Architects or Fashionistas?

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The New York Sun

From New York to Shanghai, from Capetown to Helsinki, architects are designing ever more bombastic, elastic, even chiliastic monuments to the art of architecture. Viewed from a certain angle, it certainly feels as if a new order of architectural ambition is upon us. But is it? That is the central question of a new book by Charles Jencks, “The Iconic Building” (Rizzoli, 224 pages, $35).


For several decades now, Mr. Jencks has loomed large in architectural circles as a relatively serious writer on the subject. He was polemical early on, opposing Modernism at a time when the International Style’s dominion seemed beyond question. But he went to the trouble of marshalling real facts and he demonstrated a clear mastery of the materials of architectural history.


By the mid-1980s, he became perhaps the most flamboyant ideologue of Postmodern Classicism, the kind that invoked history and classical columns in order to irritate the Modernists. His defense of this position was more spirited that persuasive, but at least it represented a coherent point of view.


Now, it is not clear what Mr. Jencks stands for. As long as a building has curves, irregular curves, Charles Jencks is happy and criticism is disarmed. I would like to know, by the way, what he thinks of all those architraves and acrotheria of 20 years past, but he declines to tell us in “The Iconic Building.” Instead, except for a brief discussion of Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, he changes the subject. It seems quite apparent that fashion has moved on, and so has he.


Indeed, Mr. Jencks never answers his own question. Instead he gives us brief, episodic sketches of such usual suspects as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, and Santiago Calatrava. To show you he has actually met them, he pads his text with excerpts from interviews that, somewhat sadly, are more illuminating than the text itself.


Is the iconic building indeed something new under the sun? There have always been important buildings in the world, buildings meant to impress, to signify, to advertise. Yet quite aside from its post-industrial vocabulary and engineering, a building like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao does appear to represent a change in the very role that such structures play in our lives.


Mr. Jencks correctly discerns the origin of the iconic building in works like Le Corbusier’s Chapel at Ronchamp, Wright’s Guggenheim, and Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House. But why not include the Seagram Building and Lever House, which confront each other on Park Avenue? We sense a difference – and there is one – but what is it?


I believe the essence of the iconic building has less to do with architecture than with architects. In the five instances mentioned above, the building was meant to convey some parcel of meaning; the neo-primitivism of Ronchamp exuded spirituality, Lever House a sense of corporate dignity and order. And in all of these buildings, attention was drawn to the architectural act itself.


The difference was that International Stylists like Mies van der Rohe aspired to be the priestly intercession between New Yorkers and the eternal verities of geometric form. By contrast, in the case of Wright’s and Mr. Gehry’s Guggenheims, not to mention the other structures included in Mr. Jencks’s book, it is the identity of the architects, represented by the individual aberrations of the building’s curves, that is the source of frantic interest.


Very well then, if Lord Foster’s Swiss Re Building, “The Gherkin” in the City of London, is an iconic structure, why can’t the same be said for his curving Great Court in the British Museum, a far finer piece of work? Why does that not feel like an iconic building?


The answer here, I believe, is that, despite its excellence, the Great Court feels like and is an act of order and respect for the status quo, just like the Seagram Building, Lever House, and Rafael Pelli’s newly completely Bloomberg Headquarters on Lexington and 59th. By contrast, Ms. Hadid’s new Rosenthal Center in Cincinnati and Mr. Koolhaas’s new Seattle Public Library are “edgy,” as in cutting-edge.


Therein lies the secret of the iconic building: It represents the migration to architecture of the values and the yearnings of the worlds of art and fashion. In art and fashion, you find that need for newness in itself, that hunger for exuberant self-expression, often taking the form of hand-me-down irony and stale, forced subversiveness.


In the iconic building, for the first time, all of these vague strivings come together in architectural terms. The building aspires to and achieves the status of an art object, like a painting or a sculpture – which is as far as you can get from Le Corbusier’s pre-Ronchamp “machine for living” aesthetic that was so essential to the evolution of the International Style. Corporate headquarters were once content to garner prestige by placing some item of contemporary art in their lobby; now the entire building must attain that status as well.


In New York, where our developers have so little yearning for self-expression and where the force of gravity weighs down more heavily than anywhere else in the world, there have been relatively few iconic buildings actually built. Indeed, what is David Childs’s recent revision of Daniel Libeskind’s Freedom Tower if not the transformation of an iconic building, with all the obstreperous, artsy individuality that implies, into a business-as-usual New York skyscraper with a few well-chosen grace notes?


But things are starting to change here. Mr. Calatrava’s proposed residential tower at 80 South Street and Enrique Norten’s proposed Performing Arts Library in Brooklyn are proof that New Yorkers are beginning to yearn for something more than the architectural pabulum they have been served so consistently over the years. What, if anything, will come of such yearnings remains to be seen.


The New York Sun

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