Anybody who enjoys the funny things that architecture critics say about the funny buildings they like ought to visit ArchNewsNow.com, a free Web site run by its founder, Kristen Richards. It collects a daily diet of news and opinion (in English) about architecture from around the world.
The other day I read an April 14 attack by Jonathan Glancey, critic for London’s Guardian, on Roger Scruton, one of Britain’s leading philosophers, who had denounced “starchitects” in an April 12 London Times essay entitled “A landscape of litter: this is not civilisation.
Scruton criticized celebrity architects who “design structures that will reliably call attention to themselves, and stand out from their surroundings.” He listed the usual suspects — Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, etc. — and said that “they have equipped themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledegook with which to explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive it.”
In his piece, Glancey essentially tells Scruton to button it up. “The point,” Glancey writes, with a nod to the philosopher Wittgenstein, “is that certain ideas, such as aesthetics, cannot be adequately put into words and are best expressed through demonstration, which is what architects do.” (Tell it to ArchNewsNow!)
Indeed, the world would be far better off if modernist buildings did rely on their intrinsic expression rather than their erstwhile defenders. They would be rejected by society at large. Instead, they are protected by a bodyguard of nonsense that, as Scruton points out, “flatters” those who pay money (albeit rarely their own money) for such architecture “into believing that they are spending it on some original and world-changing masterpiece.”
Scruton points out that people react to such “masterpieces” by naming them for everyday things they most resemble. He cites London’s dildo-like Gherkin and the Shard, which needs no further description except that when done it will be London’s tallest building by far.
Scrolling farther along in ArchNewsNow, I stumbled on a piece, also from the Guardian, summarized tartly by Richards as “Jones takes on London’s Shard: ‘Why don’t we rise up against this monstrosity? Someone has to speak up for the London skyline.’ ” But Jonathan Jones was arguing that the Shard wasn’t as good as the Gherkin. Sure threw me for a loop.
Another tease followed: In Arrtfino, Benjamin Genocchio criticizes Fernando Romero’s new art museum in Mexico City as “baldly derivative.” I figured a piece called “Money Can’t Buy Taste” would castigate some new classical building that I might like. But no, he accuses the architect of “taking open inspiration” from Gehry and Frank Lloyd Wright. For shame!
ArchNewsNow is a roller-coaster. You may not be sure you’re on your way up or down, but there’s no denying it’s a heckuva ride.
To conclude: In his attack on Scruton, Glancey instructs him that “architecture is a continuum.” But modern architecture has never been a continuum. It interrupted architecture that had continuumed, so to speak, for millennia until modernism came along. It is no surprise that Glancey failed to quote the central philosophical passage of Scruton’s essay:
“There have been architects who are geniuses — Michelangelo, Palladio, Frank Lloyd Wright. But a city is not the work of geniuses. It is the work of humble craftsmen and also the byproduct of its own continuing conversation with itself. A city is a constantly evolving fabric, patched and repaired for our changing uses, in which order emerges by an ‘invisible hand’ from the desire of people to get on with their neighbors. That is what produces a city such as Venice or Paris, where even the great monuments — St. Mark’s, Notre Dame, the Place Vendôme . . . — soothe the eye and radiate a sense of belonging. In the past, geniuses did their best to harmonise with street, sky and public space — like Bernini at St. Peter’s Square — or to create a vocabulary, as Palladio did, that could become the lingua franca of a city in which all could be at home.”
How true! Genius in classical architecture strives to do the same old things better than they’ve ever been done before. That’s how cities used to grow. But for half a century, genius in modern architecture has striven to do completely new things better than they have ever been done before. How hard can that be?
Talent is not extinct today. It lurks in the low, dishonest standards that litter our cities with a lazy creativity, so full of itself. The banality of starchitecture, stung by Roger Scruton, is on display daily at ArchNewsNow.