A case of unfortunate timing: As the American economy craters toward recession, Chanel, the French fashion house, rents a chunk of Central Park to celebrate one of its handbags in a glorified tent designed by Zaha Hadid.
And some tent it is. Hadid, the Iraqi-born and London-based architect who in 2004 won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, her profession’s highest honor, has crafted a pavilion that looks like a glossy white spaceship. Its coiling corridors usher the visitor into mood-lit exhibition rooms that resemble the futuristic lairs of James Bond villains.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The New York Times’ architecture critic, best summed up the project’s excesses in an Oct. 20 article: “The pavilion sets out to drape an aura of refinement over a cynical marketing gimmick. Surveying its self-important exhibits, you can’t help but hope that the era of exploiting the so-called intersection of architecture, art and fashion is finally over.”
But there’s something even deeper going on beneath the self-indulgence – what the Swiss architecture critic Sigfried Giedion observed in the 1960s as a “certain confusion . even a kind of exhaustion” of contemporary architecture. In Giedion’s view, contemporary Western architecture has turned into a “playboy-architecture,” always seeking new thrills in a constant effort never to be bored.
In their pursuit of perpetual excitement, however, architects have self-consciously jettisoned what Giedion saw as architecture’s main task: “the interpretation of a way of life valid for our period.” Instead, according to philosopher Karsten Harries, architecture has turned to a purely aesthetic approach, concerned mainly with how things look and feel.
Harries says the main architectural movements of the past several decades – postmodernism, post-structuralism, deconstructivism – have reacted against the rational stability of modernists such as Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe with such force that architecture has been swept up by the “swings of fashion rather than style.” In a way, the Chanel Pavilion thus showcases the extremes of an art form made subservient to the ephemeral and the superficial.
Is that really what we’ve come to – architecture deconstructed to sell high-end accessories?
Perhaps not. While some go about trying to rescue contemporary architecture from its existential crisis, others are working to elevate the aesthetic by placing it in the service of something nobler.
Thomas Heatherwick, a 38-year-old British designer, has recently garnered much attention for creating ingenious solutions to commonplace aesthetic problems such as designing a bridge that arcs up and curls backward for boats to pass.
Heatherwick recently redesigned the entrance of a drab, modern hospital complex in London. Except Heatherwick didn’t just fix the atrium – he reorganized the flow of traffic to the hospital’s entrance, changed everything from the lighting to the signage, and even moved entire parking areas around. The façade of the building now consists of braided panels of stainless steel that form wavelike bulges. Commenting on the project, Heatherwick told Paul Goldberg, The New Yorker’s architecture critic, that what motivated his redesign was “thinking about what it would be like to be an old lady who is ill and being driven to the hospital by her grandson.”
Heatherwick’s project shows that architecture at its best provides something far more than just decoration – an interpretation of our lives and our most mundane experiences in an effort to make something more edifying. In that regard, contemporary architecture still has an important, even essential, role to serve in modern life.
Especially in times like these, a humanistic architecture is more necessary than ever.
Lukasz Swiderski is a junior in the School of Foreign Service and is studying abroad at Oxford University in England. He can be reached at swiderskithehoya.com. UNFOREIGN AFFAIRS appears every other Tuesday.
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