About architecture
Away, then, with the structures, mechanical systems, with curtain walls, with emergency staircases, parapets, false ceilings, projectors, pedestals, showcases. If their functions must be retained, they must disappear from our view and our consciousness, vanish before the sacred objects so we may enter into communion with them.
Jean Nouvel describing Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France, 2006
There is an apocryphal story, popular amongst architectural students, that upon leaving a Rem Koolhaas lecture, a bewildered attendee was asked by a colleague what it had been about. ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ the hapless listener replied, ‘either I’m stupid or that guy’s a genius.’ Apocryphal or not, this charming anecdote indicates a prevailing perception amongst many in society, not the least of whom are baffled architecture students, that much of the language adopted by architects is utterly unintelligible. Flowery prose, pretentious musings, convoluted phraseology and intellectual narcissism are just some of the accusations leveled against the type of language adopted by some in the profession.
Even popular culture has taken the bait. Hollywood once portrayed architects as stoic, virtuous, and dependable, essentially idealized heroic versions of the common man. Witness the human Mount Rushmore that is Gary Cooper’s Howard Roark in the 1949 dramatization of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. Or even Paul Newman’s solidly tenacious everyman in The Towering Inferno of 1976. Jump forward a few decades and we have the architect in the Matrix trilogy, a grey-suited, mustachioed, imbecilic dandy spouting forth all manner of nonsensical verbiage about cosmic anomalies and prophetic infiltration.
Of course, it is easy to see why these perceptions exist when we look for examples of hubris within architectural discourse. There is a hardcore coterie of celebrated architects who insist on propagating an esoteric style of language that is not only completely incomprehensible to laypeople but to scores within their own profession. As the extract below demonstrates Peter Eisenman is one of the worst offenders. In fact, if Churchill said that the Soviet Union was a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ then Peter Eisenman is the Siberian snowstorm that obscures all three:
Our project represents an attempt to rethink the symbolism of the vertical office building. Traditionally, the vertical building had two metaphoric connotations, one as a metaphor for anthropocentrism (the human vertebrae as upright, symmetrical and skeletal) and the other as a symbol of power and dominance, in particular, phallocentrism. Our building symbolically seeks to undermine these two centrisms, first by producing a building that is not metaphorically skeletal or striated … and second, by producing an image somewhere between an erect and a ‘limp’ condition.
FIGURE 25.1 Example of Eisenman’s use of sloping windows and ground planes at the Greater Columbus Convention Center
Source: Mark Olson.
Here Eisenman is describing his Nunotani Corporation Headquarters, built in Tokyo, Japan, in 1992. The building is painted bright pink and features sloping walls, windows and parapets as if it is virtually disintegrating into the ground, a common deconstructivist ruse. Eisenman’s bombast, however, does no favours for those who wearily contend that modern architectural output has nothing to do with male appendages by reminding everybody, in the most ludicrously cryptic and convoluted way possible, that that’s exactly what his concept involves. Despite his best efforts, the message couldn’t have been clearer had this bizarre building been wrapped in latex and given zips for windows.
And yet, despite this patent failure to grasp the core essentials of communication, Eisenman has been deified by the global architectural academic establishment and force-fed to thousands of architectural students across the world, inevitably reducing most of them to various stages of bafflement and distress (see Figure 25.1 for an example of his work). Why? Is this the way the architectural profession wishes to be perceived by the outside world? Are pomposity and obfuscation really the skills that it wishes to bequeath to the next generation of architects?
Sadly Eisenman is not alone but it is not necessarily to his countrymen in the United States that we must turn for further evidence of this disturbing trend but Europe. Europe has produced scores of architects who happily revel in the egregious excesses of architectural hubris. France is perhaps the key culprit. Unlike England which has for centuries taken great pains to fastidiously foster a robust suspicion of overt intellectualism, in France philosophical proselytizing of the kind so adored by Eisenman and his ilk has been elevated to a religion. Jean Nouvel, as his description of his 2006 Musée du quai Branly in Paris shows, is a habitual and unrepentant offender:
everything is designed to evoke an emotional response to the primary object, to protect it from light, but also to capture that rare ray of light indispensable to make it vibrate and awaken its spirituality.
However, Nouvel’s evidently slender grip on reality is insufficient to usurp the throne occupied by that Grand Wizard of Obfuscation, the undisputed Master of Miasma, fellow Frenchman Bernard Tschumi. Attempt to decipher his description of Paris’s baffling Parc de la Villette (1988) at your peril: