While driving up and
down the Pacific Highway between the Gold Coast and Brisbane on the
M1, at trip of about 90 kilometres, one has plenty of time to ponder
the passing procession of vehicles as they speed along in their
never-ending attempts to simulate the experience of driving in a
Formula 1 event. Winning, getting in front of anyone, everyone, with
the appropriate grunt of aggression, is the apparent intent. Some
drivers are far more ambitious than others. A few seek to display
their dexterity, weaving in and out of lanes and around and between
other vehicles impulsively while texting or chatting. Keeping out of
their way becomes the core aim of every trip.
In spite of the
mayhem of the hustle and bustle of this strange warped world of
speedy sound, colour and movement, one still has time to consider the
design detailing of the sea of vehicles as it cruises along in front,
travels in parallel, and follows mirrored behind, or just crawls
along in the traffic jam caused by the crashes of the failed Formula
1 re-enactments. Those cars, trucks and utes that flash by cause such
alarm that they almost go unnoticed, perceived anxiously as a blurr,
unseen apart from their looming size and disappearing colour. The
overall variety in the remaining array of passing form, hue and
detail in those cars that can be perused is seemingly unending,
astonishing, unlimited; the more so the more one sees it and
considers it. The exercise needs specific intent, as we have become
so used to vehicles that they have become visual clichés. It is
often said that they all look the same, but this is more a statement
about a broad recognition of their pieces and parts rather than
detail. Consider just one item, the wheel. All cars have wheels, but,
surprisingly, nearly all car wheels are different. Why? Have a look.
The situation here is that all wheels look much the same when in
motion. The precise difference in detailing can only be observed when
the vehicles are stationary or moving slowly. Car parks and crashes
facilitate the study of wheels, but both situations make review and
reverie awkwardly uneasy.
The thought
occurred: has architecture become the equivalent of car design,
perhaps most clearly seen in the work of Zaha Hadid? The forms
whizzing by or moving in sync are indeed similar to those in Hadid's
work. The streamlined distortions, the ooze of the masses, the fluid
interrelationships, and the self-conscious drama in the design and
detail of the vehicles are like the shapes and characteristics seen
in Hadid's buildings. Has Hadid been inspired by this slick free-form
steel and plastic, black glass and chrome styling that starts as
freehand scribbles to be then further developed in a mass of
free-form clay? Does Hadid use clay? Is this similarity a
self-conscious attitude, or has it developed otherwise? Has a
confidence with functions allowed our attentions to wander off into
matters more ephemeral and less necessary, less essential, more
decoratively stylish?
Karl Popper has
described how scientific theories develop and change by testing,
being challenged by new conjectures, sometimes to be refuted, a
process that incorporates other theories or negates them. Has, for
example, functionalism and post-modernism been incorporated, or
perhaps negated, in today's architectural efforts? Has this growing
confidence with facts and our ability to mange them meant that
attention can now be given to a more frivolous playing with forms?
Can one liken this to the developing skills of a piano player who,
after initially struggling with simple notes and then mastering
complex techniques, is finally able to give full attention to the
subtle nuances of a symphony? Is this the outcome of our digital
world that has assimilated so much of what was once drudgery? This
observation, that architecture has similar formal qualities and
characteristics to car design, well, visually at least, might seem to
be a strange parallel to draw, just an odd observation; but it does
have an importance for us: it can help us understand more about the
architecture of today, just where we are and what we are doing. It is
clear that the form/function paradigm has gone. Now the driving
theory, (forgive the pun), seems to be that 'Form Follows Flair,'
that style is all-important: one assumes that the approach is that
the rest, the facts and functions, will look after themselves as a
matter of course, somehow; that style reigns supreme.
Car design is pure
style, an ethereal morphing of matter, any matter, just for the sake
of appearance, the whim of the creator. Appearance is the core
ambition; anything can and will be done to achieve the preferred
visual outcome. It is just like fashion design in clothing that is
changed and modified as whimsy and caprice drive the mood, providing
outcomes that will challenge and surprise with an 'outrageous' idea,
the 'stroke of genius' creating something unusually different that
will stun and sell. Philosophically, theoretically, in car design as
in fashion design, there is very little relationship between material,
structure and form other than what is essential; what has to be. The
idea that a form might follow a function, or a function a form, is an
irrelevance. Here style stands as the prime, singular ambition.
Style, that amorphous sense of immediate, present grandeur with a
matching gesture made for display that attracts the eye now for the
immediate WOW!, is the core of this vehicular design/fashion design strategy. It is of the present, accommodating little of the past that
is mocked until copied, while considering nothing of the future but
itself. It is the future. It is 'ME! WOW! NOW! NEXT!' One Australian
emporium once advertised with the slogan that sums the idea up: 'Next
is Now!' One is able to have the future before everyone else.
In vehicles, one
sees the theatrical fudge, the cheating, the making of an illusion as
the frequent solution to creating the preferred outcome that is the
achievement of a special shape or a particular detail; the unique
idea, e.g., that the whole entity is all free-floating glass or one
fluid mass when it is not. One sees black glass, applied paint and
other paraphernalia shrouding awkwardly aligned sturdy steel panels
with matching plastic pieces just to create the desired image as
sketched on the screen and modelled in the clay. The only ambition is
to achieve the imagined form, nothing else. Integrity and idealism
have no role here. Invention becomes the deconstruction of a form to
achieve the concept: like reverse engineering. It is almost
irrelevant that a material or a technique might have any integral
demands for function. Construction detailing is invented only in
order to achieve the final form. The initial concept controls the
detail, establishes the demands, the brief. The envisaged,
predetermined form is never negotiable. It is always the singular aim
in spite of everything.
In this same sense
of searching for a particular form, our architecture today has become
pure style, a fashioning of preferred images irrespective of
economies, materials and functions. It is interesting that Hadid
offered to redesign her Tokyo Olympic stadium to make a saving of
over one billion dollars when her first grand vision was priced at the astonishing amount of about three billion dollars.* It has since been decided not to go
ahead with any Hadid concept, be this a cyclist's helmet form, vagina
shape or otherwise: see -
http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/vagina-architecture-its-only-matter-of.html
- see also: http://entablatures.blogspot.com.au/
RUSKIN'S FINAL WORDS ON ARCHITECTURE. This is architecture where the
form is beyond function; the function is made to exist, to squeeze
in, irrespective of form; almost in spite of it. It just has to.
Style stands for its own unique expression, the singular creation of
the 'genius' architect or car visionary: (see the DVD series
Architecture by Encore that points out that the top one third
of Gehry's Guggenheim can be removed and there would be no impact on
any of the functions the building accommodates).
The car-making
industry has a history of making concept cars, cars of the future
that ironically is now, as if the future was here, predicted and
produced before our very eyes as 'astonishing ideas,' WOW! Why wait?
Details in buildings become much the same as those in vehicles, all
seeking some futuristic place now. Likewise, structures are made to
work in order to achieve the shapes and relationships needed;
everything is fudged to suit the concept. Consider the weight of
steel in Hadid's supposedly 'green' aquatic building for the London
Olympics – see:
http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/pairs-5-1956-2012-olympic-pools.html
Of course the detailing has to 'work' in the sense that it needs to
hold together, to keep the water out, and to use materials that can
do the job asked of them, but these matters seem secondary to the
final intent: achieving the vision, its pure style, its form. The
challenges lie in the background, behind the styling: how to support
it, how to achieve it, never in the careful resolution of the
functional brief, in resolving or even asking “what a building
wants to be,” as Louis Kahn put it. Consider the Gehry brown and
crumpled paper bag concept ideas and the techniques needed to
recreate these architectural aesthetic visions. Does a building want
to be a brown crumpled bag? Does a bag want to be a building?
This flighty,
fugacious world of fashion and style has become the core concern in
architecture today. Buildings perform as models on the walkway,
standing and striding boldly, self-confidently, in dramatic, unusual
poses meant for the immediate appreciation of the hagiographical
display. Buildings become like cars, announced in this same dramatic
manner, presented on sleek, sheik, perfectly glossy podiums for all
to gawk at and admire, to drool over, as Apple gadgets are. Behind
this fashioning is the urge to stimulate desire: the desire to have
the object; and the desire to be recognised by the world. One 'needs'
it, must have it. There is a sense of prestige here, of
self-importance; of needing this in order to establish one's place
and importance in society: ME! I am and have NEXT! It is the world of
the selfie, and strangely promotes this vision both as an ambition
and a reality: the hope to have the thing that is the gadget that can
produce and reproduce the egocentric outcome. It is interesting to
see how modern architecture is used in advertising, as a suggestive
context: see -
http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/room-11-architecture-of-simplistic.html
This is architecture for the camera; it is the photographic image
that promotes this architecture worldwide. We know all about the
image before we know the building as a body experience; and this can
be enlightening: see -
http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/pedestrian-approach.html
and
http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/bell-and-fish-two-glasgow-museums-part_04.html
We have an
architecture that incorporates this selfie sense, this
self-interested shaping of matter to immediately engage eyes and
cameras. Just how the body and its feelings and senses are engaged is
irrelevant other than in stimulating its outreach of surprise and
admiration. One might see this critique as harsh. Why not place the
new in the context of the old in the sense of some progression, as
seen in science: that having mastered the functions of forms, we now
have time to give attention to and to put effort into other more
ephemeral decorative things? Is this a possibility? Possibly, but if
one looks to nature where life processes result in sensational,
surprising, and sometimes outrageous outcomes through evolution,
natural selection, there still stands some rigour behind the shaping
and making, the growth and form: some sense of necessity. It is the
lack of any necessity in the car design ethic that becomes a concern.
There is this same void in architecture as that which exists in this
gleaming, new world of automobiles, and in the glimmering world of
fashion, where things are there just to be different, new –
'stunning' is a common description in the declaration of wonder at
the appearance of the latest flighty illusion on display in the glaze
of the bright lights, as if it was real and potentially
transformative.
It is this sense of
things being what they are not that highlights the concerns with
today's architecture that seems to work on the theory of pretense –
I am the great pretender: I am style, I am fashion, not I am what I
am; no, I am steel made to look like glass; I am plastic made to look
like steel; I am light, but I am heavy; I am the great illusion –
the maker of ME and MY own importance. Modesty has little to do here,
let alone humility. Yet traditionally the artist played no role in
the assessment of any work. Names, personalities were irrelevant. The
work was structured with its own references and rigour; it held its
own presence, of which it has been said: “One cannot marvel
enough,” (Martin Lings), such was its power and authority. Today,
all appears to be floss, fluid style, referencing, indeed, competing
with, challenging, only the hype of other style. The aim seems to be
to startle the most, to scream out for attention.
Zaha Hadid car designs
Z.CAR-11
Z.CAR-1
Z.CAR-1
Z.CAR-11
There is an odd
twist to this thought, the idea that Hadid's work is like current car
design. It proved to be accurate. She has designed a car - two: and they look like the others too! The sentiment was that Zaha Hadid's
architecture was similar to today's car design. Maybe this can now be
turned around. The proposition was that one had inspired the other,
perhaps. The similarities in the 'futuristic' forms are indeed
startling: but is it merely a matter of there being something in the
air,' or is it something else? Have both worlds arisen from some
other source? What? Why? Might it be aircraft design?
Hadid car being photographed - surely not an ice cream scoop on wheels?
The Gropius-designed Alder
Here one is reminded
of the car Walter Gropius designed. After all of his amazing early
work that culminated in the Bauhaus buildings, his car was a sophisticated box form, a vehicle based on the horse and cart, but with a classic
elegance. What happened to his approach to architectural design that
developed forms to suit materials, processes and functions? In stark
contrast to his approach to vehicle design that seemed to be rooted
in the past, was the aerodynamic form of a racing car designed at the
same time; and Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion vehicle. These other
cars had shapes streamlined to respond to the flows of air over the
forms, providing new responses and references to new functions,
materials and techniques. One realised that something had happened.
The Gropius approach had been superseded. Gropius was out of touch
with the times. So is Hadid in touch with the times, or is she
catching up with vehicle design that outstripped Gropius and his
surprisingly conservative classicism? - see:
http://www.triumph-adler.com/C125713A00471CCE/vwWebPagesByID/A8FA348B215BDA7EC12575130042F74D
and
http://architecture.org.nz/2009/03/12/the-architecture-of-the-automobile/
Fuller's dymaxion car
The car design
reference allows us to see more into the Hadid approach, such are the
parallels in form. It truly is just style, made for the prettiness of
its surprising, attractive appearance, shaped, it seems, only for
self-expression, to declare ME! Narratives might be developed to
explain outcomes, but these seem to be postscripts to any shaping and
making. Hadid spoke of 'champagne glasses' in her Brisbane project:
see -
http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/ha-ha-ha-hadid-designs-for-world-class.html
What have champagne glasses got to do with anything but champagne?
Why live in champagne glasses? Do champagne glasses want to be
buildings?
Hadid's car design
The gushing forms
used by Hadid et.al. are not only shapes, but random shapes that use
theatrical tricks, illusions to inform form in order to overcome the
demands of function, as in automobile design. In car design, the
awkward structural need for a rear strut, for example, is overcome by
the use of black glass and silicone, as is the need for, say, a door
frame that is similarly disguised by stick-on claddings to give the
preferred 'edge-to-edge, look-no-hands' glass/steel sleek, speedy
look. In the same ad hoc manner: lines are pressed into panels;
plastic is moulded and painted to match steel; grilles are added over
solid panels; and stripes, bars, curves, and different distortions
all have a role in the preferred expression, because the whole
strategy has only to do with how it looks. It is like putting make up
on. Indeed, it is all made up!
And so too with
architecture. The 'Hadid' style is much the same; but we expect this
game with cars. Why not buildings? It is a surprise, but we are now
getting 'car' buildings, and 'cycle helmet' stadiums too. Team 10
once discussed the idea of a car becoming a living space. We seem to
have reached this possibility, indeed, embraced it, but in a
different, more stylish manner.
No doubt the last
question will be: who/what is Team 10? One wonders: if there was a
Team 10 today, what might its Primer look like? - see:
http://www.amazon.com/Team-10-Primer-Alison-Smithson/dp/0262690470
What are the core ideas in architecture today other than 'car design' style? We need
to consider these matters because style and fashion are too flippantly random
and ephemeral to hold meaning and sense for us, as environments
should. Life is more than the WOW! of the perpetual, distracting
display of special, sparkling entertainment with its unique,
whiz-bang excitement.
FUTURISTIC CARS
from Google search 'Futuristic Cars' - images: 'Oh! So Zaha!'
Fuller's dymaxion vehicle comes to mind
THE ZAHA HADID BUILDINGS
from Google search 'Zaha Hadid Buildings' - images:
NO, THIS IS A CAR!
POSTSCRIPT
While having a
coffee and thinking about this piece after the futuristic car image
search, I nonchalantly notice the tablecloth, how beautiful it is. Then I see a
few more tablecloths hanging nearby. They too are astonishingly magnificent,
wonderful, uplifting without any noise or demand. I
remember that they are sarongs, traditional Malaysian prints for wrapping around the body. This is traditional fashion; traditional art. No one knows
who designed the wrap or these patterns, but they amaze. Indeed, one struggles to
'marvel enough,' such is their quiet beauty. One realizes how
inspiring these simple, everyday fabrics are, how they support life,
enrich it without domination. They boast not, neither do they declare.# In one way, the
Zaha art is demeaning. It seems false in its intent, hollow; it appears to
shape a hoax, a lie, the promotion of itself. It seems too clever; too
tricky - too smart. Art needs integrity, substance to ameliorate. We need
to realize this both as a concept and an outcome. What must one do?
and nearby:
Detailed Ordinance Survey map of the Shetland Mainland reproduced on a table mat.
The organic patterns of the map intrigue too.
In a similar way, traditional carpet patterns amaze with their beautiful rigour.
Bat flower plant
Louis Sullivan noted how the function of the leaf was the form of the leaf;
how the form of the leaf was the function of the leaf.
#
Consider the lilies
how they grow; they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you,
that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Luke 12:27
Frank Lloyd Wright
quoted this text is his early writings, explaining it as: 'the words
of an architect of ancient times, called carpenter, who gave up architecture to
work upon its source.'
The beautiful
language of the King James Version of the Bible gives an elegant,
concise critique of Hadid's 'car design' strategy: it toils too much;
it spins too much.
* 29 OCTOBER 2015
