Once and future architecture

Architectural Review, The, March, 2005

To round off this issue's survey of The Architectural Review's last quarter-century, I asked some of the architects and critics who have often appeared in these pages to comment on what they perceived to be the most important ideas and buildings of the last 25 years and to speculate on what will happen in the next 25. Responses varied a good deal: some concentrated on individual experience, some on future potential, with some focusing entirely on me. I am too vain (and touched) to leave the latter out. Illustrations are some of my favourite covers.

Redefine perception

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KEN YEANG, Selangor, Malaysia

Saving the environment from our continued devastation is the singularly most dominant and vital issue affecting our tomorrow, feeding into our fears that this third millennium shall be our last.

In the next decade or so, we desperately need answers to the question of how to design our built environment and manage our businesses for our sustainable future.

We need to redefine our perception of architecture, how it is to be designed, how it should function in the biosphere and why we also need to design its after life, regarded from the perspective both of an ecologist as well as of a designer.

Our built environment--and this includes everything that we as humans make from buildings, roads, bridges, factories, cars, refrigerators, to toys--no matter how aesthetically pleasing, how well designed or made, is simply materials that are extracted and taken often from far off locations, transiently (compared to ecological time-frames) processed, manufactured and fabricated into food, artifacts, facilities, infrastructures, enclosures (as concentrations into a single locality for our habitation and other human purposes), whose manufacture, processing, assembly, construction, operations and consumption often use huge quantities of non-renewable energy resources, can significantly affect the ecology of its locality and of the biosphere, and whose eventual disposal (at the end of their useful life) needs to be accounted and benignly reintegrated back into the biosphere.

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Will to form

MICHAEL HOPKINS, London

In spite of a number of dotty byways along the way, both the Functional Tradition, identified by J. M. Richards in the AR in 1957, and the Modern Movement, have survived the last 25 years.

In the process, they have grown richer and more complex. In the next 25 years the Will to Form will continue to be inspired by function, technology, a sense of place and history and above all, optimism for the future.

Courage to create

TADAO ANDO, Tokyo

In the last quarter-century, architecture has acquired a technology that makes freedom of expression possible. I am referring to the emergence of computers. Thanks to precise simulation analyses, architects can now be as adventurous as they please.

It seems fitting that the quarter-century should conclude with the Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao, Frank Gehry's notable work. That is because the first work to raise the issue of freedom of expression and make an impact on architecture was the Gehry House of 1979. Its technology was by no means advanced, but that little building was full of ideas that anticipated subsequent developments in contemporary art such as the use of irregular forms seemingly free of gravity and the juxtaposition of samples of different materials.

This shows the tremendous speed at which architecture, liberated from preconceptions, has evolved. In fact, today the speed of development might be said to have outstripped the human power of imagination.

I feel that the significance of the work left by Louis Kahn becomes greater as time passes. In turning his back on trends of the period and returning to the classics, he showed contemporary architecture a new direction. Kahn's architecture seems to offer silent protest against contemporary work.

It is courage to create, not technology, that opens up a new horizon. Courage must be backed by ideas, and architects' ideas are now being called into question.

Low energy solutions

NORMAN FOSTER, London

In 1979, if issues of energy and the environment were discussed at all, they were framed in terms of 'the oil crisis'--shorthand notation for the belligerent attitude of the Middle-Eastern oil-producing countries and their tightening of the financial screws. In the UK, if we were encouraged to 'clean our teeth in the dark' it was to stave off imminent power cuts rather than to conserve finite global resources. Undoubtedly one of the most significant changes in attitudes of the intervening 25 years relates to the environment and our broadening understanding of the concept of 'sustainability'. Another radical shift in architecture--both in terms of process and product--has been brought about by the computer. Twenty-five years ago the 'computer room' was the hallowed preserve of the few. Today the computer is completely ephemeralized. New computer software has allowed us to explore in quick-time forms and geometries that would once have taken years to refine, and it has enabled us to engineer low-energy environmental solutions--an example of technology and sustainability working hand-in-hand. Vital now, these issues will become ever more pressing as we face an uncertain environmental future.