance -- that our capacity to respond to real things is eroded), claiming that he is trying to create an 'affective space', which depends on being physically experienced (as opposed to being published in glossy magazines, one supposes).

In a session entitled 'The City as a Stage: Urban Entertainment', planners, architects and historians explored how cities style and package themselves to attract human and economic investment. Janet Ward, a British historian based in Las Vegas, looked at how Berlin was being Americanized, pumped up into a consumer's paradise through tax breaks and loans, although nearly half the new shops on Friedrichstrasse are empty. Athens on the Spree is becoming Vegas on the Spree, and architecture, like everything else, is being frantically commodified, boosterism gone wrong. The outcome is anxiety and anomie, summed up by a loss of a sense of Kiez or neighbourliness. The world could certainly do with more Kiez. Next stop for the triennial UIA circus will be Istanbul in 2005, where it will hope to improve on attendance figures -- only 5,000 delegates made the trip to Berlin, around half the number who attended in Barcelona six years ago.