In Our Time - Architecture in the 20th Century

Episode Date: March 25, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise in so-called spectacular architecture at the end of the 20th century. Is architecture to do with what we live in, where it’s located, the buildings that accommodate at best so much more than a few private bodies, or is it the spectacular, even show-off, extravagance, even fantasy, of architects - or is it engineers who see the huge swash of public money as an opportunity to plant a place in posterity? Daniel Libeskind has been heralded as one of the greatest architects of his generation and of the latter half of the 20th century. He is the architect of some spectacular buildings - two of which are the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the highly controversial Spiral Extension to London’s own Victoria and Albert Museum, which his critics have described as looking like imploding cardboard boxes.But why are we witnessing at the end of the century a sudden glut of spectacular buildings, such as Libeskind’s? What do they say about the state of contemporary architecture? And do they show a blatant disregard for history? Is it merely‘the architecture of excess in a world of diminishing resources, a chic counterpoint at the end of the 20th century’?With Daniel Libeskind architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Spiral Extension to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum; Richard Weston, architect and lecturer at De Montfort University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Daniel Liebeskind has been heralded as one of the greatest architects of his generation and of the latter half of the 20th century.

He's the architect of some spectacular buildings, two of which are the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which has just been completed, and the highly controversial yet to be built spiral extension to London's Victoria and Albert Museum, which as critics have described as looking like imploding cardboard boxes. But why are we witnessing at the end of the century a sudden glut of spectacular buildings such as Lebeskins? What do they say about the state of contemporary architecture and our society? And do they show a willful disregard for history?

Joining down in Lebeskin with me to discuss these issues is Richard Weston. He too is an architect and lecturer at De Montfort University, as well as being a prize-winning author and critic. He's called the new wave of spectacular headline-grabbing buildings, the architecture of excess in a world of diminishing resources, a chic counterpoint at the end of the 20th century. Do you go along with that, Danny Leibuskin? Do you see it as an architecture of excess?

No, I certainly don't see my own work as architecture of excess. There are, of course, excesses in architecture, but I think one has to make a differentiation between authentic responses in a creative and imaginative way to history, and to the needs of a city and those architects who simply through their egotistical willfulness impose forms

which are arbitrary and actually not concerned with the long range issues of cultural continuity, for example. But there are three parts of this to Richard Weston's as judgment. First of all, the architecture of excess, which you deny. But in a world of diminishing resources,

he relates that to it. And just a counterpoint. a chic counterpoint at the end of the 20th century. What do you have to say about the architect for excess or spending the millions and millions on this inner world of diminishing resources? Well, I think if you were to take probably economic statistics of how much is spent on architecture versus how much it spent on defense or on clothing or on, I don't know what, you find it a very, very small percentage.

In fact, I think if one would compare cities today with the cities of the past, which we identify with, Rome, Barcelona, New York, cities are actually not treated as works of art, which actually they are. They are three-dimensional, four-dimensional works of art because they develop in time, they develop through the imagination and dreams of a community across generations and have a power to embody

what we are as people. In fact, when people think of history, they don't think of economy, they don't think of fashion, they don't think of media, they think of what did the cities look like, what did the buildings look like? And I don't think it's coincidental.

that the world we live in, the world we identify with is the world we have created. And therefore, whether we call it excessive or not, it's the world we remember. What do you say to that, Richard Weston? Would you say that your assertion has been comprehensively attacked? I think the assertion was intended to be a provocation. I was struck actually thinking on the way to the programme this morning that, in a way, the situation reminds me of the Burgess Shale. Steve Daigle wrote about this kind of exotic flowering of new life forms

that paleontologists have discovered and trying to sort of fathom out. And we look at the world of architecture now and there are all these extraordinary buildings, each which seems to have almost no lineage to the lay observer, each more exotic than the last. And they're kind of impacted in a kind of sea of mud, which is the mediocrity of general building. And I think that is the thing that really worries me,

that we are getting a media concern with the building, the spectacular building. I suppose in a way it started with the Sydney Opera House. That would have been maybe many people would say that was the beginning of this kind of lineage. I don't think in any way it was intended to be a spectacle in that sense. Jurnetson is an architect I'm writing about. I know his intentions were very different from that, but that is what it became for Sydney. It worked an economic magic, a medium magic for Australia.

It became the image of a country, let alone a city. And I think ever since then, there's a sort of striving in a way to achieve that. And it is part of the flux of global capital. It is part of an unknown little place in northern Spain like Bilbao, suddenly thinking of how do we get on the map, how can we provoke regeneration? And the answer is you get in an architect like Frank Gehry to do something utterly spectacular. And everyone's talking about it, and in that sense, it works. But hasn't public architecture very often striven towards the spectacular?

I mean, didn't the Eiffel Tower? didn't St. Peter's, didn't the Coliseum. They haven't tried to be said a modest little places. No, they have not. No, they have not. No, they have not. Let's build a modest little monument. No, indeed.

And I think what is spectacular about these buildings that you just mentioned, including the Opera House of Utsin and Sydney, is that they are not just spectacular as buildings, but what is spectacular is the transformations of relationships to buildings of the public at large. So the spectacle is not just in the forms of buildings, but in a new identification of the public,

of the city, of space, and of the future. And I think in that sense, this is not an ordinary process. It's the process of dynamics, of transformation, change, and also of the future. Yeah, I mean, I broadly agree. I think, however, there is now a kind of disconnection between that which the media are talking about and the rest of building production, which I find very worrying. Our problem is the making of good, habitable cities. And the monument, in a sense, is a very small and isolated part of our...

I would say that the monuments in the past, to a great extent, grew out of and were a kind of flowering of a general quality building culture. I would take the Gothic cathedral as a paradigm of that. The building is spectacle in the Roman Empire was a very different animal. I mean, clearly that was a spectacular culture. The first spectacular culture we know much about. In the 20th century, we have an avant-garde at the beginning of this century that wanted to establish a way of general building. That was the aspiration. What we have now, it seems to me, is a proliferation of kind of mini avant-gards of individual geniuses and talents,

whose work offers almost nothing to the generality of building. It's very difficult to learn from, and that I think is a problem that we face at the moment. But I think that's really an interesting phenomenon, the end of the ideology in architecture, the end of the great ideologues, with their ideal utopian schemes, which were futile and actually when built, have proven to be failure. So I don't think it's a coincidental transformation of this avant-garde's notion of the masters leading the masses into the future. I think we've all learned that this was a hoax which 20th century demonstrated on every level. And I think there is another movement, I think, among architects, which is that architecture is some part of the humanistic discourse discipline that we can't just control in a massive way, but we have to be aware of it not only as a formal discipline or a discipline of creation of space, but an ethical discipline,

which has to do with community interests. But your work does arouse comments compared with which Richard Weston seems as a mild friend. The Lord Riesmock, William Rysmark, who is a commentator on a great number of subjects, as you know, who says Leibskine invites us to take a walk in the desert with the devil. For the good of our souls. Sartre Mau and Lebeskin, Sartre Mau and Lebeskin, just a second, stand for the belief that a great belief that a great, great new eruption through barbarism is the only way to a brave new world. No, well, there you are.

What did you say to that? Well, first of all, I never had the following of Mao, and I have never had that number of possibilities in terms of billions. What about the idea that an eruption of barbarism is the only way to take it? I mean, isn't that in itself the sort of ideology you said had come to an end? No, actually, this criticism is an eruption of a certain ignorance about the transformation of modernity. because modernity is not just about these cliches of good and bad

and the devil walking because the walls are not exactly at right angles. I think one has to really follow the logic of what has happened in architecture, which is, of course, part of culture. We can speak of architecture as just something out of the context. It's part of literature, it's part of the cinema, it's part of the economy, it's part of how we dream. Well, I'm not waving you down, but I'm going to try to do something which is quite difficult, but given our listeners,

I've got no doubt that they'll make up for my failings, which is to describe something you've done. I've got a photograph in front of me, which is yet to be built, and then just to discuss it. I mean, we'll discuss the proposition whether we can discuss it, have we described. I'm looking at Victorian buildings, great Victorian buildings in London,

and your spiral extension to the Victorian Art Museum, how it might look. Now, it is not unfair to describe this, at first look, on this flat photograph as a number of four or five enormous cardboard books. spliced with and put with each other. How is that part of what you were talking about, of being part of the culture?

Let me just say. I will pass the photograph to you now. I will just, I don't want to correct you, but a language is very different from space, calling it boxes. If you really, imagine yourself walking down exhibition around, you don't see any boxes. You are seeing soffets and skylights,

which show a continuity of a wall, which is folding and unfolding in the depth of three-dimensional space between the historical facades of Henry Cole and Aston Webb. And it shows that this is a building whose mass and whose lightness at the same time is something which, though apparently very different, is also related to the rooflines, to the ridges, to the geometries, and to the phantasmagoric shapes which are represented by the different architects who built the VNA. I've absolutely no doubt that were that to be built,

and ways to get the money to build it, and we're fingers crossed, I will be, I'll certainly be one of the people who will come and stand and gorp at it. But is this to do with serving the museum or is this to do with serving your own private fantasy? Well, certainly not private fantasy because one would have to re-examine the role of the museum. The museum is no longer the neutral, passive box for an inert public walking around

and looking at dusty vitrines. Was it ever? It could have become, it has become. It was not. When the Victorian Albert Museum was built, it had different audiences. It had different... I've never seen people walking around a dustyly around the museum.

People have been quite interesting. Yes, but even very interesting. Yes, but I think if you really ask people to share in the depth of the VNA's mission, which is not really just to look at objects, but to take those objects and to transform them to creative acts, which are themselves part of the competitive view of England, that's what Henry Cole wanted, that's what William Morris wanted. This was not a museum to enjoy just aesthetic spectacle.

It was a museum to introduce the public to new possibilities of imagining the world and also recreating it. Now, we're still on this image, which is firmly now in our listeners' mind and imagination. Would you address that, Richard Weston, and give us your up view, or maybe just propose the counterview, which has been as strong as the pro-view? I think one has to say that one of the things the DNA spiral is intended to do is up visitor numbers. I mean, that's quite clearly why they want to build a spectacular thing like that. It will grab attention, and I suspect a lot of people would be pretty excited about it.

And knowing Mr. Leibeson's skill, and it is considerable, as a designer, I'm sure it will be very exciting to walk around. But what I suppose does worry about it is that we are in, it's called the spiral, and I think we're in danger to locking ourselves into a kind of vicious spiral of ever-increasing effects of more and more means, as happened in the Baroque period, say, that things had to get more and more extravagant to make an effect. And the quiet and the ordinary in the ever day is silenced by this kind of thing. That's a danger. If you go to Las Vegas, you can see that in popular culture writ large,

from, you know, they build a shed with a sign, and now they have an event. erupting volcano or a collapsing, sinking pirate ship in front of it. And you've just got to keep shouting louder than your neighbour to get attention. And I just wonder internationally whether we're not heading for that, that museums are going to be just trying to top each other, you know, a progressive search for a more and more spectacular effect. But again, I think one would have to be sensitive and not just generalise. I think, in fact, the spiral of the VNA has a very meditative space.

If one really would analyze the logic and the spatial construction of the interior with its flat floors, with its peripheral light which falls on these grated walls. There is a spiritual and a very meditative atmosphere. It's not at all a building which shouts. Now, that is part of the struggle to create anything new in architecture and in the world of arts in general.

Any book which tries to create a new story, a film that projects a new image, an opera which has a new drama to it, that's part of the struggle to create a work which is compelling to the public. And I think it would be foolish to believe that all architecture is based on some sort of datum,

which is a zero line of possibility and then judge everything from that mediocre line. There's another way of looking at your Las Vegas analogy, Richard Weston, which I think is a very interesting analogy. And again, people will have seen images of Las Vegas, the casinos fronted by pyramids and, as you say, pirate ships. But people enjoy that, and they enjoy that access and they enjoy that.

Now, if this is happening in the work of Liebeskind and outside Las Vegas, what does that say about what's going on generally in the 1990s? Aren't these two linked? Yeah, I suspect they are. And so what is that link telling you as a commentator? What's it telling you? It's telling me we're living in a media-saturated world

in which, you know, people are expecting a higher, higher level of stimulation. Is that a terrible thing? No, I don't think it's necessarily a terrible thing. I think it is a phenomenon of our time. I question whether it is a sustainable thing. It concerns me. But if you project, if your argument is it is only good if it can be sustained, it means that you get on with very little, to start with, don't you?

I mean, you could say to somebody who's written a book, well, we're not going to say that's a good book until you've written eight. You could say, look, that's a really good book, and if you don't write another, you've written one really good book, which is more than most writers ever do. So that will do, thank you very much. So I don't know whether this sustaining argument gets you very far. Well, I think in terms of the agenda that I see architecture having to address in the 21st century,

which is the problem of the city at large, the problem of how to cope with energy and other problems, the global warming, all these huge issues to which buildings are major contributors to major worldwide environmental problems, I think we need architectures that are beginning to look at those in a creative way. And I don't see that happening very much in the architecture that grabs public attention at the moment. I think that's a very good point, do you. key point, but I have to tell you that the concrete walls which spiral up are designed in such a way that you really need a minimum of intervention with systems, air conditioning. It's about ecology, it's about how to maximize the efficiency of a building, and it is dealing with issues of air circulation, of function, of flow, of connections to historical fabric. So one would have to be aware that beyond the images that the buildings have on pictures and photographs,

and in media, buildings are actually bodies within the city which have to be experienced, and they are unlike a two-dimensional work, a graphic work, they are about inhabitation. But as I understand it, Richard, Richard Weston, you were saying more than that, weren't you? You were saying that this is taking the architect's eye off the ball and the whole idea of building away from what you think is a deeper and more necessary task,

which is to look at the social side of cities and build with the old ideals of making places better for people to live their daily lives in. I think what concerns me is that a lot of the architecture now that we're praising to the heavens is actually in a way a manifestation of this kind of extreme concentration of capital and the global capitalism it now operates, that actually we have to find another way of living with the world, the natural world, with its resources and with each other, and that out of that will come very different syntheses.

And I think that's what I'm looking for to see, you know, I would love to see an architect of Daniel's talent asked to do some very ordinary buildings. Well, but I am involved. I'm involved in planning, large areas of planning in Berlin. I'm involved in a competition for Allerton Bywater, and what is a village in the 21st century look like? How does one deal with the resources with ecology?

I think one has to make sure that there are different programs in architecture. Not everything is a museum, and not everything is a city plan. There are different gradations. And architects in history, whether you take Renaissance architects, Baroque architects, medieval architects, ancient Greek architects, have always there with a number of issues because architecture is just not a monoliner system. Yeah, but is it easier to build a spectacular building than to actually say, look, we've got 5 million people in this place or 500 in a village? And we're going to try to make the best use of limited resources so that they can live lives as good and efficient as possible. It's not easier. They're just different problems.

It's just a very different issue to create an environment for a museum, which is a very specific program, or for a particular town hall or for a city. Well, I don't know. I mean, for instance, you spread at the beginning of this program that it was the end of ideologies and so on. So does that mean it's also the end of ideals because people have tried to build cities for people to live in houses,

that sort of stuff, have often worked from ideals, have often worked from ideals of how humankind should best conduct itself. And now they've been, they've made only small intrusions to the jerry building and the throwing of stuff up to get as many people in one place as possible generally to do dirty work. But that's a different matter. What have you got to bring to the way people are living in cities as this thing from strolling out and gauping at great buildings? Well, I think the end of ideology is not the end of ideas.

It's just the beginning of recreating this human setting in which ideas are produced because only through public participation and I'm actually glad that a building like the spiral is discussed. I'm accused of being together with Mao Tertung and whatever because it's just sort of sheer ignorance that people have attitudes like that to new ideas. And I think that buildings would just get by whatever city clans, housing, with nobody cares, nobody talks about,

are that representative of that inertia which really has destroyed cities over a long period of time? So I couldn't agree more with you that the task of architecture is a broad one, but one cannot just lump everything and say, you know, what is architecture is not just one thing. It's mainly from doing a small place to live, from the dwelling of a human being, to the larger public spaces, which are, after all, very unique.

Do you think that, Richie was May I ask you, do you think that there has been? And I don't, you know, well, you're an architect, you two are architects. So tell me, do you think there's been a loss of nerve in the last 20, 30 years, among architects, about building for people because of the loss of faith in tower blocks and the whole tower block estate development, which has sometimes worked, sometimes not, but in sort of the trellic tower, it's done both. It didn't work, and now people say it's a wonderful place in London. But nevertheless, what surrounds those sort of developments,

those sort of mid-century and late-century experiments, is an aura of failure. Now, you think architects have lost their nerve as a result of that and think we better keep off planning for garage numbers of people because we'll get it wrong? Certainly within the architectural profession, we've witnessed a backtracking from the belief that what we used to call the social program of modernism,

that it could build a better world, you know, the great white heat of technology and all of that rhetoric of the 60s and so on. Certainly there has. But what I think, you know, is the old baby with the bathwater, syndrome that you tend then to ascribe all of these failures to the physical fabric and the actual artefacts that were made when very often it was management failures. That's exactly the issue with Trellic Towers.

Exactly the issue with all these refurbished towers. Trelic towers is a huge, huge block of flats in North, in a part of London, which was built with great idealism, quickly became, for administrative reasons, run down a place that was hated, people wanted to get out of it, and with tremendous struggle on the part of the people inside the building has become a place where people want to live, they're proud of it. I think it's got a listing now as a building, hasn't it? And that's an interesting parable, isn't it?

It is, it is. And I mean, in a sense, you could say it's almost as simple as having someone at the entrance to control people going in and out or an entry phone system. It's so cheap, it's so simple. The reason those weren't done in the first place were partly to do with an ideology of openness and freedom,

And all of that. Then they were not done for reasons of absolute economic penury, and you'd need to short-term think of the worst possible going, I think. But I think it does show these tower blocks and what they represented to show a certain reductivist idea of what architects had during large parts of the 20th century. They thought they could simplify and reduce problems to a few lines on sketch paper, and that was reality. And people know very well that that's not reality. Reality is imaginative.

Reality is about wonder. reality is about that feeling in the stomach you get when you see the Eiffel Tower and you feel, wow, this is something extraordinary, even though you know everything about how it was made. You can't live in it, can you? Well, you're right. There is a superfluous element in the necessary, and of course in time necessity becomes also superfluous. So surely, architecture is as an art. It's not just a functional business. It is an art form which goes beyond just the forms of consumption. And I think the minute we get away from just consuming architecture on whatever level and think of its roots of its possibilities, we get back to the tradition, not away from it. Would you agree that architects have lost their nerve and lost faith in social building?

Absolutely. And so what are you going to do about it? Well, I'm trying my best. I'm working on a number of projects which say that the city is also a not just a collision of fragments that remain in history, but is a creative act which has a form, which has a spatiality, which is a proportion, which is a musical quality, which has a certain beauty. Without it, why would we even live in cities or anywhere else for that matter? Well, there's economic necessity for living in cities, isn't it, outside architecture?

But economics, well, yes, of course, cities have created economic necessity. Maybe it isn't it's pressing now, but it certainly was in the 18th-19th century. It is, but I think success of great cities in history and in the future will always be that they are imaginative, that they attract people to them for whatever reasons, because of what they've done. They've recreated something, or they've created something, a market for something, which never existed before. Do you think that new technology, which is so important in these new buildings, I mean, it's absolutely no disparagement to Daniel Liebeskin.

So a lot of your work is engineering, isn't it? Well, of course, buildings have to be constructed. They're technical entities. But I mean, a lot of your work is almost driven by engineering. What can we do? No, I would say it's driven by engineering on the country. I think engineering is only a means to really. specialising spaces which are adequate and necessary.

But in fact, the high-tech architecture that is so prevalent in the contemporary world was a simply manifestation of the possibilities of technology without any goals beyond that manifestation. Well, that's a fair rebuttal of my question, but I'd like to ask again, of Richard Weston, do you think a lot of the architecture is driven by engineering? And it's certain kinds of British architecture very much are, high-tech architecture, certainly. I don't think Daniel's buildings are. he certainly uses the very limits of engineering capability of Arap and partners are engineering with a spiral building

and it is a tour de force of physical three-dimensional design. To me, there's a whole issue with technology, with society, with all of these things come back to me for this kind of issue of the kind of fragmentation in the world we're dealing with. The engineering values exist in a kind of pocket and architectural values exist in another. And so I remember as a student in the early 1970s going to the University of East Anglia where Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre was under construction.

I didn't know it was under construction, and I encountered it, and there were workmen up there working on the ceiling. And when they came down from their ladders, I said, it must be amazing working on a building like this. They said, no, it's just another job, mate, pay pack at the end of the week, in it. What do we know about this building? There's nothing to us. That, in a way, as a parable of our times,

for me, summed up the dilemmas and the difficulties of architecture. There is an almost total separation between those for whom architecture is made and those who make it, and within the making of it, there is an almost complete separation between those who think it and those will actually do it physically. And that is very unhealthy. And yet great buildings just criss-cross all that.

At once they bring together the public desire, the public intuition towards the city and towards the programs which generated these buildings in the first place. I started with a quotation from Richard Weston and I'll begin to bring this to a close with a quotation from you. You're very quotable from, but a short one. You said building is an act of faith in culture. So what act of faith is being demonstrated by the buildings that you are designing and people that you admire designing now?

Well, the act of faith that there is a continuity. It might not be very visible culturally, but there is a continuity, and that less visible continuity of tradition has to be brought through contemporary means and communicated to a larger public. So the works of Henry Cole, of Webb, of William Morris, of the great founders of the Vienna, didn't die in 1890. They are as relevant to the next century as they were relevant to the previous one. And that is what architecture has to do.

It has to communicate it through its own new resources and bring the public to a new level of enjoyment and celebration of these facts. It's very interesting that a lot of this centers around museums, doesn't it? When is it going to center around people living in houses? Well, it is centering around houses. I haven't had much opportunity. I am trying desperately.

And I've won a large competition in Berlin, and I'm working on large areas of cities. And I think the same discussion we're now having about representative buildings of the public is the same discussion we would have about housing, what does it mean to be on a street, what is the role of the car, energy resources, sustainability of environment in the 21st century with the limited resources that are going to be there, as Richard said. You know, I think architecture is a discipline that is about faith in culture. It's about faith in a deep past.

You know, architects are immersed in a past that goes back to the Greeks and the Egyptians. And that for us is living still, you know, the quality of an architectural culture. And it is inevitably to build is an act of faith in the future. And I think we need, although we can't project a kind of social program in the arrogant way that was done in the 1920s, we do need to have a vision about better futures, which are ultimately social futures, rather than just artistic, aesthetic idealizations. I couldn't agree more. I think architecture is about ethics.

It's about our fellow human beings and neighbors. unless architecture tackles the deep issues of dwelling in the contemporary world, it would disappear like a field that never existed. Well, thank you very much, Tanya Liebeskind and Richard Weston, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.