My current students have never heard of Bjarke Ingels, Liz Diller, or Norman Foster. Pressed to name an architect practicing today they admire, they shrug. In fact, the only modern or contemporary architects they have heard of are Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Santiago Calatrava (but only because of the Oculus in New York) –and two of those are deceased.
After decades of moaning and groaning about so-called “starchitecture” as the bane of the profession, we now seem to be entering into a new era in which names do not matter and there are no idols. Is that a good thing?
As always, architecture lags other cultural phenomena. The days of Picasso or Warhol, or even Jeff Koons, are long gone, as are the days when the Beatles were battling the Stones or Blur Oasis.
Quick, name one author as famous as Mailer or Vidal. Yes, we still have Ms. Swift and now Mr. Bunny, but they are shooting stars who explode over a crowded field of Spotify glimmers that pop up on people’s playlists before fading with a tinkle of reverb and an endlessly looping riff.
Still, the extent of (willful?) ignorance among students at the various universities where I teach (currently, Kean University, last semester University of Pennsylvania, where some had, to be honest, heard those architects’ names) and give guest lectures is astonishing.
What makes the situation even more surprising to an old fart like me is that, when I ask them whose work they are looking at for inspiration, they shrug. They are too busy (doom)scrolling or asking ChatGPT wazzup to think about architecture until the moment they have to work on a project and might try to Insta something of use for their plan or façade. And even that is so last decade to some of them. AI can help, or they can just mine sources way beyond what I still think of as architecture.
So, is this a good thing? On the face of it, of course. For a long time, we have wanted to get away from the worship of false idols and move back towards the belief in the sacred mysteries of architecture, which are deeply shrouded in the ark and its temples, and which are now nothing but memories or relics, because that is True Architecture.
Or, we wanted just the facts, constructing logical results from an efficient survey and analysis of pertinent conditions. Copying what heroic architects of our era are doing is for lazy amateurs or sycophants.
The problem is that some of those (almost) dead men and a very few select women got all that attention because they and their teams did and continue to do things that are amazing and worth looking at. We can learn from masters and mistresses, if we look carefully enough.
That we have a vastly enlarger field of knowledge at our disposal but also must process and sift through all that stuff with much greater speed now, should not take away from the heightened relevance of great buildings or designs (as we know, the runners-up to competitions are always worth looking at more than the winners).
Then again, that assumes that you want to use your knowledge and skills in architecture to make buildings. In reality (or IRL), the irrelevance of Ingels’ twisting towers or Diller’s spatial and visual choreography may have as much to do with the fact that making (big) buildings is something that is and increasingly will be done semi-automatically. Future architects must look to other arenas in which they will be working.
For some, that is figuring out how to do work better than AI. For others, it is asking what architecture could be doing. The remit of architecture is shifting.
When I discussed the situation I have tried to sketch above with Craig Konyk, the Chair of my program at the Michael Graves School of Public Architecture at Kean University (Michael who?), he pointed out that our School has a strong emphasis on confronting the complex social issues of our times through architecture in a way that might not need the forms or strategies developed for buildings that are striking enough to stick in your mind’s eye.
There is also the sense that leaders in our discipline have gotten bad names because they either turn out to be evil or morally compromised, as so many big names in every field have turned out to be in one way or the other, or that they have had to sell out to such an extent that the results, when they grow past the making of the small projects that establish their name, are compromised into the kind of blandness that makes my students shrug. Moreover, the whole cult of the hero seems so not just twentieth, but nineteenth century.
So, good riddance to the days when we waited for each building drop or for the Progressive Architecture Awards publication as if it was the swimsuit issue. And good riddance to following leaders who, as Bob Dylan pointed out long ago, just want your parking meter. Come to think of it….issue? Swimsuit? Parking meter? And, for that matter, leader?
I just hope that there is something in the flood of imagery, sounds, other data given form that washes over our students everywhere all the time that inspires them to do good work. By that I mean that they produce not just buildings, or more in general projects that work, but that they also find ways to make us at home in this confusing world, to astonish us, and to help us how to open that reality available to all in a sustainable manner.
I would and continue to look at the work of people calling themselves architects to figure out to do that, but I look forward to seeing what students come up with now and in the future.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
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