Take the example of the iconic Frank Gehry and two of his projects, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Stata Center at MIT. The Disney Concert Hall has vertically-curved layers of shiny stainless steel sheets at different angles, which amplify and reflect abundant California sunlight in all directions, blinding residents and heating up their neighbouring apartments by several degrees. After many complaints, the Los Angeles Philharmonic had to solve the reflection problem by covering up the steel facade with unglamorous matte cloth. Had Gehry taken into consideration the impact of the building on its surroundings, he would not have used mirror-like panels in the first place. It seems Gehry did not learn his lesson, as his subsequent work on the Stata Center exemplifies.
MIT had sought a new large building to house several science departments and research labs, in a harmonious and collaborative environment. Gehry took the latter part of agenda a bit too seriously, at the expense of function, low maintenance, and cost savings. Outside, the centre looked like the crooked house from Mother Goose, as Silber aptly puts it, with flat glass roofs that wilted under Massachusetts rains and snow, subjecting expensive computer and lab equipment to damage from frequent leakage. Inside, it was equally chaotic. Gehry had wanted to do away with walls between offices, but after the faculty insisted on their privacy, he compromised with glass walls that failed to block sound or visual distractions. Ironically, there are glass walls in the cryptography departments and other centres that conduct secret military and industrial information. For this building that was completed four years behind schedule, MIT paid nearly twice the original estimate of $100 million. In late 2007, MIT would sue Gehry for providing designs with major structural deficiencies leading to high maintenance and repair costs.
Another high-profile architect, Daniel Libeskind, is guilty of prioritising art over architecture, or form over function. His plan for the Freedom Towers won the public competition, but the leaseholder of the WTC plot had the foresight to submit the plan to a professional architecture firm to make it structurally sound and economically reasonable. It took several revisions of Libeskind's original and fantastical design to make it a sturdy and realisable building. Some features of the original design were a glass needle-like spire, a twisted main tower with an all-glass atrium and a parallelogram-shaped foundation that would have been hurricane-prone and terrorist attack-prone.
Examples abound throughout of poor choices, whether in aesthetics or structural engineering, exercised in works by noted architects such as Le Corbusier, I.M Pei, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn. Silber points to the tendency of prominent architects like Libeskind and Gehry to use hubris and "gratuitous bloviation", obfuscation and esoteric "theoryspeak" to bully gullible clients into accepting their idealist and often absurdist art. As a former president of Boston University, a large urban institution, Silber himself experienced this aggressive selling when commissioning architects to design buildings for student and faculty purposes, a category in which longevity, practicability and economy are particularly critical. Only, Silber's informal education in architecture allowed him to see through the architect's grandiose drawings and explanations and insist on structural corrections and improvements. Silber urgently calls upon institutions and the public to maintain their dignity and not succumb to "genius disfiguring practical art".
Compact and concise, with several visual aids, the book is an absorbing read but ends a bit abruptly, and one wishes that the book was longer as there must be many other similar blunders in contemporary architecture. Yet, in a time when one has to visit historical or heritage sites to look for beautiful and practical buildings, it is very satisfying to come across a book that hits the nail squarely upon the head.
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ARCHITECTURE OF THE ABSURD
HOW "GENIUS" DISFIGURED A PRACTICAL ART
By John Silber
2007, The Quantuck Lane Press, New York
Pages: 91; Price: $27.50
