Thankfully, the vagina stadium controversy appears to have faded from the news cycle already. [...]
It all also reminded me of how architecture is so routinely pilloried, and with such imaginative comparisons, delicious takedowns, and clever labels. The nicknames come from comedians and critics, rivals and urban legend. [...]
Mockery, of course, is nothing new. It’s just been on a steady incline throughout the 20th century.
— theatlanticcities.com
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Derision, ridicule and sarcasm. If someone has never seen, or imagined, such architecture the response will always be negative. Living and thinking 'in the box' turns anything different into 'weird' . How many times have you heard someone tell you that about your architecture, or anything different? I hear it all the time. Even a bevel or a bull-nose detail can get awkward silence. A curve? Shall we dare?
Nevertheless in this piece the comedians do a service to the designers. The name calling is a recognition of the power of architectural image, whether vagina stadium or gherkin. The Eiffel Tower was once thought a monstrosity.
Actually, the term "hate on," per the thread title, is rather newfangled. When did it come into vogue? It used to simply be "hate" (a person, an object, a trait, etc.)
Nicknames for buildings are newfangled creations when a significant building is fairly new. They could be endearing (corn cobs for Marina City-Chicago or jello mold for the no longer Kingdome-Seattle, as in being reminded of something worth eating) to neutral (the electric razor for the high-rise with the rounded top in Denver) to derisive (a vagina for this stadium and a penis for Seattle Municipal Tower, since being called a d**k or a c**t is rarely a good thing).
The other thing is trying to determine the time of conception of a building's nickname. It could have come from someone who is far removed from architecture, meaning the person on the street. We've talked to a cabbies or hot dog vendors who, when giving directions, indicate landmarks with their crusty regional accents as in "You know, that building there that looks like a .... " Architects and those in the design professions tend to be more colorful and metaphoric when coming up with the labels. Either way, labeling a building by any name other than its official name or address (1 Battery Park Plaza, if such a building exists) is up for grabs, for the architect or animal trainer alike.
The Eiffel Tower is a monstrosity. Paris needs to dismantle it already.
I like the Eiffel Tower. I think its curvature and proportions are great, as is the view. It's Centre Pompidou I have a problem with. If I recall, that came about when "bowelistic architecture" was an acceptable vernacular. If you did something like that in a school design studio today, your prof would step on your model. He or she should.
'Bowelism' was a decade before, coined re an Archigram projects, and short lived. You might be confusing the exterior escalators with plastic intestines. Easy mistake if you have to go bad, but at that point everything looks like a toilet.
This is what happens when buildings no longer reflect a nameable archetype. When people can no longer look at a house and say, "that looks like a house", or a stadium and say, "that looks like a stadium", they will make other connections. It's human nature, and it's not necessarily meant to be derisive... although sometimes it clearly is. When people call that giant supository in London "The Gherkin", it's not a term of endearment, for the most part.
My favorite of the comments on the posted article:
"Don't like ugly nicknames? Don't build ugly buildings."
:)
Define ugly as it pertains to architecture.
Define ugly as it pertains to architecture.
Most people don't like it.
giving a building a nickname based on a semblance is not automatically tantamount to hating on it.
also, its wrong to think that architecture would not fall prey to a wider visually referential culture. to go back a bit to Zaha's defense:
I feel that Zaha's defense -given that she feels she needs to speak in defence of the project- counters the claim that it looks like a vagina by somewhat suggesting that that claim further suggests that the building had been designed to look like a vagina (she is confusing the design intent she had in mind and needs to continually refer to as an architect with the outcome that cannot be controlled in its reading). yet of course no one claimed (seriously) that she had designed a vagina. So she should just accept that the building must now stand on its own (and suffer the consequences) and that the author of the building, the architect, is dead. The building looks like a vagina - this is indisputable. And no, not everything that has a hole looks like a vagina...the shape around the hole is suggestive of one. thats all. its a stupid boring obvious resemblance that dies as soon as its made - does not mean its a good or a bad building. she could have dismissed our fixation with the (justifiable) resemblance as being silly (and she would have been right). But to dismiss the observation itself as silly..is a bit silly.
and anyway, pop imagination tends to be more risqué and irreverent than classical culture.
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
"The building looks like a vagina - this is indisputable."
I have seen enough Rorschach's to know it's me NOT the design. or designer.
Funny story. I had a job guarding one of Ray Kappe's under construction residences, a big one, down-slope, with cylindrical stairwells screwing down, one to each level, then go the the next stairwell etc,. All ended up at the triangular jaquzi spraying water like a fountain.
An architecture writer from Italy, looking at the wood stair cylinders, with slit openings at the tops just went berserk ''His architect is obsessed with sex! " she says. "The phallus symbolism is everywhere, plunging and thrusting. The pool and the spraying fountain are all orgasms. The man is sick!'
What journalistic know-how I thought. I was there two weeks babysitting the place and never saw it. Even Ray Kappe never knew. Such insight.
The Kappe's had a good laugh. Never knew Ray was so sex-obsessed.
but it does look like one.
you might not notice it...but once someone notices it and relays his or her information to you, you'll see exactly what s/he means and you can't possibly dispute it (and you haven't). this is why its such 'hot news' that it looks like a vagina because everyone can see the resemblance - either after noticing it for themselves i didn't) or hearing/reading others say so.
you're confusing 'looking like one' with 'knowing that it looks like one'.
It's sexism. Why is it "bad" if something looks like a vagina? We have a problem in this country with our attitudes towards women.
again, similitude is a dumb (that is, non-connotative and non-denotative) thing, and it perpetuates in a open non-hierarchical relationship.
a ball looks like a melon that look like an orange that looks like an ostrich egg that looks like the moon that looks like a circular pool of water, that looks like a circular middle ages shield that looks like a pearl that looks like an eye that looks like bead that looks like an orange that looks like a ball
the vagina looks like this project just a much as this project looks like a vagina. it also looks like an eye socket, like a clam...
the issue is that the pop imagination is more taken aback by the stadium-to-vagina resemblance because the vagina constitutes a more powerful and -obviously,however one seeks to be independent- irreverent trope than does an eye socket. thus the hierarchy is not a result of resemblance per se but of the disposition within the space of the imagination. the space warps around the great sun that is the vagina and so we are more likely to orbit around it than enter other force fields.
so, more generally, with respect to the article, the reason that some architecture start looking like certain things is that they firstly formally mimic (consciously or not-the intention is irrelevant) aspects of powerful pre-existing semantic cores in the imagination and thus they fall into orbit around them. secondly, such an architecture almost removes any ambiguity of form, any paradoxical aberration, any complexity and contradiction in form- the structure is sculpted down to the singularity of purpose/form that makes it appear the indexical product of the abstract mold equally associated to the primary object -the vagina in ZHA project.
so, in other words, the issue is platonic. except all of us are not speaking of the mold (and no, i dont mean fungus) - because the pop imagination always tends to anthropomorphize, to relate worldly things to other worldly things.
hence the difference between a classical (derivative, procedural) imagination and a pop (associative) imagination.
therefore twice removed from a vagina? (Vagina - Sex Toy- Stadium)
i just googled "vagina sex toy" and looking at the images, many of them actually have 'interpreted' the vagina form away from the vagina - for instance by alluding to lips (mouth lips that is). others replicate exactly the vagina form, without abstraction.
i'm not sure but i suspect that the parent of this might be neither the vagina nor the mock/make-believe vagina but the platonic ideal of vagina. the form is suave and sleek, the lines of muscles have been idealized as in an anatomy drawing...there is nothing vaguely sexual about it. an indexical imprint of the abstraction of a vagina....maybe.
here is The Great Wall of Vagina by Jamie McCartney, 400 casts of vulvas (the below is obviously just a sample). The direct imprint of the vagina indeed is too variegated, too specific and too divergent from the abstract mold to be a mold itself. twice removed.
i looked around for vagina sculptures and came across this by Shalinee Kumari
its unsettlingly cosy looking.
and no one bothered to note that Lord of the Ring was also dominated throughout by the specter of a vagina
It's sexism. We have a problem in this country with our attitudes towards women.
We might have a problem in this country with our attitudes towards women who kick start their vibrators.
We do not have a problem in this country with our attitudes towards women who are feminine.
American men try to act all progressive and shit, but traditional gender roles are still very much the norm. Most won't admit that.
As for the stadium, I'm sure it doesn't look like a vagina upon approaching it at street level and photographed from such a vantage point. However, even from an aerial shot, the sides of the opening are too bulbous to make for a convincing vagina. I'm sticking to symmetrical breast implant sacs that were being tossed around by medical school residents at 2 a.m. ... the same way a-students went nuts in architectural design studio right at about that same hour.
its unsettlingly cosy looking
That would make for a great hanging retro-styled chair.
Who knows what cheeky games Zaha was playing, but it certainly looks interesting. As observant mentioned though, the fact that this building will almost never be experienced from the bird's eye view used to market it shows this publicity is not entirely unwelcome. Jamie McCartney's work is also interesting. I wonder what her concept was...
"As observant mentioned though, the fact that this building will almost never be experienced from the bird's eye view used to market"
on the contrary, more people in the world are more likely to experience it from 'bird's view' /aerial view by virtue of skycams, spidercams, helicopter views during the sporting events and whatnot...and so they will remember the stadium mostly from aerial viewpoints rather than from side views or internal views.
that's a good point tammuz. The same could be said for a lot of buildings I suppose. Even the ice frosted Capitol building in DC is recognized from the air. I still think the public realm ie. feet on the ground should be given more consideration.
The idea of floating a blimp into the stadium comes to mind. Then again just a few skilled parachutists followed by a fireworks display would make for a great climatic opening event.
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