practice

“Dictatorships – the golden times for architecture”

It’s a title of an interview with Jacques Herzog by Ulrike Knofel and Susanne Beyer. The interview was originally published by Der Spiegel, but I have read it in Forum - a digest of the foreign press articles in polish. Questions asked to Jacques Herzog insist on something that most of architects who practised a bit in an office know by hard. Architecture is a function of money.

And only big money allows architects to create truly impressive pieces of architecture. Dictatorships tend to have the money for architects and pay them well for materializing what the regime stands for. Other powers able to do so, are big corporate brands, as Verena mentioned in her article here. Those brands can finance all sorts of design, be it a “good” one (BMW) or a “bad” one (Disney).

I have recently spoke about the above building with a friend of mine who study under Wolf D. Prix at Angewandte in Vienna. He said something that I can hardly agree with, which is that only through such building an architect is able to communicate a message, because only those make it to mass media. They indeed make it to mass media, but not as the architects message, but as brand identity. Let’s not live in a dream: architects do not differ much from marketing specialists here.

Coming back to the interview with Herzog. He claims that the bird’s nest is some sort of “Trojan horse”, because it was designed to enable informal meetings in places where “it’s impossible to place CCTV cameras”. Of course, I haven’t seen the building by my own eyes, but being in London quite often, I don’t think there are any places where it’s impossible to place the CCTV. Sadly, Herzog’s argument sounds to me (yet again) as a justification of branding of a very “contemporary” regime.

Sitting in a cozy room of some design school, where light is deemed and mac books are humming gently, we might think that Watercube heralds a new kind of architectural practice because of it’s unique structural system. But in reality, saying that architecture in not a political practice is wishful thinking.

© 2008 we have NO VISION.