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Architecture Between Spectacle and Use
With the recent international proliferation of architectural projects, expansions, and renovations––particularly in the art and museum worlds––critics have accused architecture of entering too fully into the “society of the spectacle,” yielding to consumerist display, and trading its historical aims, ambitions, and obligations for celebrity and ostentation.
This important and timely volume examines the current state of contemporary architecture worldwide and the ways in which it is caught between the art of display and the accommodation of use. Eleven distinguished scholars from the fields of architecture, art history, and architectural criticism explore the problems and possibilities of contemporary architecture in the light of the history of its modern reception, new approaches to design technologies, and philosophical issues about the “meaning” of architecture. They also consider whether the new buildings, projects, and ideas that have generated such excitement and public interest are a creative response to society’s fundamental social, cultural, and economic needs.
This important and timely volume examines the current state of contemporary architecture worldwide and the ways in which it is caught between the art of display and the accommodation of use. Eleven distinguished scholars from the fields of architecture, art history, and architectural criticism explore the problems and possibilities of contemporary architecture in the light of the history of its modern reception, new approaches to design technologies, and philosophical issues about the “meaning” of architecture. They also consider whether the new buildings, projects, and ideas that have generated such excitement and public interest are a creative response to society’s fundamental social, cultural, and economic needs.
- GenresArchitecture
240 pages, Paperback
First published March 4, 2008
36 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Vidler
69 books9 followersAnthony Vidler (4 July 1941 – 19 October 2023) was an English architectural historian and critic. He was Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union.
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October 7, 2018Based on the 2005 Clark Conference, eleven architecture critics and historians offer their thoughts on the position of architecture in contemporary culture. Topics range from developments in production to acid trips. Vidler loosely groups the essays into three sections: Question the Spectacle, Histories and Genealogies, and Redefining the Spectacle. Most of the essays were written between 2004 and 2006, and a lot has changed in the world of architecture since then (both with technological developments and economic collapse), but most of the ideas hold up. Naturally, there is a lot of focus on modern architecture in exploration of the roots of today's spectacular architecture. Buckminster Fuller makes several appearances, as does the Sydney Opera House. Critique of very recent works is pretty limited, but it is a fairly solid overview of contemporary theory and what gave rise to the Bilbao effect. I would probably give it 3.5 stars but Felicity Scott and Beatriz Colomina's contributions are cause enough to round up.
January 18, 2023
This collection of essays explores the theoretical implications of iconic architecture, spectacle, modes of perception, new blobism and starchitects such as Frank Gehry, whose Bilbao Guggenheim contributor Hal Foster denounces as “image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital”.
Fame is a constant theme running through much of this mixed bag of academic pieces. Anthony Vidler, who edited the book, wonders in his introduction how Gehry, once so radical, ended up doing work so “computer-generated, titanium-covered, arbitrary, perverse and oppressive”. But stars like Gehry can always rely on their fans. Writing about Gehry’s Los Angeles Concert Hall, a rather ordinary auditorium disguised inside a histrionic exterior, Kurt Foster tries to argue that Gehry’s direct source of inspiration was Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie, the exterior of which is the sublime outward expression of its exhilarating “vineyard” interior space. Foster’s conflating of the two cannot possibly expect to be taken seriously.
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, discussed by Terry Smith, is another building whose dull interiors, completed after Utzon was fired, bear no relation to the expressive external “sails”, the city’s most famous architectural image. As Mark Jarzombek writes, “being a famous architect is not something everyone hungers for and that not everyone survives”.
Fame is often represented in mythology as a goddess. For architects, she makes it possible to break through what Jarzombek intriguingly calls “the silences”, but he points out that fame is also a whore who makes them lick the feet of the powerful. Fame is despised by rationalist philosophers such as Kant, who preferred “studied, adjudicated differentiation”, and in our day by Richard Sennett , who rejects fame as “a negative force that erodes the dignity of life”.
Beatriz Colomina is cynical about how architects pursue celebrity by manipulating imagery, as Mies van der Rohe did in the 1920s with photomontages to make his glass towers seem real, even though at that time he had no idea how to build them; but they made him famous.
Since then, modernists have often courted popularity by adopting a “pop” language whose colourful prankishness obfuscates a more serious intent. This interesting thought is developed by Hal Foster in a re- examination of the Smithsons, Stirling, Archigram, Superstudio, the Venturis, Rogers, Peter Cook, Gehry and Koolhaas.
When large-scale projects seek to create spectacular monumentality, says Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “narratives of sociopolitical power” are generated in which details, decorations, and materials serve to fine- tune a deliberately manipulative intention on the part of the architect: projects such as Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Centre arrange buildings and spaces as abstract solids and voids that ignore the human scale; while Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia was only designed to look good in photographs. She suggests we should be suspicious of their inherent “political, economic and social agendas”, which in the case of Yamasaki’s WTC, invited attack. At other times, the agenda of which she speaks may seek to be spectacular — the Millennium Dome, the London Eye — but when Mark Dorrian attempts to theorise on this, in Thoughts on a Millennial Urban Spectacle, he founders in his own convoluted lingo: “The titanium cladding on the Guggenheim seems well suited to produce a kind of surrogate emissive immediacy in support of a hypervisual display of its formal involutions”.
Mark Wigley’s Towards a History of Quantity is a disquieting spew of pronouncements: “Contemporary architecture has become a high bandwidth medium produced and monitored in new ways necessitating a recalculation of the field’s basic assumptions”. At every step, the reader wants to take issue with these assumptions.
One of his “new ways” is digitally generated, functionless architectural form, the “new abstraction” bandwagon every first- and second-rate academic is trying to climb onto, adopting a lexicon of “blobs, swarms, crystals, webs and software”, which Vidler hopes can supplant traditional design with “flows, networks and maps”. Vidler proposes this “expanded field” may be a “truly ecological aesthetics”, whatever that means, offering an “internal exploration of architectural form” for “bioblobists, programmatic ironists and autonomistic formalists” to elaborate “topologies drawn from natural structure, skins, DNA”.
With the exception of Goldhagen, Hal Foster and a couple of others, this book is all too typical of the navel- gazing impenetrability of the kind of architectural theory read by nobody except other architecture academics, but which gets universities a high research rating.
Fame is a constant theme running through much of this mixed bag of academic pieces. Anthony Vidler, who edited the book, wonders in his introduction how Gehry, once so radical, ended up doing work so “computer-generated, titanium-covered, arbitrary, perverse and oppressive”. But stars like Gehry can always rely on their fans. Writing about Gehry’s Los Angeles Concert Hall, a rather ordinary auditorium disguised inside a histrionic exterior, Kurt Foster tries to argue that Gehry’s direct source of inspiration was Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie, the exterior of which is the sublime outward expression of its exhilarating “vineyard” interior space. Foster’s conflating of the two cannot possibly expect to be taken seriously.
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, discussed by Terry Smith, is another building whose dull interiors, completed after Utzon was fired, bear no relation to the expressive external “sails”, the city’s most famous architectural image. As Mark Jarzombek writes, “being a famous architect is not something everyone hungers for and that not everyone survives”.
Fame is often represented in mythology as a goddess. For architects, she makes it possible to break through what Jarzombek intriguingly calls “the silences”, but he points out that fame is also a whore who makes them lick the feet of the powerful. Fame is despised by rationalist philosophers such as Kant, who preferred “studied, adjudicated differentiation”, and in our day by Richard Sennett , who rejects fame as “a negative force that erodes the dignity of life”.
Beatriz Colomina is cynical about how architects pursue celebrity by manipulating imagery, as Mies van der Rohe did in the 1920s with photomontages to make his glass towers seem real, even though at that time he had no idea how to build them; but they made him famous.
Since then, modernists have often courted popularity by adopting a “pop” language whose colourful prankishness obfuscates a more serious intent. This interesting thought is developed by Hal Foster in a re- examination of the Smithsons, Stirling, Archigram, Superstudio, the Venturis, Rogers, Peter Cook, Gehry and Koolhaas.
When large-scale projects seek to create spectacular monumentality, says Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “narratives of sociopolitical power” are generated in which details, decorations, and materials serve to fine- tune a deliberately manipulative intention on the part of the architect: projects such as Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Centre arrange buildings and spaces as abstract solids and voids that ignore the human scale; while Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia was only designed to look good in photographs. She suggests we should be suspicious of their inherent “political, economic and social agendas”, which in the case of Yamasaki’s WTC, invited attack. At other times, the agenda of which she speaks may seek to be spectacular — the Millennium Dome, the London Eye — but when Mark Dorrian attempts to theorise on this, in Thoughts on a Millennial Urban Spectacle, he founders in his own convoluted lingo: “The titanium cladding on the Guggenheim seems well suited to produce a kind of surrogate emissive immediacy in support of a hypervisual display of its formal involutions”.
Mark Wigley’s Towards a History of Quantity is a disquieting spew of pronouncements: “Contemporary architecture has become a high bandwidth medium produced and monitored in new ways necessitating a recalculation of the field’s basic assumptions”. At every step, the reader wants to take issue with these assumptions.
One of his “new ways” is digitally generated, functionless architectural form, the “new abstraction” bandwagon every first- and second-rate academic is trying to climb onto, adopting a lexicon of “blobs, swarms, crystals, webs and software”, which Vidler hopes can supplant traditional design with “flows, networks and maps”. Vidler proposes this “expanded field” may be a “truly ecological aesthetics”, whatever that means, offering an “internal exploration of architectural form” for “bioblobists, programmatic ironists and autonomistic formalists” to elaborate “topologies drawn from natural structure, skins, DNA”.
With the exception of Goldhagen, Hal Foster and a couple of others, this book is all too typical of the navel- gazing impenetrability of the kind of architectural theory read by nobody except other architecture academics, but which gets universities a high research rating.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews