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Revealing Trends in Architectural Culture

It also makes you think about where we are, and where we're going. Looking back over the year 2001, and ahead to 2002, a couple of trends seem to stand out. One is the ever-growing globalization of design, otherwise known as the star system.

In my own city of Boston, for example, there were no fewer than eight winners of the Pritzker Prize actively designing buildings in 2001. Only two of these eight were Americans. The others came from Austria, Japan, Spain, Italy, Britain, and the Netherlands.

Why were these architects asked to come so far, sometimes halfway around the world, to work in my city? Because they are all international stars, of course. Why are they stars? Well, the first stars were, of course, the movie stars, which gives us the clue.

Stars are a product of media publicity. And in a world in which the media are powerful, the stars become global. If you're a rock star in England today, you're automatically a rock star in Bangladesh and Singapore and Rio. It's the same with architects.

Why a Star System?

The more important question is this: Why do clients hire these stars, when there are, usually, perfectly good architects closer to home? There are, I think, two reasons.

One, the media hype leads clients to believe that the stars are really better, more creative, more competent. And sometimes, no doubt, they are.

Two, the client often believes that labeling the building with the "brand name" of an architectural star will assure its success. Maybe the "signature" name will help with fundraising, maybe it will draw crowds to the finished building.

Universities and art museums are especially susceptible to these two incentives. The model for them all is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by superstar Frank Gehry. Bilbao was an international sensation and drew visitors from all over the world. It did so, at least, in its first years. The roar of the crowd has now somewhat faded. The novelty is gone.

Bilbao is now a large museum without a collection of its own, sited in a medium-sized and rarely visited city. It is doubtful that all those enthusiastic overseas visitors — of whom I was one — will ever pay a second visit to Bilbao.

Yet the initial success of Bilbao spurs other cities to emulation. Of a proposed museum in Denver, by star Daniel Libeskind, the New York Times writes: "Politicians and civic leaders have begun excitedly predicting that [the museum] will focus attention on Denver much as Gehry's Guggenheim Museum has done for Bilbao, Spain."

Well, maybe it will, maybe not. It sometimes seems the same twenty or thirty international stars are now being asked to design every important building in the world. Are clients buying quality, or designer labels? The stars can't do their best work if they're doing too much. Often, they don't have time to get to know the places they're designing for.

The star system is a worrisome trend. It recalls the warning of the late Norwegian historian Christian Norberg-Schulz: "The institutions are becoming monuments to the architect who designed them, rather than expressions of common agreements and values."

Looking Closer to Home

As always happens with a trend, there's a counter-trend, working against the star system and against the globalization of which it is part. It's like politics. Just at the moment when nations are relaxing their nationalism and gathering into larger units (for example, the economic community of Western Europe), nationalism elsewhere is becoming more intense.

In the case of Russia, Yugoslavia, Scotland, Quebec, it either splits former federations into smaller parts, or threatens to do so. Big is beautiful and small is beautiful at the same time.

In architecture, the same thing happens. Just as everything seems to be in the hands of those global stars, there's a revival of interest in something more local. It's at its best in the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. This is a program that awards prizes every three years to distinguished new works of architecture in the Muslim world.

The idea is to encourage architecture that isn't an imitation of star-studded, Western-dominated global culture, a culture that is threatening to engulf the whole world. But at the same time, the Aga Khan program also discourages reactionary Disneyish stage-set copies of the Muslim architecture of the past.

It seeks instead to honor buildings that respond to whatever is genuine in the geography, the culture, the climate, and the building traditions of their locations. The Aga Khan, who is the spiritual leader of many millions of Muslims around the world, was present at the awards ceremony, held this year in Aleppo, Syria. His program is the wisest thing going.

A Role for Styles

What about architectural style? That's a topic one can only guess about. But it does seem safe to predict that we'll continue to live in a culture of many competing styles and philosophies. There will never again be a single dominant style in any given place, like the Gothic of the European Middle Ages, or the high modernism of the West in the middle 20th century.

We live in a world that is too aware of too many options for that. In the United States, we've recently seen a revival of classic Modernism, especially in architecture schools. The revival resulted, in 2001, in an enormous two-museum show in New York of the work of modernist Mies van der Rohe.

But at the same time, other architects — member of the New Urbanist movement — are creating communities where both the planning and the architecture are a deliberate imitation of the American small town of the past.

And still other architects are experimenting with never-before-seen shapes. Architects known as Blobmeisters create buildings that look like enormous lopsided candy apples (for instance, Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project in Seattle).

Architects known as Deconstructionists create buildings that look like tragic train wrecks (for instance, Daniel Libeskind's proposed addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London).

Both blobs and wrecks are the result of a new tool, the computer. The computer makes it possible both to draw, and later to build, such irregular structures. Will they be good places to live, work, visit? Will they gather to shape good streets, squares, parks?

Time will tell. What we can be pretty sure of is that in a world as self-aware as ours now is, no style, once established, will ever completely disappear. Even a revival of the Post-Modernism of the 1980s, so much deplored during the 1990s, may now be imminent.

The one thing you can say for certain is that design today is on the front burner of culture everywhere. People are arguing about it. They are visiting it. And in this Almanac, they will be learning more about it.

Robert Campbell, FAIA is a writer, teacher, and architect and Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Boston Globe. He is contributing editor of Architectural Record and Preservation and author of Cityscapes of Boston.

This article is excerpted from Almanac of Architecture & Design, Third Edition, copyright © 2002, available from the publisher online at Greenway Consulting or by phone at 800-726-8603. It is also available at Amazon.com.

Note: the photos in the book are in black and white.

An Almanac entry: demographics of architecture students and graduates. Image: Greenway Consulting Sticks, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa, a recent project by Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck, the 2001 Architecture Firm of the Year. Photo: Farshid Assassi An Almanac entry: time required to build American houses. Image: Greenway Consulting The Küppersmühle Museum, Grothe Collection, Duisburg, Germany, by the 2001 Pritzker Prize winners Herzog and De Meuron. Photo: Margherita Spiluttini An Almanac entry: The world's tallest buildings. Image: Greenway Consulting Restoration of the 1922 Detroit Opera House by Albert Kahn Associates, a 2001 AIA Honor Award recipient. Photo: © Hedrich Blessing Photography Roy Lee Walker Elementary School by SHW Group, Inc., winner of the 2001 Shirley Cooper Award. Photo: SHW Group, Inc. The Almanac of Architecture & Design, published by Greenway Consulting, edited by James P. Cramer and Jennifer Evans Yankopolus. Image: Greenway Consulting   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.