A stroll down a historical street yields a host of emotions, so full of character are the buildings. Some are cheerful, others somber, many elegant, a few charming. These oldtimers can be light or heavy, but above all there is an imbued honesty never found in contemporary buildings. There's no tricks to make them stand, no hidden steel beam covered by wood, no steel frame behind a drywall cover. No, with old buildings what you see is what you get. A stone wall is a stone wall, brick is brick.
 |
| Whimsical and charming yet still elegant, traditional architecture is imbued with a wealth of emotions |
Today, buildings and cities lack character, the personality utterly nonexistent, mystique impossible. In their quest to strip buildings of decoration, Modernists stripped them of everything else as well, leaving buildings as nothing more than geometrical shapes in the sky. The wild and unrestrained buildings of some contemporary architects, while in some ways a step in the right direction, almost never make any concessions to local considerations. Whether in England or the Middle East, their buildings look the same. Some of this architecture in particular seems bound by the limitations of computer modelling, the geometric edges and curves softened by a software's meshsmooth modifier, the way they are because of what is easy to do with software. But I don't mean to single any particular architect out, for many of today's architects are guilty of gross negligence. Their ignorance of site and context is baffling, and immensely frustrating. Over and over, their buildings play right into the hands of poor planning, sited on a big plot of land or surrounded by a huge parking lot.
Famous architects are much more influential than any urban planner and they have a duty to join the urban debate. There is no glory in designing a popular museum if it doesn't on some level improve the quality of its surrounding context. Otherwise the architecture is as shallow as much of today's pop music, good for a few listens and forgotten once the next hit comes along.
To get back to character. I simply don't see any hiding among the crazy shapes. These buildings have no face, no common grounding with which the city dweller can relate. Without these all important features one cannot say they have a soul. They will not sag with age, not develop a patina, or age gracefully into ruins. No, at most they will crack and crumble to reveal steel reinforcing rods, that hidden ingredient without which they could not stand. Like a robot, they may be fascinating, at times awe-inspiring, but one cannot have a conversation with contemporary architecture. No dialog or long term relationship can spring from an object with no soul. Standing one after another, these characterless buildings have clustered into a collection of objects which can hardly be considered a city, devoid of community, engagement, and life.
