If the Tower of Babel furnishes architecture with a paradigm, this paradigm carries a warning: as we all know, the tower could not be finished – the center would not hold. By confusing the builders’ languages and scattering them abroad… God inflicted on them the fate they had sought to avoid. — Karsten Harries
(Burj Khalifa) the anorexic Tower of Babel that does reach up into the heavens. — Aaron Betsky
In the Tower of Babel fable, Noah’s descendents were attempting to build a tower that reached the heavens. They were unable to complete the project because they were eventually unable to communicate with each other. It was God’s punishment for their impertinence. The story was unclear about how high they would have to go to succeed. We may find out, as we seem to be still trying to build buildings to reach the heavens. One wonders what the punishment will be this time. Despite the wake-up call of the Twin Towers, the race to be the tallest has recently been on the upswing. The current leader is SOM’s Burj Khalifa tower, reported to be over 2,650 feet, or half a mile tall. It appears that Frank Lloyd Wright’s mythical mile-high tower may be a reality yet.
Perhaps another aspect of the Babel myth also bears heeding. It is an appropriate cautionary tale for the building information modeling (BIM) generation. Everyone working together on the same model from different professional values, cultures, and jargons could result in the reenactment of the communication breakdown that occurred at Babel. As large, multinational project efforts shift from being spearheaded by American firms to being locally managed and directed, the challenge of overcoming the cultural and language barriers will grow. Babel reincarnated as BIM could cause a reassessment of the process of twenty-first-century integrated practice, including the consideration of a shared international language, and rules and procedures of practice.
See also: Building information modeling: BIM • Globalization • Hyperbuilding •
Integrated practice
Further sources: Harries (1998: 140)
Banal
I like boring things. — Andy Warhol
Many people like suburbia. By dismissing Levittown, modern architects … reject whole sets of dominant social patterns because they don’t like the architectural consequences.
— Robert Venturi in Learning from Las Vegas (1977)
In our search for the unique we all make or find the same things; desiring en masse the authentic and the exceptional, it all turns out banal. — Winy Maas
31 | B Baroque
Unoriginal and commonplace, the very definition of banal, is the fate of most buildings. The background building is ignored by the critics but is an important and necessary work of architecture. Banal architecture is the background that is needed in order for foreground buildings to shine as landmarks. Every jewel needs a setting. Banal does not necessarily imply bad. As Steven Izenour and the Venturis famously proclaimed in Learning From Las Vegas (1977), there is value in the ugly and the ordinary as a reflection of the truth of the American suburban condition – the low-density sprawl of Levittown. Banality reigns. It is familiar, and thus comfortable, for most of its occupants. The desire to live in the same architecture as your neighbor is universal. As the appreciation of high- design architecture is still the domain of the initiated, everyone else is perplexed. The problem became most evident during the era of modern architecture. Modern international-style buildings, hailed by critics at the time, now form the banal backgrounds of industrialized cities around the world (Figure 19). Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine that the colorful and aggressively foreground blob building of the more recent past will become banal. They are more likely to simply become sad reminders of a short-lived mannerist, neo-baroque, pop architectural style. Like the glitz and glitter of 1970s Las Vegas, they will be regarded as pathetic and dated as they become trite and age badly. As “green” building becomes the norm, the banal, modest, background building may become respectable once again. After all, the dominant architectural agenda will be to humbly do the right thing and not necessarily to impress. It may ultimately be the age of banality in architecture in a good way.
See also: Blob architecture
(Archispeak) • Blobitecture • Cliché • Fabric architecture • Green building (Archispeak) • Heterotopia • Ugly and ordinary
Baroque
.…defined as “complex forms characterized by grotesqueness, extravagance, or flamboyancy” describes … Frank O. Gehry’s Experience Music Project … — Joseph Rosa
The affinity between the baroque age and our own goes deeper than the formal complexity common to both … — Herbert Muschamp The baroque is most associated with the historical style in architecture that occurred in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Renaissance baroque style consisted of exuberant decoration, expansive curvaceous forms, undulating façades, large-scale sweeping vistas, and
B | 32 Beauty
spatially complex compositions that often employed ovals in plan. The baroque space was carved and subtractive, rather than assembled and additive.
In reaction to the visual excesses of the baroque style of architecture, plus the movement towards rationalism in all things, the neoclassical and gothic revival styles that followed the baroque eventually resulted in the most extreme anti-baroque style of all – modern architecture. The dogmatic modern architecture style did not become popular, as the humanity and richness of the baroque persisted in the public appetite.
Recently, the term baroque has become understood as transcending a particular style and denoting instead an ideology that rejects the paucity of unadorned, rectilinear form and space, and thus the modern “international style” of architecture.
Some of the above characteristics of historical baroque architecture, and urban planning, could be describing the current crop of blob and fold architecture. Digitally generated architecture facilitates curvature and spatial complexity (Figure 20). It is making the task of creating baroque architecture easier than it was in the Renaissance. Perhaps in our never- ending need for labels, this installment of architectural style could become known as the twenty-first-century neo-baroque.
See also: Blob architecture (Archispeak) • Blobitecture • Digital architecture •
Fold
Figure 20: Greg Lynn: Alessi coffee and tea set
Beauty
It is amazing how complete the delusion is that beauty is goodness. — Leo Tolstoy
Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting … — Theophile Gautier (1825)
“Functionalism” has many forms. Its most popular form is the aesthetic theory that true beauty in architecture consists in the adapting of form to function. — Roger Scruton
33 | B Beauty
In Eisenman’s work and in other recent theory, beauty is reemerging in the context of opposition to the sublime (grotesque). — Kate Nesbitt The word beauty remains proscribed in modern professional debate today only as a vestige of Puritanism.
— Inaki Abalos and Juan Herreros
Since the Renaissance, architects have been uncomfortable with the burden of beauty. During the twentieth century, it was barely mentioned and seldom embraced. Louis Kahn was one of the only prominent twentieth-century architects to dare to mention the word. His dictum: “Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love” stands as a recipe for modernist beauty. With Venturi’s legitimization of the “ugly and the ordinary,” the burden of beauty was lessened. Perhaps thankfully beauty is now seen as old-fashioned and dispensable; an obstacle to the perception of the more profoundly moving aesthetic values of the sublime and the uncanny.
Today’s architectural students have little interest in qualities such as beauty and elegance. They regard these as “old school,” out of step with the aesthetic that celebrates pseudo grunge styling, alongside an emerging ecological fashion movement in architecture towards retro “junkstyle.” The popularity of anti-beauty merchandise like the youth- oriented anti-aerodynamic “cube” automobiles is testament to the sea change that has occurred in consumer goods (Figure 21).
Influenced by the curved-form opportunities provided by digital design tools, the language associated with the search for architectural form has evolved from the traditional terms “beauty, scale, and proportion” to “smooth, supple, and morphed.” The leader in the current design revolution is Apple. Its “designed” versus “engineered” product line has started to influence the appearance of all of the other consumer electronics products. Such staid companies, as Dell, Samsung, and Nokia, have even discovered color. It is a brave new world.
Beauty… withers under the edicts of today’s aging architectural revolutionaries who man the review boards and have achieved aesthetic certainty.
— Robert Venturi’s parting words in Learning from Las Vegas (1977) See also: Aesthetics • Elegance (Archispeak) • Junkspace • Purism • Sublime •
Ugly and ordinary • Uncanny – unheimlich
Further sources: Abalos (in Gausa 2003: 79); Hale (2000: 52); Harries (1998: 229); Johnson (1994: 402); Scruton (1979: 25) Vittamo (in Leach 1997: 151)
B | 34 Behaviour and environment