The man's a genius. An artistic and engineering genius.
I've only had the the pleasure of being in one of Santiago Calatrava's magnificent buildings -- many of which bring to architecture the novel concept of seeing buildings as mechanisms, or as organisms that change as a living thing would during the course of the day -- so the film on Calatrava and his work currently on show at the JASMAX Architectural Film Festival was a delight. A real delight. (That's him above with another of my heroes, architect Felix Candela.)
A building that changes and grows as an organism does is a difficult thing to convey in a photograph, particularly when they change with the grace of a Calatrava building (often reminiscent of the scillia of an anenome, or the windswept movement of of a field of corn), so film offers the rare opportunity of capturing this delight.
The photographs here of Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum for instance give you an idea of the elegance of the construction when it's embrature is both open (above), when it seems to soar like a great bird, and closed (below), but not of the grace of its movement or the sheer 'organic' ingenuity of its mechanism. If you are at all interested in either architecture or engineering, I would urge you to try and get to one of the remaining sessions of the film showing over the next few days in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to see these buildings and the man's work as close to 'in the flesh' as you can see in this country.
And just as a contrast, to help you see how lucky are the people of Milwaukee to have a Calatrava creation for their Art Museum, I've selected a few other recent Art Museums produced by architects fashionable only for being fashionable, all of which have been, not to put too fine a point on this, expensive failures. I give you, Frank Gehry's monumentally ugly (and inordinately expensive) Columbus Art Center, resembling nothing so much as an expensive pile of used tin cans:
Zaha Hadid's disastrous Cincinatti Art Museum (below), erected at huge expense to help revitalise Cincinatti and the arts in that city, only to see patrons staying away in droves:
And Peter Eisenman's recently expensively rebuilt Wexner Art Center (below); at the time of rebuilding "director Sherri Geldin took the opportunity to list, to the obvious chagrin of an increasingly crimson Peter, exactly why the building sucks [and needed reconstruction]: lost patrons, damaging sunlight, useless spaces, etc. 'It would have been easier to start from scratch,' she said, and not in a nice way. Eisenman fled mid-speech." [Reported here at Not PC.] Her comments could just as easily have been reflected by the curators of the other museums above.
In fact, it would have been "easier" and infinitely more delightful if all those Art Museums had hired real architectects like Calatrava, instead of the posturing poseurs they did.
Go and see the film: 'Santiago Calatrava's Travels.' If you've read this far in this post, you'll love it. But be quick. The last showing at Auckland's Academy Cinema in Lorne St for instance is tonight at 6:45pm. Here's another link to the schedule for your city.
LINKS: Santiago Calatrava resources - Frederick Clifford Gibson
Milwaukee Art Museum,Quadracci Pavilion - description and story at the 'Galinsky' site.
Posturing poseur alert - Not PC (Peter Cresswell)
JASMAX Film Festival '06: Celebrating Architecture - JASMAX
RELATED: Architecture, Films, Heroes
4 comments:
dare i ask your opinion of te papa?
Ditto what Leelion said; would love to know your opinion both as an aesthete and architect.
Just for the record (being neither architect nor art expert) I think Te Papa is both an eyesore and an architectural abomination. As if designed by a committee who never bothered to collaborate. The result is not only disjointed, but plain tacky and ugly as well. As for functionality - the building's interior is filled with useless 'space' - huge empty voids surrounded by cramped, awkward, cluttered, poorly-lit exhibition spaces that are difficult to traverse and navigate.
Just my humble opinion. Apologies in advance if you consider it a 'great building.'
Yours truly,
Cringing in Wellington
Te Papa? It's original name was Te Papa Tongarewa, which a friend versed in Maori scholarship loosely translated as 'Expensive Box.'
It seems an accurate description.
Ugly, unattractive and unsympathetic to its wonderful site would be simple assessments anyone can easily make, just as Phil did -- you don't need special knowledge to do that (in fact it's the "special knowledge" that commentators have that so often blinds them to the bleeding obvious). And they'd be right.
My first visit there I did what I always like to do with a building when I visit for the first time: I like to see where the building leads me. This one led me through the front door, up the stairs to the top and then straight back out the front door again. It took two minutes.
Subsequent visits haven't shown me I've missed anything. To me, as a museum it fails in the very first point of a museum: exhibiting its wares. There are too few real exhibits, and those that are there are displayed just too randomly and unsympathetically to be attractive. It's not just the 'gee-whiz' approach taken by the curators -- who fear that anything other than flashing lights and dumbed-down displays will scare off the peasants -- the building itself supports this. (Most of the stuff the museum has is not displayed, and is poorly supported when it is, it's in storage - the previous home of the Wellington museum had more display space than the present 'national' museum.)
Take for example the Treaty of Waitangi section (supposed even by the standards of the building to be the centre-piece of the place) and just note how little is explained, and how much space is taken up not to say it. And notice to how few actual "museum" pieces are displayed -- unlike the far superior Auckland musuem, they're all in bloody storage.
Curiously, Pete Bossley who was the primary design architect for Te Papa (and who, to be fair, has done far better work elsewhere -- including for the original design for this museum, the one that won the competition) has always when I've heard him on the subject seemed rather apologetic about how the thing turned out.
As he should be.
From a proud kiwi layman's point of view, Te Papa is a freaking disaster. The exhibits trivialise NZ and its culture, turning us towards a sort of Rainbow's End pile of crap. Some may say 'thats us,' but I disagree. The building is incongruous and appears to have no roots in its site, it's city, it's environment and as I have said, the culture of New Zealand.
D minus, Do again!
Post a Comment