I would be really careful grouping that first group together as formalists. Lynn is different than Ghery who's different than Koolhaus, and no one likes eisenman and libeskind

If you read how Lynn talks about architecture, there is nothing sculptural about it. It is in fact suppose to be super contextual in its formation. A new way to think about architecture where these forces actin upon an object and how that object responds. Foster's GLA might be a bad example, but its shape comes from digital analysis of wind, sun, etc.

Ghery's practice is in fact the most revolutionary out there, although his buildings are not. Making physical models, 3d scanning them, using software developed by shipping and aerospace companies, and working with manufacturers to produce highly irregular architecture. I think Bilbao was the watershed moment into mass customization, returning the architect to the level of the master builder.

Really blob or formal architecture is trying to detach itself from thinking in cartesian space. Maybe?

I think the distinction you discuss above is only important to people who care about what Lynn/Gehry/Hadid/Calatrava/Libeskind/Eisenman are doing.

I appreciate the distinctions between their processes, and I understand that many posters here want to chastise me for "grouping" them together. But in some sense that's the equivalent of a music snob berating me because I lump Fugazi and the Sex Pistols together. "One is American Hardcore, one is British Punk!" Yes, and on the continuum of music, they're also pretty close.

Whatever processes they use, I believe these architects' results are all similar: buildings that are primarily about form at a grand scale, without an argument about users, social space, program (or rather, these arguments happen by accident and as a byproduct of formmaking.)

I get that Hadid came from a kind of constructivist perspective; that Lynn uses algorithms; that Eisenman engages with continental philosophy; that Libeskind has lost his way; and that Calatrava looks at fish bones. Fine. They all use a different generative device to achieve big gestural forms.

This is fine. I admire a lot of it. Hadid, especially, makes some beautiful things, and I've learned from her. But is there any critique in their work beyond a formal/structural one? Is there anything transformative in their work beyond the formal? Will we live differently as a result of these architects?

Or just ohh and ahh over pretty new forms? (That's ok, too, but should pretty forms be the foundation for a critical architectural practice? Shouldn't we be addressing deeper issues than that?)

To me, it comes down to experience - the experience of the space. Sure, I seduced by beautiful form (from here we can eliminate Lynn), but it is the spatial complexity, juxtaposition, and surprise that truly engages me.
This is what I love about form - there are so many unique opportunities that arise from formal experimentation.

That said, this form should be about how a person experiences the space and it must meet the requirements of a building.


I'd highly recommend visiting some of the buildings of those architects, walking through the spaces and making a conclusion about the experience, not just the postcard image.

once work is produced in an office with employees, or built, or was commisioned by a client, etc., don't those conditions inherently make that work not strictly about formalism? by referring to lynn, gehry, eisenman, hadid, and libeskind's work to be merely empty constructions of sculpture and about nothing else is a narrow sighted, isn't it?.

plus, those criterions you've listed do not even guarantee good architecture. how many times have you seen two similar buildings with similar materials, both of high quality construction, similar use and programs, etc, but one is crap and the other is great.

?

It may be the Viognier talkng, but I think that the form of a building - its materials, connections, details, junctions, textural qualities and the spaces contained within - is the only quantitative and qualitative point of judgement.

Everything else is debatable and will never be resolved - but we will always out of logical and metaphysical necessity have form.

fays.panda:

i'd be willing to bet that zumthor's studio did go through a plethora of studies for the facade. zumthor never reveals that stuff, though.

order is not synonymous with form; it is, rather, the structuring matrix for form. different orders may also persist within the same architecture: the linear disclosure of “promenade", the expansive amnesiac recurrence through the "modulor" (the uniform grid module unit, although replicating its neighbour, in its nature, never registers/serialize its neighbour’s existence) and the blot-locale of the "painterly” … even , perhaps as a historicist device to don more respectability to the composition, the golden ratio. le corbusier would bring those orders into a tense composition.

yes, pliant, but also quite a tortuous pliancy that has to work with, paradoxically, a restrictive intellectual rigour; this pliancy that would stretch out and into structures but would never totally gulp down the total structure.

beyond the idiot's-guide knowledge of citing 5 corbusian points and the brute sensuality that came thereafter, i have had difficulty in appreciating le corbusier's work because of this paradoxical composition of orders. why would someone want to let isotropic uniformity be spatially expanded by the column/slab system yet also bring in a ramp/passage to fictively reconstruct the space around it and still have the sobriety for an assemblage of elements that participates in the contemporary compositional art culture of his time? this is architecture that is not paranoid about geometric and numerical consistency, this is architecture that is performative (multi-performative in fact, architecture on both sides of the proscenium) prior to the vogue of the performative. then, i could appreciate a modernist father like mies more; he somehow clung less to the world than did le corbusier. even his, mies’, self advertising was less (i use metamechanic's word) "visceral", more likely to dissipate into a disembodied virtual powder puff.

dr. frankenstein was the archetype of a composer: a composer is someone who’s awareness of death and endings renders his mind into a patchwork of corporeal seams. their ambition to exceed the restriction of the antagonism between now and then is in the criss-cross pattern of their stitches, always the obvious evidence of a mind seeking to bridge between one moment and the moment after.

This debate scares me in the sense that instead of trying to expand the architectural oeuvre, it appears instead intent on reducing it to essentials which to me seems dangerous. The fact that laymen don't understand the difference between Fugazi or the Sex Pistols (which is a pretty obvious difference) doesn't make their unique histories, the way they came to being and realization any less rich and engaging if one chooses to understand it. The beauty of this field is its complication. As architects we should embrace and celebrate it and not try to reduce it into palatable camps. It is possible for buildings to work on both cerebral and pedestrian (no pun here) levels. Celebrate their intricacies and show you have the capacity to entertain possibly opposing concepts in your heads, we'll all be the better for it.

I brought this thread up not as a way of limiting architectural discourse, but in the hopes of expanding it. The most advertised architects of our day—the ones who gain the most public acclaim—are the ones I mention above. And primarily because they make beautiful object-buildings. I don't deny that.

My hope, as an appreciator of architects who deal with a wider range of issues, is to expand the horizon of the debate.