Kazys thinks that the 21st century has been a stinker for architecture. Rem's getting pimped by the Chinese, Gehry jumped the shark in Bilbao, and H&deM are the architectural equivalent of a warm glass of milk (I'm paraphrasing of course). He's looking for just five examples of significant architecture from this century. Prove him wrong!
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I can name one off the top of my head - Scottish Parliament Building, Miralles
I'm sure many more will be "discovered" in the next few years... but I think the most significant architecture is happening with a new generation of architects - not the old heavy-hitters...
kwk Promes is doing interesting work, so is atelier bow wow
I'd tend to agree on Scottish Parliament.
However, I think it's premature to talk about the longevity of influence of buildings that are less than 8 years old. Give them some time to exist for awhile first before judging whether their impact is significant.
Sheesh, are our attention spans that short?
How do you know kwk Promes and atelier bow wow doing interesting work?
What is interesting? What is new? All that are iterations. Photogenic, but recursive. Kazys is right.
And only newness is interesting?
holl, Nelson-Atkins Museum
weiss | manfredi, SAM olympic sculpture park
RPBW w/ Fox & Fowle, New York Times HQ
zumthor, Kolumba
siza, Fundação Iberê Camargo
I don't think Siza's Camargo building is more interesting than most of his previous works, and definitely not among the best examples of "significant architecture of this century", but Zumthor on the other hand is doing significant things... I think precisely Kolumba would be a good example of what "significant architecture" will have to be about in the 21st century (at least in Europe): mixing the old with the new. It's time for architects to build less and study more what's already there to work on existing buildings.
However, I think it's premature to talk about the longevity of influence of buildings that are less than 8 years old. Give them some time to exist for awhile first before judging whether their impact is significant
in Barcelona there's the Dècada prize promoted by architect Òscar Tusquets. Every year they bring a starchitect (this 2008 was Kazuyo Sejima), they take him/her on an exhausting 24h tour by the city showing the best examples of buildings completed 10 years ago, and the starchitect has to chose which one has kept its original virtues the best and to value how it works today... Sejima chose a reform of an old market from 1888 as the best work.
will think about this more and maybe comment on kazys' thread. (which is getting to be a pretty interesting conversation!)
my first reaction is to say that it's too easy to make the challenge and then back away. of course we can't prove what will turn out to be significant and there will be 'yes but...' exceptions to most of what people propose. that's already happening, to some extent. 'oh that doesn't count because...' it's too easy to say no.
matching the beginning of this century up with the beginning of the last is happening over at kazys' site too - the sentimental pressure we like to put on the fin-de-siecle. sort of an arbitrary parallel, really. movements already started in the 1890s fed the activities of the 19-aughts and there is no reason that we should exclude 1990s work from consideration of impt work just because it happened before y2k. the flow of design thought isn't tied down to location or a specific timeline.
this is a pronouncement from a historian's perspective. architects are likely to get all riled up about it when, in essence, it's just an attempt to capriciously bookend ten years as somehow separate from what came before and what will come after. maybe valuable to a historian but not so much for architecture?
like i said, i'll have to think about it more. i think there have been some germinal projects that have set some things in motion. whether they will prove to have been after jan 2000, i'll have to verify.
Burj Dubai...its more than a supertall building, more like the strange rectangular obelisk that appears in Kubrick's 2001..
if rem, h&dm, and others were, in kazys' and others' opinions, making critical architecture in the 90s then it is maybe not so surprising that we're no longer so excited by their work. the projects now seem necessarily big and glitz-y and each new billion-dollar state/corporation-sponsored one needs to top the previous.
the cutting edge will be elsewhere. where i'm not sure myself but i think something about a more critical take on actual and long-term sustainability -- work that specifically wrestles with energy and carbon or diverse and effective housing for the masses perhaps -- is due.
personally i do think mvrdv still rocks the mainstream starchitecture world quite regularly.
quite a convenient pronouncement isn't it?
all examples can be dismissed because the argument is framed in author's personal opinion, and not based on fact. who knows what will be significant in a hundred years? in 1910 there was no one alive who knew with any certainty what was impt. lots of what seemed impt at time was not and much of what seemed trivial was in the end the thing upon which the world turned...
so, like whatever you know...let's have some critique beyond "...i just can't take CCTV seriously". ok, if you say so. now what? there is no where to go with that argument.
"some of the old and some of the new"...reminds me of the panel judging christopher wren's reworked 2nd design for st. paul's. he deliberately made a train-wreck of the design so that his original version (which the king supported) would have to be built (cuz time was up). But the frickin judges thought it was brilliant, mixing a bit of the old with a bit of the new. Wren's hard-wrought pile of crap pleased the clergy-judges in spite of his efforts to be third rate (he had to come up with a bit of amazing fraud to make sure the piece of shite he designed for them didn't get built).
anyway...point is what people think now is not what people will think in a hundred years...more importantly what we think doesn't matter. significance is about influence and that takes decades to fall out and has nothing to do with opinion.
i find Kazys interesting usually, but in this case wonder if maybe he is just jealous of the future...
why not kill the whole idea altogether and expect nothing from anybody?
move forward with survival and let new architecture come from the people, perhaps not great in the beginning but better later when the craft developes...
most residential architecture i have seen published, are for 5 acre trustfunders in the midsts of a lakeside, isolated and contemplating and roughing it in sub zero temperatures (refrigerators too) raging outside of their all doubleglass minimal interiors and conducting the inheritance proceedings from the new white i-machines etc.., networking for equally important poverty issues in the world for their social activity with celebrity clubs or org's, achieving nothing except praise from plebbes who want to be just like them when their turn comes for the bigger cash allowance! one poster gives an axamle above, kwk promes house; now now...
how many cuban families we can put in there? huh? or how many low wage workers one has to make money off to get a house built on ass taste? surely that house says nothing about that it could be a standard issue, someday. 7.5 billion people on this planet half in poverty and they are teaching architecture in school by people who design white glass houses with eames chairs ass wipes hidden.
leaders of the industry? fuck corbu too, he'd suck mussolini's dick.., the butt naked bad painter wanted to be...
21st century schizoid man... nothing he's got he really needs...
i am finally laughing... thanks kazys. and the rest of the posters.
there should be a building among a '00s top five that would exemplify the building-as-landscape type that has developed over the last few years. kazys has excepted the foa terminal - and it's sort of an infrastructural exception anyway. i'm thinking more of the type of work like snohetta's opera house and perrault's ewha women's uni in which the roof becomes an occupiable surface that is also integrated into the surrounding landscape. it's not exactly a new phenomena, but it's become so much more prevalent lately. anyone wanna name 'the' exemplar?
Steven Ward I think the example that defines it actually not from the 00s and is actually Zaha's Vitra Fire Station albeit subtle in comparison to FOA's Yokohama
Orhan, I love the angst
you know - i agree that this is ridiculous... I'll bet in 10-20 years we'll be naming off great buildings designed and built during the 00s by architects that very few people had heard of back then (of course all anointed by historians in a smoke-filled backroom somewhere).
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