The world has plenty of bell towers that are in no way means of oppression or of power. The ones at the University of Alabama and the University of North Carolina are especially attractive. The bells in collegiate towers not only keep the students on time for classes they often are used for special occasions such as weddings and graduations - the elements of life, not death.
(tduds, I will try like heck to make this a weekly discussion thread. It has been a really great discussion. Don't let this post stop that, please, everyone!)
If nothing else, we can follow towers back to humankind's desire to control gravity, right? So, does controlling something always mean oppression?
Human nature is always about control. At least for the last 14,000 years or so, according to Jared Diamond. Instinct rules, in particular hormone-driven mating instinct. Plenty of close cousins (primates) demonstrate this clearly.
I like the bell towers example Volunteer. I think we've all accepted the construct of time enough to appreciate that one, except maybe tduds?
There is a difference between power and oppression, and it might come down to perspective. We don't generally find water towers oppressive because they have probably never been used against us in an oppressive manner. But the water tower is a power structure, if only just exerting control over a resource. I don't think controlling something means oppression, but it does mean having power over that something. How the power is used leads to oppression or I guess benevolence a la the public service comment earlier. I read Nouvel's tower as a power structure AND as oppressive based on the context, the program and probably my own biases against state surveillance / militarized police. Also the form is a little stocky and I think the windows are clumsy. The brick itself is very nice though.
Imagine this as a prototype for future municipal security development: armored panopticon with empty plaza providing clear fields of fire. If Nouvel had any balls he would have made it look like a giant billy club.
There was a time when police were called (rightly or wrongly) peace officers. Now they are law enforcement officials, and the architecture of the state reflects that.
^which is why I really dig Pollack...He straddled the thin line between chaos and control. Can also be said for some of the neo-expressionists like Basquat. In contemporary architecture, disorder, or the illusion of disorder is intentionally sought. Is this to create the illusion that the work is NOT a manifestation of power and wealth by denying the historical forms and traits associated with western power? How dishonest that is...
I wonder if this mostly American audience is misreading the building based on our understanding of power dynamics and the police.
Is it relevant that this is a design by a French architect for an economically depressed post-industrial city in the overall poorer French-speaking Wallonia? Maybe this is something of a matter of pride for local citizens?
I'm just speculating - I don't have any direct knowledge of this. I just know that what we read as power is just as often the mere projection of it. That is not always a thing to dismiss with contempt.
---
Quondam actually brings up a fascinating case in the Washington monument.
Two obelisks:
^One, a monument funded in part by donations by private individuals, political parties, and eventually a democratic government celebrating the end of slavery and conclusion of a civil war. Built haltingly by paid labor and incorporating some donated memorial stones.
^The other, built presumably by slaves in a theocratic Egyptian state. Dragged back to Rome as the loot of imperial conquest. Appropriated by Europe's only extent theocratic state to decorate the front yard.
---
I think it's dumb to regard all manifestations as power equally. So what power dynamic does a tower for a city police force in Belgium indicate? I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows Belgium and Charleroi better than I do.
midlander what you describe is kind of what becomes the nonsense in architecture. somehow equating the politics and economics behind the object with the objects form itself. if you weren't an educated architect would nouvels blue tower appear oppressive?
Olaf, what strikes me as ironic is that non-architects honestly seem to LOVE so-called narrative architecture, in which they can easily identify that *this* thing on the building represents *that* specific thing in culture. I don't mean to belittle this tendency; I think narrative connects people to one another and our buildings should enhance that connection.
What is challenging about this instance is that police oppression is such a huge topic - in the US, at least - right now that it is a challenging association.
Donna to a degree, but try selling a narattive on a brutalist building that perhaps serves as a happy preschool? with the blue tower by Nouvel he has sold the police image i guess based mainly on color. in Germany it would have to be a green tower.
Donna, the narrative aspect is why I suggested the building should look like a billy club. The problem with starchitects is that their narrative isn't intended for the public but aimed squarely at the competition. Thus parametrics, etc. Mayne even came right out and said that he designs for (read against) other architects. It's Battle of the Titan(antic Ego)s, and mere mortals get crushed underfoot.
I will reiterate an earlier point: power =/= oppression.
They are two different things.
Also, it is telling that the reactions and criticism here have been overwhelmingly negative when looking at the building as it is from the perspective of how it is actually perceived from the ground, versus more positive when looking at aerial drawings and concept sketches. This is indicative of a much deeper problem among architects in general: we have lost touch with the humane experience of architecture as environment, and are in love with the abstractions and playthings of design communication.
The problem with starchitects is that their narrative isn't intended for the public but aimed squarely at the competition
This is true, totally. But I also think we as architects should be able to explain the narrative on both levels: it should be accessible to the public, but not so trite and hokey that we're embarrassed to share it with our peers, too. IMO the blue tower = police is not only trite, but oppressive, too. The way Mayne uses materials to reference complex geological and environmental interactions, as in the Perot Museum, isn't hokey, but could be read as oppressive by someone who isn't interested in hearing the explanation. So the answer is more museum docents who can explain the intent to visitors? A higher level of public discourse about design? A cartoon series like Schoolhouse Rocks! to explain public buildings?
Off topic - balkins has not commented on this thread or any thread where the topic has been about design or theory and he only comments on anything to do with life questions.
Quondam: A photograph is much less an abstraction than a drawing. Both drawings and photographs lie, but drawings are a high-level abstraction mostly unconnected to experience of reality. Photographs at least capture some aspect of something real, even if they are directed perspectives through a lens.
If you need a high abstraction layer or a bunch of drawings in order to appreciate the aesthetic value of a built work, then it is pretty much a failure. Aesthetic reactions are emotional and created works stand for themselves without mediation or exposition. There is an intellectual dimension to them, certainly and necessarily, but they are fundamentally about emotional resonance to perceptual experience. The perceptual experience of the photographs of this project is horrible. It's a tremendously inhumane and ugly building, even in the photos that are being used to promote its design, and that is a legitimate critique of it. No other critique is really necessary, but tduds and I gave a detailed explanation for some of the design failures which are driving that negative reaction: it's about poor form, planning, and perceptual scaling (all of which are common themes in Nouvel's work, incidentally).
Gwharton - the first half of your last post is obfuscational jibberish. Not coherent.
You make your point starting with "It's a tremendously inhumane and ugly building." Which is simply your angry opinion restated.
I disagree with you. I don't think that its the best building ever, but it isn't some evil tower of oppressiveness - your overwrought dogmatism is bizarre.
Again, I think that people are looking too simply at signs. Towers aren't inherently oppressive (and that assertion being made here doesn't mean that its something most people believe), and blue is associated with lots of stuff other than the police. The Guthrie is the same blue - no cops there.
tduds- Photography in architecture would make a good post on its own, and probably already has been. I'd say that photography is often the "what I wanted to do." A new house in my neighborhood made it onto a couple of the arch./design sites recently. In real life, the house looks pretty good, I like it. But, the photographs of it portray something completely different. You wouldn't know that it is 30 feet from a busy street and 15 feet from the neighboring house; the photos lie, idealizing the design.
anonitect, gwharton gave a very detailed explanation of why he thinks it's an ugly building. Short answer: it has scale relationship problems of parts to parts and parts to whole. That's not just an opinion. Can you rebut his analysis?
I think it's safe to say that most towers tend to connote power, and some towers definitely connote surveillance, and surveillance combined with power very strongly connote oppression in the absence of an opposite symbol. Like maybe a smiley face.
Back to narratives - On one level they are a vitally necessary aspect of civilization and culture, for example oral tradition. On another they are simply entertainments that our culture uses to manipulate, sell, etc.
Art requires a narrative for context (and sales, among other things). Buildings have a preexisting context established by program, site conditions, budget, codes, etc. Thus a building does not require a narrative. It does require sensitivity to program, site, etc.
Making the narrative more important than the work is the antithesis of architecture. Architecture is not fine art (sculpture) - it is design. The "art" of architecture is the art of craft, specifically the manipulation of materials for a specific functional purpose. Most starchitects have it backwards.
The fatal flaw is having a stand-alone police building in the first place. If you were told the Hotel de Ville Paris had a police station within you would just envy the police who got to work there.
To me, it is the character of the space that makes this design oppressive.
I believe that someone approaching that building would feel reduced in stature and pushed off to the side.
In Rossi's design, there is a difference in relative scale of the tower to the surrounding buildings not present in Nouvel's design. More importantly, the voids in the surrounding buildings in Rossi's design contain the space and turn in back on itself.
At the very least, Nouvel's building is ham fisted.
I do not know which is worse, done intentionally or unintentionally.
Donna, gwharton had just been going with "SUCKS" for a while, so I hadn't really considered his original post about scale.
Where does that 1:7 ratio come from? It seems pretty easy to disprove that there's a mandated "good composition" ratio for building elements- just look at the obelisks above, I'll think of better examples (Seagram bldg.?) if challenged.
But, if we are going with that ratio, remember that the building (which is only 20 stories tall) is acting as a foil to the built structures, which certainly fall within that weird compositional mandate.
Corporate towers and condo bldgs. blocking out everyone else's light are certainly about power, but here are too many examples (lighthouses, clock towers) where vertical structures are not about dominance, or where their power function is archaic (watch towers, steeples) that I honestly don't believe that this building would be interpreted by people on the ground in Charleroi as a way of surveiling them. (And remember that there are civilian functions there as well.)
Narrative is important to the communication of meaning, but Miles is right that narrative-dominant architecture is problematic: really a kind of category error - trying to make something function contrary to its nature, like didactic art. When architecture gets too story-driven, it becomes contrived and trite like a theme park.
Where narrative and abstraction are necessary in the aesthetics of architecture, they function best in that mode in the form of metaphor. The language of design is not for precision communication or high abstraction. That's why the symbolic connections associated with this work are important to its design and aesthetic resolution. You can't just plop a police tower in the center of an existing complex and expect the connotations of all the metaphors and semiotics associated with that to be ignored.
The 1:7 threshold comes from a bunch of research that has been done in human perceptual discrimination. In addition to a bunch of more abstract research in neuroaesthetics and cognitive science, some fascinating empirical studies focused on architectural perception were done by Arthur Stamps. I highly recommend the papers he's written summarizing his findings.
Interestingly, there is a pretty strong correlation between human perceptual discrimination and proportional thresholds defined by the Plastic Ratio (1:1.324717957244746025960908854), the lower categorical bound of which occurs at approximately 1:7. Scalar relationships greater than 1 to 7 tend to lose visual connection without intermediate compositional definition to perceptually unify them.
It should be noted, as part of this, that proportionality is an entirely relative thing in the specific sense. Internal proportions are always relative to the whole of which they are a part. And compositional proportioning is further relative to the point of reference of the viewer. At the smallest increment, this is limited by the MAR (minimum angle of resolution) of the human retina at any particular viewing distance (the same principle which guided the design of Apple's "Retina Screens.")
Really, still pounding the "scale" thing, huh? Yea, and Leonardo wrote on the proper scale of buildings to streets...yada yada yada. And yet, I can spend a whole day in Manhattan and have the best time ever, really enjoy myself, but yet I'm surrounded by these high towers that are oppressing me, how can that be.
A few comments:
- the tower is not bad, but I agree with the "cold" comment. It would be better in the same warm material, brick in this case, as the existing buildings; it would seem like it belonged.
- towers do not just connote power, even in cases where they do so initially (just check out the screaming, frightened tourists on the Tower of Pisa or the Eiffel.) Towers originated as things of "power", more correctly surveillance 'cause you could see your enemy a long way away; but even castle towers can become loved (ask Walt Disney Corp.).
- architecture (or a building) is not just its official first program or use; if a building survives years or centuries, use (and therefore meaning to users and culture) will change many times (read yourself some Aldo Rossi). And this is a very important part of architecture which an architect can't necessarily "design" in, it's very often out of his control. Therefore, architecture is not just the craft of the materials, although it is that too; there is a whole world more to it than that.
- the "starchitect" term hurled as an insult is a lazy and tired cliche' and I wish it would disappear from this forum. Of course they're competing with other architects. A pizza guy sells his pizza 25 cents cheaper than the pizzeria down the street and puts out ads with a narrative that's pretty purple; doesn't mean it isn't good pizza. Obviously the narrative layered on by the designers doesn't mean shit: it IS a form of advertising. Well, then just look at the building and "critique" it on that basis, go see it even, walk inside it, and ignore the narrative.
Btw, not saying that this building will be around centuries, most likely it won't, but I just don't see the imposed "narrative" of oppression being sold here.
^ There is infinite variety in the design of towers.
For the most part starchitects do more to damage the profession than they do to improve it. The celebrity status granted by the Pritzker has been the kiss of death for more than a few as the branding / marketing requirements of a post-Pritzker commission far outweighs the design requirements.
Film is a good metaphor. You don't cast Adam Sandler, Sylvester Stallone or Nicholas Cage to make a great film, you cast them to sell a bad film in order to make money.
And actually, I happen to agree with you that this is a "refreshingly non-mediocre building" in the sense that it genuinely is NOT mediocre. It's just bad.
But that is actually higher praise than judging it mediocre. It's a failure, and it's getting well-deserved negative reactions, but that is a measure of its aesthetic ambition. Mediocre buildings don't get strong reactions from people. Just indifference, which is much worse.
I often make this point with my students. In order to achieve greatness, you must risk failure. To get love, you must risk hatred. Most designers and builders loathe that risk and fear the possibility of the negative response, so they play it "safe" and generate only mediocrity and indifference.
So, I do judge this project by Nouvel harshly in the sense that it is a bad building, and I have no qualms about naming it so (with many good reasons for doing so). It risked and failed, and it's getting the negative response it earned. But that is still higher praise than the ultimate condemnation: indifferent mediocrity. It has risen above that, at least.
Actually, quondrum, you haven't critiqued anything. You've posted a question, some pictures and opinions but nothing that remotely resembles disciplined, systematic analysis.
@Don Kashane re: "the tower is not bad, but I agree with the "cold" comment. It would be better in the same warm material, brick in this case, as the existing buildings; it would seem like it belonged".
Just to clarify the tower is made from blue brick, so do you mean "same warm material" as in literally same red brick/color?
Nam, yes, that is what I meant, red brick like the lower buildings, although the more I look at the project I'm thinking that, since the ground paving is also red brick, the color of the new brick is fine as a contrast.
I've always liked the Rossi project quondam pointed out and other projects like his Modena Cemetery where he uses large conical elements. The size of this tower in relation to the lower buildings is only a bit larger than the same relationship in the Muggio project (at least from looking at the two drawings above). To my mind, if one is standing in that "piazza", the oval shape and sloping-in of this tower would certainly not make it that oppressive or out of scale (but that would definitely be better confirmed on site than in a photo).
The world is littered with failed greatness. It's also filled with successful mediocrity or just plain badness (and I'm not talking about just buildings).
Let's talk about a building
The world has plenty of bell towers that are in no way means of oppression or of power. The ones at the University of Alabama and the University of North Carolina are especially attractive. The bells in collegiate towers not only keep the students on time for classes they often are used for special occasions such as weddings and graduations - the elements of life, not death.
What's more oppressive than the totalitarian dictation of time?
@quondam - I fixed it for you.
Where's RCWBPBD Esq. with a cut 'n paste from Wikipedia on bell towers?
(Sorry, just couldn't resist. Damn agave!)
(tduds, I will try like heck to make this a weekly discussion thread. It has been a really great discussion. Don't let this post stop that, please, everyone!)
If nothing else, we can follow towers back to humankind's desire to control gravity, right? So, does controlling something always mean oppression?
WHAT THE FUCK? This is a civil, sane, coherent, engaging and informative thread. Please leave it that way EVERYBODY, no more mention of that.
Human nature is always about control. At least for the last 14,000 years or so, according to Jared Diamond. Instinct rules, in particular hormone-driven mating instinct. Plenty of close cousins (primates) demonstrate this clearly.
I like the bell towers example Volunteer. I think we've all accepted the construct of time enough to appreciate that one, except maybe tduds? There is a difference between power and oppression, and it might come down to perspective. We don't generally find water towers oppressive because they have probably never been used against us in an oppressive manner. But the water tower is a power structure, if only just exerting control over a resource. I don't think controlling something means oppression, but it does mean having power over that something. How the power is used leads to oppression or I guess benevolence a la the public service comment earlier. I read Nouvel's tower as a power structure AND as oppressive based on the context, the program and probably my own biases against state surveillance / militarized police. Also the form is a little stocky and I think the windows are clumsy. The brick itself is very nice though.
Imagine this as a prototype for future municipal security development: armored panopticon with empty plaza providing clear fields of fire. If Nouvel had any balls he would have made it look like a giant billy club.
There was a time when police were called (rightly or wrongly) peace officers. Now they are law enforcement officials, and the architecture of the state reflects that.
I believe I read somewhere that future wars will be over water not oil.
To some people who are the victims of violence may view a symbol of power and authority favorably.
^which is why I really dig Pollack...He straddled the thin line between chaos and control. Can also be said for some of the neo-expressionists like Basquat. In contemporary architecture, disorder, or the illusion of disorder is intentionally sought. Is this to create the illusion that the work is NOT a manifestation of power and wealth by denying the historical forms and traits associated with western power? How dishonest that is...
^response to Miles point...
In my opinion, an asymetrical prison is no less a prison than a symmetrical one.
I see a big difference between the two in terms of scale, compositional sense, and level of abstraction.
actually the blue is quite festive, but still funny and offensive, say vs Brutalism!
I hear most felons vote democrat, and it appears most criminals like modernism
but the state can cure them for sure - in dingy brick establishments
but once cured, back to same old self
and one day you too can have an interior like this \/ (famous radio commentator, take a guess)
.....
I'm blaming Concrete.
quondam, I'm now seeing the Rossi, but it's just not like Rossi, not done the same way Rossi might
(note this building showed up a in dream once, 30 of them, pink and blue, very strange)
I wonder if this mostly American audience is misreading the building based on our understanding of power dynamics and the police.
Is it relevant that this is a design by a French architect for an economically depressed post-industrial city in the overall poorer French-speaking Wallonia? Maybe this is something of a matter of pride for local citizens?
I'm just speculating - I don't have any direct knowledge of this. I just know that what we read as power is just as often the mere projection of it. That is not always a thing to dismiss with contempt.
---
Quondam actually brings up a fascinating case in the Washington monument.
Two obelisks:
^One, a monument funded in part by donations by private individuals, political parties, and eventually a democratic government celebrating the end of slavery and conclusion of a civil war. Built haltingly by paid labor and incorporating some donated memorial stones.
^The other, built presumably by slaves in a theocratic Egyptian state. Dragged back to Rome as the loot of imperial conquest. Appropriated by Europe's only extent theocratic state to decorate the front yard.
---
I think it's dumb to regard all manifestations as power equally. So what power dynamic does a tower for a city police force in Belgium indicate? I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows Belgium and Charleroi better than I do.
midlander what you describe is kind of what becomes the nonsense in architecture. somehow equating the politics and economics behind the object with the objects form itself. if you weren't an educated architect would nouvels blue tower appear oppressive?
What is challenging about this instance is that police oppression is such a huge topic - in the US, at least - right now that it is a challenging association.
Donna to a degree, but try selling a narattive on a brutalist building that perhaps serves as a happy preschool? with the blue tower by Nouvel he has sold the police image i guess based mainly on color. in Germany it would have to be a green tower.
Novel could have taken St. Marks campanile in Venice, added some fenestration, modernized it a bit, plopped it down on the site, and called it a day.
Donna, the narrative aspect is why I suggested the building should look like a billy club. The problem with starchitects is that their narrative isn't intended for the public but aimed squarely at the competition. Thus parametrics, etc. Mayne even came right out and said that he designs for (read against) other architects. It's Battle of the Titan(antic Ego)s, and mere mortals get crushed underfoot.
I will reiterate an earlier point: power =/= oppression.
They are two different things.
Also, it is telling that the reactions and criticism here have been overwhelmingly negative when looking at the building as it is from the perspective of how it is actually perceived from the ground, versus more positive when looking at aerial drawings and concept sketches. This is indicative of a much deeper problem among architects in general: we have lost touch with the humane experience of architecture as environment, and are in love with the abstractions and playthings of design communication.
The problem with starchitects is that their narrative isn't intended for the public but aimed squarely at the competition
This is true, totally. But I also think we as architects should be able to explain the narrative on both levels: it should be accessible to the public, but not so trite and hokey that we're embarrassed to share it with our peers, too. IMO the blue tower = police is not only trite, but oppressive, too. The way Mayne uses materials to reference complex geological and environmental interactions, as in the Perot Museum, isn't hokey, but could be read as oppressive by someone who isn't interested in hearing the explanation. So the answer is more museum docents who can explain the intent to visitors? A higher level of public discourse about design? A cartoon series like Schoolhouse Rocks! to explain public buildings?
Olaf - the average Joe may see that the tower is oppressive, loads of people call the shard in London saurons eye.
Off topic - balkins has not commented on this thread or any thread where the topic has been about design or theory and he only comments on anything to do with life questions.
Quondam: A photograph is much less an abstraction than a drawing. Both drawings and photographs lie, but drawings are a high-level abstraction mostly unconnected to experience of reality. Photographs at least capture some aspect of something real, even if they are directed perspectives through a lens.
If you need a high abstraction layer or a bunch of drawings in order to appreciate the aesthetic value of a built work, then it is pretty much a failure. Aesthetic reactions are emotional and created works stand for themselves without mediation or exposition. There is an intellectual dimension to them, certainly and necessarily, but they are fundamentally about emotional resonance to perceptual experience. The perceptual experience of the photographs of this project is horrible. It's a tremendously inhumane and ugly building, even in the photos that are being used to promote its design, and that is a legitimate critique of it. No other critique is really necessary, but tduds and I gave a detailed explanation for some of the design failures which are driving that negative reaction: it's about poor form, planning, and perceptual scaling (all of which are common themes in Nouvel's work, incidentally).
quondam, is this not oppressive? is this liberating?
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S5QMW4Ltj8M/VHd0FzEvLWI/AAAAAAAACUE/mzLAhnU_92g/s1600/torre-4-costanera.jpg
Gwharton - the first half of your last post is obfuscational jibberish. Not coherent.
You make your point starting with "It's a tremendously inhumane and ugly building." Which is simply your angry opinion restated.
I disagree with you. I don't think that its the best building ever, but it isn't some evil tower of oppressiveness - your overwrought dogmatism is bizarre.
Again, I think that people are looking too simply at signs. Towers aren't inherently oppressive (and that assertion being made here doesn't mean that its something most people believe), and blue is associated with lots of stuff other than the police. The Guthrie is the same blue - no cops there.
Drawing = what I wanted to do
Photograph = what I think I did
Reality = what I did
LOL @ anonitect. U mad bro?
tduds- Photography in architecture would make a good post on its own, and probably already has been. I'd say that photography is often the "what I wanted to do." A new house in my neighborhood made it onto a couple of the arch./design sites recently. In real life, the house looks pretty good, I like it. But, the photographs of it portray something completely different. You wouldn't know that it is 30 feet from a busy street and 15 feet from the neighboring house; the photos lie, idealizing the design.
(gwhart - not your bro.)
anonitect, gwharton gave a very detailed explanation of why he thinks it's an ugly building. Short answer: it has scale relationship problems of parts to parts and parts to whole. That's not just an opinion. Can you rebut his analysis?
I think it's safe to say that most towers tend to connote power, and some towers definitely connote surveillance, and surveillance combined with power very strongly connote oppression in the absence of an opposite symbol. Like maybe a smiley face.
Back to narratives - On one level they are a vitally necessary aspect of civilization and culture, for example oral tradition. On another they are simply entertainments that our culture uses to manipulate, sell, etc.
Art requires a narrative for context (and sales, among other things). Buildings have a preexisting context established by program, site conditions, budget, codes, etc. Thus a building does not require a narrative. It does require sensitivity to program, site, etc.
Making the narrative more important than the work is the antithesis of architecture. Architecture is not fine art (sculpture) - it is design. The "art" of architecture is the art of craft, specifically the manipulation of materials for a specific functional purpose. Most starchitects have it backwards.
The fatal flaw is having a stand-alone police building in the first place. If you were told the Hotel de Ville Paris had a police station within you would just envy the police who got to work there.
To me, it is the character of the space that makes this design oppressive.
I believe that someone approaching that building would feel reduced in stature and pushed off to the side.
In Rossi's design, there is a difference in relative scale of the tower to the surrounding buildings not present in Nouvel's design. More importantly, the voids in the surrounding buildings in Rossi's design contain the space and turn in back on itself.
At the very least, Nouvel's building is ham fisted.
I do not know which is worse, done intentionally or unintentionally.
Donna, gwharton had just been going with "SUCKS" for a while, so I hadn't really considered his original post about scale.
Where does that 1:7 ratio come from? It seems pretty easy to disprove that there's a mandated "good composition" ratio for building elements- just look at the obelisks above, I'll think of better examples (Seagram bldg.?) if challenged.
But, if we are going with that ratio, remember that the building (which is only 20 stories tall) is acting as a foil to the built structures, which certainly fall within that weird compositional mandate.
Corporate towers and condo bldgs. blocking out everyone else's light are certainly about power, but here are too many examples (lighthouses, clock towers) where vertical structures are not about dominance, or where their power function is archaic (watch towers, steeples) that I honestly don't believe that this building would be interpreted by people on the ground in Charleroi as a way of surveiling them. (And remember that there are civilian functions there as well.)
Narrative is important to the communication of meaning, but Miles is right that narrative-dominant architecture is problematic: really a kind of category error - trying to make something function contrary to its nature, like didactic art. When architecture gets too story-driven, it becomes contrived and trite like a theme park.
Where narrative and abstraction are necessary in the aesthetics of architecture, they function best in that mode in the form of metaphor. The language of design is not for precision communication or high abstraction. That's why the symbolic connections associated with this work are important to its design and aesthetic resolution. You can't just plop a police tower in the center of an existing complex and expect the connotations of all the metaphors and semiotics associated with that to be ignored.
anonitect,
The 1:7 threshold comes from a bunch of research that has been done in human perceptual discrimination. In addition to a bunch of more abstract research in neuroaesthetics and cognitive science, some fascinating empirical studies focused on architectural perception were done by Arthur Stamps. I highly recommend the papers he's written summarizing his findings.
Interestingly, there is a pretty strong correlation between human perceptual discrimination and proportional thresholds defined by the Plastic Ratio (1:1.324717957244746025960908854), the lower categorical bound of which occurs at approximately 1:7. Scalar relationships greater than 1 to 7 tend to lose visual connection without intermediate compositional definition to perceptually unify them.
It should be noted, as part of this, that proportionality is an entirely relative thing in the specific sense. Internal proportions are always relative to the whole of which they are a part. And compositional proportioning is further relative to the point of reference of the viewer. At the smallest increment, this is limited by the MAR (minimum angle of resolution) of the human retina at any particular viewing distance (the same principle which guided the design of Apple's "Retina Screens.")
Really, still pounding the "scale" thing, huh? Yea, and Leonardo wrote on the proper scale of buildings to streets...yada yada yada. And yet, I can spend a whole day in Manhattan and have the best time ever, really enjoy myself, but yet I'm surrounded by these high towers that are oppressing me, how can that be.
A few comments:
- the tower is not bad, but I agree with the "cold" comment. It would be better in the same warm material, brick in this case, as the existing buildings; it would seem like it belonged.
- towers do not just connote power, even in cases where they do so initially (just check out the screaming, frightened tourists on the Tower of Pisa or the Eiffel.) Towers originated as things of "power", more correctly surveillance 'cause you could see your enemy a long way away; but even castle towers can become loved (ask Walt Disney Corp.).
- architecture (or a building) is not just its official first program or use; if a building survives years or centuries, use (and therefore meaning to users and culture) will change many times (read yourself some Aldo Rossi). And this is a very important part of architecture which an architect can't necessarily "design" in, it's very often out of his control. Therefore, architecture is not just the craft of the materials, although it is that too; there is a whole world more to it than that.
- the "starchitect" term hurled as an insult is a lazy and tired cliche' and I wish it would disappear from this forum. Of course they're competing with other architects. A pizza guy sells his pizza 25 cents cheaper than the pizzeria down the street and puts out ads with a narrative that's pretty purple; doesn't mean it isn't good pizza. Obviously the narrative layered on by the designers doesn't mean shit: it IS a form of advertising. Well, then just look at the building and "critique" it on that basis, go see it even, walk inside it, and ignore the narrative.
Btw, not saying that this building will be around centuries, most likely it won't, but I just don't see the imposed "narrative" of oppression being sold here.
^ There is infinite variety in the design of towers.
For the most part starchitects do more to damage the profession than they do to improve it. The celebrity status granted by the Pritzker has been the kiss of death for more than a few as the branding / marketing requirements of a post-Pritzker commission far outweighs the design requirements.
Film is a good metaphor. You don't cast Adam Sandler, Sylvester Stallone or Nicholas Cage to make a great film, you cast them to sell a bad film in order to make money.
quondam, you're missing my point entirely.
And actually, I happen to agree with you that this is a "refreshingly non-mediocre building" in the sense that it genuinely is NOT mediocre. It's just bad.
But that is actually higher praise than judging it mediocre. It's a failure, and it's getting well-deserved negative reactions, but that is a measure of its aesthetic ambition. Mediocre buildings don't get strong reactions from people. Just indifference, which is much worse.
I often make this point with my students. In order to achieve greatness, you must risk failure. To get love, you must risk hatred. Most designers and builders loathe that risk and fear the possibility of the negative response, so they play it "safe" and generate only mediocrity and indifference.
So, I do judge this project by Nouvel harshly in the sense that it is a bad building, and I have no qualms about naming it so (with many good reasons for doing so). It risked and failed, and it's getting the negative response it earned. But that is still higher praise than the ultimate condemnation: indifferent mediocrity. It has risen above that, at least.
In order to achieve greatness, you must risk failure.
The world is littered with failed greatness, we really don't need any more of that. Even basic competence would be better.
Actually, quondrum, you haven't critiqued anything. You've posted a question, some pictures and opinions but nothing that remotely resembles disciplined, systematic analysis.
@Don Kashane re: "the tower is not bad, but I agree with the "cold" comment. It would be better in the same warm material, brick in this case, as the existing buildings; it would seem like it belonged".
Just to clarify the tower is made from blue brick, so do you mean "same warm material" as in literally same red brick/color?
Like Miles says. You haven't critiqued anything, quondam.
I'm surprised you haven't hooked up with Balkins yet, you two have a lot on common.
Nam, yes, that is what I meant, red brick like the lower buildings, although the more I look at the project I'm thinking that, since the ground paving is also red brick, the color of the new brick is fine as a contrast.
I've always liked the Rossi project quondam pointed out and other projects like his Modena Cemetery where he uses large conical elements. The size of this tower in relation to the lower buildings is only a bit larger than the same relationship in the Muggio project (at least from looking at the two drawings above). To my mind, if one is standing in that "piazza", the oval shape and sloping-in of this tower would certainly not make it that oppressive or out of scale (but that would definitely be better confirmed on site than in a photo).
The world is littered with failed greatness. It's also filled with successful mediocrity or just plain badness (and I'm not talking about just buildings).
the drawings are bad to begin with.....
I can only speak to the second hand evidence given, but the Rossi looks 2:1 and Nouvel looks 4:1.
Agree, would have to confirm on site, often one can not be certain.
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