When austerity overtakes architectural ambition
Ellis Woodman- Executive Editor
When large-scale architectural projects fail economically, how much is the design to blame?
In a week in which we review the lone housing block to have been realised within Will Alsop’s decade-old masterplan for Middlehaven, news arrives that the board of Zaha Hadid’s Stirling Prize winning Maxxi has been placed into administration.
These projects are far from the only victims of the current economic downturn, but given the scale of their architectural ambitions, their fate feels particularly bleak. Like Shelley’s traveller from an antique land surveying Ozymandias’ wreck, we can only look at Fat’s wasteland-engulfed building in the knowledge that it is a remnant of a long-gone, bolder age.
How much of the blame for these schemes’ problems can be attributed to their designs? It is an awkward question but one that can’t be avoided if we want to understand how architecture might genuinely contribute to projects of urban regeneration.
From Sanaa’s quickly closed Zollverein School of Management and Design to Peter Eisenman’s wildly overscaled and overbudget City of Culture at Santiago de Compostela, one can think of all too many recent high-profile buildings that were revealed as hungry white elephants once their moment in the spotlight had passed. Failures on that scale can blight communities’ lives for decades.
Let us have an architecture that is bold and adventurous, by all means, but one that is lifelike too.
Related Articles
- McAslan’s London staff face threat of redundancy
12 July 2012
- Community in a Cube, Middlehaven, by Fat Architects
25 April 2012
- Zaha Hadid Architects' Maxxi museum in administration
24 April 2012
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Readers' comments (1)
The problem appears to occur when a towering architectural ego intersects with an over-ambitious and ill-prepared client. Each inflates the other and the resulting prodigy tends towards answering the need for a monument to the vanities rather than being a pragmatic response to a genuine social/economic need. Expressive, thoughtful architecture is lost to vapid, stylistic tricks.
The difficulty, as ever, is that architects are trusted by their clients to deliver not only expressive and functional solutions to a given brief, but solutions which respond to social, economic, environmental and statutory parameters. The evidence of the last decade is that we architects and the industry and culture within our firmament have cultivated a celebrity elite, for whom the more mundane parameters of context and economic sustainability are no longer relevant.
It is impossible to separate – especially in the case of Maxxi – the influence of the building on the fate of the collection and its funding. It does not appear to be a particularly self-effacing building and is quite possibly expensive to run and maintain, but we don’t know for sure.
But for a competent, capable architect, the stricture of economic viability is just another brief parameter to inform good design. One cannot help but feel that the celebrities we have created within our midst will struggle to rise to this key challenge, yet they shape the public image of how remote we architects are from the grit of life in 2012. It is not that an individual building has failed here or there, but that the progenitors appear so indifferent to their responsibilities in the building’s fate. Maxxi may be the result of a decade-old competition, but its creation is very much embedded in the growing crisis of the last five years.
Ford’s chief designer in the 90s famously said that any fool can design a supercar, but it takes real talent to design a car that the masses both want and can afford. The social concern which proliferates in the lower 98% of the profession needs to filter upwards to the elite, who feel that the wealth of their public and private clients absolves them of this fundamental responsibility.