From dezeen magazine, new art gallery possibilities and completions from around the world …
Architect David Chipperfield has released images of the completed seafront Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate composed of six identical volumes with an acid-etched glass skin
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Danish architects Bjarke Ingels Group have won a competition to design the new National Gallery of Greenland in the country’s capital city, Nuuk.
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Links, credits, background and more photos can be found under listing here.
In my dotage, I would far rather sit home listening to the delicate tones of Margo Timmins than try to understand your polyglot “New and proposed art galleries around the world” dysfunctional hysteria.
Last nite CBC entertained us to a tour of Jack Diamond’s new Mariinski ll concert hall. While Jack was encouraged to effuse by an over effusing CBC and local director Valery Abisalovich Gergiev Saint Petersburg’s architects had quite a different point of view.
Believe me choice of architect on such projects is solely political: and by God it shows!
I have not had the . . . errrr . . . pleasure of attending any one your listed galleries. God knows similar twisted techo-babble is cropping up like warts on a sat-upon-arse the world over.
I have visited Museu do Olho Curitiba Brasil . . .
http://www.google.ca/search?q=museu+do+olho+curitiba&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=houCUfzHEoO0iQK2zIDQDg&ved=0CEQQsAQ&biw=1012&bih=538
. . . though.
I am surprised, it did not make your list. Needless to say I loved it: the locals I spoke to, however, were of a different opinion.
And oh dearie me we are about to be regaled with more juvenile prognostications choosing our own (got ‘im by the balls) Starchitect.
The collective typology of these things tells us we have come to the end: the only typology we have left is chaos!
To Roger Kemble, I used to work for David Chipperfield until recently and I do appreciate a good cantankerous rant. Although I have not worked on either the Turner Gallery or the Wakefield Gallery recently coming out of the office I will try to answer some of the points you make.
First off; the hysteria and dysfunctionality of architectural criticism these days. My short answer would be there is no longer any real architectural criticism as there used to be in the days of print. I think even the notion of trying to establish a critical framework on which to assess buildings is complete anathema these days. (If you go to my blog, I speak about this with the architectural critic Hal Foster). I think one should try, amidst all this confusion of new technology, to graft a new niche for architectural criticism.
The second thing is the political climate in which architects have to operate. When you speak about this to Chipperfield he would argue that at the time when he started his career the climate for modern architecture in the UK was reactionary. Prince Charles and Charles Jencks were in, modernity was out. In addition, and more importantly, local governments were rolled back, the welfare state was attacked and Thatcher famously announced that “There was no such thing as society”. The rise of the starchitect finds its roots in the misguided individuality cult that resulted from the atomization of society in the 80s. In other words, many architects big themselves up to attract clients because institutional patronage dried up. An explanation, but perhaps not a solution.
I understand by the way, judging from the crowds which showed up at the opening and are visiting the Turner regularly, that at least the building fulfills a need in that sense. Margate is a somewhat dilapidated seaside town with high unemployment. The project was indeed political, it was intended to invest culturally in the town to improve confidence. Whether the attraction of the cultural and creative industries (I hate those terms) will be enough to resolve its economic woes is another story.
Thomas, vis the above list of art galleries, they only compound the architectural trend started by architect Zaha Hadid, continued by Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and others, as shown in this list, of hysterical architectural . . . eeeee .. . . “path-finders“?
They are bucking a trend!
The trend is aggravated urbanism, a time the world’s cities are growing exponentially: people flocking into them for jobs, safety and through land expulsion policies.
Globalisation and free trade have not been the panacea the politicos touted. Indeed, they have had the opposite effect: perfidiously billing freedom and prosperity that has, not so far, happened: indeed this is the architecture of chaos, the bellwether of a future break down of culture and probably society.
What happened to the party wall, that great equalizing creator of great historic places we expend millions to visit?
To cut a log story short two examples come to mind, I try to keep my conversation to places I have personally experienced, Vatican city Rome and Centro Historico Mexico City.
Both are replete in great architecture, the party wall and the ambience of culture that tells its people who they are.
This polyglot list of isolated, twisted boxes and egos doesn’t tell us anything about who we are but it tells us were we are headed. So Duck and hold onto your hat!
Roger, what you are really discussing is the irrelevance of the architectural profession in late capitalist, spectacular society. I agree with you that the path of the starchitect is escapism at best and a distraction to the real issues at hand. There is an elaborate system of domination and oppression within advanced industrial society which exacerbates unequal division of wealth, depletes resources, pollutes and leads to the alienating environments you describe.
I am quite keen to listen to and explore viable solutions for our dysfunctional economic and political systems, actually. So let’s forget about the galleries!
“ . . . what you are really discussing is the irrelevance of the architectural profession in late capitalist, spectacular society.”
Well, errrrr, really yes. I track my own professional journey to exactly that conclusion. I pretty well gave up architecture (although I am still a registered architect) in the early ’80’s not that I couldn’t handle it but because there was no point. The subsequent built environment corroborates my conclusion.
What is the point of enduring a decade of post secondary education only to be confronted by planning requirements limited, essentially to height, FSR, occupancy and set backs.
Private property, that illogical left over from the eighteenth century closures, prevents any kind of figure ground (i.e. in the urban context, the spaces between) articulation impossible.
The late Baroness Thatcher famously said, “There is no society, only individuals.” Well, there you have it from the small town grocer’s daughter!
Those art gallery thingies sure make her point!
Roger, I really enjoy our discussion, I have to say. It’s a bloody shame I am in the US now, and I take it you are in the UK – I’d love to meet up. I once spoke to David Wild, he had given up on the profession as well for similar reasons. David wrote for the AJ, the AD and so on, committed communist or anarchist – I forget. I don’t have an answer to the serious issues you raise. Only a few days ago I happened to have a chat about the first CIAM declaration with Kenneth Frampton, the La Sarraz declaration, in which private property and land ownership is tackled as the main obstacle to providing decent housing. It seems we have only regressed from there. Another interesting bit of trivia; Robert van t’ Hoff, a Dutch architect who was part of De Stijl, and had worked for F.L. Wright also decided to give up, because he felt he wasn’t able to do quality in the ‘system’. Lubetkin became a farmer. And that’s before and just after the war. You’re in good company!
I don’t know, I was just made out a disappointment to the 1848 Communist Manifesto on my own blog, haha, but I still would like to raise a family with my wife. My wife is good fun, btw, we went to Margate, she steps inside the Turner and says “My god, this is boring, and the shop is the centrepiece, of course.”