Idiotic Architectural Fantasy

The winners of the 2010 eVolo Skyscraper Competition are, as my mother would say, 'remarkable'.  I'm going to overlook the winner, an absolutely ridiculous prison in the sky (no, really, where "the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields and factories that would support the host city below", which is a good thing because I, for one, have always wanted to live literally in the shadow of another city) - yes, I'm going to go right pass that bit of inane, thoughtless stupidity and move on to an honourable-mention winner, the 'Art of Building High Skyscraper in Paris', by the French Atelier Zundel & Cristea.

Their website says that they always begin a project with a deep analysis of geographical, economic, and regulatory issues, without ever trying to rely on theoretical justifications.  Mm-hmm.  So, in the most densely-populated Western city, a city far more dense than any other in Europe, they propose a 'skyscraper-city' in Beaugrenelle, the skyscrapers-on-a-concrete-podium experiment on the south bank of the Seine, in the 15th arrondissement.  Unfortunately, the designers of this scheme (it's a 'spatial texture', you dig?) forgot to put in a site visit; had they done so, they would have found that the idea didn't work and that the podium is an urban wasteland.  Maybe this is where I come out as a reactionary traditionalist, but a far better way to redevelop bits of Beaugrenelle would be to introduce the tight arrangements of pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use streets with perimeter blocks, courtyards and small parks that have made the rest of the city so famous.

This is just one of countless daft architectural proposals.  Naturally, they're all carbon-neutral, environmentally-friendly, zero-waste, uplifting, beautifying, etc. etc. etc.  Except they're not.  Generally they're no more than highly-egotistical artefacts of highly egotistical, reflection-free, contextually-unfettered minds, and I have no idea how they then go on to win prizes.

Well, I think it's time to establish a new prize:  Idiotic Architectural Fantasy of the Month.  Check back soon for more entries.  Why, maybe I'll set up a competition.  E-mail your entries in...

Icons and anti-icons

Architectural photographer and writer Dan Hewitt has just blogged about architectural icons. It's an interesting and provocative piece and well worth reading.

The word 'iconic' gets bandied about to mean 'oh that big building that everyone notices', and particularly 'that big building that defines city X'. But of course this simply makes an iconic building 'one which stands out'; in other words, perhaps, one that ignores its context. It ignores the fact that an icon should perhaps have some sort of meaning: either as an archetype for a class of building, or possibly imbued with some other social, economic or political meaning.

It is in this respect that I find the current crop of starchitects' buildings lacking. Not that I don't like 'em - well some of them, anyway - but let's take Rem's CCTV, or Zaha's...er...anything, or Gehry's Bilbao, or even the Pompidou Centre, and ask how they are iconic: How does the form express the meaning? Well, we can imagine that the Pompidou's form could have particular meaning, given that the idea of putting the services on the outside should, in theory, make for a more flexible set of spaces for viewing art on the inside. And perhaps the idea of the continuous loop in CCTV could have some sort of redefining functional aspect. But aside from their 'wow, look at me' factors, how is MAXXI an icon - or of what could it be an icon?

We should perhaps be introducing another term. For if buildings can be iconic, and if they can be anti-iconic - let's assume so, at any rate - then there must be a middle ground: the non-icon. Caruso St John's efforts in Nottingham strike me as neither iconic nor anti-iconic, but as simply one that fits into the city around it, fits its purpose unobtrusively, and confers a sense of beauty and delight to those who choose to notice it. Surely this should be the point in a post-crash era, however fleeting it may be?

Jan Jongert of 2012Architecten

Last night I heard Jan Jongert, of 2012Architecten, at an Architecture Foundation talk about his firm's work.  2012Architecten has done some very interesting work in re-use of components.  This is very different from using recycled materials, the more obvious process in which materials are broken down, recycled into a raw state, and then formed, shaped, or worked so as to appear as virgin materials; 2012Architecten use ready-made, already-formed components - washing-machine doors (evidently Miele makes high-quality products which, being properly screwed or bolted together, are easy to take apart), unused automotive windscreens, pieces of wood from the centres of large cable reels - and thus avoid the energy involved in, say, melting down recycled glass and forming it into new sheets, not to mention the transport required to move the materials around.

The ideas are fascinating but raise a host of questions:  Can this work on a large scale?  Don't you need a major exchange for materials?  (It turns out they implemented such a thing years ago, but the idea was probably ahead of its time - the website no longer exists.)

A house they have recently built with a facade made of wood from cable reels (it took them 10 years to go from realizing that this wood could be a construction material to figuring out how to successfully recover and treat it so that it can be used as such) look good, but the pictures he showed the audience were of a suburban subdivision that could be Surbiton, or Phoenix, for that matter.  It's all very well and good to reduce the embodied energy in buildings, but what about the automobile use implied in the location?  Even in Holland, the land of the bicycle, the tram, and the train, some 70% of all journeys are made by car.

The biggest issue, as ever, is one of speed and scale.  If the challenges of climate change mitigation and adaptation are what we think they are; if we do need to reduce our carbon emissions by something between 60% and 80% by 2050; if sea levels are already rising - and never mind crises, real or imagined, in the availability of energy or raw materials - we don't have time to spend on small interventions.  We need to be rethinking all the energy and resource flows in our economies, as well as the spatial implications of reducing the size of those loops, and we need to be doing it now.