http://www.iht.com/articles/529013.htm
The writing of the walls: Architecture as propaganda
Alain de Botton NYT
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
The writing of the walls
LONDON Recent events have played into the hands of those who believe
that architecture has lost its way and become - in some cases fatally -
too fancy for its own good. Last week's report on the collapse in May of
the Paul Andreu-designed terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport outside
Paris, which killed four people, came amid the sudden critical scrutiny
of and public scandals over Andreu's opera house under construction in
Beijing.
There were the problems with Santiago Calatrava's roof for the Olympic
Stadium in Athens. The Whitney Museum in New York dismissed Rem
Koolhaas's plans for its extended galleries on the grounds that they
were too bold and expensive. And in the squabble over Ground Zero, the
only thing the competing designers seem to agree on is the need to build
a Freedom Tower vastly taller than most New Yorkers would feel safe
living and working in.
These setbacks and controversies have allowed sober-minded skeptics to
accuse the profession of abandoning its original purpose - holding up a
roof and keeping out the weather - in favor of reckless and
phantasmagorical aesthetic effects, best exemplified by the wavy
titanium surfaces of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim or the angled walls
of Koolhaas' new Central Library in Seattle.
Thus the fate of Andreu's "prestige" airport terminal seems a most
old-fashioned and (for some) grimly satisfying morality tale: how
pretension can win out over common sense; how those who look at the
stars can end up falling in the ditch. The skeptics are certainly right
in one regard: The last decade has witnessed a sharp rise in the number
of buildings whose design seems motivated not primarily by any
functional goal but by a desire to enhance the status of the cities or
countries that have commissioned them.
But to imply that this strays from architecture's historical goals is to
deny history. More than 150 years ago in "The Stones of Venice," John
Ruskin remarked that architecture had two missions: to provide shelter
on the one hand, to glorify on the other. And it's this second task that
the new libraries, museums, airports and town halls appear to have taken
up with gusto. These buildings have helped to flatter and idealize their
often hitherto neglected environments. Their appearance speaks to us of
modernity and intelligence, of elegance and luxury.
Yet because we live in a practical and literal age, we are liable to be
suspicious of the grand claims of new buildings. They should instead
reflect and accommodate reality: Buildings should speak of people as
they really are, rather than as they hope to be.
But this is a fairly recent idea. Rather, the new high-status buildings
have tradition on their side. Architects have long thought themselves to
be in the business of glorification - think of how one's eyes are
directed skyward in the Pantheon in Rome, of the soaring spires and
stained glass of Gothic cathedrals. This tradition endured through, and
even profited by, the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Contrary to popular supposition, the architects who built in a grand,
idealizing fashion were not naïve about human nature. They knew that
most of those who used their buildings would not be as kind or good as
the architecture implied. Rather, the buildings embodied an aspiration;
they were intended as a goad to virtue. They were a kind of propaganda.
It's common to make a severe distinction between art (good) and
propaganda (very bad). Whereas art doesn't try to sell us anything or
inspire us to perform any particular activities, propaganda is given
over to whipping us up to admire tyrants or exhorting us to produce more
for the motherland. But it might be worth redrawing our feelings on the
subject by remembering that, in the literal sense, the word propaganda
refers only to the promotion of a set of beliefs.
That many beliefs have historically been associated with political
ideologies or commercial preferences of the more unpleasant kind is more
an accident of history. All an object must do to count as propaganda is
to use its technical resources to direct us toward something - to
enhance our sensitivity and readiness to respond favorably toward any
idea, vision of life, person, belief and so on.
Defined in this way, a lot more things suddenly seem as if they deserve
to be seen as propaganda, including a museum or an airport. Calling a
building a piece of propaganda makes us see that every consciously
created object is trying to tell us something. Furthermore, it shows
that there may be nothing particularly wrong with an attempt to direct
our behavior and spirit, so long as the direction is a valuable one.
To defend many works of recent architecture, one could therefore argue
that they are rather nobly trying to change the way we perceive certain
places and cities and forms of travel. They are attempting to present a
glorified image of Bilbao or Athens - an image that places the stress on
all the most attractive sides of these places.
Even if we don't always approve of their appearance, we should at least
be sympathetic to the ambitions behind their constructions. They
represent attempts to lend dignity to their surroundings, and that -
assuming the ceiling doesn't cave in - may be one of the most serious
and traditional functions of architecture.
Alain de Botton is the author of "The Consolations of Philosophy" and,
most recently, "Status Anxiety."