Where Are We Now?
Architecture’s Place in an Era of Evolving Values
Architectural Record, March 2003
Only 18 months ago, the megabuck glitterati clinked glasses at the unveiling of the Rem Koohaas-designed Guggenheim Las Vegas. It had promised to be one of those moments that history measures as characteristic of its era, just as the emergence of the spire of the Chrysler Building, only months before the stock market crashed, signaled the dizzy peak of Jazz-age optimism. Conjured as a moneymaker, the Las Vegas outpost finally—inevitably, it so recently seemed—merged art, architecture, brand culture and commerce. It celebrated the values of the “bourgeois bohemians” who, according to author David Brooks (in his Bobos in Paradise, Touchstone, 2000), “have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success.”
The Guggenheim Las Vegas is shuttered (temporarily, say officials), as is its sister institution, The Hermitage Guggenheim. The entrepreneurial vision of executive director Thomas Krens, which made possible the architectural event of the decade, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, has ended. That era of endless possibility began deflating along with the dot-com bubble, and evaporated with the broader, corruption-hastened collapse of the American stock market—source of so much Bobo wealth and hubris.
Then the terror attacks of September 11th shattered the nation’s sense of its own inviolability. In that brutal spectacle, we found that we could not consider ourselves safe from large-scale terrorist acts, executed using the portable, inexpensive, and efficient technologies that were among the great industrial accomplishments of recent years. The terror attacks engaged the nation in a war of ideals, one that may have to be fought over an extended period using wartime’s uncompromising measures.
In his book, Brooks argued that the Bobo elite had little use for politics and blurred what had once seemed the defining values of culture (Krens, for example, seeming to equate motorcycles with Mondrian). But a reassessment of national values is clearly underway, even if it is still only simmering. Can an anti-ideological nation that defines itself primarily by what it buys and projects no values beyond those embodied in commercial media fully engage a foe driven by moral and religious fervor?
Under such circumstances enormously ambitious projects like the now-cancelled $650-million Guggenheim branch that would have stretched for a block or more along Manhattan’s East River, and loomed spectacularly over the East River Drive, appear to be very indulgent baubles indeed (not to mention possible terror targets). The uncertainty of the times has stalled a number of other prominent projects including the Magnes Museum in San Francisco (Daniel Libeskind) and the Whitney Museum in New York (Rem Koolhaas/OMA). The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has shelved its ambitious OMA plan, announced only about a year ago.
Big splashy urban trophies are but a tiny fraction of American architectural output, but there is a sense that such projects represent the profession and the limits of its possibilities. If architecture lives by the champagne fundraiser, does it die by it?
This question emerged in a commentary written in the Los Angeles Times by its architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, which seems to echo a gathering unease in the profession. “Today, architects working in America are confined to serving a relatively small and entrenched elite—the corporate kingpins and aging philanthropists who typically make up the boards of the country’s major cultural institutions,” he wrote in January. He worries that an architecture that serves as a “mere plaything for the rich and their institutions,” speaks little to the city’s real needs, especially in its poorer neighborhoods.
The assertiveness of contemporary architectural expression came under attack from another quarter last Fall. In a panel, called Monument and Memory, sponsored by Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archeology, Sherman Nuland, a surgeon and authority on death and healing declared, “I actually find myself offended by the thought that there will be a piece of architecture on that spot [Ground Zero], because, ultimately, architecture is about the architect.” Another panelist, Leon Wieseltier, of the New Republic, added, “Architects in the aftermath of September 11th have been altogether too avid.” Criticizing proposals for the site assembled by New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, he said, “there is something a little grotesque in the interpretation of Ground Zero as a lucky break for art, as the opportunity for advancement of a particular aesthetic cause.”
Wieseltier is not the first to argue that no work of design could ever match the terror attack’s magnitude of tragedy. “The planes that brought down the World Trade Center exposed, along with other frailties, the frailty of matter as a medium for the perpetuation of human progress,” he added. Nor is Nuland alone in his naïve assertion that a garden would somehow escape the visible hand of the designer. But there is something shocking in the idea that architecture lacks legitimacy as a means of cultural expression.
In flush economic times, it mattered less that people thought such things. Just as pop-styled, three-tenor spectacles have been thought to lure new audiences to “serious” music, there has certainly been a hope that the dramatic, sensuous, and even beautiful architectural form-making that has become de rigeur for ambitious institutions in America might build a broader public constituency for design. Anecdotally, it looks like more communities recognize the value of structures that offer amenity to their users and enhance their surroundings. But with economic uncertainty comes pressure to dispense with public-spirited grace notes.
Americans have tended to succumb to such pressure. Even after an extended era of great wealth, we shop not in some kind of American Rue du Rivoli, but in concrete hangers, which, if designed to recognize anything but the cheapness of their construction, offer a faux pediment carved out of Styrofoam and skimmed in synthetic stucco. America obsesses about its children and their education, but increasingly stamps out schools using the same catalog plans in the deserts of the West as in the mangroves of the Gulf Coast. And they little differ from nearby outlet malls.
America is not a poor nation even now, but it builds poor. A nation that works in warehouses, drives to strip malls on massive slabs of asphalt at best embellished with a few trees is not asking architecture to say much.
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