quondam @ archinect/79/7910q.htm
Columbia GSAPP, AMO and Archis Mag Join forces?
Rita Novel 2005.02.28 19:18
To: architecthetics
Subject: AD[vocating] PUBLICITY
Date: 2001.01.23
After reading through "Bold Architecture at a Price" I asked myself, "What do you call architects if they are not "star" architects? "Non-star" architects seems to be the logical, grammatical answer, but such a label doesn't exactly elicit the correct notion that an architect that is not a "star" architect is (really) an architect whose buildings do not receive widespread publicity (even though the great majority of architects today design perfectly acceptable buildings).
The real point of the article is about getting publicity, and publicity via architecture is just one way for universities to get publicity (now-a-days). As the article well states, architecture is very costly, hence there is much expected from architecture, indeed, today there seems to be much, much more expected from architecture -- the proverbial "more bang for the buck".
Should architectural education begin teaching students how to design buildings that generate publicity? Of course, that includes doing a building correctly in terms of structure and function, yet getting publicity appears to be a new and already prevalent user demand that requires compliance as well. And isn't it common sense for architects to supply what the client asks for?
Then again, it really isn't the architecture or architect that generate the publicity. Rather, it is the advertisement driven publicity/news 'machine'. Exactly one year and two days ago, Hugh Pearman posted the following here at architecthetics:
"To the point: is it enough for a building to exist principally as a media image? Everyone in the world with media access knows what the Sydney Opera House looks like, and Bilbao is in the same category. Bilbao functions rather well as an art gallery. I'm told that Sydney is hopeless for opera. But functional considerations do not apply here.
Certainly these buildings need to exist: a virtual-reality image of an unbuilt building is not the same. Beyond that, the Somerset Maugham rule applies: the image is so often better than the actuality. Which means, of course, that architectural photographers are as important as architects. Do we care?"
My point being that the above quotation is indicative of the fact that entities other than architects and architecture generate the publicity.
My feeling has been all along, however, that architects and architecture are well capable of generating their own publicity, but professional 'decorum' has for the most part made that attitude an ethically and aesthetically wrong position for architects to take. This 'wrong-ness' is really just a fabrication, an artificial restraint, and, as always, it is precisely at these artificial points where 'institutions' are the weakest, where the decay happens, where things begin to fall apart. I wholeheartedly advocate architects to embrace publicity as a new, additional ingredient that makes good architecture, the same as firmness, commodity, and delight make good architecture. Furthermore, I hope it takes less than twenty years for architects to begin creating and directing web sites that are just the same as television channels.
Steve Lauf
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