ncontro dei ministeri della cultura dei Paesi del sud-est Europa

< Indietro
Ca’ Giustinian – Sala delle Colonne Sabato 20 novembre 2010, ore 9.00
16 | 11 | 2010
Evento Direzione Generale per la Cooperazione allo Sviluppo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri – UNESCO

Sabato 20 novembre i ministeri della cultura dei Paesi del sud-est Europa si incontreranno nella prestigiosa cornice della Biennale di Venezia presieduta da Paolo Baratta, per rafforzare la cooperazione regionale per la salvaguardia e la promozione del patrimonio culturale nella regione del Veneto. L’incontro, organizzato dall’Ufficio UNESCO a Venezia e dalla Direzione Generale per la Cooperazione allo Sviluppo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, si svolgerà nell’ambito della 12. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura dal titolo People meet in architecture, diretta da Kazuyo Sejima,e vi parteciperanno Albania, Bosnia Erzegovina, Bulgaria, Croazia, Grecia, ex Repubblica jugoslava di Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia e Slovenia.

Dopo i saluti del Presidente della Biennale di Venezia Paolo Baratta, e del Sindaco di Venezia Giorgio Orsoni, apriranno i lavori il Direttore Generale per la Cooperazione allo Sviluppo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri italiano, Elisabetta Belloni, e il Direttore dell’Ufficio UNESCO a Venezia, Engelbert Ruoss. La conferenza sarà un’occasione per presentare i risultati del progetto “Il Patrimonio culturale, un ponte verso un futuro condiviso” e per una verifica delle iniziative avviate dall’Italia sin dal 1995 durante gli eventi bellici, con il Master Plan di Mostar e la ricostruzione del famoso Ponte.

Solo negli ultimi cinque anni, tramite il progetto “Patrimonio Culturale” MAE/UNESCO, sono state realizzate ben 18 iniziative in nove Paesi del sud-est Europa, con l’obiettivo di sostenere la protezione del patrimonio culturale quale strumento di comprensione reciproca, dialogo e sviluppo sostenibile. A sottolineare questo messaggio di unità e concordia, nel corso dell’Incontro sarà anche presentato un percorso di studio che un gruppo di studenti appartenenti ai Paesi partecipanti compirà insieme, il prossimo anno, nella regione del sud-est Europa.

Sede dell’evento sarà la Biennale di Venezia, a conferma del ruolo della città e delle sue istituzioni culturali quali luogo privilegiato di cooperazione culturale internazionale e nell’area dell’Est Europa.

La Cooperazione italiana diventa sempre più protagonista a livello mondiale della protezione del patrimonio culturale e dell’ambiente con l’obiettivo di promuovere opportunità anche imprenditoriali a livello locale.

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For the first time, the most interesting architect is a woman. The world is waking up to her–with the glaring exception of London, her home city. Jonathan Meades meets Zaha Hadid …

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

Zaha Hadid’s practice occupies a former school in Clerkenwell, an area of London that still bears the scent of Dickens. It’s an 1870s building designed by the London School Board architect E.R. Robson, who, typically of his profession, was unquestionably formulaic. Still, his was a sound enough formula. Today the high, plain, light rooms are crammed to bursting with Hadid’s 200 or so employees. Though they are of every conceivable race, they are linked by their youth, their sombre clothes, their intense concentration. They gaze at their screens, astonishingly silently. There is little sound other than the click of keyboards and a low murmur from earphones. They don’t talk to each other. It is as though they are engaged in a particularly exigent exam. It feels more like a school than a former school. And it feels more like a factory than a school. If there is such a thing as a physical manifestation of the dubious concept called the knowledge economy, this is it. This is a site of digital industry.

“What is exciting,” says Zaha, “is the link between computing and fabrication. The computer doesn’t do the work. There is a similar thing to doing it by hand…”

“The computer is a tool,” I agree.

“No. No, it’s not…”

What then?

The workers on the factory floor–my way of putting it, not hers–are, she says “connected by digital knowledge…They have very different interests from 20 years ago.”

Sure. But this does not make immediate sense. It is a matter to return to, that will become clear(ish) in time.

Ten minutes’ walk from the practice is Hadid’s apartment–austerely elegant, a sort of gallery of her painting and spectacularly lissom furniture. It’s a monument to Zaha the public architect rather than Zaha the private woman. It occupies a chunk of an otherwise forgettable block. Her route from home to work might almost have been confected as an illustration of the abruptness of urban mutation. Here is ur-London: stock bricks and red terracotta, pompous warehouses, run-down factories, Victorian philanthropists’ prison-like tenements, grim toytown cottages, high mute walls, a labyrinth of alleys, off-the-peg late-Georgian terraces, neglected pockets of mid-20th-century Utopianism, apologetic infills, ambiguous plots of wasteground. It is neither rough nor pretty, but it has sinewy character. It may be ordinary, but it is undeniably diverse. The daily stroll through this canyon of variety is surely attractive to an artist whose aesthetic is doggedly catholic, each of whose buildings seems unsatisfied with being just one building.

If Zaha is offended by the suggestion that constant exposure to such a typical part of London might, however indirectly, impinge on her work, she doesn’t show it. But she is faintly bemused. It is as though such a possibility had never occurred to her. This is absolutely not the sort of proposition that gets mooted in the world of Big Time Architecture which Hadid has inhabited all her adult life (she is 57), for many years as a perpetually promising aspirant, a “paper architect” who got very little built but still won the Pritzker prize–the Nobel of architecture–which raises the questions of whether architecture is divisible from building, of where the fiction of design stops and the actuality of structure starts. Today she is this tiny, powerful milieu’s most singular star, and its only woman, its only Zaha.

So distinctive a name is useful. It’s a fortuity which might just grant her effortless entry to the glitzy cadre of the mononomial: Elvis, Arletty, Sting. The first architect to be so blessed since Mies (van der Rohe).

Architecture is the most public of endeavours, yet it is a smugly hermetic world. Architects, architectural critics and theorists, and the architectural press (which is little more than a deferential PR machine) are cosily conjoined by an ingrown, verruca-like jargon which derives from the cretinous end of American academe: “Emerging from the now-concluding work on single-surface organisations, animated form, data-scapes, and box-in-box organisations are investigations into the critical consequences of complex vector networks of movement and specularity…”

They’re only talking about buildings. This is the cant of pseudo-science–self-referential, inelegant, obfuscatingly exclusive: it attempts to elevate architecture yet makes a mockery of it. Zaha, however, has the chutzpah to defend it. She claims to be not much of a reader of anything other than magazines, so the coarseness of the prose doesn’t offend her. The point she makes is that this is the lingua franca of intercontinental architecture. A sort of Esperantist pidgin propagated by the world’s major architectural schools–the majority of which happen to be notionally anglophone, yet whose pupils and teachers come from a host of countries–and the world’s major architectural practices which are international and polyglot. When Zaha talks about architecture, about urbanism, about the continuing exemplary importance of the Architectural Association (AA) in London, where she studied after a childhood in Baghdad, boarding school in England and university in Beirut (reading maths), she uses this pidgin, and studs it with syntactical mishaps.

“You know, space is an interesting endeavour…you create an interesting…the impact you have on the cityscape. The whole life of a city can be in single block…Break the block, yeh? Make it porous…Organisational patterns which imply a new geometry…The idea of extrusion…One thing always critical was idea of ground, how to carve the ground, layering, fragmentation…” Perhaps being “connected by digital knowledge” is just a way of circumventing the problems inherent in a polyglot workforce, given that verbal expression plays only a minor part in architectural creation. The gulf between clumsy, approximate jargon and precise, virtuoso design is chasmic. And it has some important ramifications. Despite its practitioners’ fastidious, perhaps delusional protests that it is a creative and scientific endeavour, architecture is a very big business, one that is involved in the creation and sale of one-off objects: it is a trade dealing mostly in the bespoke.

Now, one consequence of being “connected by digital knowledge” is an enforced internationalism–at the highest tier. So take, for example, the Basque provinces where Santiago Calatrava has built Bilbao’s airport, where Frank Gehry has famously built a Guggenheim Museum, where Rafael Moneo has built the (better) Kursaal at San Sebastian, and where Zaha has no fewer than three projects: a new quarter of Bilbao; a sleek, partially buried railway station in Durango, and government offices in Vitoria.

This region, whose paranoiac sense of itself and of its blood-drenched individuality need hardly be emphasised, is becoming a testing ground for exercises in a globalised aesthetic entirely at odds with its vernacular idioms of distended chalets and Hausmanian pomp. Zaha is enthusiastic about this sort of dissonance. She is opposed to new buildings which nod allusively–she would say deferentially–to their ancient neighbours. She regards such buildings as sops to populism.

“It would be interesting to do a large project without looking backwards.”

“How large? “

She grins. “A city. A city! Without looking backwards. Vernacular building… it’s like minimalism.” (I take it that she means neo-vernacular building.) “People can handle minimalism, vernacular. It doesn’t disturb them.”

Hadidopolis, the dreamed city, would, paradoxically, be less disturbing, less astonishing than a single building by her in an already established environment where the clash of idioms is potentially deafening.

“They still talk about contextual. Ha!”

“They” are her bugbear, the (now rather old) New Urbanists, the begetters of crass, kitschy, retro-developments such as Seaside and Disney’s Celebration, both of them in Florida. Her distaste for their twee, anti-modernist escapism is total.

In Zaha’s lexicon, contextual might be synonymous with compromised, which is the last word that could be applied to her own work. Bloody-minded, unaccommodating, serious, joyful, emotionally expressive, intellectually engaging: these are more apt. Yet, no matter what she says, each of her buildings is sensitive to its context. Being sensitive does not mean being passive. It is not a question of taking a cue from the immediate surroundings, but of making an appropriate intervention that changes those surroundings, which creates a new place and better space. She has 25 projects either completed or under construction, and even the most cursory scrutiny of them reveals an exceptional versatility and a multitude of responses. She has eschewed the temptation to develop the signature that afflicts high-end architects, prompting the accusation that Libeskind or Calatrava or Gehry merely plonk down the same lump of product time and again across the globe. Zaha has style all right, but not a style.

The Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati is blocky, grounded, cubistic; it is unrecognisable as being by the same hand as, say, the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, which is taut, dynamic, horizontal and looking to make a quick getaway. The Museum of Transport on the south bank of the Clyde in Glasgow has a silhouette that might be a child’s depiction of a city’s skyline. Of her cable railway stations in Innsbruck, one is sleek and reptilian, a second fungal, a third an homage to a species of bird that never existed.

Sometimes she seems to be working in steel, other times in butter; here she is chiselling wood, there she is twisting chocolate. A university building on the Barcelona waterfront recalls a poorly shuffled pack of cards. Her winning entry for the new Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the already architecturally rich city of Vilnius might be an exquisite example of the patissier’s art which has melted under a merciless sun. The A55 motorway’s descent into Marseille, one of the most thrilling in Europe, will be further enhanced by the headquarters for the cma-cgm container company, built in the cleft where raised carriageways bifurcate. This 147-metre tower will be the highest in the burgeoning city. It is a perhaps reproachful complement to the effortful wackiness of neighbouring projects, such as Massimiliano Fuksas’s Euromed Centre: Zaha’s tower is as stately as a duchess’s ballgown, and again very different from anything else she has done.

How do she and her collaborators, chief among them Patrik Schumacher, manage to avoid the besetting architectural tic of self-plagiarism?

“Don’t draw on computer. Don’t draw and then put it onto computer…I have five screens…Different projects…You work on developing, oh, a table while at the same time you’re developing masterplans. It’s like you have different information coming from different directions. Like photography. Out of focus… then you zoom in. I’ll have a sketch–it’ll take a few times before it takes. Sometimes a few years. You see, not every idea can be used right then. But nothing is lost. Nothing.”

So a shape or form devised initially for a piece of furniture may be fed a course of steroids and become a building?

“No. That’s not what I’m saying. Doesn’t work like that.”

I rather suspect that Zaha has an ancient fear: that to discover how her processes work would be to jeopardise them.

*****

The idea that London comprises a series of villages–an estate agent’s vulgar conceit–goes lazily unchallenged. Villages are small, hick, inward-looking. London is not. London pioneered sprawl: it was a horse-drawn precursor of Los Angeles. It is a city of stylistic collisions and astonishing juxtapositions. Which might be reckoned to make it susceptible to imaginative and unorthodox architectural interventions. There is, after all, no classical homogeneity to rupture, no defining idiom which must be adhered to.

Yet Zaha Hadid–an architect who is nothing if not imaginative, nothing if not unorthodox, who is feted throughout the world as, ugly word, a starchitect–still does not have a single building to her name in London, despite having lived and worked here for three and a half decades. There are, to be sure, schemes–the 2012 Olympic Aquatic Centre, and a building for the Architecture Foundation in Southwark; but the former’s budget is being persistently called into question and pared, and the other has not progressed since it was first mooted several years ago.

It would be disingenuous to feign surprise at this absence of a work by her in her adopted home. A catalogue of circumstances militates against her. She is extraordinarily engaging but equally obstinate. She has never pretended to be anything other than an artist. An artist moreover of a particularly dogged sort, one who has kept alive, or revived, the unfashionable notion of the avant-garde. And who has created her own fashion rather than blindly following the herd like, oh, 99% of architects.

She is, evidently, not English; her sensibility is not English; her lack of timidity is not English; her earnestness is not English; nor her resolute ambition. Then there is the question of her sex.

*****

Architecture is dominated by men to a degree that no remotely kindred endeavour is. This has always been the case. The history of architecture can be written, often has been, with no mention of women save, perhaps, of monarchs, aristocratic grandees, philanthropists: patrons, not makers. The contention that women are less adept than men at three-dimensional thought doesn’t begin to account for their acutely disproportionate position in British architecture. According to a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) survey in 2007, only 14% of practising architects in Britain are women. The percentage of qualified women architects is 38%, but women drop out at an alarming rate–so alarming that the former RIBA president George Ferguson commissioned an investigative study.

He need hardly have bothered. Its conclusions were thoroughly predictable: low salaries and long hours (which equally afflict men), lack of preferment and office machismo (which probably don’t). The outstanding woman architect of the generation before Zaha’s, Georgie Wolton, opted for a (successful) career as a landscape architect having designed just one major building, a studio block in the north London district of Holloway. Sarah Wigglesworth (whose most celebrated building is also in Holloway), Amanda Levete and Cécile Brisac are London architects currently producing work of the highest order, much of it outside Britain, in cultures where there exists less bias against women. The volume and prestige of commissions received by such practitioners as Manuelle Gautrand in France or Tilla Theus in Switzerland is unthinkable in Britain.

Of course, the British bias is not merely against architects who happen to be women. It is against architects who happen to be architects.

British architects who aspire to anything more than polite apartment buildings or self-effacing, production-line offices have to prove themselves abroad. That is where creative reputations are made. This has been the case since the early 1970s, when public confidence in architecture plummeted and architects came to be regarded as licensed vandals committing a sort of aesthetic trahison des clercs.

“No! Later,” Zaha corrects me. “It was 1975, six. Definitely.” By that time, she had been at the AA for four years. It is telling that popular antipathy towards the discipline took so long to breach that institution’s carapace of ivory exclusivity.

She is certain of the date. For that was when, incredulous and indignant, she witnessed the transformation, the near-apostasy, of some of her dogmatically modernist teachers. “Between one term and the next,” she says, Leon Krier became a former modernist, literally a post-modernist. Krier lurched, in the bipolar way that fundamentalists will, from preaching the rhetoric of imaginative, technologically based rationalism, to becoming a groupie of the then still incarcerated Nazi war criminal Albert Speer, an architect whose formidable banality was matched only by the megalomaniac scale of his (mostly, thankfully) unbuilt projects. Krier would, frighteningly, go on to become the Prince of Wales’s architectural adviser, and thence the brain (if that’s the word) behind such volkisch excrescences of the New Urbanism as Poundbury, the cottagey slum of the future disgracefully dumped on a greenfield site on the edge of Dorchester.

“By 1978 he is god of historicism…You know–that attitude that you can’t go forward without looking back, that’s the historicist position, post-modern position.” It’s one she deplores, to put it mildly. Zaha seems to consider post-modernism a sort of betrayal. Which may be going a bit far. Surely, I suggest (adapting Duke Ellington’s maxim about music), the question is not taxonomical, not what style a specific building belongs to–post-modern or any other–but whether it is good or bad. She appears not to hear. She asks for more tea. She snuffles. She has a cold.

But then I too would develop a cold if someone had put to me a proposition that impertinently questions the very core of my aesthetic. She is contemptuous of the sort of relativism that even hints that the often infantile, mostly eager-to-please idiom of the Thatcher years is serious architecture. She is, perhaps, right. Accessibility merely means lowest-common-denominator populism, commercial opportunism, the subjugation of the creator by market researchers, and of originality by second-guessing what the “people” will find acceptable. Zaha has been fighting all her professional life against the architecture of the marketplace, struggling to assert the paramouncy of the artist, ie, of herself, of an uncompromised vision. She had to bide her time a long while.

She was the victim of a shift in taste. She could, chameleon-like, have followed Krier and many of her AA contemporaries and near-contemporaries, who discovered themselves suddenly sympathetic to upside-down diocletian windows, playground colours, bluto columns, oafish pediments: the components of a new architectural “language”. On the other hand there were those who invented with aplomb.

She tells me she doesn’t want to talk about other architects’ work before I have even broached the matter. Happily she isn’t as good as her word. An architect with a detailed knowledge of architectural and urbanistic history is, astonishingly, a rarity. Yet the living and the dead constellate her discourse. They are not the figures one might expect. Despite the status she has achieved she still, implicitly, considers herself an underdog rather than a star. There is something heartening and generous about the way she enthuses about the work of Douglas Stephen, an unacknowledged genius who designed less than a dozen buildings in a lifetime of scrupulously high standards and absolute integrity. She is enthusiastic about the Italian rationalist Aldo Rossi, whom she describes as forgotten. Forgotten by whom? I wonder.

“Forgotten,” she insists.

I point out that his rationalism was hardly all-encompassing and that whenever he was in London he would go to gaze at the clunkily historicist War Office in Whitehall. She smiles, as though to acknowledge the disparity between the architect and the man. She admires Rodney Gordon, maybe the greatest of the British brutalists, a sculptor in concrete whose finest buildings (the Tricorn in Portsmouth, the Trinity in Gateshead) have been or are about to be demolished.

Would we burn a Bacon? Take a hammer to a Gormley? No. But in Britain architecture is peculiarly expendable. British short-termism is expressed in two ways. Buildings, notably those of the 1950s and 1960s, are wantonly torn down before they have been allowed the chance to come back into fashion. This, of course, is not exclusive to Britain. Even in France, which has a much greater appreciation of modernism, Claude Parent’s space-age shopping centres at Reims and Sens have been disfigured. We rue the loss of High Victorian buildings of the 1860s. Why will future generations not rue the loss of those made in the 1960s, during another of those rare periods when British architecture abandoned its habitual timidity?

Secondly, buildings used to outlive humans, not least because the process of construction was so long and laborious that permanence was a desirable aim. Today’s corporate presumption is that a building’s duration will be hardly longer than a few decades. Its lifespan is in inverse proportion to our own continually stretching sentence. This is disposable-building syndrome, and one consequence of it is that quick delivery and low cost are valued above all other considerations. Much architecture is, then, increasingly concerned with the provision of what are in effect temporary structures. Zaha has an unfashionable distaste for such ephemerality. She must, like any architect, worry about what will become of her buildings. One of her earliest completed projects, a pavilion for the study of landscape at Weil am Rhein on the German-Swiss border, is already looking as tatty as a sink estate, while the fire station she built nearby for the furniture manufacturer Vitra’s factory was considered inappropriate for that role and has been turned into a museum of chairs.

A consequence of short-termism is standardisation. “London is becoming more and more even. I don’t like current work here. I’m not against new projects, obviously I’m not. But there’s no planning here, no critique about what is coming next. There is a responsibility on the city to impose–not, not, ah, rules but…quality. The state should invest in architecture like in Spain, Holland. But the dynamic here, it’s all corporate…”

Again, it always has been. Aesthetic dirigisme is as alien to Britain as economic dirigisme. Public building is the exception: the long third quarter of the 20th century–the years of abundant social housing, of new hospitals, theatres and libraries, of the new universities and their architecturally enlightened chancellors–were atypical.

“Yup,” she sighs and shakes her head. “London: city of lost opportunities.”

That’s largely because London lacks the sort of patrons the city needs: wilful, vain, philanthropically inclined plutocrats with a taste for self-advertisement, endowment and high-art museums rather than for football grounds. Collecting buildings is a very expensive hobby. There is no Getty, Guggenheim, Whitney, Vanderbilt or Rosenthal here.

Zaha doesn’t seem embittered but, rather, wearily resigned. As well she might be, for while London is unquestionably enjoying a building boom, it is equally suffering a blandness boom. The private-finance initiative does not encourage audacity. Indeed, it is infected with an almost totalitarian conviction that architecture should be useful rather than beautiful or striking or marvellous. And most architects duly oblige, for they know who calls the tune. It is as though they pride themselves on the design of risk-free buildings whose primary attribute is that no one will notice them, so no one will take offence. (They are wrong. Blandness on a massive scale is offensive: just look at Southwark Street, across the river from the City of London, where the prolific commercial practice Allies and Morrison has committed some sort of crime against streetscape which Zaha loyally refuses to condemn.)

Why then does she base herself in a city that, if not professionally antagonistic to her, has been hardly welcoming?

“I was teaching here.”

But she was also teaching at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Hamburg, Vienna…

“Vienna has the same problems as London.”

What are they?

“It’s historic city.”

But many of the cities in which she has buildings under construction are equally historic. Naples, Madrid, Strasbourg, Barcelona, Seville. And as for Rome…

“I’m in London because the best civil engineers in the world are here.”

Civil or structural engineers are unquestionably the scientists without whom architects would not exist. But, given the internationalism of both architects and engineers, it is a truly bizarre reason. One is inclined to suspect that it’s a professional disguise that masks a private inclination.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever do a big project in London…But I do have a take on the city.”

That take is as much a flâneur’s as an architect’s. Over 20 years ago, Zaha envisaged a linear city down the Lea Valley and another around the Royal Docks. The latter has come to pass, but in typically London manner–piecemeal, unco-ordinated, scrappy, unambitious. And the Lea Valley is being cleared, cleansed, to host the Olympic games, a trophy coveted by emerging tyrannies, tinpot totalitarians and third-world dictatorships. Tactfully, and atypically for so opinionated a woman, she refuses to diverge from the party line and mutters some right-on stuff about the games’ “legacy”. Maybe she believes it, maybe not.

I wonder, because Zaha the flâneur has an immense appetite for a very different London, an insatiable curiosity which she reveals only obliquely. She palpably appreciates the very oddities of the area that the Olympic site will occupy, the atmospheric terrain vague of abandonment, dereliction and toxic canalisation.

*****

When Zaha talks about anything other than architecture, she employs an urbane vocabulary, a flourishing grammar, and even the definite and indefinite articles. She is fun. On how London has changed socially: “The kids cannot believe it when I tell them about the King’s Road in those days, cannot believe it.” She is eloquent about parties, friends, flu remedies, clothes (she nearly always wears black, though she professes to pine after the days of colour), a tardy florist, a driver whose limited comprehension of sat-nav prompts him to put in “crescent” rather than the name of the crescent. Her word-power expands miraculously.

You might deduce that a different part of the brain is activated, that architecture is confined to a ghetto that is actually cut off from language–pre-verbal or extra-verbal. Zaha is neither dyslexic nor left-handed, two conditions which afflict a number of extravagantly gifted architects.

The awkward struggle to describe the products of her capacious imagination is hampered by her disinclination to employ simile, which, though it might clarify, would undermine her achievement. To compare her work to something already existing would be to detract from it. For me to state that her buildings are like something–frozen napkins, or origami in a hurry, or squeezed-out tubes of ointment, or a carnival dame swaying in a frock, or a flock of starlings cartwheeling like iron filings subjected to a magnet, or baroque drapery–is explanatory shorthand. It is not to debase them, far from it. But I didn’t make them. They are admirable for a load of reasons.

Her work derives, she says, not from observation of extant architecture. Nor from formalism. She claims to take nothing from organic morphology. No ammonites, no sharks, no petals. It all begins with painting, with pure abstraction.

But a few moments later she changes her mind. She contradicts herself and attributes her inspiration to landscape, topography, sedimentology, geological patterns…Indeed, one of her pieces of furniture is called Moraine, and there is an unmistakable acknowledgment of a badlands roster of folds, prisms, hoodoos and organ pipes, a nod to the shifting shapes of dunes and drifts. European architects such as Lars Sonck, Antoni Gaudi and Gottfried Boehm have represented rock formations with differing degrees of naturalism. Zaha goes further. Buildings are static objects. Throughout the 20th century, architects vainly attempted to imply that structures were on the move, to invest them with speed, one of the essential properties of modernity but one which is, alas, necessarily absent even in borax buildings that are streamlined or googie ones which borrow the imagery of aero-planes or rockets. Much of Zaha’s work implies a different sort of speed–the slow passing of millennia, the gradual attrition of wind, the grind of the sea on stones, the way rain turns chalk into pinnacles and spires. There is a scent of erosion, of time’s inexorability, of future fragmentation. Of mortality.

Image Source: Zaha Hadid Architects, Steve Double

(Jonathan Meades writes and broadcasts on culture, architecture and food. His programme “Magnetic North” has just ended on BBC2)

Novedad de hoy y ruina de pasado mañana, enterrada y resucitada cada día,
convivida en calles, plazas, autobuses, taxis, cines, teatros,
bares, hoteles, palomares, catacumbas,
la ciudad enorme que cabe en un cuarto de tres metros cuadrados inacabable como galaxia,
la ciudad que nos sueña a todos y que todos hacemos y deshacemos y rehacemos mientras soñamos,
la ciudad que todos soñamos y que cambia sin cesar mientras la soñamos,
la ciudad que despierta cada cien años y se mira en el espejo de una palabra y no se reconoce y otra vez se echa a dormir,
la ciudad que brota de los parpados de la mujer que duerme a mi lado y se convierte,
con sus monumentos y sus estatuas, sus historias y sus leyendas,
en un manantial hecho de muchos ojos y cada ojo refleja el mismo paisaje detenido,
antes de las escuelas y las prisiones, los alfabetos y los números, el altar y la ley:
el río que es cuatro ríos, el huerto, el árbol, la Varona y el Varón vestidos de viento
-volver, volver, ser otra vez arcilla, bañarse en esa luz, dormir bajo esas luminarias,
flotar sobre las aguas del tiempo como la hoja llameante del arce que arrastra la corriente,
volver, ¿estamos dormidos o despiertos?, estamos, nada más estamos, amanece, es temprano,
estamos en la ciudad, no podemos salir de ella sin caer en otra, idéntica aunque sea distinta,
hablo de la ciudad inmensa, realidad diaria hecha de dos palabras: los otros,
y en cada uno de ellos hay un yo cercenado de un nosotros, un yo a la deriva,
hablo de la ciudad construida por los muertos, habitada por sus tercos fantasmas, regida por su despótica memoria,
la ciudad con la que hablo cuando no hablo con nadie y que ahora me dicta estas palabras insomnes,
hablo de las torres, los puentes, los subterráneos, los hangares, maravillas y desastres,
el Estado abstracto y sus policías concretos, sus pedagogos, sus carceleros, sus predicadores,
las tiendas donde hay de todo y gastamos de todo y todo se vuelve humo,
los mercados y sus pirámides de frutos, rotación de las cuatro estaciones, las reses en canal colgando de los garfios, las colinas de especias y las torres de frascos y conservas,
todos los sabores y los colores, todos los olores y todas las materias, la marea de las voces -agua, metal, madera, barro-, el trajín, el regateo y el trapicheo desde el comienzo de los días,
hablo de los edificios de cantería y de mármol, de cemento, vidrio, hierro, del gentío en los vestíbulos y portales, de los elevadores que suben y bajan como el mercurio en los termómetros,
de los bancos y sus consejos de administración, de la fábricas y sus gerentes, de los obreros y sus máquinas incestuosas,
hablo del desfile inmemorial de la prostitución por calles largas como el deseo y como el aburrimiento,
del ir y venir de los autos, espejo de nuestros afanes, quehaceres y pasiones (¿por què, para qué, hacia dónde?),
de los hospitales siempre repletos y en los que siempre morimos solos,
hablo de la penumbra de ciertas iglesias y de las llamas titubeantes de los cirios en los altares,
tímidas lenguas con las que los desamparados hablan con los santos y con las vírgenes en un lenguaje ardiente y entrecortado,
hablo de la cena bajo la luz tuerta en la mesa coja y los platos desportillados,
de las tribus inocentes que acampan en los baldíos con sus mujeres y sus niños, sus animales y sus espectros,
de las ratas en el albañal y de los gorriones valientes que anidan en los alambres, en las cornisas y en los árboles martirizados,
de los gatos contemplativos y de sus novelas libertinas a la luz de la luna, diosa cruel de las azoteas,
de los perros errabundos, que son franciscanos y nuestros bhikkus, los perros que desentierran los huesos del sol,
hablo del anacoreta y de la fraternidad de los libertarios, de la conjura de los justicieros y de la banda de los ladrones,
de la conspiración de los iguales y de la sociedad de amigos del Crimen, del club de los suicidas y de Jack el Destripador,
del Amigo de los hombres, afilador de la guillotina, y de César, Delicia del Género Humano,
hablo del barrio paralítico, el muro llagado, la fuente seca, la estatua pintarrajeada,
hablo de los basureros del tamaño de una montaña y del sol taciturno que se filtra en el polumo,
de los vidrios rotos y del desierto de chatarra, del crimen de anoche y del banquete del inmortal Trimalción,
de la luna entre las antenas de la Televisión y de una mariposa sobre un bote de inmundicias,
hablo de madrugadas como vuelo de garzas en la laguna y del sol de alas transparentes que se posa en los follajes de piedra de las iglesias y del gorjeo de la luz en los tallos de vidrio de los palacios,
hablo de algunos atardeceres al comienzo del otoño, cascadas de oro incorpóreo, transfiguración de este mundo, todo pierde cuerpo, todo se queda suspenso,
la luz piensa y cada uno de nosotros se siente pensado por esa luz reflexiva, durante un largo instante el tiempo se disipa, somos aire otra vez,
hablo del verano y de la noche pausada crece en el horizonte como un monte de humo que poco a poco se desmorona y cae sobre nosotros con una ola,
reconciliación de los elementos, la noche se ha tendido y su cuerpo es un río poderoso de pronto dormido, nos mecemos en el oleaje de su respiración, la hora es palpable, la podemos tocar como un fruto,
han encendido las luces, arden las avenidas con el fulgor del deseo, en los parques la luz eléctrica atraviesa los follajes y cae sobre nosotros una llovizna verde y fosforescente que nos ilumina sin mojarnos, los árboles murmuran, nos dicen algo,
hay calles en penumbra que son una insinuación sonriente,
no sabemos adónde van, tal vez al embarcadero de las islas perdidas,
hablo de las estrellas sobre las altas terrazas y de las frases indescifrables que escriben en la piedra del cielo,
hablo del chubasco rápido que azota los vidrios y humilla las arboledas, duró veinticinco minutos y ahora allá arriba hay agujeros azules y chorros de luz, el vapor sube del asfalto, los coches relucen, hay charcos donde navegan barcos reflejos,
hablo de nubes nómadas y de una música delgada que ilumina una habitación en un quinto piso y de un rumor de risas en mitad de la noche como agua remota que fluye entre raíces y yerbas,
hablo del encuentro esperado con esa forma inesperada en la que encarna lo desconocido y se manifiesta a cada uno:
ojos que son la noche que se entreabre y el día que despierta, el mar que se tiende y la llama que habla, pechos valientes: marea lunar,
labios que dicen sésamo y el tiempo se abre y el pequeño cuarto se vuelve jardín de metamorfosis y el aire y el fuego se entrelazan, la tierra y el agua se confunden,
o es el advenimiento del instante en que allá, en aquel otro lado que es aquí mismo, la llave se cierra y el tiempo cesa de manar,
instante del hasta aquí, fin del hipo, del quejido y del ansia, el alma pierde cuerpo y se desploma por un agujero del piso, cae en sí misma, el tiempo se ha desfondado, caminamos por un corredor sin fin, jadeamos en un arenal,
¿esa música se aleja o se acerca, esas luces pálidas se encienden o apagan?, canta el espacio, el tiempo se disipa: es el boqueo, es la mirada que resbala por la lisa pared, es la pared que calla, la pared,
hablo de nuestra historia pública y de nuestra historia secreta, la tuya y la mía,
hablo de la selva de piedra, el desierto, del profeta, el hormiguero de almas, la congregación de tribus, la casa de los espejos, el laberinto de ecos,
hablo del gran rumor que viene del fondo de los tiempos, murmullo incoherente de naciones que se juntan o dispersan, rodar de multitudes y sus armas como peñascos que se despeñan, sordo sonar de huesos cayendo en el hoyo de la historia,
hablo de la ciudad, pastora de siglos, madre que nos engendra y nos devora, nos inventa y nos olvida.

Octavio Paz

eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organization. The award seeks to discover young talents whose ideas will change the way we understand architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

The Jury of the 2010 edition was formed by leaders of the architecture and design fields including: Mario Cipresso, Kyu Ho Chun, Kenta Fukunishi, Elie Gamburg, Mitchell Joachim, JaeYoung Lee, Adelaïde Marchi, Nicola Marchi and Eric Vergne. The Jury selected 3 winners and 27 special mentions among 430 entries from 42 countries.

Globalization, sustainability, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution, were some of the multi-layered elements taken into consideration.  The first place was awarded to a project for a vertical prison designed by architecture students Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze, from Malaysia. Their project examines the possibility of creating a prison-city in the sky, where the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields and factories that would support the host city below.

The recipients of the second place are Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, and Leonardus Chrisnantyo, from Indonesia, whose project ‘Ciliwung Recovery Program’ aims to purify and repair the Ciliwung River habitat. The building is designed as an ingenious habitable machine that would collect garbage, purify water, and provide housing to thousands of people that live in the slums along the river.

The third place was awarded to Ryohei Koike and Jarod Poenisch, from the United States, for their project ‘Nested Skyscraper’ that explores robotic construction techniques for a novel structure of carbon sleeves and fiber-laced concrete. The building is a system of multiple layers of composite louvers which thicken and rotate according to solar exposure, ventilation, and materials performance.

Among the special mentions there are skyscrapers used as bridges that link different territories, cities in the sky powered by renewable energies, instant deployable buildings for disaster zones, skyscrapers that purify and desalinate sea water, or high-rises that commemorate historic dates. Other proposals create new pedestrian layers for existing cities. Some use the latest building technologies and parametric design to configure environmentally conscious self-sufficient buildings, while others create city-like buildings where different programs are mixed in one structure.

eVolo Magazine would like to acknowledge all the competitors for their effort, vision, and passion for architectural innovation.

Because you invited me here, we did some research. We looked first at antiquity and realized that 25 years before Christ there was already a profound knowledge about ecology and how people should build to be economical, logical, and beautiful. Vitruvius (1), for instance, was completely aware that the sun would cast shadows at different inclinations depending on the orientation of the site, and that his architecture should address these conditions (2). Since the sun was shining from the south, the hottest parts of Roman baths should also be in the south (3). This knowledge was not limited to individual buildings, but extended to the planning of cities that were effortless and logical, based on engagements with and an understanding of nature.

During the Renaissance, this knowledge was cultivated and further amplified. A century later, the so-called Enlightenment broke out, and with Enlightenment came a formal launch of modernity. What we see is that the Enlightenment had a phenomenal effect on reason, in terms of triggering the apparatus of modernity in a surprisingly short time. Also inscribed in Enlightenment were people like Goethe, who effortlessly combined art and science, and people like Caspar David Friedrich. His paintings show highly sophisticated and cultivated people in search of and interacting with nature in a way that doesn’t show any tension or alienation; the interaction actually seems to work for both sides (4). Perhaps the very final outcome of this highly reasonable streak of our civilization is the nuclear power plant (5).

There is also an entirely different streak in our culture. It is a not a narrative of linear and reasonable progress, but a narrative of disasters and fundamental tensions between nature and mankind. It depicts nature as a kind of punishment of mankind and, occasionally, mankind as a punisher of nature (6, 7). That narrative, however we look at it – religiously or otherwise – is a fundamentally anti-modern one, which insists on apocalyptic expectations. Friedrich symbolizes this feeling in some of his paintings, which generated a series of prophets. Perhaps Malthus was the first one, with his belief that a premature death must visit the human race. Others were Paul Ehrlich in 1968 (8) and James Lovelock (9).

What we have are two completely opposite strains, both with very eloquent and impressive practitioners. Both ideologies read the same phenomena in completely contradictory terms: one as a line of reasonableness and the other as a line of disastrous manipulation and wrongness. The confusion at the current moment is generated by the tension between these two lines. We are not able to disentangle them or understand when one of the traditions speaks and when the other speaks. This polarity is still operating and has been for a long time.

To introduce a slightly more autobiographical moment, when I studied in London in 1968, I was taught in a school where tropical architecture was still on the curriculum. Although I didn’t take it entirely seriously, I was fascinated by its teachers, who taught us an incredible respect for the landscape. They taught us to look at other cities to see how they work, and to look at seemingly completely non-architectural environments. For them, no issue was too humble or lowly. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry (10) made drawings of open sewers and ways to clean them. That kind of humility in architectural education has practically disappeared.

But it’s not only about humility. They were also interested in the tropics as a special domain, which is now the front line of the tensions and impossibilities that we are confronted with. They looked at these areas in great depth and were able to analyze to what extent this climate required specific architectures and planning. The studies also examined how an architecture could emerge that would actually persist in this climate without the degree of artificiality that we now take for granted. What I find touching in retrospect is not only the earnestness of this discourse, but also the conviction that they had relevant knowledge worth teaching. The equivalent of this kind of knowledge today is rather tenuous in our academies.

They developed a repertoire of measures, avoiding air conditioning and the trappings of typical Western architecture, and created strange prisons of avoidance. They also created an aesthetic that was able to renew modern architecture, which at the same time was running into issues of Puritanism and unpopularity. They not only worked on architecture, but also on cities or villages. I am impressed by the perhaps condescending, but still highly efficient didactic intensity of this kind of effort. Even the simplest words were explained in plausible language. As a student, I cannot say that I embraced this knowledge. But in retrospect, I was being confronted with knowledge that was on the way out because it was in the way of development. That is one of the tragedies.

I have since become increasingly involved in researching Africa and the tropics, and have found examples of engineering for Lagos by an East German firm. They seemed to ruthlessly turn Lagos into a modern metropolis, making everything local disappear. But upon closer inspection, the project coexisted plausibly with expressions of poverty and of social improvisation. Though it appeared completely chaotic, things actually worked extremely well in a process of mutual interdependence. There is a subtlety to this kind of engineering that is not visible at first sight. But if you look over time as the infrastructure decays, you see that it has a certain depth (11).

That depth came not from the capitalist West, but from the Communist world, which influenced Africa in the 1960s and 70s. It was so frugal, so efficient, so methodical and so coherent that it could actually realize complex and subtle entities. In the period between 1965 and 75 there was an incredible ability to take difficult conditions seriously, to take different climates seriously, to take the question of energy use seriously and to try and combine the words “design” and “science”. Unfortunately, 30 years later, these words are further apart than ever before.

This joint entity, design and science, was stimulated and sponsored not only by designers and scientists, but also by free-form intellectuals like Marshal MacLuhan and Ian McHarg, a sociologist who, in Design with Nature, wrote one of the most subtle manifestos on how culture and nature could coexist.

At a reunion on a boat in the Mediterranean in 1965 (12), the anthropologist Margaret Mead and other intellectuals discussed at a very high level of intelligence the issues that we are discussing now. They produced sketches in which, almost as a matter of course, human energy, solar energy, and commercial forms of energy are intertwined and mixed in ways we barely know how to do now. What I find particularly impressive in the handwriting of these sketches is how enforced and urgent it is compared to our current, more smooth and perfect renderings. These sketches show the inevitability of nature and networks operating together.

Perhaps Buckminster Fuller’s contribution to the field was the apotheosis of this combination of nature and network. He did the most with the least, producing on the one hand diagrams of ponderous simplicity. On the other hand, he worked on radical inventories of the world, both of cultural and natural elements, documenting the neck-and-neck race between them in a very forward-looking way. For instance, this group was appalled by the predominance of American consumption. Fuller was able to show, in diagrams produced for a mainstream publication, how the problems of the world could be resolved by switching military resources into other domains (13). This kind of clarity doesn’t exist at this moment at all. It is the absence of this kind of clarity that makes us so desperate for a degree of coherence.

Fuller also made a diagram of energy in the world running in certain kinds of streaks or vents, therefore enhancing the entire efficiency of the system (14). There’s more about it later. Now, if you put everything that’s happening in the late 1960s and early 70s in a cloud or cluster, it seems that there is a very confusing mixture of good and bad. But if you put the events into different zones or categories, a pattern emerges. There are of course many crises, but an explosion of green consciousness as a response to those crises. At the same time, a highly developed and imaginative form of engineering, theorized by Fuller and others, was put into practice: the bridge across the Bosporus, the reversal of a river current to irrigate entire parts of Siberia, the spread of computers, the Concorde, the World Trade Center, and the first international conference about international environmental issues.

Against this backdrop came the first Club of Rome meeting, which talked about the limits of growth (15). It was a reasonable and dramatically illustrated argument about the limits of resources, and showed how in the next hundred years we have to be more careful and more restrained in our consumption. But then the market economy was unleashed in the mid 70s. The market economy had a devastating effect on the knowledge that had been accumulated at this point. This forced the apocalyptic streak of the polarity that I defined at the beginning.

Twenty years later, the Club of Rome is completely open about the fact that “global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill … In searching for a new enemy to unite us.” In the same year, they even suggested that “democracy is no longer well suited for the task ahead” (16, 17). You see a perverse amplification and intensification of the arguments: seemingly rational, but actually on the apocalyptic side.

So, these two tendencies almost merge, or the evidence that they use is the same. But one continues to use the evidence for a rational and reasonable future, such as the application of atomic power. In France, about 80 percent of electricity is generated from nuclear energy. The country in which the Enlightenment began is still the most enlightened nation, in a way, with its energy policy.

Scientists like Freeman Dyson relativize the disaster of CO2 levels, saying that actually they could also, in certain areas, have a positive effect (18). He is, of course, completely vilified for these statements. But this kind of thinking leads perhaps to a school of thought that engineering can finally offer a number of strategies that could help us.

Then there is the apocalyptic streak, which portrays trains powered by coal as a holocaust (19), and which develops more and more extreme scenarios (20, 21). For example the deadline on intervention that the Club of Rome envisioned in its first report has been revised to four years, confronting all of us with a desperate time limit.

We have an energetic crew of people working on the problem, but we doubt their seriousness and whether they have the necessary information at their disposal. Interesting accusations emerge: “White people with blue eyes have caused it”. “America can no longer dictate”. “Western consumption is no longer necessary”. “The dollar has to be abandoned”. What you see is a push back of the American position (22, 23, 24).

Now, what about architecture? I think what the crisis will mean for us is an end to the ¥€$ regime. For those who didn’t recognize it, this is a collection of masterpieces by architects in the last ten years (25). It’s a skyline of icons showing, mercilessly, that an icon may be individually plausible, but that collectively they form an ultimately counterproductive and self-canceling kind of landscape. So that is out.

Unfortunately, the sum total of current architectural knowledge hasn’t grown beyond this opposition. That is where the market economy and the evolution of architectural culture have been extremely irresponsible in letting knowledge simply disappear between the different preoccupations. I still think that architectural dialectics are between buildings like Falling Water and Farnsworth House, and are therefore not deep enough.

We have all of these images of buildings that do not perform correctly, but our answers are not necessarily very deep. I don’t exclude myself from any of these comments, as I hope you realize. Embarrassingly, we have been equating responsibility with literal greening. The boutique of Ann Demeulemeester in Seoul, for example, covered entirely in green (26). Even significant buildings by serious architects, such as the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, for me almost fall into the same category (27). What is very difficult about architecture today is that architects themselves are the main commentators, using a language that is either outrageously innocent or deeply calculated – probably both – but in a shocking way. If you read the criticism in the New York Times by Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architect’s commentary seems to work very well, because Ouroussoff is extremely happy with this building. A question that doesn’t seem to be asked is: is it all so necessary? And, do we need more aquariums? We have a kind of Parthenon with a planetarium, a piazza, and a rainforest. I would politely submit that it is not a Parthenon. In Abu Dhabi, Foster makes a much more serious effort with his zero-carbon city, Masdar, which will have no cars and will be carbon neutral by using technologies that are still to be revealed.

I didn’t really want to talk about our own work, but there is one project that resonates with the material here. It also indicates the direction in which I think we need to move: we need to step out of this amalgamation of good intentions and branding in a political direction and a direction of engineering. We are working on an analysis of what Europe could do with power harvested from the North Sea. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and England all have large territories on the North Sea (28). We have divided them into sections, which means that Holland could be conceived as having a new shape, extending into the North Sea.

The project imagines that wind energy could be combined, and that supply and demand could be regulated (29). A single ring of integrated wind turbines would not only generate energy, but would also have additional benefits like the reuse of some of the redundant oil-extraction apparatus, and potentially even generate its own tourism. A single ring could generate more energy than the Middle East currently produces each year (30). Looking even further, there would be a potential North-South connection to try to exploit the specific potentials in each area: wind, tidal, and solar. All these sources of energy can be mobilized into a single European grid (31). It’s simply through the combination of politics and engineering that this needs to be addressed.

In working on this material, I discovered that what we are doing is inadvertently exactly what Fuller proposed when he looked at the map forty years ago (32).

Rem Koolhaas
Keynote lecture on two strands of thinking in sustainability: advancement vs. apocalypse.
Ecological Urbanism Conference, Harvard University, 3 April, 2009

In partnership with Luis have managed to maintain one of the best consulting firms in Economics and Urban Planning  and established connections between contemporary society, economics and architecture.  She heads the work of both ULP and TAU, the conceptual branch of ULP focused on social, economical and technological developments and exploring territories beyond architectural and urban concerns.