Temporary and permanent architecture

French Communist Party Headquaters, Paris, 1972. Oscar Niemeyer

Deconstruction is unbeatable in terms of spectacle.

The video below is on the ZHA 2007 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, and it shows the construction process of such a clever devise. The result could not be more appealing. Koolhaas , Ghery and Liebeskind have done theirs with similar striking results.

For permanent wrap surface buildings, I mean real (not virtual) architecture, Oscar Niemeyer is still the unbeatable one, as his Paris building demonstrates. The picture was taken few weeks ago thanks to Monsieur Benoit kindness.

Architecture, politics and sex

Liebeskind skyscraper Milan, (Archinet)

The politicy of “putting cities in the map” through iconic buildings (gherkins) has finally bumped into an awkward subject for urbanism and architecture: sex. The problem starts when politicians think of architecture as a source of meanings (individual and collective), and not as a chance of constructing artistically.

The polemic on the “impotent” (Berlusconi) skyscraper of Daniel Liebeskind in Milan is the result of forcing architecture to represent almost literally what the public should see: “the meaning of the Holocaust” in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the “globe shattered into fragments” in the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, an “open book” in the Bar-Ilan University in Israel and “the Orion Constellation” in the London Metropolitan University.

The paradox is that the impulse of being represented by buildings is precisely what keeps architecture alive. Alejandro de la Sota was a expert in doing architecture while people only asked him to do a house, a school or a Council Hall. Konrad Fiedler used to say that "the form, which is the content, does not represent but itself": every architect should remember that when taking the briefing form politicians. This link opens the article "Not manly enough" Berlusconi´s verdict on Libeskind work, by Arifa Akbar in The Independent.