While architecture is fundamentally about the design of social space, an exhibition necessarily conveys this using wall-mounted presentations of text, illustrations, plans, models, and now video. Beyond categorizations of style, school, trend or theme, the annual ‘international’ exhibition at GA Gallery is comprised of a wide variety of works by some of the world’s most talented architects. Pressed to identify any overarching values in the group of projects on display, it is tempting to foreground two: sustainability and grandeur. Of course, the latter is a mainstay of the architectural trade, but here it is very much in evidence. Simply put, these projects are big. The notion of “sustainable design” is of more recent vintage, and has become a sort of buzz phrase du jour.
Among the museum projects on display, Frank Gehry’s Foundation Louis Vuitton is likely the most idiosyncratic. To be situated in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris XVI, all functions are enclosed in a whale-like skin of curved glass sections. While the interior light could be extraordinary, one wonders whether this design will age with any more grace than Gehry’s ill-fated American Center at Bercy (Paris XII). A totally different approach to transparency is found in SPBR Arquitetos’ Mediathèque Puc-Rio. Composed of separate administrative and research volumes, the latter encloses a vast 15 by 90 meter reading room under a glass ceiling. Poised above a tropical water garden, one entire level of the mediathèque is open-air.
At the bleeding edge of advanced environmental technology, as always, we find the laughing architect, Renzo Piano. Where Piano’s design for Intesa Sanpaolo Office is the embodiment of decorous restraint, the towers of the China Construction Bank by Morphosis throw such unmanly prudence overboard, to concretize a vision of sheer capitalist excess. As an alternative to the office tower, both Zaha Hadid’s Antwerp Port Authorities HQ and Randic-Turato’s Adris Group Building in Zagreb propose spaces elevated on massive support structures above the existing city. In the latter, the architects describe the hovering profile with references to Constant’s “New Babylon” and the gigantic saucers of Emmerich’s “Independence Day” (though naturally omitting mention of the aliens’ full-phaser reply to Washington).
Other notable projects include Norman Foster’s Spaceport America for Virgin Galactic (“Is this for real?” With USD 300M of investment, apparently, yes), Tadao Ando’s Water Charnel, and Dominique Perrault’s San Pellegrino Thermal Baths. This is an exhibition that will set your mind buzzing about what works — and what doesn’t — in contemporary architecture.
To read about “GA International 2008”, see TABlog’s review.
M. Downing Roberts
M. Downing Roberts