Technique and art, architecture is also a built expression of society. As a technique bordering on engineering, it has experienced the impact of new materials and innovation in construction, structures, and installations, facing the historical challenge of sustainability; as public art, it has participated—and sometimes been a protagonist—in the renewal of visual language and the aesthetic shifts of an era marked by spectacle; finally, as constructed sociology, it has shaped the colossal transformation that has urbanized the planet, replacing traditional landscapes with sleepless megacities.
The classical treatises that have informed Western architecture already alluded to these three complementary dimensions when theorizing about a discipline that overlaps so much with other related fields. Since the Roman philosopher Vitruvius, architecture has been assigned the task of reconciling technique and art with the social use of its spaces, and the motto firmitas, utilitas, venustas (strength, utility, beauty) has been the shorthand summary of that purpose. However, the three facets are so intricately interwoven in concrete architectural works that it is difficult to discuss them separately, and a different argumentative strategy has been chosen here.
Instead of describing the functional and formal technical innovations that characterize the architecture of the early 21st century, the exhibition focuses on a dozen episodes in different cities around the world. These provide both a sequence of significant achievements from the last two decades and an illustration of more general trends or phenomena. Presented in roughly chronological order—from post-Wall Berlin, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and 9/11 New York to Olympic Beijing and the colossal projects of the Gulf oil autocracies and Russia—the episodes are also organized to resemble a journey with stopovers around the globe.
Always towards the sunset, and always in the Northern Hemisphere—which leaves many regions on the margins—the route begins in Europe, which closed the 20th century and the Cold War with the demolition of an urban frontier. It passes through America, which saw the fall of the Twin Towers as the starting gun for a "war on terror," traverses Asia, which raises energetic built symbols of its economic strength, and culminates in a Russia straddling continents, asserting—also through architecture—its recovery after the trauma of the USSR's dissolution. After ten stages, the circle closes with another political ice age, which adds to the economic cooling and the financial and social upheavals, in a cluster of fractures and tremors that architecture registers with its precise seismograph needle.
Berlin without a wall: The architecture of memory in the face of ideological struggles
The journey begins in the city where architecture most faithfully reflects ideas. Capital of a totalitarian empire defeated in 1945, and for four decades a border between Western democracy and the communist bloc, post-Wall Berlin has remained an urban laboratory where architecture is subjected to the demanding filter of ideology and memory. This is evident in the Jewish Museum by Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, a collection of fractured and unstable volumes added to a Baroque building; in the new Reichstag by British architect Norman Foster, a critical restoration that transforms the character of a mythical building; and in the Holocaust Memorial by New Yorker Peter Eisenman, a warped expanse of concrete slabs that transforms the monument into an urban landscape.
The zigzagging shape of the Jewish Museum alluded to the dramatic shifts in German history and the tragic interruption of the Jewish presence in the city, but it also held singular architectural significance. With the 1985 IBA—an exhibition whose objects were buildings constructed at a 1:1 scale in different parts of the city—Berlin had been the main stage for the postmodern movement, which advocated a return to classical architecture in opposition to the abstractions of modernism. With Libeskind's project, unveiled around the time of the fall of the Wall, Berlin would construct an icon of deconstruction, a rival trend—launched with an exhibition at MoMA in New York during the summer of 1988—that championed fractured and catastrophic architecture as an expression of a world in turmoil.
For upheavals, certainly, there were those caused by the two world wars that had their epicenter in Berlin, leaving the ruins of the old parliament building as a silent witness to the collapse of democracy and the Wagnerian downfall of German expansionism. When, after Gorbachev's capitulation to Reagan and Thatcher, the end of the Cold War allowed for German reunification and the return of the capital to Berlin, Foster rehabilitated the old Reichstag as the new Parliament of a nation determined to prevent the return of the ghosts of an ominous past. To this end, he crowned the Wilhelmine structure with a glass dome enlivened by helical ramps, serving as an urban viewpoint and symbolically placing the citizenry above their political representatives, overseeing their assembly to prevent further historical derailments.
Near this regenerated Reichstag—which even the artist Christo exorcised by covering it with tarpaulins before beginning construction—Eisenman built a colossal and lyrical memorial to the Jewish extermination with a grid of concrete prisms that is simultaneously an undulating landscape of cultivated fields and a labyrinth of disquiet among precise graves. Initially conceived with the sculptor Richard Serra, the memorial—so different in its stark abstraction from most of the Holocaust museums that have sprung up in recent times—is a penitential gesture at the heart of the horror, and at the same time an effective example of architecture's capacity to express ideas through form.
Rotterdam or Basel: New landscapes and old cities in an undecided Europe
After the exhaustion of the postmodern style—which did indeed have Berlin as its choral stage and was intellectually promoted from Milan and New York—the architectural debate did not shift to the Paris of Mitterrand's grand presidential projects, with its combination of geometric monumentality and celebrity glamour, nor to Blair's London, which celebrated the millennium with a third way: architectural, technological, and cool. Instead, it fell to two medium-sized European cities: Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Basel in Switzerland. In the former, numerous young architects, inspired by the abrasive talent of Rem Koolhaas, and among whom those grouped under the acronym MVRDV stand out, exacerbated the modern language with accents of the Russian constructivist utopias of the 1920s and extended it to the urban landscape; In the second, a new generation of Swiss Germans, where the creative energy of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron immediately stood out —with the permanent rural and essentialist counterpoint of Peter Zumthor— created a bastion of constructive excellence, artistic rigor and sensitivity towards the material heritage of ancestral territories.
Dutch hypermodernity fed on the tabula rasa of a war-torn city on the artificial territory of a polder country, but also on Koolhaas's futuristic fascination with the metropolitan congestion of a New York that was for years his adopted city, object of study and intellectual laboratory, the latter in the roundabouts of the IAUS (Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies) directed by Peter Eisenman. Combining Le Corbusier's formal grammar with Russian diagonal audacity and American pragmatism, the Netherlands gave rise to an optimistic and playful school that did not hesitate to flirt with the twists and turns of Anglo-Saxon deconstructivism—fueled in no small measure by the extreme flexibility offered by new computer representation systems—but which found its best manifestation in an artificial landscaping that surrealistically penetrates buildings with the topography of the surroundings, to create a "free section" that puts a twist on the "free plan" of the historical avant-gardes.
In contrast, the Swiss-Germans developed a “zero degree” of architecture, through exquisitely constructed, elemental prisms deeply rooted in the traditions and territory of the Alpine country, but also influenced by the rigorous teaching of Aldo Rossi, who was Herzog de Meuron’s professor at ETH Zurich. Defiantly archaic, and at the same time closely linked to the art scene—initially through Joseph Beuys, and later through numerous collaborators from the art world—the two Basel partners established themselves as leaders of their generation with a sequence of ornate boxes of great material and tactile refinement, and with a series of interventions in industrial buildings—most notably their conversion of a power station into the new home of London’s Tate Gallery—that demonstrated the enduring relevance of an architecture of continuity.
Faced with a prosperous and politically fatigued Europe, undecided between the modern messianism of building the contemporary city ex novo and the link —cultural and emotional— with its heterogeneous urban heritage, the Dutch and Swiss supplied opposing architectural and urban models, establishing a fertile disciplinary dialogue between Rotterdam and Basel that would eventually lead to a cautious convergence between the two schools.
Bilbao and the Guggenheim: The spectacle of the museum as an urban engine
In 1997, the opening of the Bilbao branch of the Guggenheim Museum—an undulating sculptural accumulation of titanium sheets designed by Californian Frank Gehry—was a media event that altered the course of architecture and museums. Certainly, the New York institution already boasted an original building of great singularity and architectural beauty—the famous spiral ramp erected by Frank Lloyd Wright on Fifth Avenue—and its emblematic building by the Bilbao estuary had such significant and iconic precedents as the Sydney Opera House, where the Dane Jørn Utzon built concrete sails that became a symbol of Australia, or—in the realm of museums—the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where the Italian Renzo Piano and the Briton Richard Rogers interpreted the countercultural spirit of the youth of the 1968 protests with their joyful, colorful, and technological futurism.
The Guggenheim Bilbao went a step further, subordinating art entirely to the spectacle of architecture, transforming it into a colossal sculpture, delicately matte in its reflections and turbulent in its suspended, stormy movement. A critical and popular success, the museum attracted numerous visitors to a stark city of obsolete industry, previously isolated from artistic and tourist circuits. It became a powerful engine of urban regeneration and demonstrated the capacity of cultural infrastructure to contribute to the transition to a service economy. What in Spain was called the "Guggenheim effect" and abroad the "Bilbao effect" spread like wildfire, and every mayor of a declining city sought to acquire an emblematic building that would attract tourists and investors, boost self-esteem, and serve as a logo for a makeover.
This use of architecture for identity modernization and urban rebranding—which came to affect metropolises of the size and character of London or Rome—accentuated the disciplinary drift towards sculptural differentiation, since each new cultural or sports venue had to be unmistakable and surprising: museums certainly, but also libraries, auditoriums or stadiums had to reconcile their own functions with their symbolic role, and even buildings as demanding in their organization as stations or airports—in Bilbao itself, the metro stations were made by Norman Foster, and the airport by Santiago Calatrava—were put at the service of urban identity, on a path already traveled by large corporations that promote unique skyscrapers as a brand image in the coral profile of the city.
Guy Debord theorized "the society of the spectacle" in 1967, but four decades later his insights remain entirely relevant. The absorption of architecture by the world of entertainment has a bittersweet flavor: on the one hand, it grants greater visibility to the works, making them the subject of social debate in the media, as has been seen in recent projects by such demanding and secretive masters as Álvaro Siza or Rafael Moneo; on the other hand, it transforms architects into celebrities of glamour and fashion. If Gehry designs jewelry for Tiffany's and Koolhaas or Herzog de Meuron design Prada stores, the Anglo-Iraqi Zaha Hadid erects a warped, portable pavilion for Chanel, and all of them frequently appear in luxury consumer advertising as supreme representatives of aesthetic discernment and avant-garde elegance.
New York after 9/11: The future of the skyscraper and the future of the empire
The fourth leg of our round-the-world journey leaves Europe, where the end of the Cold War and the hedonistic enjoyment of the peace dividend had stirred so many expectations, and crosses the Atlantic, stopping in New York, the scene of a colossal attack that resulted in a tragic massacre and altered the course of contemporary history. The suicide group of young Islamic militants, led by architect and urban planner Mohamed Atta, brought down two towers in Manhattan designed by the Japanese-American Minoru Yamasaki. These towers symbolized the city's financial power and the United States' global leadership, and their atrocious act triggered an unprecedented geopolitical crisis, while also calling into question the future of the skyscraper, the building that best represents the architectural challenges of the 20th century.
Indeed, the destruction of the Twin Towers redrew the boundaries of conflict across the planet, and the already extinct rivalry between capitalism and communism was replaced by the confrontation between the West and Islamic fundamentalism; at the same time, the prestige of the superpower erratically led by George W. Bush suffered a devastating blow—exacerbated by the errors of the subsequent "wars on terror" in Afghanistan and Iraq—, its economy experienced the burden of military spending and financial excess, and the metropolis of New York saw a wound open that has not yet healed: the intellectual, aesthetic and administrative fiasco of the architectural competitions convened to regenerate the ominous void of Ground Zero is one more sign of a loss of momentum that makes one fear an impending decline.
However, the predicted decline of the skyscraper—which, in addition to its complexity and cost, now also suffers from extreme vulnerability—has been far from materializing, and towers have continued to rise everywhere. With revised safety standards and inevitable budget increases, the major public and private power players have continued to build skyscrapers to demonstrate their strength through height. Although many corporations have turned their attention to office parks, and although towers beyond 200 meters have little economic justification, the struggle for global or regional records continues to fuel competition between cities and countries, capturing media attention and sparking public curiosity.
New York City, which suffered the devastating blow of September 11, refuses to relinquish its reputation as "the city of skyscrapers," and perseveres in the construction and planning of new towers, often linked to its enduring cultural and artistic leadership, such as the headquarters of the Hearst and New York Times media groups (designed, respectively, by Norman Foster and Renzo Piano), the small stack of the New Museum (a work by the Japanese architects Sejima and Nishizawa), or the residential skyscraper planned by the Frenchman Jean Nouvel next to MoMA: this sector—that of luxury housing designed by great architects—which, while it has flourished in Manhattan, has given rise in Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper and a city whose architectural mythology unites Sullivan and Wright with Mies van der Rohe, to a spectacular high-rise project by Santiago Calatrava, the same Spanish architect who, with his cathedral-like subway station, is building the only relevant work in the troubled New York Ground Zero.
Las Vegas as a paradigm: The urbanism of leisure and the thematization of the world
America gave birth to skyscrapers, which take urban density to its most hyperbolic extreme; but it also legitimized a more dispersed urbanism, which, aided by the automobile, spreads the city across the land like a thin carpet of houses and gardens. This unanimous suburbanization, which squanders space and time by wasting materials, water, energy, and land—not to mention transportation infrastructure—and which has been exported with great success to the rest of the world, relegates collective control to large commercial agglomerations that often present themselves in the guise of traditional urbanity, figuratively interpreted with the same scenographic resources—admired by Warhol's pop sensibility in the art world, and by Venturi and Scott-Brown in the field of architecture—as Disney theme parks or Las Vegas casinos.
This Nevada city, which is also experiencing the fastest growth in the United States, serves as a fitting paradigm of postmodern urbanization, whose trends it exacerbates to the extreme, and provides an effective metaphor for the contemporary rise of "casino capitalism," as glittering, noisy, and massive as the gaming rooms that seamlessly extend the lobbies of the endless hotels serving the mirage of leisure in this neon metropolis. The Egyptian or Venetian theming of Las Vegas establishments—like the Wild West towns or Snow White castles in the countless Disneylands scattered around the world—reverberates like a stubborn echo in every mall in America and the world, and consumer urbanism clumsily mimics the traces of a vanished urbanity.
The centrality of commerce in these new ways of occupying territory—admirably analyzed by Koolhaas in his description of junkspace, the contemporary "garbage space"—is undisputed, and the morphology of the shopping center—including large retail areas and food courts—infiltrates the remaining infrastructures of transport, leisure, sports, culture, health or work that, with their activity nodes, articulate the indiscriminate extension of residential construction: airports and stations, amusement parks, stadiums, museums and even hospitals or campuses of teaching, research and business suffer the invasive penetration of the mall, which with its shops and restaurants already complements the long-standing role of the mall in the areas of relationship and encounter in the thematic suburbanization of the world.
Even the compact cities of the European tradition, expanded with anonymous and indistinct low-density peripheries, are reshaping their historic centers as spaces for leisure and tourism, vast open-air shopping malls where boutiques, fashion stores, bars, and terraces are combined with the occasional palace, church, or museum. Thus, cities like the Barcelona of Bohigas and Miralles, which was presented in the 1992 Olympic Games as an exemplary model of urban transformation, attentive both to "sanitizing the city center" and "monumentalizing the periphery," find that contemporary trends have created a civic environment at the service of occasional visitors, far removed from the modern, avant-garde, and even utopian foundations of the initial project.
Source:/https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/.
