End of the Bilbao Decade

[kennedy]

From Today's Globe:

Marking the end of 'The Bilbao Decade'
Times dictate a shift away from vanity projects

Have we reached the climax and termination of a whole era in architecture? An era you might dub "The Bilbao Decade"?

I'll explain about Bilbao later. But first two news items. Between them, they bracket the present moment.

"The downturn is spreading. It's getting worse. It hasn't hit bottom yet," says Kermit Baker, the American Institute of Architects' chief economist. Another journal suggests that for American architects "there may be nothing to do but wait and pray."

The AIA maintains an index of prosperity for architects. That index has now fallen to historic lows in every category - commercial, residential, industrial, institutional, whatever. Projects of all kinds are being halted and put aside, for nobody knows how long. Architects are told by their clients to stop working until further notice.

Usually institutional work - especially hospitals and universities - holds up best in a recession, which can be good news for New England architects. But that sector too has hit an all-time low.

OK, the American news is too gray and depressing. Let's focus on an item from the other side of the world.

In the emirate of Dubai, over there on the Arab peninsula, the sun is still shining. In fact, it's shining so brightly that the Palazzo Versace, a hotel due to open next year, plans to offer its guests a beach of artificially cooled sand.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, reports that pipes filled with coolant will be installed beneath the beach to prevent it from stinging anyone's toes. "We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool," says the hotel's president.

Huge fans, too, will maintain a gentle breeze on the beachgoers. These will be wind machines, but instead of generating energy, like windmills or wind farms, they'll be expending it. Not only that: The new Versace plans also to refrigerate the water in its enormous acre-and-a-half swimming pool.

Why would anyone want to visit such an unnatural beach? Why not just stay in your air-conditioned hotel suite with a sun lamp? I have no idea. Perhaps part of the attraction for a tourist is the sheer pleasure of knowing that you have the power to waste the earth's resources.

The Dubai tale goes on and on. Just one more detail: Thirty thousand mature trees are being shipped to the emirate to landscape a new golf course. In Dubai's climate they will, of course, be artificially irrigated.

Severe architectural recession on the one hand, grotesque architectural luxury on the other. The two stories are the yin and yang of this moment in time. They mark the end, perhaps, of what we'll call the Bilbao Decade. It's been a boom, a clearly defined epoch in the history of architecture.
By Bilbao I mean, of course, the Guggenheim Museum in that Spanish city, designed by American architect Frank Gehry, which opened in 1997. With its billowing curves of shiny titanium and its powerfully massive sculptural presence, it was instantly perceived as a masterpiece. Tourists flocked to it. This one building put the city of Bilbao on the cultural map of the world.

Suddenly architecture was in. Every city, it seemed, wanted to be like Bilbao, wanted its own daring, avant-garde iconic building. Usually that building was an art museum or a skyscraper. Every few months, someone announced plans for the new tallest building in the world. (The current candidate is Burj Dubai, still under construction, which when complete will be approximately twice the height of the Empire State Building.)

Buildings took on crazy forms, largely because the computer made it possible for structural engineers to figure out how to make almost any shape stand up. Students at schools of architecture, influenced by the work of Gehry and others, played with their new computer programs to invent amazing shapes. Every work of architecture, it seemed, sought to be an original icon. A few leading international architects became, for the first time ever, media celebrities.

Architecture critics were not immune. Some of them, during this decade, perceived architecture as an elite activity, an art form of spectacle created by maybe 20 major architects around the world for an audience of a few thousand aficionados. There wasn't a lot of attention to everyday building types like schools and housing.

All that fever now feels passe. Architecture students, I'm told, are more interested in so-called "green architecture," work that responds to the global crisis of climate and resources, than they are in artistic shape-making. They're interested in urbanism, in the ways buildings gather to shape streets and neighborhoods and public spaces. They research new materials and methods of construction. Increasingly, they're collaborating with students in other fields, instead of hoping to produce a private ego trip.

As others have pointed out, there's an upside to recessions. They give people time to step back from the frantic pace of a boom economy and think hard about what it is they want to do. In a time of limited resources, architects and their clients will focus again on solving the practical problems of making an environment that is, in every sense of today's overused word, sustainable.

Some day, the tourist vogue will fade in Dubai. The emirate will cease to be the latest toy for the jet-setter. There will be a big empty pool and a forgotten beach. A moment of selfish insanity will have passed.

The Bilbao Decade produced some wonderful buildings, but it was a time when the social purposes of architecture were sometimes lost. Architecture is supposed to be about making places for human habitation - rooms, streets, parks, cities - not merely skyline icons or beachfront palaces.

Just as one feels a page turning with the arrival of a new American president, so a page is turning, once again, in the history of architecture.

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/01/11/marking_the_end_of_the_bilbao_decade/?page=2

 

[kennedy]

This portion stood out to me the most, as is was relevant to myself (future architecture student) and the board (more about urbanism than architecture, recently):

Buildings took on crazy forms, largely because the computer made it possible for structural engineers to figure out how to make almost any shape stand up. Students at schools of architecture, influenced by the work of Gehry and others, played with their new computer programs to invent amazing shapes. Every work of architecture, it seemed, sought to be an original icon. A few leading international architects became, for the first time ever, media celebrities.

Architecture critics were not immune. Some of them, during this decade, perceived architecture as an elite activity, an art form of spectacle created by maybe 20 major architects around the world for an audience of a few thousand aficionados. There wasn't a lot of attention to everyday building types like schools and housing.

All that fever now feels passe. Architecture students, I'm told, are more interested in so-called "green architecture," work that responds to the global crisis of climate and resources, than they are in artistic shape-making. They're interested in urbanism, in the ways buildings gather to shape streets and neighborhoods and public spaces. They research new materials and methods of construction. Increasingly, they're collaborating with students in other fields, instead of hoping to produce a private ego trip.

What is the future of architecture? Will we see the end of starchitecture? Can an building be artistically iconic, contribute to urbanism, and be sustainable? Those architects who are able to create structures that satisfy all of these needs will be the starchitects of the next movement in architecture, not in style, but in theory.

In the early days of America, architects were revered because they alone has the talent, work-ethic, and vision to create the buildings and cities of our new nation. In ancient times, Plato even postulated that an architect is the closest a man can be to God, as he is the only one who can take an idea and create a physical edifice, while a carpenter was twice removed as he could only build. Yet as time progressed, and our nation developed (in the 1900s), it seemed that architects lost this reverence, and the divide between starchitects and regular architects grew. As the Wrights, Sterns, and Gehrys built monoliths to their ego, opulent buildings that were a pure expression of art, the regular architects were complacent to trot along designing unoriginal suburban homes, or prefabricated apartment buildings. They became little more than carpenters who drew on paper rather than build with wood, just following the existing style. As the gap between rich and poor grew smaller in society, in architecture, the gap between starchitect and architect grew larger. It would seem that this culminated in the "Bilbao Decade," and Dubai formed as the Mecca of this era, a physical representation of everything starchitecture stood for.

There is a very strong parallel to what we are experiencing now, and what happened in the Great Depression. War is being fought, the economy is in serious turmoil, the environment is suffering, people are moving to cities, and there is a wide gap between poor and rich in society, or talented and untalented in architecture. This period of societal strife will act as a catalyst for a new generation of architects, and bring back the reverence architects once enjoyed. Architects will be relied upon not only their ability to create structures, but on their creative genius not only in form, but in function as well. Form or function does not exist anymore, and any who chooses to follow one school of thought will undoubtedly fail. The question is, how can a building maximize both the form, and the function? Those architects who can successfully design an brilliantly artistic and symbolic structure that also considers urbanism and sustainability, will be the most successful in the future. The status-quo of architecture will not be acceptable any longer, and architects will be those who are looked to as those able to shape our buildings, our cities, and our world, and define our future. Architecture will no longer be something anyone can do, as it will require added layers of thought to design anything worth building in the future, and as our world changes, so must our architects.

 

[czsz]

Boom turns to bust for adventurous architecture in Spain as slump bites

? Tumbling real estate prices hit prestige projects
? Barcelona's glory fades as city of pioneering designs



Giles Tremlett Madrid

Spain's long-running love affair with cutting-edge architecture has come to a dramatic end as high-profile projects from the world's greatest architects fall foul of recession and a countrywide building bust.

Last week builders walked away from one of the country's most glamorous architect-driven developments, the Richard Rogers transformation of Barcelona's Las Arenas bullring. With bills unpaid and developers unsure what to do with the 19th century bullring, Lord Rogers' project turning it into a leisure and shopping centre faces an uncertain future.

The half-built shell of Las Arenas now serves as a symbol of Spain's fall from the pedestal of international architectural glory. In Barcelona, the city that kickstarted Spain's embrace of big name architecture two decades ago, a growing number of projects are grinding to a halt. Norman Foster's colourful, ?250m (?230m) remodelling of Europe's biggest football stadium, the Camp Nou of Barcelona football club, is among those delayed indefinitely.

Work by Frank Gehry on an audacious 34-story office block and a development of 10 tower blocks by Jean Nouvel have also been put off as the city struggles with a construction crash and tumbling real estate prices.

"There is neither the financing nor the confidence to go on,'' said the local La Vanguardia newspaper as it mourned the future loss of Barcelona's reputation as a contemporary architecture showcase.

"There are other priorities,'' said Barcelona mayor Jordi Herreu when asked why some projects were not going ahead.

The slowdown is not confined to Barcelona. London-based architect Alejandro Zaera Polo recently walked away from a building at Madrid's new Campus of Justice ? which is also set to boast buildings by Rogers, Foster and Zaha Hadid ? complaining the budget was too low.

In Valencia, a new stadium for the city's football club also stands half-built as the owners admit they have no way of paying for it to be finished.

The collapse of such high-profile projects follows two decades of frenetic building that turned Spain into a playground for the world's star architects.

Financing for many schemes, however, depended on land sales or the construction of office blocks and residential buildings that would help fund them.

A Spanish housing bubble burst last year, bringing construction to a grinding halt. Up to 2m recently finished homes have yet to be sold and the value of building land has been wiped out in some places.

Some estimates suggest the excess stock of newly-built homes will not be sold off until 2012. House prices are predicted to fall by up to 30%.

With Spanish developers queueing up to file for bankruptcy, few can now afford big-name architects. Metrovacesa, which owns the Las Arenas site, was recently taken over by a group of banks after it failed to pay debts and is sacking its staff.

Barcelona led a fashion among Spanish cities for turning to the great names of contemporary architecture to transform urban centres with huge ‑ and often costly ‑ emblematic buildings.

Its buildings for the 1992 Olympic Games set the trend, bringing in architects like Foster, Gehry and Arata Isozaki.

Gehry's transformation of the northern city of Bilbao through a single building, the titanium-clad Guggenheim museum, marked the spread of the Barcelona model to the rest of Spain.

Cities of all sizes vied to bring in the big name. Many winners of the prestigious Pritzker prize ‑ dubbed the architects' Nobel ‑ found themselves busy on Spanish projects.

Madrid's Campus of Justice, with its collection of designs by Pritzker-winning architects, is another project that is slowing down.

"The campus is no longer a top priority and resources must go elsewhere," admitted Alfons Cuenca, deputy head of the Madrid regional government's justice department. "That does not mean it isn't going ahead, but that the work will slow down.''

Architects admit the writing is on the wall but hope Spain will recover a taste for signature buildings when the recession ends.

"You cannot pick up a newspaper without reading about the financial crisis,'' said a source close to Gehry's practice, commenting on his Barcelona office block. "We've waited many years to do this project, and we will keep waiting."

"We are unable to comment on how the Las Arenas project will proceed following the recent change of ownership,'' said Lennart Grut, a senior director at Rogers' architectural partnership. "However, we continue to maintain our site presence.''

Meanwhile the fenced-off shell of Las Arenas will provide a depressing reminder to visitors that the boom days of Spanish architecture are over.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/16/spain-architecture-design-recession

 

[Lurker]

Keep in mind that architectural styles always change during economic turmoil. If one traces all the years when a major boom or bust started there is a direct link to the rise and fall of styles.