The Architecture of the New Century: Around the World in Ten Stages LUIS FERNÁNDEZ-GALIANO

the architecture of the new century: around the world in ten stages LUIS FERNÁNDEZ-GALIANO Both technique and art, architecture is also a Instead of describing technical, functional, and constructed expression of society. As technique bordering formal innovations that characterize architecture at on engineering, it has experienced the impact of new the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century, we have materials and innovation in the areas of construction, preferred to select ten episodes in different cities on structures, or installations, facing the historic the planet that offer both a sequence of signifi cant challenge of sustainability. As public art, it has been achievements in the last two decades, and an a participant—and sometimes a protagonist—in the illustration of tendencies or phenomena of a more renewal of visual language and the aesthetic mutations general nature. Those episodes, which are presented of a period marked by the spectacle. Lastly, as in more-or-less chronological order—from Berlin constructed sociology, it has given form to the colossal following the Fall of the Wall, Bilbao and the transformation that has urbanized our planet, replacing Guggenheim, or New York and 9/11; to Olympic traditional landscapes with sleepless megacities. Beijing and the titanic works of the petroleum The classical treatises at the root of Western autocracies of the Persian Gulf or Russia—are also architecture already speak of these three complementary organized so that the their consideration herein facets when theorizing on a discipline that overlaps resembles the stages of a trip around the world. so many others. Ever since Vitruvius, in Roman times, Ever westward, and always in the Northern architecture has been assigned the task of reconciling hemisphere—which leaves an enormous amount of technique and art with the social use of its spaces, geography out of the picture—our journey begins in and the motto, fi rmitas, utilitas, venustas (solidity, Europe at the close of the twentieth century and of usefulness, beauty) has been shorthand for this the Cold War, marked by the demolition of an urban approach. But those three facets are so impossibly border. It then travels to the United States, which saw Opposite page: intertwined in concrete works of architecture that it the destruction of the Twin Towers as the parting The Guggenheim Museum in is diffi cult to consider them separately, and here we shot for its “War on Terror.” Next is Asia, which builds Bilbao, by Frank Gehry. have sought out a different strategy. energetic signs of its economic force, and fi nally, 376 FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE Russia, astride two continents. It, too, is using studded with concrete stellae that turn this monument architecture to affi rm something, namely its recovery into an urban landscape. following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After The Zigzag shape of the Jewish Museum alludes to ten stages, the circle closes with another political ice German history’s dramatic changes of direction and age that coincides with an economic cooling, and the tragic interruption of the Jewish presence in that fi nancial and social convulsions, in a cumulus of city, but it is also of singular architectural importance. fractures and trembling that architecture registers With the IBA of 1985—an exhibition whose objects with the exactitude of a seismograph needle. were buildings made on a scale of 1:1 in different neighborhoods of the city—Berlin became the main Berlin without the Wall: the architecture stage for the postmodern movement that foreshadowed of memory in the face of ideological struggles a return to classicist architecture in opposition to the Our journey begins in the city where architecture most abstractions of modernity. And with Libeskind’s faithfully refl ects ideas, capital of a totalitarian empire project, announced around the same time as the Fall defeated in 1945 and frontier for four decades of the Wall, Berlin was to construct an icon of between the democratic West and the Communist deconstruction, a rival tendency launched with a show bloc. Since the demolition of the Wall in 1989, Berlin at MoMA in New York in the summer of 1988 that has continued to be an urban laboratory where defended fractured and catastrophic architecture as architecture is subjected to the demanding fi lter of an expression of a convulsed world. ideology and memory. Such is the case of the Jewish No city can better personify convulsion than Berlin, Museum by the United States architect of Polish origin the epicenter of two World Wars that left the ruins of Daniel Libeskind—a group of fractured and unstable its former parliament as a mute witness to the collapse volumes added to a baroque building—and the new of democracy and the Wagnerian defeat of German Reichstag by British architect, Norman Foster, which is expansionism. When Gorbachov capitulated to Reagan a critical restoration that transforms the character of and Thatcher at the end of the Cold War, allowing a legendary headquarters; as well as the Holocaust Germany to reunite and Berlin to recover its status as Memorial by New Yorker, Peter Eisenman, an extension capital, Foster rehabilitated the old Reichstag, making it Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, by Peter Eisenman. 377 THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE NEW CENTURY LUIS FERNÁNDEZ-GALIANO The Tate Modern in London, by Herzog & de Meuron. the new Parliament of a nation determined to impede in Milan and New York—architecture’s debate did not the return of the specters of an ominous past. To do so, move to Paris, where Mitterrand’s grand presidential he crowned the massive Wilhelmine structure with a projects combined geometric monumentality and the glass dome enlivened by spiral ramps. That dome serves glamour of celebrities. Nor to Blair’s London, which as a place to observe the city and symbolically places its feted the millennium with a technological and cool citizens above their political representatives, overseeing architectural third stream. Instead, the debate took their assembly to prevent new historical derailments. hold in two medium-sized European cities: Rotterdam Near this regenerated Reichstag—even the artist, in Holland, and Basel in Switzerland. In the fi rst, Christo, exorcised it by covering it with canvas before numerous young architects inspired by the abrasive the renovation began—Eisenman built a colossal and talent of Rem Koolhaas—especially those who worked lyrical memorial to the murdered Jews: a screen of under the initials of MVRDV—exacerbated modern concrete prisms that is simultaneously the waving language with accents of Russian constructivist landscape of planted fi elds and a disquieting labyrinth utopias from the nineteen twenties, applying them to running among exact tombs. Originally conceived the urban landscape. In the second, a new generation with the sculptor, Richard Serra, this commemorative of German Swiss architects emerged. There, the monument—so different in its jagged abstraction creative energy of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de from most of the Holocaust museums that have Meuron quickly stood out—with the permanent rural sprung up in recent times—is a gesture of penitence and essentialist counterpoint of Peter Zumthor—as in the heart of horror. At the same time, it is an they created a stronghold of constructive excellence, effective example of architecture’s capacity to express demanding art, and sensitivity to the material heritage ideas through form. of ancestral territories. Dutch hypermodernity was fed by the tabula rasa Rotterdam or Basel: new landscapes of a city devastated by the war, on the artifi cial territory and old cities in an indecisive Europe of a country of polders. But it was also fed by Koolhaas’ Following the exhaustion of the postmodern style— futurist fascination with the metropolitan crowding of which had its showroom in Berlin, and its think tanks a New York that was, for many years, his adopted 378 FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE home, object of study, and intellectual laboratory, the Dane, Jørn Utzon, designed concrete sails that made especially in the IAUS (Institute for Architecture and it the symbol of Australia, or—in terms of museums— Urban Studies) directed by Peter Eisenman. Combining the Pompidou Center in Paris, in which the Italian, the formal grammar of Le Corbusier and audacious Renzo Piano, and the Englishman, Richard Rogers, Russian diagonals with American pragmatism, those interpreted the countercultural spirit of Paris’ 1968 architects created an optimistic, playful school in youth demonstrations with a joyful, colorist, and the Netherlands. Soon, they were fl irting with the technological futurism. fragmentation and droopiness of Anglo-Saxon Bilbao’s Guggenheim took one step further, deconstructivism—drawing largely on the extreme because it entirely subordinated art to the spectacle ductility offered by new systems of computer of architecture, turning the latter into a gigantic representation. But their fi nest manifestation was sculpture with delicately matt refl ections that is artifi cial landscaping in which a building is surreally reckless in its detained stormy movement. A critical penetrated by the topography of its surroundings, and popular success, the museum attracted numerous creating a “free section” that puts a new spin on the visitors to a rough city of obsolete industry that had, “open fl oor plants” of the historical avant-garde. until then, been far removed from artistic and tourist The Swiss Germans, on the other hand, developed circuits. It became a powerful motor for urban a “degree zero” of architecture with elemental and regeneration and showed the capacity of cultural exquisitely constructed prisms deeply rooted in the infrastructures to contribute in the transition towards traditions and territory of their Alpine country, but also a service economy. What became known in Spain as infl uenced by the rigorist teachings of Aldo Rossi, who the “Guggenheim effect,” and outside the country as was Herzog and De Meuron’s teacher at the ETH in the “Bilbao effect,” spread like wildfi re, and mayors Zurich.

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