To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. Starting Friday, you'll be able to vote for the trend you think is the most important. Somehow, there'll be a prize involved. I've got to figure it out. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: Macho Macho Modernism
It used to be that the prevailing trends of architecture transformed slowly over decades; now style turns on a dime. This year,
MOCA's "Skin + Bones" show charted parallel processes and techniques between architecture and fashion and brilliantly showed that how the two disciplines had moved closer to each other in recent years. It's easy to see the couture lines in the recent work of Libeskind, Gehry (who was sued by M.I.T. this year for creating a building that dumps snow on students) and Hadid. Each of these architects have been recently called on by cities to build glamorous tourist destinations that could serve as both icon and visual shorthand for renewal, even if they did little to actually improve the fabric of the city. And like fashion, architecture styles now change as fast as hem lines.
A few high-profile projects this year distanced themselves from the swooping digital aerobatics of "starchitecture" by embracing function over form, most notably the Japanese firm Sanaa's
New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Admittedly, it makes use of a mesh skin, but it's firmly rooted in the Modernist tradition of a building responding to a problem, but marries it to the best lesson of Post-Modernism: That a building must be more than machine for living; it has to respond to its environment as well. While PoMo's like Michael Graves took that mandate as an excuse to create buildings shaped like castles and china cabinet's, Sanaa's New Museum is the kind of clever that doesn't break a sweat. That mesh skin recalls the Bowery's dwindling industrial past and the playful arrangement of the Modernist box serves the practical purpose of letting more natural light in. In the process, it avoids the pitfalls of both schools: it's too playful to develop any of the Modernist's self-importance and it lacks the showy insecurity displayed in a lot of the new buildings being created now.
But this is more than a plug for the New Museum (though really, it's awesome). The buzzword of the year seems to be restraint. You can see it
Norman Foster's glass-roofed atrium at the Smithsonian, in
Herzog & de Meuron's surprisingly refined take on the ironcast facades of SoHo and in NY Times critic Niccolai Ouroussof's sometimes unrelenting coverage of
Modernist classics or architects
working in the modernist tradition. Whether Ouroussof is creating the trend or just responding to it is a chicken or the egg proposition.
L.A, for its part, hasn't added much to the conversation, other than to prove that like New York, it's perfectly capable of throwing up a bunch of banal overpriced condos with stupid names. One exception is the
Wilshire/ Vermont Station, designed by Arquitectonica, the first housing development in L.A. to actively engage itself with the city's mass transit (a number of MTA stations are part of a building, but are treated as afterthoughts). That's all going to change with the February opening of
Renzo Piano's Phase I redesign of LACMA, which looks to be both spectacular to look at as well as an intellectually rigorous exercise in function; recreating (well, this being L.A.- - creating) the social dynamics of pedestrian urban space. Originally, the plan was to have Rem Koolhaas raze the existing campus and replace it with an undulating dystopian glass tent. Money (and the question of how to clean the roof of bird droppings) stopped that plan, but it could turn out that Piano's modernist-influenced plan may be the face of the future after all.
Labels: 2007, design
