Bling, blobs, burgeoning: problems of figure; Architecture has become more and more gestural in its searches for monumentality and the race for iconic status

Architectural Review, The, March, 2005

Next door to the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie is the city's music school and theatre academy, designed a little later by the same architects. Unlike the earlier building, which gently resonates with the topography, the school is tough, even strident. Stirling used to say that he had removed the cork from the drum (the spatial focus of the building) and had erected it on the adjacent site. The functional reason for the extraordinary difference between the two was that the younger building has many spaces that need daylight, so to make a tower with windows was practical.

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But equally important must have been some of the criticisms of the earlier building. Almost immediately, virtually everyone recognized it as a masterpiece, but some (particularly Colin Rowe, Stirling's mentor and friend) argued that it did not have enough figure--urban presence--to signal the institution's importance in the city's cultural life. Stirling was prone to dramatic gestures, in architecture as in life, and the assertive, obviously monumental tower was his response. At first sight, it is similar to several PoMo buildings built in the same years, but it is a great deal more graceful and learned than most of them: intrusive and flashy urban insertions that draw attention to themselves with smeared-on Classical surface patterns. Stirling and Wilford's second Stuttgart building politely grows out of a striped stone plinth that continues the materials and levels of the Staatsgalerie. Its upper parts are clearly derived from Stockholm City Library, with the tower, like Asplund's, originating from Ledoux's Barriere de La Villette that has echoes of the Castel St Angelo, which was of course Hadrian's Mausoleum, itself based on prehistoric archetypes. Few architectural figures could have more resonance with history.

During the '80s and '90s, there was an increasing demand for figure. It came about for several reasons. First of all, the general dislike of the mediocre morass of late clapped-out Functionalism, and a need to make statements--almost any statement or gesture that could differentiate a particular building from the mass was welcome after so many years of greyness. Second, gestures could become more and more dramatic because computers allowed the potential of new geometries, new materials and new structural techniques to be explored, offering possibilities of making buildings never previously imagined (except in dreams and the sketchbooks of the Expressionists and Constructivists).

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The possibility was a powerful temptation to both clients and architects. At a time when branding is one of the essential components of almost all endeavour, both public and private, hiring a well-known architect is often seen as brand-enhancement. Architects have found branding to be an extremely effective means of drumming up business. Of course, this is by no means new--after all, Palladio set up one of the most long-lasting and most successful brands in history, and good practices have always carefully built up their reputations to make themselves attractive to clients.

But the game is changing. We live in a world permeated by the cult of celebrity and dominated by the electronic media, which demand constant novelty. The more unusual the gesture, the more enhanced an architect's brand. The cult of celebrity has been so successful that most of the limited (1) international competitions are open only to a small group of celebrated architects--perhaps no more than 100--who are almost forced to become increasingly demonstrative and outre to ensure that they retain their place in the hierarchy of the celebrated.

Anti-humanism

Architecture cannot help being a commentary on human life, but a large number of architects seem determined to demonstrate how indifferent to ordinary human concerns they are. Future Systems' Selfridges store in Birmingham is an obvious example (AR October 2003). A huge blue slug slimes its way toward the city's chief pedestrian piazza. It is covered with shiny metal discs like scales or molluscous scrofula and it pays no attention at all to its surroundings (dim as those are, they surely deserve better than the amorphous blue intrusion). One of the saddest things about the Birmingham building is that Jan Kaplicky (one of the founding partners of Future Systems) used to be an adventurous and often poetic interpreter of High-Tech. Computers were needed to generate the amorphous shape of Selfridges, but its construction is dull and the discs (which have no function) are applied in the crudest fashion like giant drawing pins, offering multiple birds' nest sites and causing questions about their thermal behaviour. Future Systems have created a flashy monument to Bling--is that what Selfridges really wanted?

The Birmingham building is a form of blob, and blobs are becoming increasingly common these days. They are easy to design with computers (though they look difficult and novel). Almost everyone is playing with blobs, Foster, for instance, seems to have become fond of them of late in buildings like the recent Gateshead music centre, and even the Swiss Re (Gherkin) tower (AR November 2003). The latter is a quite civilized form of blob, in that it has been carefully designed to come down to the ground with grace, and to have decent relationships to nearby buildings. The same applies to the cultural centre in Graz (AR March 2004) by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier; it makes a proper contribution to the street at ground level, and somehow, the bulging upper storeys insert themselves into a very dense urban texture without too much trouble. But Gherkin and Graz are exceptions: in general, blobs and Moebius writhings are indifferent to their surroundings, and to any notion of human scale.