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July 12, 2007
How many stars can the skyline take?
If every city wants an iconic building, how will we tell when one is truly special?
The Times of London
Hugh Pearman attends the opening of the Tate Modern’s Global Cities exhibition, and realizes that we're at starchitect saturation, with Atlantic Yards designer Frank Gehry leading the way:
It’s when architects get to the point where you can’t keep track of all their work any more that the alarm bells start to ring. Big, important international landmarks have always been built, but they used to arrive rarely. There was nothing much between the Sydney Opera House competition of 1956 and the Pompidou Centre competition of 1970, for instance. Stuff got built, sure. Cultural buildings leavened the bread of spec office blocks; America went through a superscraper phase.
...
What everyone calls the “Bilbao effect”, after the jump-start impact Gehry’s Guggenheim had on the world perception of that grimy industrial city in the late 1990s, was the same as the Pompidou effect or the Sydney Opera House effect. Cultural buildings as giant sculptures, as identifiers, three-dimensional logos. That’s the aim.
One point that keeps coming up in the criticism of Frank Gehry and Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards scheme:
...such is the growth of the world’s cities that, for the first time, more than half of the world’s population lives in them. That has nothing to do with landmark buildings or the globetrotting signature architects who provide them. It is all to do with finding ways to accommodate everyone. When it comes to the way people live, good ordinary buildings count for a lot more than the headline sculptural stuff. Clean air and water count for a lot, too. But that’s not something you get fees for designing.
...or free land via eminent domain.
Posted by lumi at July 12, 2007 8:41 AM