Have we reached the climax and termination of a whole era in architecture? An era you might dub "The Bilbao Decade"?
I'll explain about Bilbao later. But first two news items. Between them, they bracket the present moment.
"The downturn is spreading. It's getting worse. It hasn't hit bottom yet," says Kermit Baker, the American Institute of Architects' chief economist. Another journal suggests that for American architects "there may be nothing to do but wait and pray."
The AIA maintains an index of prosperity for architects. That index has now fallen to historic lows in every category - commercial, residential, industrial, institutional, whatever. Projects of all kinds are being halted and put aside, for nobody knows how long. Architects are told by their clients to stop working until further notice.
Usually institutional work - especially hospitals and universities - holds up best in a recession, which can be good news for New England architects. But that sector too has hit an all-time low.
OK, the American news is too gray and depressing. Let's focus on an item from the other side of the world.
In the emirate of Dubai, over there on the Arab peninsula, the sun is still shining. In fact, it's shining so brightly that the Palazzo Versace, a hotel due to open next year, plans to offer its guests a beach of artificially cooled sand.
The Guardian, a British newspaper, reports that pipes filled with coolant will be installed beneath the beach to prevent it from stinging anyone's toes. "We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool," says the hotel's president.
Huge fans, too, will maintain a gentle breeze on the beachgoers. These will be wind machines, but instead of generating energy, like windmills or wind farms, they'll be expending it. Not only that: The new Versace plans also to refrigerate the water in its enormous acre-and-a-half swimming pool.
Why would anyone want to visit such an unnatural beach? Why not just stay in your air-conditioned hotel suite with a sun lamp? I have no idea. Perhaps part of the attraction for a tourist is the sheer pleasure of knowing that you have the power to waste the earth's resources.
The Dubai tale goes on and on. Just one more detail: Thirty thousand mature trees are being shipped to the emirate to landscape a new golf course. In Dubai's climate they will, of course, be artificially irrigated.
Severe architectural recession on the one hand, grotesque architectural luxury on the other. The two stories are the yin and yang of this moment in time. They mark the end, perhaps, of what we'll call the Bilbao Decade. It's been a boom, a clearly defined epoch in the history of architecture.
By Bilbao I mean, of course, the Guggenheim Museum in that Spanish city, designed by American architect Frank Gehry, which opened in 1997. With its billowing curves of shiny titanium and its powerfully massive sculptural presence, it was instantly perceived as a masterpiece. Tourists flocked to it. This one building put the city of Bilbao on the cultural map of the world.
Suddenly architecture was in. Every city, it seemed, wanted to be like Bilbao, wanted its own daring, avant-garde iconic building. Usually that building was an art museum or a skyscraper. Every few months, someone announced plans for the new tallest building in the world. (The current candidate is Burj Dubai, still under construction, which when complete will be approximately twice the height of the Empire State Building.)
Buildings took on crazy forms, largely because the computer made it possible for structural engineers to figure out how to make almost any shape stand up. Students at schools of architecture, influenced by the work of Gehry and others, played with their new computer programs to invent amazing shapes. Every work of architecture, it seemed, sought to be an original icon. A few leading international architects became, for the first time ever, media celebrities.
Architecture critics were not immune. Some of them, during this decade, perceived architecture as an elite activity, an art form of spectacle created by maybe 20 major architects around the world for an audience of a few thousand aficionados. There wasn't a lot of attention to everyday building types like schools and housing.
All that fever now feels passe. Architecture students, I'm told, are more interested in so-called "green architecture," work that responds to the global crisis of climate and resources, than they are in artistic shape-making. They're interested in urbanism, in the ways buildings gather to shape streets and neighborhoods and public spaces. They research new materials and methods of construction. Increasingly, they're collaborating with students in other fields, instead of hoping to produce a private ego trip.
As others have pointed out, there's an upside to recessions. They give people time to step back from the frantic pace of a boom economy and think hard about what it is they want to do. In a time of limited resources, architects and their clients will focus again on solving the practical problems of making an environment that is, in every sense of today's overused word, sustainable.
Some day, the tourist vogue will fade in Dubai. The emirate will cease to be the latest toy for the jet-setter. There will be a big empty pool and a forgotten beach. A moment of selfish insanity will have passed.
The Bilbao Decade produced some wonderful buildings, but it was a time when the social purposes of architecture were sometimes lost. Architecture is supposed to be about making places for human habitation - rooms, streets, parks, cities - not merely skyline icons or beachfront palaces.
Just as one feels a page turning with the arrival of a new American president, so a page is turning, once again, in the history of architecture.
(via Boston.com)
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