Irony free zone
Jul. 13th, 2008 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoNicolai Ouroussoff has a piece in the New York Times today that's more odd than his usual.
Here're the opening few grafs:
"BEIJING — If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it’s understandable. It’s not just the grandeur of the space. It’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust.
The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.
Designed by Norman Foster, Beijing’s glittering air terminal is joined by a remarkable list of other new monuments here: Paul Andreu’s egg-shaped National Theater; Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium, known as the bird’s nest; PTW’s National Aquatics Center, with its pillowy translucent exterior; and Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for the CCTV television authority, whose slanting, interconnected forms are among the most imaginative architectural feats in recent memory.
Critics have incessantly described these high-profile projects as bullish expressions of the nation’s budding global primacy. Yet these buildings are not simply blunt expressions of power. Like the great monuments of 16th-century Rome or 19th-century Paris, China’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do with intellectual ferment as economic clout." (bold added to paragraph 3)
See... The problem I have is, look at the architects cited. There's not a Chinese name or firm in sight. So in what way, exactly, is this China's new architecture? There may be intellectual ferment at work, but is it in China, or about China? And note the contrast to Ouroussoff's cited evocation of turn-of-the-century New York -- which was almost entirely designed by Americans, rather than imported prestige Europeans.
The whole project seems an affirmation rather than a rejection of Western aesthetics. "We're not a major country until we have lots of pointless modernist buildings? Fine, we'll buy the name brands you like, and build 'em as quickly as we can."
It reminds me more than a little of the way nouveau riche art museums will stock up on lots of modernist pieces because they can get them in bulk, rather than one or two older paintings -- which are much more expensive and less widely available.
Let alone, to my eye... Well, there just isn't anything terribly new about these buildings. The new National Stadium reminds me of Munich's Olympic Stadium. The others, generally, all look like derivatives of Syd Mead and other SF movie art direction. It's new that they're getting built, yes, but visually... They're decades old. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing, but labeling it "new" is dishonest at the least.
There's also very little about how these buildings work in their tasks. Part of the justification for things like the spiral-that-isn't-a-spiral in the Seattle Public Library (also by Koolhaas) is that they serve a specific function. (In that instance, a wish to bring all non-fiction into a grand sweep.) Where is the discussion about function here? How does CCTV's giant un-twisted paper clip make it easier to broadcast television? Why do we never see or talk about how the buildings interact with the street?
These aren't the works of architects. They're sculptures. In fact, Ouroussoff agrees, with no apparent irony -- about the National Stadium, he says, "The columns, which twist and bend as they rise, are conceived as a gigantic work of public sculpture." Ouroussoff compares Foster's airport terminal to Berlin's Tempelhof by Albert Speer, without any acknowledgment of the irony there, either, given that people have been comparing these Olympics to the 1936 ones overseen by Hitler.
Ouroussoff has always had his detractors for this general attitude (see this post at David Sucher's City Comforts blog), but even for him, this article seems somewhere in a private construct.
Here're the opening few grafs:
"BEIJING — If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it’s understandable. It’s not just the grandeur of the space. It’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust.
The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.
Designed by Norman Foster, Beijing’s glittering air terminal is joined by a remarkable list of other new monuments here: Paul Andreu’s egg-shaped National Theater; Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium, known as the bird’s nest; PTW’s National Aquatics Center, with its pillowy translucent exterior; and Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for the CCTV television authority, whose slanting, interconnected forms are among the most imaginative architectural feats in recent memory.
Critics have incessantly described these high-profile projects as bullish expressions of the nation’s budding global primacy. Yet these buildings are not simply blunt expressions of power. Like the great monuments of 16th-century Rome or 19th-century Paris, China’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do with intellectual ferment as economic clout." (bold added to paragraph 3)
See... The problem I have is, look at the architects cited. There's not a Chinese name or firm in sight. So in what way, exactly, is this China's new architecture? There may be intellectual ferment at work, but is it in China, or about China? And note the contrast to Ouroussoff's cited evocation of turn-of-the-century New York -- which was almost entirely designed by Americans, rather than imported prestige Europeans.
The whole project seems an affirmation rather than a rejection of Western aesthetics. "We're not a major country until we have lots of pointless modernist buildings? Fine, we'll buy the name brands you like, and build 'em as quickly as we can."
It reminds me more than a little of the way nouveau riche art museums will stock up on lots of modernist pieces because they can get them in bulk, rather than one or two older paintings -- which are much more expensive and less widely available.
Let alone, to my eye... Well, there just isn't anything terribly new about these buildings. The new National Stadium reminds me of Munich's Olympic Stadium. The others, generally, all look like derivatives of Syd Mead and other SF movie art direction. It's new that they're getting built, yes, but visually... They're decades old. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing, but labeling it "new" is dishonest at the least.
There's also very little about how these buildings work in their tasks. Part of the justification for things like the spiral-that-isn't-a-spiral in the Seattle Public Library (also by Koolhaas) is that they serve a specific function. (In that instance, a wish to bring all non-fiction into a grand sweep.) Where is the discussion about function here? How does CCTV's giant un-twisted paper clip make it easier to broadcast television? Why do we never see or talk about how the buildings interact with the street?
These aren't the works of architects. They're sculptures. In fact, Ouroussoff agrees, with no apparent irony -- about the National Stadium, he says, "The columns, which twist and bend as they rise, are conceived as a gigantic work of public sculpture." Ouroussoff compares Foster's airport terminal to Berlin's Tempelhof by Albert Speer, without any acknowledgment of the irony there, either, given that people have been comparing these Olympics to the 1936 ones overseen by Hitler.
Ouroussoff has always had his detractors for this general attitude (see this post at David Sucher's City Comforts blog), but even for him, this article seems somewhere in a private construct.
