Fashionable Architecture vs. Common Sense

In my first week at Architecture School, our very new and progressive professors wanted to make a point: They took us to architecture projects that were 10 to 20 years old (1974) and made us give them our view of how we thought they had achieved their purpose as buildings and as part of urban landscape.

This same process was repeated with each assignment; research, field study and a presentation to the entire class by students working in three-person teams.

We all vowed NOT TO REPEAT the previous generation’s mistakes of NOT being fashionable at the expense of owners and neighborhoods. (This helped to prepare me for life as a NY Architect).

So, how is it then that we are back to MOONSCAPES? High profile buildings and architects have again lost their tactile quality. These buildings are shapes hovering above ground, NOT OF IT and, just as in our field trips, no one is gathering under them or next to them as the wind blows and shadows creep. Instead we go to inside malls.

One can tell which generation CAD software these buildings were created on as people are looking for gimmicks rather than substantive acknowledgement and an understanding of architecture as a broad development where we are supposed to learn from our mistakes.

Magazines that publish architectural design need desperately to show off projects that look good on the cover, or they headline the article worded in such a way as to attract advertisers — much like our TV news or general shows these days. Green is a byword, not a reality. The smallest features are exaggerated in order to call a project green. Real Green Building, like practiced in some European countries, is truly green and not a gimmick. But this form of architecture is done by architects that are paid professional fees, unlike in the U.S and some other countries where we bid against each other, and end up with such a small fee that we cannot train our staff or ourselves, or keep staff long enough to develop essential skills.

Many editors have visited my projects and they say that they are not splashy enough, despite the fact that every normal person visiting them, including building inspectors, love them.

Media selling is a must for an architect’s or landscape architect’s survival too, but at the expense of quality of purpose. No one goes to a restaurant that does not serve food that is not based on a chef’s years of experience with best possible teachers. One can change a menu but not ignore our palette, habits, and the basic enjoyment we get from dining with friends who have many different personal preferences. So we are forced to be more of a ‘Harlot’, as Philip Johnson once said, than professional like a doctor for instance.

A purely nice ZERO CARBON GREEN normal building is unpublishable, and thus has a very limited audience from word of mouth. Our world will not change fast enough in this way for our children.

Recently, I visited a colleague a couple of hours away and she showed me some student resume projects from some of the foremost universities that were submitted to her for employment. None of them were BUILDINGS, but abstract mathematical planes forming clouds or shapes. These poor souls were taught by professors who were not practicing architecture themselves and had no respect for or understanding of historical progress. After 5 years or so these students arrive at our doorsteps, but very few of us can start training architects to do the real work of building real buildings and real programs at a time when the economy for us is beyond AWFUL, and our own families are looking for us to feed them.

PS. These abstract mathematical programs have beautiful practical purposes too as they solve real world program and technical issues for us so that we can focus on our client’s needs more, but everything has to be in balance, historically, today, and in the future.

Regards,
Tapani Talo, AIA