Peinlich

LONDON.

The obvious problem with this sort of episode illustrated above is that it is just silly. It is embarrassing for everyone involved in the realization of a skyscraper to have the building appear on international cable news because the building is unexpectedly ridiculous.

But beyond the reporter-frying-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk antics, this is another own-goal for architecture.  what does it say about architecture that this is one of the few times that not just regularly-scheduled programming would be interrupted, but surreal graphics like the one above appear, and that Twitter hashtags blow up-- in other words, that this is one of the few times that architecture is a news story?

Even if rows of laser-fighting louvres were value-engineered out, well, that also sort of proves the point, doesn't it?  In one way or the other, the celebrities of the architectural profession are no more adept at spotting latent risks in their designs as the financial titans they build for.

The unexpected absurdity of 20 Fenchurch Street only compounds the already unmitigated silliness, which can only be either intentional or unplanned. Even before it fried a trader's jag on a climate-changingly-stupendous late summer day, it was already reaching the prize circle as the worst of the starchitectural sheds to shove their way into the medieval streets.

Who has ever looked at a walkie-talkie and thought it would make an attractive office building? What is a walkie-talkie? Does anyone still use them? How does this warpy UN Secretariat look like a Walkie Talkie? Don't walkie-talkies have antennae? If the building doesn't look like anything, why give it a nickname of an outdated technology?

Wheras a genuinely-derived popular nickname for many buildings around the world has been 'the box that another building came in,' 20 Fenchurch Street could only aspire to be recognized as a piece of the styrofoam packaging that the Gherkin came in.

Even many ultimately hideous skyscrapers look alluring in their skeletal infancy. Yet this tornado-column of steel plates, bulging up over the Thames, only suggested the horrible combination of the infantile and the egomaniacal that the wavy, twisty, torquey, turny, kissy, misshapen trend manifests. Moreso than even the Shard, Fenchurch Street is the arrival of Gulf-style showmanship to London.

Long before its glazing summoned a death ray from the September sun, swoops of steel swung out over the narrow, ancient streets, blocking out just a bit more of the sky. Even without that perfect metaphor of the glossy, reflective surface of a financial house suddenly and without anticipation melting the possessions of its neighbors, these corpulent corners fanned out to grab just that much more light and air for itself.

But if you're planning to blot out the sun, at least get that right.

Zeichenwerk von Nairobi

NAIROBI.

The previous post's pictures of the Nairobi skyline excluded several of the city's tallest buildings.  In particular, it completely omitted the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC), but not because it wasn't worth mentioning. On the contrary, this is an all-time favorite of building of mine, literally, ever. And since that last post was so long, and this building is so great, I thought I would give the megastructure its own dedicated post.

KICC logo

While no longer the city's tallest building, and at about 40 years old, hardly its newest, the 23-story tower of the KICC is unquestionably the architectural symbol of Nairobi, and Kenya, and may be one of the most recognizable structures in Africa (if still an order of magnitude below the pyramids).

©April 2013 Bauzeitgeist.

The arrestingly handsome, hyperfuturistic tower is crowned by a wide-brimmed disc, which acts both as a sun-shade and also lifts a helicopter pad aloft, and smoothes into a halo the dodecagonal shaft's geometry, which is accentuated by metallic bronze awnings, shading the glazed façade. A defunct revolving restaurant occupies the top floor of the office block.

This dynamic ensemble would be fantastic enough if the office tower rose from the street into the sky, yet the tower is but one element of the complex. Not visible from afar is the plenary amphitheatre, which might be an even more astonishing structure than the tower itself.

©April 2013 Bauzeitgeist.

A dusty origami lotus flower balances over the rectangle reception hall, like a giant spinning top at the edge of a table, and seems to be giving off a similar kinetic, centripital energy. It is so tempting, when coming upon the KICC from ground level, to employ that most tired of architectural metaphors, the landing UFO, yet here both the tower and the congress seem to be of the squadron of an alien civilization. In fact, the inspiration for the amphitheatre's shape and shade were the conical thatched homes of rural Kenya. That even the more rational geometry of the ground-floor reception hall is reached by criss-crossing ramps from the street further suggests the landing docks of spacecraft.

Photo courtesy BuildDesign Magazine, Kenya

This is all the more remarkable when considering the architecture's vintage, in that it proceeded the first Star Wars movie by years, which invites speculation that the palace of Jabba the Hutt and the villages of the Ewoks could have been inspired by these edifices years before sci-fi animators imagined these later pop-cultural icons. One of those questions of architectural influence and inspiration that may never be answered.

 Photo courtesy BuildDesign Magazine, Kenya

The real story of the KICC is much more typical of a modern African landmark, which was commissioned as a headquarters for the country's ruling party, KANU, during the reign of the post-independence president, Jomo Kenyatta, and built with public funds. It later times its odd origins have lead it to be formally be transferred to state property, and has morphed into a venue for conferences.

Its architect, David Mutiso, was chief architect at Kenya's Ministry of Public Works, and although he went on to a successful practice and is still alive today, but much unlike the career calculations of today's starchitects, this building was neither hailed as a masterpiece nor did it form a aesthetic basis for a signature style to be applied and replicated on later projects, which only adds to its visual impact. There are certain buildings in the world like this, that are so singular and unique and yet never generate any offspring.

KICC is open to the public. For a few shillings a friendly security guard operates the lift for visitors, up to the top observation deck, where there is no one but another bored, friendly security guard, who walks you across the inoperable revolving restaurant floor and to a decrepit flight of stairs...

All 3 above ©April 2013 Bauzeitgeist.

...which lead up to the heliport, still very much in use, and reveals a panoramic view of East Africa's major city, from the airport to the shiny zinc rooftops of the city's infamous slums, to the sloping angles of malls and hotels peaking up from the verdure of affluent Westlands, all surrounded by mountains and edge of the stretching plains, as burgeoning Nairobi still houses a national park in its city limits, famous for its photo opportunities of African wildlife roaming the savannah in the foreground with an ultramodern skyline in the background.

via Wikipedia and Next City.

The Most Architectural Country on CNN

Another post-Soviet, Eurasian state that has both built iconic architecture and made these landmarks the central focus of advertisements shown on CNN is the Republic of Georgia. There are several advertisements for the Republic of Georgia that have appeared on CNN over the last few years. Recent iterations (many viewable, but not embeddible from the Invest in Georgia website) such as the one titled Why Georgia is Different showcase the country's recently completed glass halls and gilded towers. Another, not posted to the site, shows one the country's 80 newly-constructed, glass-enclosed police stations, and underscores this architectural metaphor as part of the state's commitment to transparency and anti-corruption.

Georgia is fairly unique as a small, developing country without any particular resource boom that has undertaken a nationwide construction of new public facilities. While this might make the pages of the Financial Times, that the Republic's recent buildings feature the stylish attempts at avant-garde form-making from such celebrity firms as UNStudio and J. Meyer H. make this fertile eye-candy for the light-speed semi-pro architectural blogosphere, the universe of DesignBoom and its siblings.

Police Station in Mestia, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Mayer H. images via this website, April 2012.

 Terminal Building for the Airport at Mestia, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Meyer H. Via Dezeen, November 2011.

This has given the leading architecture blogs a little geographic variety in their usual line up: The Fox Is Black recently featured a rest stop along a Caucasian highway designed by J. Meyer H., and last November FastCo Design decided on titling a post: Georgia Builds the World's Wackiest Border Crossing (the childish title is actually better than the horrid copy of the rest of post), which featured another JMH design of what is certainly rather delightful for a border crossing, although it adheres to the cookie-cutter mold look that makes JMH's buildings more punny than clever.

Border Checkpoint at Sarpi, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Mayer H. images via Dezeen, January 2011.

 The 'Georgia' geographic tag on Dezeen in particular is an easy reference for Georgia's new landmarks. That Georgia's remote airfields have luscious terminal halls worthy of Wallpaper, thought up by some of Europe's most popular architectural talents, is remarkable by itself. Less celebrated is the Ministry of the Interior, situated outside of the capital on the way to the airport, with a half-hearted attempt at showmanship via its undulated glass, looking like a new-built office park anywhere, but proudly displaying its gesture of government openness and accessibility via its shiny exterior.

 

Ministry of Internal Affairs, Kakheti Highway, Georgia, by Michele de Lucchi.

In a similar way to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, this whole effort, which must be expensive, comes across as a whole lot of marketing. Georgia is working hard to attract investment, with a website and a series of CNN commercials that seem designed solely to increase the country's standings in the World Bank's Doing Business Rankings, a phenomenon that has grown in the last five years to a bizarre fixation. Georgia isn't, ultimately, a wealthy country, and sits in a troubled region. This is before considering the fact that an autonomous region of the country declared its independence, with Russia's encouragement, and the country was invaded and humiliated by its giant former ruling power just as the first of these projects was commissioned.

Renderings for the Border Checkpoint at Ninotsminda, Georgia via Dezeen, July 2012.  

So, rather than giggle at why a border post is in the outline of a giant squiggle, one might start raising critical questions such as why Georgia needs such a monumental pile guarding the borders with Turkey at all, or whether its remote corners of the Caucaus need air terminals which look nicer than first class lounges at major hubs. Its unquestionable that Georgia's infrastructure budget might have been put to use elsewhere, perhaps more generally in providing services to its citizens. There has been some investigation into how one of these new architectural designs comes about and why realizing one will cost 66% more than the Ministry of Agriculture's entire budget. 

Speculatively, it is easy to imagine that Georgia's leadership is focussed on investment-fuelled growth, and that blog-ready infrastructural projects might have a singular ability to brand Georgia as a progressive, cool country. But these undertakings are also surely profitable for national construction companies  and land developers. Exactly who in Georgia truly benefits from this is not obviously, and as the above-article makes clear, the answers are not forthcoming from the various government entities which have suddenly taken an interest in awarding jobs to hip architects from central Europe. Whether this is all the worthy endeavors of strengthening a young, weak, isolated state, or another iteration of cronyism is not currently clear, but what is lucid from Georgia's current architectural infatuations is that Georgia may not, in fact, be different and that it takes more than a curtain wall of glass to make democracy and development more transparent.

Land aus Feuer und Hochhäuser

CNN International has a particular roster of advertisements. Most likely due to its widespread, worldly audience as one of the planet's principal satellite news networks, for years CNN has featured commercials not for cars or canned goods but for countries. A random collection from recent broadcasting includes tourism and promotional ads featuring Taiwan, Singapore, Qatar, and Montenegro.

This leads to some unusual advertising arrangements. "Arrangements" seems the correct terms as the network not only airs commercials during programming breaks, but also has embarked on favorable, sponsored coverage on the economic and investment climate of sovereign states, a somewhat behind-the-curtains practice which was revealed by Max Fisher in the Atlantic in the last week.

The Atlantic article specifically called out some unusual editorial arrangements in which former or even current regime officials in Kazakhstan were interviewed as experts and commentators on Kazakhstan's attractiveness to foreign investors.

Even before this controversy surfaced, I had wanted to post two ads in particular here: one for Azerbaijan and one for Astana, capital of Kazakhstan. Both feature recently-completed contemporary architecture quite prominently.

The Azerbaijani advert is a more straightforward pitch to the business traveler: zip to Azerbaijan for the day on your Citation, seal an investment opportunity by sunset. While there is some of footage of the sandstone buildings of the old city of Baku, that capital's newest addition, the Flame Towers, are unmissable: the towers shown no less than 5 times, and form the backdrop of the conclusion of the ad. As the names make obvious, the towers are supposed to resemble flickering fire, a reference to the country's Zoroastrian fire-worshipping heritage.

However, with their blue-green glass slimming upwards, the resemblance to the Financial Harbor Towers in Bahrain, (previously blogged about here) although likely unintentional, is unmistakable, and the effect of booming Baku having a Bahrain- or Dubai-style skyscraper set was surely part of the allure of their addition to the skyline.

The second advert shows the instant-city-on-the-steppes, Astana, the circa 1997 capital of Kazakhstan, an immense country which boasts even more extraction-action than Azerbaijan. The ad is similarly storyboarded if slightly less overtly financial. It is mainly some cloudless vistas of the capital's glistening new towers, aligned on what is surely, during the long sub-Siberian winter, a frigidly-windswept central promenade: apparently called the Green Water Boulevard or Shining Path, which is the central part of the city's master plan, designed by Kisho Kurokawa.

The camera rests as 0:25 on Norman Foster's Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center, an indoor beach resort and shopping center (again, that winter), but the footage doesn't show Foster's other Astana edifice, the pyramidal Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, perhaps because that slightly older structure has less permanent use (This 2010 Blueprint Magazine article thoroughly covers the story of Foster in Kazakhstan.

I've posted previously about Astana, and the Kazakhstani government's use of architecture to visually promote trade. The prominence of contemporary architecture, putting its "iconic" these emerging economies as worthy business destinations, is neither a particularly new or unique use of architecture. In fact, as much as it boasts of where the global growth seems to be these days, it also evinces the come-from-behind status of these investment frontiers, in comparison to more established markets. Its hard imagine that places such as Milan or Los Angeles would either need television commercials or have them feature recently-constructed buildings to reassure potential investors; but then American and European cities hardly have the budgets to buy spots on CNN, and the government would have to answer to its own constituents if its spent taxpayer money on a TV spot. The leaders of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan don't have to worry about that.

Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Here are a series of scans from a booklet, Kazakhstan: Land of Wonders, published by the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 2009 and distributed at a promotional event at the Kazakh Embassy in Washington, D.C. (Apologies for the low quality of the scanning).

"The Republic of Kazakhstan - a unitary state with a Presidential government"

The glossy handbook is an introduction to the achievements and enticements of the state, attempting to interest tourists, and more importantly foreign investors, to the Central Asian country, which in the post-Soviet period has enjoyed enormous dividends due to the mineral and energy deposits within its vast territory.

This windfall has allowed the post-Soviet regime to devise an entirely new capital, Astana, a city masterplanned by Kisho Kurakawa. President Nursultan Nazarbayev decreed that the capital be renamed and removed to this remote hamlet in 1998, and construction has been on-going since.

A remarkable aspect of the booklet is its promotion not only of this fanciful, glittering new Brasilia on the steppes through a series of photographs edifying the neo-islamic, plastic-paneling and cobalt-blue opaque glazing scheme of the country's new mosques, apartment towers, office complexes, and government ministries.

Whereas some of this is evidently an attempt to forge an architectural identity for this young state, a land of an ancient, nomadic civilization, which for some time has had its islamic faith (and continues to have its political freedoms) repressed, much of the construction is strikingly reminiscent of the Soviet monumentality of its former client state than might be expected.

The vast, glistening plaza in central Astana is gated by the immense State Gas Corporation building, KazMunaiGaz, (above), which, with symbolism that maybe only partially intended, is the only construction to transect the monumental axis of the city's new administrative district. Its also unclear how much the architects intended the similarity to the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas (of course without the coral reef and shark tank), or, geographically and politically more related, Palace Square in St. Petersburg.

As if the new city couldn't be more reminiscent of its former Imperial Power, Astana also has a close copy of Moscow's Seven Sisters. The feel of 21st century Moscow is further embodied in that these Stalinist creations are surrounded by the cheap, gaudy shopping malls at their skirts.

"The impressive elegant palace made of white stone is a symbol of prosperity and power of state."

Astana has among its "most stunning" landmarks two works by Norman Foster & Partners. One, a metallic pyramid, has been labelled the Palace of Peace & Reconciliation, and lends itself most naturally to large international conferences. The other, which is also the second tallest building in the city, is a humungous leisuredrome, the Khan Shatyr, the world's largest tent, which includes an indoor beach so that bored bureaucrats can seek shelter from the merciless climate. (link to an excellent article, Foster in Kazakhstan, by Richard Orange, in Blueprint, 2010.)

It would certainly be possible to write a more extensive post about Astana, one of the greatest examples of the contemporary intersection between autocracy and starchitecture, but I really only intend this to be a brief post about the photographs in this booklet, and not only what they show of this developing country and its flashy capital, but also what the images reveal about the marketing of Kazakhstan as a destination for foreign tourism and capital.

What may be more notable than all the spreads of windy, glistening Astana, then, is a two-page panorama showing some sort of belching smelter plant blotting out the horizon. It suggests influence of both an older Socialist-Realist tradition of edifying Industry, but also a more neoliberal, emerging-economy inclination to boast of a country's economic capability--and is wholly ignorant of any aesthetic and ecological considerations. It would hard to imagine a European nation or American state billboarding its farting smokestacks to entice foreigners to visit.

Further in the handbook is another wide-angle shot of the Mangyshlak Peninsula, lapped by waters less neon and opaque than the new ministerial skyscrapers of Astana, is nearly postcard picturesque. Yet upon closer examination the photograph, surely captured by aircraft, implies some more complex economic forces at work. In the middle of the photograph, proletariat housing piles, too low to break the horizon stand back from the cliffs at the center of a planned settlement, while the waterfront property seems newly-occupied by enormous stucco-and-tile Malibu-Mediterranean McMansions sprouting half-complete out of the sandy precipice. At left, a luxurious, glittery-blue Esfahan-meets-Arizona estate centers on a lush tapis vert cascading down to the Caspian.

Chaos, Indeed

Whitney Museum Expansion, New York @2001 OMA

Its difficult to imagine that the young, urbane staff of OMA/AMO does not have a contingent of aesthetically-conscious post-grads who have spent significant time in downtown Manhattan (anything in walking distance of the firm's Prada Epicenter on Broadway) at any time over the last decade or so.

However, it seems to have eluded the OMA/AMO team that the predominant retail interior of the district has for many years been the incomplete, 'raw' fit-out, that naked palimpsest of the building's previous industrial and/or dilapidated punk purposes.

For to only partially refurbish a sub-Houston Street storefront as an art gallery is a completely routine, unoriginal act. To declare it ironic or provocative, as OMA/AMO and the New Museum did in the brief display of the CRONOCAOS exhibit on the Bowery, is to be basically unaware of the interior appearance of both art galleries and retail shops in Manhattan.

Either that, or OMA/AMO/Koolhaas think their joke is a lot funnier than it really is. As seemingly every article on the exhibit, and the press release itself, seems to need to explain the partial revamp in detail (Ouroussouff, in The New York Times, called it "startling"). If a joke has to be explained, then is it really that clever?

The Binnenhof: Extension of the Dutch Parliament, the Hague ©1978 OMA

****

But considered in another way, it is altogether fitting that the gallery housing CRONOCAOS was half-finished and in need of explanation, for the entire exhibit, and the theorizing behind it, is a half-baked, incomplete mess.

Aside from the theorizing itself, the content of the exhibit's boards suffer from a very low standard of editing, description, and visual communication. The narrative would not meet the standards of a mid-semester pin-up at a respectable architectural school, much less what would be produced by the in-house curating team of a major New York cultural institution.

An architecture student who presented this level of sloppiness would suffer a withering review for making tutors sort through such an incoherently assembled mix of unrefined argument and unsupported assertion. The startling presence of so many typos, and the stylistic laziness (for example, putting some words in single quotes, and some in double) is annoying.

Some of the graphics themselves are not particularly convincing, and many appear to have been hurriedly churned out. Part of the problem may be that OMA/AMO's signature look, the lower-case-Helvetica-labels-over-multicolored-rectangles-as-diagram, which the office pioneered more than a decade ago in the early years of Photoshop and Illustrator, have become ubiquitously elementary, and have not aged well. Perhaps they should not have been preserved.

Meanings are elusive. Words and phrases are employed without bothering to define them adequately. Paragraphs trail off as unfinished thoughts...further lending to the breathless, bromidic atmosphere of the writing. Few opportunities to make cheesy puns or eye-rolling plays on words are passed up: the project on the Illinois Institute of Technology is titled "Miestakes"; an aspect of the Harvard Campus masterplan is named DMZ, standing for DeMoralized Zone. Statistics and facts are often either wrong, or asserted without citation. The caption of one board, for example, reads:

There is now a worldwide consensus, in all cultures and all political systems, that postwar architecture was wrong, that is deserves [sic] to die and disappear because it is 'ugly', and because it is declared responsible for many of our current ills...

In another part of the show, a board asserts that The Reichstag in Berlin contains "no trace of earlier identities..."

This may be just small nitpicking. But remember that CRONOCAOS is universally presented as nothing less than a cutting-edge visual and dialectic manifesto from the world's premier, avant-garde spatial think-tank and its celebrity-genius intellectual/practitioner.

In reality, its obvious that it is a speedy dust-off of earlier project boards, strung together in haste by interns, and while it points to many important questions, it is too disorganized, too shallow, and too incoherent to be regarded as successful museum exhibit, much less a mature architectural theory.

"Veritas:" Harvard Campus Plan to fill-in Charles River ©2001 OMA

****

CRONOCAOS has promise. Across its presentation, it suggests a number of very good questions about historic preservation. These are important, relevant issues which are not being debated or called into question very widely elsewhere.

But CRONOCAOS asks too many questions, and delves into almost none of them--little effort is given to moving below a titillating, ostentatiously provocative surface to a deeper discussion or understanding of the issues. It is didactic when it should be speculative, brash when it needed to be erudite.

It so launches (emphasis added):

Embedded in huge waves of development, which seem to transform the planet at an ever accelerating speed, there is another kind of transformation at work: the area of the world declared immutable through various regimes of preservation is growing exponentially. A huge section of our world (about 12 percent) is now off-limits, submitted to regimes we don't know, have not thought through, cannot influence. At its moment of surreptitious apotheosis, preservation does not quite know what to do with its new empire.

Architects-- we who change the world -- have been oblivious or hostile to the manifestations of preservation. But the current moments sees the perfect intersection of two tendencies that will have so-far untheorized implications for architecture: the ambition of the global taskforce of preservation to rescue larger and larger territories of the planet, and the - corresponding? - global rage to eliminate the evidence of the post World War II parried of architecture as a social project. The various elements of this exhibition attempt to show the wrenching simultaneity of preservation and destruction that is destroying any sense of the linear evolution of time and propelling us into a period of CRONOCAOS.

OMA and AMO has been obsessed, from the beginning, with the past-- though we didn't always realize it at the time. On this wall are a selection of projects that have not been presented before as a body of work concerned with time and history. On the opposite wall, we show the documentary debris of these efforts. Together, the work reveals an inability to rest with any single approach towards the past. OMA has instead deployed an array of tactics, each one super-specific to the particularties of the project and the site. If there is one constant, it is the desire for the 'preserved' - when we choose to preserve it - to not be embalmed but to continue to stay alive and evolve...

Who thought this was good copy??

Initially, its confusing in that the pronoun "we" seems variably to stand in for: AMO/OMA; Rem Koolhaas; the profession of architecture; and society. There might be "preservation regimes" that OMA or Koolhaas aren't aware of, but to say suggest that "no one has thought through" them or "cannot access" them-- who wrote this stuff?? How arrogant to state that a subject that many other people are concerned with has just recently occurred to you, so here you are, helicoptering in to grace it with your veneer. How silly to claim to have been heretofore oblivious.

Then that 12%-- what is that supposed to mean? Does this include the Amazon Rainforest? The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Belgravia? Paris? Beacon Hill? The Grachtengordel? Teotihuancan? The Great Barrier Reef? There is absolutely no definition of this.

It would be bizarre to assert, in this end-of-nature era, that there is too much of the planet's surface that is defended against our consumption. The protection of just 12% of the earth's surface seems appallingly low, not secretive-danger-regime, as it is clearly suggested. And even if the figure refers strictly to 12% of mankind's built environment as being under some form of protection, that is clearly not the same as saying that it is off-limits to alteration.

Not many people think that Venice, Amsterdam, Paris or Charleston would be better off with the bulldozer; to lose architectural and cultural heritage for the sake of more building. There is also a question of whether many of the world's most popular tourist destinations would continue to be commercially viable or economically prosperous if they were built over. The only advantage would be to the builder.

As OMA well knows, tourism is a massive global industry, and one of the most effective transfers of foreign exchange to developing regions of the world. This is quite aside from the environmental and ecological considerations of endless cycles of throwing away and rebuilding our cities.

****

Kloten Airport 2000, Zürich ©1995 OMA.

One wall of the CRONOCAOS exhibition is covered in a wall of tear-sheet, self-assembly exhibition catalogues (clever!), indexing several of OMA/AMO's projects from the past thirty years. Some of them, such as the firm's study of Lagos, Nigeria, have very little relationship to any issue of preservation.

Others, such as the innovative proposal for Zürich Kloten Airport's expansion, in which

we identified in the existing structures of ZRH enough abandoned or under-used sections to accommodate the entire program; all we needed to do was to stitch the 'found' spaces together with infrastructure in a sequence that accommodate the intended flows

sounds utterly fascinating. But the single-paragraph board is woefully insufficient to convey the achievements of the proposal itself, much less summarize the preservation implications of the intervention.

Milstein Hall, College of Architecture, Cornell University ©2006 OMA

Many of the other projects included in CRONOCAOS take a much more pedestrian, tried-and-true approach to preservation: contrasting the original architecture by adding on an unapologetically contemporary expansion (Whitney Museum; Cornell's Milstein Hall; the Binnenhof, etc.) Some like the LACMA proposal, are made slightly more interesting by the relative youth of the original building. Unfortunately, none of these undertakings are presented with any measure of depth of detail.

Again, quick sentences have been dashed off and printed up, a painful, unenlightening mash of blathering snark, overzealous self-importance, and grandiose triumphalism. The project boards do not seem to have been re-examined or edited for the show, so that there seems no attempt foundation for a greater coherent theory.

Maison à Bordeaux. ©2002 OMA

Then there is wounded Rem, poor he whose genius was so great, the French state has punished him for its: his Maison à Bordeaux was listed, and the original, handicapped occupant died, but given its protections, it can't be altered for reuse by someone more ambulatory. However, this self-serving lament does not entertain the possibility that a model of high-design accessibility might have a wider benefit to society.

Preserving Beijing. ©2003 OMA

****

CRONOCAOS is at its most goading when it hints that destruction should be promoted, or when Koolhaas asserts there should a destruction commission as much as a landmarks board. These are clever, but unserious and flippant, and become ridiculous when Preservation becomes a global hegemon straw-man. On the other issues central to the preservation debate, many can be discovered in the exhibit, with a bit of work.

Societies struggle with contradictory desires for new and old (especially fast-growing, non Western countries, such as China). Preservation is intertwined with the more challenging struggles of contemporary culture: fleeting authenticity and economic viability. Few buildings are built with the intent that they stand forever, and materiality makes their lifespans very short indeed. Preservation oscillates between sanctifying some landmarks so quickly that their worth has not been established by consensus or pedigree (Maison à Bordeaux; perhaps Swiss Re also).

In other instances, recent but not yet historical treasures are not protected, and therefore destroyed before future generations can celebrate them. Robin Hood Gardens is not included here, nor are the Nakagin Capsule Tower or even the recent rejection of Le Corbusier buildings by UNESCO. A board which includes an image of Berlin's Palast der Republik makes no mention of that building's story, or the reconstruction of the faux-historic Schloß on the site. A further question of whether we can presume that a newer building will be better, prettier, or more valuable could also be put forward.

Tate Modern proposal, London ©1994 OMA

It has previously been observed that preservation either freezes an object in a state of dilapidation (Greek and Mayan ruins) or overhauls it to an idealized state, which is sometimes a contemporary invention (Colonial Williamsburg; The Palace of Knossos). The choice of archaeology and restoration by their nature eliminate the other possibilities, and present a structure's complicated, meandering history as a single, static image.

Preservation favors the masterpiece over the ordinary, and so magnifies the bias of the historical record toward the elite. OMA/AMO repeatedly use the term "mediocre" --winking at the concept that ugly or average architecture should be preserved as well--in contravention of the exhibit's more prominent assertion that there is already far too much preservation.

These are mostly not new ideas, and are certainly not OMA/AMO's fertilizing of "un-theorized" territory, as has been clearly set out. Indeed, most the above issues, when related to CRONOCAOS at all, are only really explored in articles about the exhibit, rather than in the exhibit itself.

Polemically, CRONOCAOS has not been nurtured to a degree that such issues are adequately, purposefully juxtaposed, or present any fresh insights. The potential for meaningful argument struggles for attention on a surface paved with embellishment and meaningless prattle. To walk through the CRONOCAOS exhibit is to read someone's scribbled notes of a brainstorming session which you didn't attend and which no one has followed up on. It is no window into an exclusive salon of avant-garde architectural theory, nor a useable manifesto for our young century.

The Guardian of Guangzhou

Where the GOH is now. ©2011 Google.

THE BANKS OF THE PEARL RIVER, GUANGZHOU.

Peter Kelly's curious diatribe in Blueprint late last year is a weakly-argued disgruntlement by a professional print journalist toward bloggers, blaming them for their lack of formal criticism of new architecture, as most chose instead explore niche topics or personal interests.

In response, many so-besieged bloggers have aligned themselves with a general dissatisfaction of the state of current architectural criticism, in which many print critics seem wedded to the public relations arms of celebrity architectural offices, real estate developers, and government, and are accused of being either adolescently star-struck, or agents in a larger power brokerage, of which the newspaper as a whole is part.

With this debate on-going, it is all the more remarkable to have Jonathan Glancey of the Manchester Guardian file simultaneous print and video reviews of a large project by a major architect: global hyperstar Zaha Hadid and her recently-opened Guangzhou Opera House in Southern China. These twin adorations, with the print piece embarrassingly headlined, "Move over Sydney!" perfectly exhibit the pathetic state of architectural journalism, which has so engendered starchitect hagiography in general and the Zaha-worship in particular.

Both the video and article don't offer anything remotely technical, other than reporting that the acoustic designer helpfully declares his own work to be "perfect." Even for a popular, non-professional audience, the absence of any level of specific performative analysis is astonishing. Its as if music were reviewed while avoiding all mention of the instrument's harmonies or the singer's pitch, or if a film was reviewed while excluding analysis of the camera work or editing.

Its one of the most remarkable buildings not just in China, but in the whole world!

Jonathan Glancey says virtually nothing specific or meaningful about the architectural design, and says a lot that makes little sense, be it either helplessly vague or annoyingly cliched. Glancey's verbage is a parade of contemporary architectural bromides, kicking off the video with the hugely-dated metaphor that a particularly unusual architectural form was built by an alien civilization. Elsewhere he compares the building to a bolt of lightning. He variously characterizes the "geometry" as either impossible and gravity-defying.

Where on Earth or in space is this otherworldly monument?!

Most ignominiously, Glancey repeats, almost word for word, the architectural office's own PR metaphor for the structure: a typically empty comparison of the opera house to a natural phenomenon:

From Simon Yu of the ZHA project team: "“We liked erosion and stones. It worked well next to the Pearl River. The metaphor is two pebbles picked from the bed of the river and placed on the river bank.”

From the ZHA press release (via Dezeen): Shaped to resemble two pebbles on the bank of the Pearl River, the building houses a 1,800-seat theatre plus 400-seat multifunctional hall, rehearsal rooms and entrance hall...Like pebbles in a stream smoothed by erosion, the Guangzhou Opera House sits in perfect harmony with its riverside location.

From the Guardian: Set in Haixinsha Square, a brand new stretch of south China's ever-expanding trading city, the opera house takes the form of what appear to be two enormous pebbles that might have been washed up on the shores of the Pearl river, on which Guangzhou stands. Rough-shaped things sheathed in triangles of granite and glass protrusions, one houses the main auditorium while the smaller encloses a multipurpose performance space.

From the Video: "...Rest like Giant pebbles on shore of pearl river. They act as the cultural anchor of massive development of new financial towers..."

In one of the most revealing moments of the video, Glancey, standing head-on to the camera on an upper level balcony high above the "gravity-defying foyers", seems to apologize for the roaring din of the intermission crowd mingling below ("Its very loud…but its supposed to be…its an opera house," he says in a high, contrite tone), as if his slight frame could censor whatever auditory flaw he perceives to need masking.

Sometimes, just sometimes, architecture makes you want to burst out into song! ...the building behind me does all the singing you'll ever want!

The view behind him, through a massive, irregular space, is an extremely intriguing one, and the noise could be either a purposefully or unintentionally enjoyable experience, but Glancey neither asks Zaha (or the acoustics consultant) about this effect, nor gets out of the way to let the camera lean over the balcony for his audience. In this way, not only is it not clear what there is in the building to dislike, there isn't even a very good expression of what may, at least within the realm of possibility, be some effective or enjoyable aspects of the architecture.

Very nice? Its a bit more than that! Its a truly radical design!

This can't even be called criticism. There is no portion of the reporting that lets up even momentarily on the blood-rushing, exhilarating promotion of the subjects at hand. There is no point where he criticizes the building.

The building, even when empty, has this quality of being restlessly alive.!

Image courtesy of the Guardian by Dan Chung

With its speedy editing and great number of dark night shots, it is difficult to get a visual sense of the form of the interior or exterior of the opera house in the four minute video, its pop-synth soundtrack not withstanding. Redeemably, the Guardian's 20-image slideshow provides a much more thorough visual understanding of the space, but Glancey's own works remain confusing. But providing an understanding of the architecture is not the point. Even more than the building itself, the purpose is to promote the personality behind it.

Even Zaha seems dazzled by the result!!

Tellingly, there is as much face time on the clip as there are shots of the new construction, whether inside or outside. In four minutes of video, the viewer has more time to examine Glancey's teeth and Zaha's leathery complexion than gain a spatial understanding of the building.

A virtuoso performance!!

Glancey's breathless, hyperbolic intoxication isn't just hilariously over-enthusiastic, but is actually detrimental in several ways. Glancey is obviously drunk on both celebrity-workship and signature form-making. Aside from his floor-licking veneration of Zaha and her opera house, one of Glancey's main points is that the citizens and leaders of Cardiff, and Britain by extension, are pathetically timorous and myopic to have not done whatever it took to get a Zaha building. As if a Zaha Opera House=Zaha Opera House (even the Lauraete herself had to chide Glancey mildly for this view), and more broadly ignoring whatever political or fiscal context the Cardiff Opera House project had to navigate to work. Glancey exhibits no concern for this.

Guangzhou's gain is Cardiff's loss. Zaha Hadid is a trailblazer! But the trail she blazes so very brightly has still to light up British towns and cities... Zaha had hoped to built an opera house like this years ago in Cardiff Bay in Wales, but an unholy chorus of dim local politics and cultural philistinism wrecked her plans.

While Glancey mentions how the Opera House anchors a new district of this enormous city, there is almost no visual or verbal exploration of this. More specifically, the social, political, and economic milieux in which this Opera House was solicited and realized is almost entirely ignored. Glancey flatly states: "this extraordinary building has been a very big event in China," as vague and meaningless as any of his other declarations.

Although its appeal will be global...it is built very much for local conditions.

In fact, it is left to a completely non-architectural journal to cover these issues at all: it is only by happening to read a column in the Financial Times--but not by its architecture critic Edwin Heathcote, but its South China correspondent, Rahul Jacob-- that the larger context of still-impoverished China, with Guangzhou its Dickensian factory-opolis, is incorporated into a discussion of the building:

This conundrum – of an opera house that cost more than $200m to build but has the concert schedule of an institution flailing financially – might seem baffling at first but it is emblematic of the problems facing China. It has a government that is eager to spend lavishly on trophy projects such as high-speed railways and concert halls but not always the will to manage the minutiae of ensuring that ticket prices are affordable or that programming is adequate.

The GOH is the most extreme example. “You have the GOH with no [resident] symphony and no opera chorus,” says one observer. “Beijing and the local government pitched in to build the opera house but when it comes to programming the attitude is ‘You mean we have to pay for that too?’”

Instead, Glancey closes with a bang:

Is this a great building? Well, yes I think it is...A marriage of high, intellectual, brilliant avant-garde architecture and true populism...what a wonderful meeting that is. A grand, avant-garde architecture opera house for everyone.

Not so much avant-garde as Avant-Guardian. At least he didn't blog about it.

A tweet from Dwell Magazine, linking to Glancey's video in the Guardian.