Architecture Myths #21: Total Design
“Who needs architecture critics?” was the rhetorical question of the title
but, as with most rhetorical questions, the answer wasn’t long forthcoming. We all do, it seems.I might have guessed for, the previous six months, I’d been continually reminded I was missing out on the full value of my subscription.
Gradually, these reminders became more closely spaced and increasingly desperate renewal reminders. Hands up, I was one of those who simply lost interest.
It wasn’t always like that. Ever since Peter Davey left, I continued to subscribe whenever I could afford it, mostly out of sentimental memories of better days. But Peter Davey left in 2003! I’m all cried out now. Over it. Outgrown it.
Former freemasonry? Fixed they definitely seem to be, but colossi?
And who exactly are they these titanic colossi? William Curtis? Charles Jencks? Aaron Betsky? Michael Sorkin? Farshid Moussavi? Peter Cook? Please. I too object to architectural worth being reduced to a number count of likes and dislikes, but I also have an issue with what AR considers to be substance. In any case, titan or otherwise, the idea of an architecture critic is outdated.
I would love nothing more than a rational basis for the appreciation and evaluation of architecture. Unfortunately, what we still have is a battle for the supremacy of one individual’s subjectivities over another’s. The Victorian notion of an all-knowledgeable critic to whose opinion everyone else must defer is still alive in this whizz-bang digital age of ours. It’s there in the belief an objective opinion “about a piece of art” can only be arrived at by ideal (“knowledgeable”, “educated”, etc.) observer under ideal conditions. Roger Scruton is of this view – once prompting some wag to say Roger Scruton’s “ideal observer” is Roger Scruton on vacation in Italy.
William “Titan-Of-Yore” Curtis continues the tradition. In September 2014, AR published his piece on RCR Arquitectes’ Musée Soulages in Rodez, France. Curtis made much of the fact that the building is a bit dark and gloomy – not unlike a Soulage painting, and triumphantly recalls a child saying “It’s like being in a painting!” If this is an old-skool critic evaluating a building for us on our behalf, well, God help us all.
To merely list items from the bag of tricks architects deploy to gain commissions and afterwards imply appropriateness is neither criticism nor praise. Yet it counts as it. RCR clearly know what side their commission is buttered on. But is a building that mimics its contents really the way to go as Curtis seems to believe or at least make us want to think matters?
Total design as we used to understand/tolerate it, used to be about the things inside a building being designed by the same hand that designed the building – or at least acknowledging it like the café food does, for example. With Musée Soulages the building however, what we have is a building appropriating for its own purposes whatever depth and gravitas people grant the art it contains. What the architects have done is create a Soulages theme park. Entry €7.
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Oddly, the Heironymus Bosch Art Centre is housed in a former church in Bosch’s home town of Hertogenbosch, NL. Sadly, it contains only reproductions as the originals were spirited away long ago. But as you can see, something’s not right. The intention must have been for the architecture to enhance the experience of the art by prompting recollections of quivering fear or reassuring faith. Instead, the paintings jolly up the church quite nicely.
They obviously need RCR Arquitectes on the case to provide a total Hieronymus Bosch experience.
That’s one architectural competition I’d like to see. Perhaps it could coincide with next year’s Heironymus Bosch 500 Festival?
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