Necessary monument

Architectural Review, The, July, 1995 by Peter Davey

Monuments are needed (p4). But in our democratic and plural age, they have to be different from the great works of the past. The challenge lies in generating forms and spaces that embody the power of the decent state without falling into the nineteenth-century trap of copying the types of the past which, however noble, were created to serve other and more oppressive regimes.

The French have been the most adventurous in trying to find the nature of the democratic monument. Because French presidents have power unrivalled in any democracy, they are able to celebrate their time with huge built works (as have all their predecessors, kings, emperors and dictators alike). In this issue, we show the last two monuments of Mitterrand's reign: the Cite de la Musique (p66) by Christian de Portzamparc and the Tres Grande Bibliotheque by Dominique Perrault (p60). It is clear that both suffer from hyperventilation. They are both striving so hard to be noticed that their form and content have become disjunct. In particular, the library's upside-down-table parti is simply absurd: the fragile books are stored in glass towers and the wonders of human understanding are arbitrarily divided into four sections by the form of the building. But it must be admitted that the vast building has a great deal of presence, and because of its figure, it has begun to transform a run-down area of the left bank. The succession of monuments on the La Villette site, of which the Cite de la Musique is the latest (and final) act, has undoubtedly greatly helped to improve that part of the city.

But it would be wrong to suppose from the Parisian experience that modern buildings that aspire to the condition of monument must be perversely a-functional, that they must be large, or even that they will necessarily have a transformative effect on their surroundings. Leiviska's wonderfully moving churches for instance (p9) stand modestly on the edges of their towns, serving their congregations but without making any great impact on their surroundings. Similarly, the law court building in Oslo by Ostgaard Arkitekter (p54) makes only a modest immediate impact on the street, yet it effectively expresses the dignity of the law and the judicial process (the effect of its strange roof from a distance is another story). Our other law court, the Palais des Droits de l'Homme in Strasbourg by the Richard Rogers Partnership (p44) can scarcely be called reticent - it is after all Europe's supreme court. The architects' intention was to make 'a non-monumental monument', an impossible aim perhaps, but much more noble than that of the architects of other Euro buildings in Strasbourg, for whom figure came before function with unrestrained pomposity.

Inflated presence and pomposity are too often the attributes of contemporary buildings. In the modern selfish jungle, the building that shouts loudest is the one that gets the media coverage, the highest rents and the quickest returns. At the same time, costs have to be held down, so that buildings become more and more flash and architecture is reduced to glued-on effects. Monumentality, properly understood, is exactly the opposite of this, as the best buildings shown in this issue demonstrate.