12.24.2010

Where have all the children gone…


By JOSEPH EBERT

First Prize, Hungarian architects Tamás Lévai, Ágnes Jószai
The Maribor Art Gallery Competition shows that a young generation architects have lost their revolutionary momentum.  With all of their pretension and rebellion, the architects trained in the late nineties and the early ought’s are finding that their will to inject a venom of computational philosophy into the practice is drying up. Architects can’t help but be enthralled by the youthfulness that the young guns are bringing to the practice.    The entrants, whether of this adolescent generation, or of a more veteran generation, are products of drinking too much of the “[cool]-aid.”  The results can be viewed as a sort of collage of the Starchitects of the nineties, reconciled with architectural platitudes of a parametric age.  The Maribor Art Gallery Competition projects an unresponsive and diluted outlook for the future of architecture.  Truly, history rhymes rather than repeats.

The entrants of the competition tend to regurgitate the works of figures like Steven Holl, Zaha Hadid, SANAA, Rem Koolhaas, and R+U, figures not amongst the finalists, or gaining honorable mention. In a way, this is not a bad thing.  The work of these canonic designers is smart in its ability to address site, culture, and politics, and ineffably consistent at presenting the discipline with new authenticities.  Yet while these figures are the ones being copied and their styles fragmentally collaged, the younger generation is borrowing inadequately, misleading our culture into a belief that all of the talk about computational philosophy is finally reaching a material reality.  

The absurd tragedy lies in the reality that even the canonic figures are beginning to be affected by computational philosophies.  Whether it’s the interns they higher, who bring with them the ability to form any seemingly amorphous object, or the competitive need to keep up with the times, the overall work is falling to a certain ambiguity for the discipline of architecture.  This ambiguity could mark the beginning of a new epoch for the discipline, or position a mood of indifference from moving on, chasing an avant-garde in close proximity, but seemingly light-years away.  An ambiguity which is parallel to the general mood of the public which architecture tries to affect, a mood of anxiety fettered by the reality of a failing economy. 

Europe is trying to counter this mood of anxiety by seeking to enliven its image by bringing to the fore the variety of cultures that exist in the European Union.  One of the ways this is being done is by choosing a particular city, giving it the opportunity for a year to highlight all of its cultural dynamics, and allowing it to re-present its image in a European dimension and at the international level.  Maribor is the second largest city in Slovenia up until the mid-nineties, had trouble defining its autonomy.  Ergo, Maribor has received the position as the European Capital of Culture for 2012. 

The Maribor Gallery of Art is to be placed along the river Drava, situated within a monotonous field of white buildings with red-clay tiled roofs.  What the entrants have done is extract an architectural dialogue of culture that discusses the importance of the museum as a cultural stimulus.  “Museums, as we know, don’t simply reflect the identity of a city, they transform identities through the material life of architecture,” presenting the city and the architecture with the chance to respond to the changes of an ever evolving living culture.1 The project entries all attempt to step into this cultural fold, yet in doing so, the entries all dismiss the actual living culture and identity of Maribor.  The entries are too disjunctive to sustain an identity of consistency. 

The results force upon Maribor an alien identity, one that proposes something different from what exists.  Now, some may say this is a matter of modernity existing within the city, bringing contemporary ideas to a form of adolescence.  But there’s some flavor and truth to the cliché that parents have to let their children go, allowing them to make mistakes on their own.  However, what the entrants present is an ideal not familiar to Maribor, nor to consistency of new authenticities in architecture.  If the entrants want to make a mark for a city on the up, then they should revert back to their own experimental ages of adolescence, seeking to bring into focus all of the memories in which fun and play were catalysts for creating.

The winning entry is imaged in black and white, a repurposing of the coastal site different from the hues of white and red.  The architects: Tamás Lévai and Ágnes Jószai of nearby Hungary.  What this repurposing does is generate the fabric anew.  By doing this, the architects position their ideal notion about how the building will mesh into the rest of the urban fabric.  The black and white images ameliorate the hard, yet fluid geometrical lines of the project against a regiment of vernacular forms. This is what the architects want the public to think, but in real time, the existing vernacular colors will be too vivid for the alien object.  The banal form is a blurring of Steven Holl’s Nelson Atkins addition, Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, and Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam’s Knowlton School of Architecture.  These examples represent solid and coarse geometric forms; most of which discuss a fluid continuity, but emphasize the importance of individualized spaces. 

In plan, we can see almost a programmatic tracing of the design methods SANAA presents in their Glass Pavilion in Toledo.  Spaces become contained as individual and separate environments; again, the echo of Knowlton Hall, its wrapper containing within it multiple autonomous programmatic spaces.  The architecture is pristine and white, but too neutral even for contemporary art.  The architecture makes no attempt to acknowledge or be acknowledged.  It subtracts itself from the occupant and the artwork.  This conflict of separation doesn’t seem to be an issue for the presentation of art, but the pristine, banal blankness carries throughout the building and all of its individual spaces.  So where the art isn’t present, in the three restaurants, the library, and the children’s museum, the architecture becomes an amorphous alien of white ether; it cares very little for what exists within.  In architecture’s attempt at separation it fades into a white oblivion, leaving a void in the line of coastal vernacular.

Left: Stan Allen Entry;  Right: Neil Denari Entry
Two entrants that weren’t finalists, or honorable mentions, were Stan Allen and Neil Denari.  One represents the canon of the veteran, and the other a middle-aged designer fraught with the notion of being stuck between the elders of architecture and the adolescents; one wonders whether this identity of ambiguity is the position needed for making a synthesis, producing for the discipline a new stage for the avant-garde.  But in this conversation, the two ultimately fail to direct their ideology onto a culture that doesn’t want it.  Allen and Denari represent a dialogue outside of the competition, a dialogue about where the discipline is going.  Like the Lévai and Jószai project, the architecture works as an alien object, abject from synthesizing with an adolescent culture that just needs to play with children its own age.  Or rather, with children that just want to have fun, experiment and play.

The competition portrays an instance of architectural ambiguity and cultural anxiety.  The architects, for fear of hearing the ideologies of their discipline fall upon deaf ears, enter fight-or-flight mode as a way to counter the demise of architecture as shaper of culture.  The architects are making these designs to fit their need, rather than the need of the culture, and in doing so threaten to destroy the culture it so desperately wants to effect.  These architects have figuratively graduated from college, and don’t have a clue as to how to enter the real world.  What they should do is realize that the most prosperous way they ever existed was when they were children, when nothing mattered but understanding the world as it was and learning its nuanced beauty.  What we have now is a generation of architects that are numb, and with meaningless verve, unknowingly endeavor to use architecture as a means to destroy places, cultures, societies.

 
 
1 From Neil Denari’s competition entry.