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“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture”. So said Pevsner, who fled Nazi Germany to the UK and is responsible for one of its greatest architectural edifices. Something that is neither a bicycle shed or a cathedral, but an inimitable 32 volume foundation to the definitive history of the “Buildings of England”.
Today’s piece of self indulgence is poached from my all time favorite Youtube user, “Meades Shrine”.
Jonathan Meades looks at the branding and regeneration of inner cities through spectacular, but ultimately vacuous, signature buildings such as Bilbao’s “museum with nothing in it” - Gehry’s Guggenheim, and through loft style modernism light - rather like the ridiculous and vapid Phillipe Stark or Armani Casa condos being built in Wall Street, where I live.
The case is put with great wit and erudition, complete with sarcastic marketing doublespeak, throughout. The conclusion is that the end result of this insincere, marketing driven, regeneration is that the once diseased inner cities have merely relocated their problems to the areas beyond the ring roads. The places where they burn cars nightly in the Banlieus, but its not just in France.
This is the trend that was identified years ago by Mike Davis in city of quartz, but the difference is that Davis realized it is a phenomenon independent of the brand of politics, social libertarianism (read Blairism), that Meades sees as the culprit. But its worth seeing Meades do his bit because he says it so well. He understands architecture so much better than a Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind, who have become glorified window dressers able to plonk a building anywhere in the word, to rapturous acclaim, without actually having ever been there.
Le Corbusier designed the city of Chandigarh making it one of the few examples of pure modernist urban planning by a celebrated architect and a reference point to assess the validity of ideas that are more difficult to criticize on paper.
Images of Chandigarh, like Brasilia, tend to be stock photos just after it was built, so it is fascinating to see it as it is today, in the flesh, semi-decayed and ultimately something of a testament to the failure and naivity of Le Corbusier as a planner.
The 5 thousand year old city of Caral, in Peru, is as old as the pyramids of Egypt and a thousands years older than any other civilization in the Americas. Many believe it is the missing link of archeology.
Not sure how I missed this TED talk. Anyway, Thom Mayne was one of the founders of Morphosis, who were doing interesting things with asymmetric geometry or ‘deconstruction’, and actually getting it built, while people like Zaha Hadid were still just producing pretty drawings. Enjoy.
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