Even More on CelebritURBanism

...and on "starchitecture" in general...

An interview with Rem Koolhaas of OMA in der Spiegel presents the other side of celebritURBanism, which is best summed up with this quote from Mr. Koolhaas:

I have a very hard time with the expression "star architect." It gives the impression of referring to people with no heart, egomaniacs who are constantly doing their thing, completely divorced from any context. I believe that this is a grotesque insult to members of a profession who -- to the extent that I know my colleagues -- go to great lengths to find the right thing, the appropriate thing, for each individual case. At the same time we are, of course, driven by the market -- and by developers who try to pin us down to certain forms. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the best way for us to escape this being pinned down to the purely formal. That's why I decided to simply demonstrate it: There is, in fact, no great difference between the buildings by "star architects" and those designed by others.

And I think that is a pretty valid statement. Some people believe in the trickle down theory of design. I have heard it described by Peter Eisenman pretty well. Basically, there are people in the profession who have achieved a privileged* status, for one reason or another, and are able to produce canonical works of architecture that influence the discipline at large. These works are canonical for any number of reasons: they can be typologically innovative, they break new aesthetic ground, etc. Koolhaas, later in the interview, explains it as "This, in turn, is what makes up the credibility of European architecture in an age of globalization: That we are able to execute our formulas in a less formulaic way than others, and that we can pay closer attention to the circumstances under which other people live." Which is a very profound thought and something all urbanists should heed.

This 'canonical' work (for lack of a better word, although the idea of a canon is way too loaded) then influences other designers and they produce similar work, and it trickles it's way down from the trend setters and taste makers through all levels of the profession. Or we can think of it a different way: that as a profession we are preoccupied with the same thoughts and obsessions, we are all grappling with the similar architectural and urban issues, and are therefore coming up with similar results for the most part.

In Beijing there is a supercharged version of this phenomenon. It is commonly joked that the copy precedes the original here--driving along the ring roads you come across many buildings that are clearly influenced by CCTV, TVCC, the Bird's Nest, LAB's SOHO complex, and others, that were all fast-tracked and finished before the original buildings. This is a by-product of China's lightening fast development, the rapid change in tastes on the part of the public, the flexibility and alertness of the developers abilities to read fluctuating trends, and the slow inertia of western architects, all of which point to the need for new forms of architectural practice.

Koolhaas also discusses another subject near and dear to our hearts, sustainability. He offers an additional critique of the ubiquity of the sustainable movement: it's lack of real thoughtfulness and innovation and the danger of it becoming mere window dressing. Another form of slick corporate branding and advertising. Koolhaas states:

..Another one is the now universal demand for everything to be "sustainable." We have been interested in this idea since the 1960s, so in that respect we feel vindicated. But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament. Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill...Because it's become an empty formula, and because, for that reason, it's getting harder and harder to think about ecology without becoming ironic.

*Although this idea of privilege can imply many things, I just mean that they some how exist outside the normal modes of architectural practice and are not as restricted by time, budget, and other constraints as typical practitioners.

More on CelebritURBanism

Usual Suspects: Hadid, Libeskend, Koolhaas, and Chipperfield's proposals for new cities across the globe.

Via Archinect we come across this article from the Wall Street Journal Called "Designer Cities: The Development of the SuperStar Urban Plan"

From the article:

Name-brand master plans are "an entrepreneurial tool" that are key to getting these large projects built, says Reinier de Graaf, an OMA partner working with Mr. Koolhaas on the Riga and Waterfront City projects. Urban planning is now "a very weird mixture of marketing and urbanism," he says.

Mr. Chipperfield agrees. "It's easier to know about architects than architecture," he says. "A banker won't know about architecture but will know that 'Zaha Hadid' or 'Rem Koolhaas' is a brand."

...

"We are seeing an emergence of a new industry," says Dennis Frenchman, director of the city design and development program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's urban-studies department. "It's not real-estate development; it's not architecture; it's not city planning. All I can do is name it 'the city-building industry.' "

And a name-brand architect can make the product sellable. "It's just like teapots," he says. (emphasis mine)

"Just like teapots?" I shriek in my tiny little brain. "What is this world coming to?"

CelebritURBanism

Collection of projects from Next Gene 20

"NextGene 20" is the latest in a recent rash of celebrity architect developments, joining the ranks of "Ordos 100" in Mongolia, "Jinhua Park" in China, and the "Houses at Sagaponac" in New York. Each of these developments, excluding Jinhua Park, which is a sculpture park in a second-tier Chinese city where international architects were invited to design seventeen pavilions for public use, capitalize on spectacular design by name-brand architects as a marketing strategy for their high-end luxury subdivision. Next-Gene 20 seems to have taken this strategy to a totally different level. Particularly this video, prepared by noted animators Squint Opera, which gives the whole affair a certain Oceans 11-esque flair:

Team NEXT-GENE20 from iMage on Vimeo.

And architects, always willing and able to do a bit of marketing, branding, and self-promotion, are happy to oblige themselves to this campaign as well. For them, it is a win-win situations: They are offered tabula rasa type settings (particularly in Ordos--it literally is a desert), exorbitant budgets, and no nagging clients (at least, it seems as much, judging from their designs). In return, the architects offer their design skills and their advanced sense of aesthetics. More importantly, they offer their superior wit and finely honed skills of repartee to come up with names for their projects that are sure to have the designs selling in no time. Names such as“Elf on the Hilltop”, “Monsoon village”, “Latent dragon”, “In phrase of stratus”, “Twilight”, and the perennial favorite: “Shell under copious rain.” I can't get enough of that one folks, let me tell you!

Next-Gene 20 also seems to be a cut above the rest of these types of developments in terms of the ambitions for environmental integration, i.e., the architectures relationship to the landscape. It says, right there at the beginning of the video: Architecture in harmony with the landscape. If that is not enough to convince you just listen to these quotes from the Gene group's finely soundtracked website:

Building dreams on a vast ground:
Acquire the mansion of your dreams…Not only putting design into architect, also bringing light, water, wind, and nature into the atmosphere…so people can integrate with nature, and buildings can interflow with the earth. Let there be a presence of soul in nature, let there be a presence of world in the architecture, like a futuristic city atop a tranquil ocean surface.

Now, I don't mean to sound cynical about such developments because they offer excellent opportunities for the fields of architecture and urbanism. Fertile ground for exploration, innovation, and experimentation, with ample budget to do it. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity for many of these architects, and since many of them are young or have built relatively little, it is a portfolio building opportunity as well. And these architects seem to be heeding the call. As one commentator put it, with this showcase you can "talk about every architectural cliche from the last ten years on display. Certainly formal exuberance, innovative building systems, and exotic materials all seem to be on display in the designs.

Fig. 2: Masterplans of Ordos 100 and Houses at Sagaponac

My only problem is that there is never enough urban experimentation (see fig. 2, or read Lebbeus Woods' critique), or truly innovative processes on display. This is no "futuristic city atop a tranquil ocean surface." No way buddy, not even close!! Because we all know that would look a little more like this. I wish that one of these days a developer would come along and attempt the kind of thing that only this type of project would allow designers to experiment with. What if, with one fell swoop, both of these demands were met through what I like to call "radical collaboration." Two options present themselves as viable for this scenario.

SITE's Highrise of Homes

Option 1: Let one of the architects be the master planner. Allow her to create a radical framework for the project--a matrix, as Lebbeus Woods would call it. Something that none of the architects could avoid, something they all have to contend with, such as SITE's "Highrise of Homes" concept, or Archigram's Plug-In City. The designers have to design an object that plugs into said matrix, which could act much like a shelf that showcases the designs as precious objects. It could be an updated version of the Megastructure as defined by Reyner Banham. Or, in SITE's own words, it could be in an urban setting and become a "vertical community" to "accommodate people's conflicting desires to enjoy the cultural advantages of an urban center, without sacrificing the private home identity and garden space associated with suburbia."

-OR-

Next Gene 20 reconceived as siamese twin monstrosity

Option 2: Force the designers to collaborate together to create a megaproject. It could be done in a way that allows them to maintain their individual signature but forces them to respond to each of the other's projects. Maybe it is set up like that game where everybody sits in a circle and one person starts by whispering a sentence into the ear of the person sitting next to them and that person passes it on the next and that person passes it on to the ne-....ok, you get the point. One architect starts by designing an unfinished object. The next architect comes along, uses the first architects project as DNA for his project, but transforms, and so on. Each one could choose a particular theme before hand, but is forced to reconcile the previous architects theme with his own. The best results would probably come from connecting two designers who would make unlike bedfellows--the original odd couples.

What kind of monstrosity would this produce? What type of hyper-object would result? I don't know, but it'd be a super cool thing to witness--like some bizarre version of architectural Frankenstein-ism. Better yet, let's catch the whole thing on celluloid! "The World's Next Top Architect", or "So You think You Can Design." How great would it be to watch Kengo Kuma react when he has to connect to JDS' Twirl House? How could anything marry itself to the Latent Dragon? It sounds like the making of a good mockumentary.