Edwin Heathcote walks us through some of his thoughts on the future of architecture, in the Financial Times.
"The structures that change the world take such a long time to get built that by the time they are complete the architects are usually on to the next big thing, enthused more by what is on their drawing boards than by what has just been completed. This means that the excitement, the hype, thebuzz almost always surrounds the future rather than the present, the avant-garde frantically searches for the next big thing while the commercial practices (which actually shape most of our cities) are busily latching on to the last big thing. The last big thing was the icon, the post-Bilbao Guggenheim signature building, usually arts-related, designed by a world-renowned architect to put a city on the map. Most cities remain pathetically in thrall to the last big thing, the architectural one-liner, a decidedly bad thing for architecture and urbanism.
The next big thing may well be architecture integrated with landscape, the building that seems to have an almost gravitational effect on its surroundings, pulling the ground up around it or subsumed in subterranea. This is a neat way of avoiding the building as icon, and integrating architecture with site and city: several British firms lead the way, as witness Foreign Office's magical Yokohama Terminal in Japan and Zaha Hadid's powerful Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany.
The cosmic shifts in architecture will still not be visible by the end of 2006 but the statistic that China is currently using 40 per cent of the world's concrete should give an idea of where the shift might take us. Chinese cities are growing exponentially, pushing to become international destinations, while there are 300 skyscrapers under construction in Beijing alone. Mostly it is generic commercial tat, but the 2008 Olympics will be China's shop window. From the bird's-nest complexity of Herzog and de Meuron's brilliant new stadium to the deliberate inelegance and structural bravado of Rem Koolhaas's CCTV building, a paradoxical möbius-wraparound sky- scraper, Beijing will be where it's at for years to come - for better or worse.
Dubai is branding itself the world's architectural theme-park: next season's tallest building (SOM's actually pretty good Burj Dubai) is on site along with much large mediocrity. London's fate will be decided by a series of skyscrapers that will exert enormous impact if executed yet add very little architecturally, while New York will continue to flap around the increasingly tedious Ground Zero proposals. Perhaps it will be airports that will provide relief, with Lord Rogers' Barrajas extension in Madrid opening and Lord Foster's astonishing Beijing International, the biggest in the world, gearing up. Perhaps airports in themselves will become destinations, the new public squares that Paul Virilio astutely predicted in the 1960s."
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