Recent events have played into the hands of those who believe that architecture has lost its way and become - in some cases fatally - too fancy for its own good. Last week's report on the collapse in May of the Paul Andreu-designed terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris, which killed four people, came amid the sudden critical scrutiny of and public scandals over Andreu's opera house under construction in Beijing.
There were the problems with Santiago Calatrava's roof for the Olympic Stadium in Athens. The Whitney Museum in New York dismissed Rem Koolhaas's plans for its extended galleries on the grounds that they were too bold and expensive. And in the squabble over Ground Zero, the only thing the competing designers seem to agree on is the need to build a Freedom Tower vastly taller than most New Yorkers would feel safe living and working in.
These setbacks and controversies have allowed sober-minded skeptics to accuse the profession of abandoning its original purpose - holding up a roof and keeping out the weather - in favor of reckless and phantasmagorical aesthetic effects, best exemplified by the wavy titanium surfaces of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim or the angled walls of Koolhaas' new Central Library in Seattle.
Thus the fate of Andreu's "prestige" airport terminal seems a most old-fashioned and (for some) grimly satisfying morality tale: how pretension can win out over common sense; how those who look at the stars can end up falling in the ditch. The skeptics are certainly right in one regard: The last decade has witnessed a sharp rise in the number of buildings whose design seems motivated not primarily by any functional goal but by a desire to enhance the status of the cities or countries that have commissioned them.
But to imply that this strays from architecture's historical goals is to deny history. More than 150 years ago in "The Stones of Venice," John Ruskin remarked that architecture had two missions: to provide shelter on the one hand, to glorify on the other. And it's this second task that the new libraries, museums, airports and town halls appear to have taken up with gusto. These buildings have helped to flatter and idealize their often hitherto neglected environments. Their appearance speaks to us of modernity and intelligence, of elegance and luxury.
Yet because we live in a practical and literal age, we are liable to be suspicious of the grand claims of new buildings. They should instead reflect and accommodate reality: Buildings should speak of people as they really are, rather than as they hope to be.
But this is a fairly recent idea. Rather, the new high-status buildings have tradition on their side. Architects have long thought themselves to be in the business of glorification - think of how one's eyes are directed skyward in the Pantheon in Rome, of the soaring spires and stained glass of Gothic cathedrals. This tradition endured through, and even profited by, the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Contrary to popular supposition, the architects who built in a grand, idealizing fashion were not naïve about human nature. They knew that most of those who used their buildings would not be as kind or good as the architecture implied. Rather, the buildings embodied an aspiration; they were intended as a goad to virtue. They were a kind of propaganda.
It's common to make a severe distinction between art (good) and propaganda (very bad). Whereas art doesn't try to sell us anything or inspire us to perform any particular activities, propaganda is given over to whipping us up to admire tyrants or exhorting us to produce more for the motherland. But it might be worth redrawing our feelings on the subject by remembering that, in the literal sense, the word propaganda refers only to the promotion of a set of beliefs.
That many beliefs have historically been associated with political ideologies or commercial preferences of the more unpleasant kind is more an accident of history. All an object must do to count as propaganda is to use its technical resources to direct us toward something - to enhance our sensitivity and readiness to respond favorably toward any idea, vision of life, person, belief and so on.
Defined in this way, a lot more things suddenly seem as if they deserve to be seen as propaganda, including a museum or an airport. Calling a building a piece of propaganda makes us see that every consciously created object is trying to tell us something. Furthermore, it shows that there may be nothing particularly wrong with an attempt to direct our behavior and spirit, so long as the direction is a valuable one.
To defend many works of recent architecture, one could therefore argue that they are rather nobly trying to change the way we perceive certain places and cities and forms of travel. They are attempting to present a glorified image of Bilbao or Athens - an image that places the stress on all the most attractive sides of these places.
Even if we don't always approve of their appearance, we should at least be sympathetic to the ambitions behind their constructions. They represent attempts to lend dignity to their surroundings, and that - assuming the ceiling doesn't cave in - may be one of the most serious and traditional functions of architecture.
Alain de Botton is the author of "The Consolations of Philosophy" and, most recently, "Status Anxiety."
2 Comments
also seen here
hmm, this article i think is worth discussing because it shows how disconnected thoughts can be placed together in one written piece to form an argument. he is not the first to be 'connecting the random dots' in this manor.
very mediocre architecture such as the kansas city hyatt can fail to. how soon we forget.
then takes ruskins word of 150 years ago 'to glorify on the other' and reinterpretes it as modern day politcal extremist agenda or propaganda.
if a building is considered art, its ok, go for it? but not so called 'propaganda buildings'-stop them right now!! next think youll see that they will be called 'liberal'.
projects such as the KC hyatt, which clearly has the intent of 'glorify', have as much polictical impact on our lives as any other. some just work harder to understand it better before they pick up a pencil.
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