Context

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain is a prime example of how “starchitects” have eradicated context from their minds as well as their drawings. But what caused this shift away from vernacular architecture towards a more prominent and contrasting form? Is the subversion of context its own context, and what does this mean for the industry? Architectural context is indeed being subverted by starchitects who’s buildings are instantly recognizable and can be matched to a specific architect, even by the general public. But this shift towards celebrity buildings has been to the idea of context what manure is to a cake, that is to say you could still probably do a lot with it if you tried but its still going to be covered in poo. The masses might applaud the upstart who decided to defecate on a once delicious baked good as they praise his novelty and innovative thinking but it’s not going to change the fact that they ruined the cake for everyone in line after them. An architect can put up the most wild and novel building on the corner but it ruins the block for anyone who comes after them, then the street becomes a shouting match between two buildings attempting to grab the eyes of a fickle and fastidious public.

Equating architecture to celebrity has been the death of context as architects all over the world struggle to outdo every building around them and to monopolize and brand their own ideas about design. What was the development of urban centers through smart context-based design has been turned into a reality competition where the unlearned masses all have a vote. A building can genuinely attempt to solve some metropolitan problem or increase the standard of living but the public might not appreciate it more than the forty-story solid gold statue to Micky Mouse because one is more visually interesting, and the general public value novelty more than they value their ability to breathe. But what does this mean for context? It means its death, albeit a necessary death.

The foundation of the economy is scarcity; goods are limited and therefore they must be assigned value in proportion to that scarcity. Architecture is an industry, but one inexorably linked to another industry; development. Developers know they can use the scarcity provided by celebrity to create a desire for a product, or building. Reputation is highly marketable as well, it is the reason for celebrity endorsements. An implicit quilt of trust binds a person with celebrity to the general public, regardless of whether or not it’s true, we feel as though they are a known quantity to us. We might prefer one movie over another because it has an actor or actress we like. In the digital age, when image and reputation are available for all to see and there is constant and almost infinite competition for our attention, the idea of reputation or celebrity becomes even more powerful. Developers frequently face resistance with projects from municipalities or citizens, but when faced with someone recognized for their brilliant work, barriers melt away and developers can frequently flout local ordinance (Landry). It’s easy to recognize the architect’s involvement, but sometimes it is the client making dictations of “fuck context,” an idea conceptualized by Rem Koolhaus, who also coined the term.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain is a very interesting building. It is a series of metal explosions swirling out from a central core. The whole building overlooks the water in Bilbao and sits apart from the town overall. Bilbao itself is laid out as a typical Roman town. The streets form a strong grid until they meet the river. The buildings are baroque or art nouveau, consistently throughout the town, with a few highly notable exceptions. The most blatant exemption is the Museum.

It’s easiest to classify the contextual ideas of this building by what they aren’t. It certainly doesn’t fall in line with Ernesto Rodger’s idea of ambiente (as a deconstructionist building meshes as seamlessly with baroque as a lawnmower meshes with a wedding dress), nor does it fit some archetypal order of the orthogonal town, alla Venturi. Water features may be an attempt to link the building to the river and embrace the locale, but they are vestigial at best and contribute about as much to the overall building as a single drop of rain contributes to the ocean. The building stands apart, it resonates only with itself and it is only supported by its own design and its own goals, unreliant on the imagery and reputation of the city around it. It is a bold and controversial movement in the practice of obliterating the idea of what context should and must be. The subversion of traditional design is one of the core themes of the deconstructionist movement, which the building certainly represents. It is possible for this subversion to extend to the context into which the building is placed.

The Museum is extremely unique in both form and influence, causing the town to lend its name to the so-called “Bilbao effect.” This effect is the process by which cities and towns can be given importance through architecture. The effect is also an economical one. An influx of tourists hoping to see the building brings in money to a city. With these factors, context is quickly replaced with commercial viability.

When broadening the scope of the idea of context as it relates to today, the building itself is virtually irrelevant compared to the architect behind it. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is a building on the opposite side of the world but it’s verbal description is nearly identical to that of the Guggenheim. Both buildings were designed by the same architect, Frank Gehry, and from both can be gleamed an unwritten manifesto of everything architecture should be. Many of Gehry’s buildings share the same aesthetics though contained within them are thoroughly different functions and without them lay completely different urban landscapes. Gehry’s buildings are defined and informed not by the city or the nature around them or even the program within them, but by Gehry in a form of aesthetic architectural auteurism. This philosophy can be seen in many of the architects of the post-modern era such as Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, and Renzo Piano. Each embodies a different design philosophy, but they’ve monopolized their individual philosophies and have used them as an effective branding for their careers. Each name conjures an image in the mind not of their faces but of their buildings and their design ideas (Keskeys). It is something an architect must do when building a global presence because, in this age, creativity is the only proprietary thing architects have left. When faced with the overwhelming power of market branding, any desire to reflect the context of the site melts away. “Bilbao: Home of the Guggenheim Museum” becomes the unofficial slogan of the city.

One of the greatest questions in any artistic medium (and architecture is indeed an artistic medium as that is all that is left to the architect when all else can be accomplished without an architect) is ownership. Who truly owns the art? In architecture, the client may own the building or the land it sits on but the idea of it, the appreciation of it is owned by others. The client may own a building but it is the general public that will appreciate it if it is good enough. Typically, architecture critics and theorists serve as an insulator between the architect and the public through which all ideas are filtered. With the internet diametrically adverse to quality control, the general public have a much less distilled vision of architecture and architects. Now the relationship between celebrities and their fans is a direct one by way of twitter and other social media. No longer are relationships between architects and their fans curated through the lenses of skepticism and challenge. Critics exist as an afterthought to the primary introduction of a building. Architects who fail to please the masses are resigned to languish in their own obscurity. It is the branding power of starchitects that allow these designers to overcome the barriers to mainstream popularity such as market saturation. While this is not the best or most ideal manner to achieve notoriety, it is the one available by way of the current media. Where does this leave context? With the public introduced to a building only through the photos on their favorite architecture website, the context of the site vanishes in a haze of glossy images and is then buried under all of the functionally identical posts. To say that context cannot exist on the internet is a dangerously totalizing statement as Google Street View can give you a preliminary indication of the surrounding area and technology is constantly improving and overcoming its own challenges, but it is fair to say that context cannot exist on a blog post or in a tweet, or even an image.

As with any idea in architecture today this paper can hardly be described as ubiquitous. Peter Zumthor pays great attention to the context of his sights and he does well for himself in Europe. However, you’d be hard pressed to find a member of the general public who is aware of Zumthor’s work before you’d find one who knew Gehry’s. Context is dead and that’s ultimately a good thing. To build to a city is well and good but it shackles the creative freedom of an architect to express themselves, and in this democratic society created by the proliferation of information through mass communications and the internet, all an architect has to defend their career with is their mastery of their own creativity. It’s only through relentless creativity that architects will be able to solve whatever problems rigidly adhering to context for three centuries while technology continued to innovate inevitably created. While novelty may sometimes be only the fast spark of an easily digestible idea for the masses, it can lead to new solutions to old problems. Consider for a moment, the Eiffel Tower. It was the progenitor of “fuck context” and managed to stand apart and create a visual identity for a city where everything had been laid out with such rigor and intent that it was almost inhumanly uniform. This isn’t to say that contextual designs cannot be creatively fulfilling or solve problems, only to say that for every Peter Zumthor building a chapel in the Swiss alps which perfectly reflects both the nature of the environment as well as the aesthetic forms of the town it inhabits, there will be a Bjarke Ingles putting a ski slope on a power plant, screaming from the highest point of the tallest anti-contextual tower, “FUCK CONTEXT!”.

Citations

Keskeys, Paul. “All Hail the Death of Starchitecture - Architizer Journal.” Journal, 6 Nov. 2017, architizer.com/blog/inspiration/industry/all-hail-the-death-of-starchitecture/.

Landry, Charles, and Franco Bianchini. The Creative City. Comedia, 1994.

Venturi, Robert, et al. Learning from Las Vegas. The MIT Press, 2017.