Don't Mistaken Your Eggs For Just Eggs:

Why some critics can't understand the Avant-garde

This contribution by Slate's architecture critic presented some of the newest projects under construction by Herzog and De Meuron, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas amongst others, in the increasingly high profile cities of Abu Dhabi and Beijing with a sweeping argument aimed at discrediting the entire field of Avant-garde Architecture. The piece amounts to not only an absurdly xenophobic simplification of what is happening in "an obscure sheikdom on the Gulf and the world's largest Communist dictatorship" - more significantly it underscores an all too common barrier that comes between works of Architecture and good Architectural criticism.

The piece posited that so-called '"experimental," "innovative," or "cutting edge"' architects of the past have tried but rarely succeeded in predicting how buildings of the future will look - invoking clichéd images of the three Modern architects Wright, Mies and Le Corbusier for no good reason other than to indicate the truism that buildings today don't, in fact, all look like what these men designed. In the same way, he argued, neither will buildings of the future look like "Herzog and de Meuron's bird's nest, Andreu's egg, and Koolhaas' twisted donut" - all currently being completed in Beijing for this summer's Olympics Games. He goes on to infantilize his audience with an etymology of the generic label of avant-garde, asserting the faulty-logic that buildings have limitations and so by definition cannot be avant-garde.

Mr. Rybczynski's argument highlights the widespread lack of understanding of many armchair critics, evident in his caricature of Le Corbusier as "one of the leading white-box practitioners" who "soon got bored and turned to rougher, more sculptural, raw concrete" - I know a few people who think his work was about a little bit more than that. It is the attempt to distill the products of complex social and cultural conditions and ideas into bite-sized concepts for simple minds, by loosely evaluating only the most superficial qualities - in this case as in most, Form. It is a blatant disregard for all of the contemporary political and economic conditions that produced these unique projects forcing architects to react with technologically innovative solutions at various stages of design, manufacturing and construction - the first Olympic Games in the increasingly image conscious, open-for-business East-Asian juggernaut for goodness sake! It is an unwillingness to engage the unfamiliar and open-ended questions posed by the juxtaposition of star western architects practicing amidst the messiness of such Oriental cities, their culture, their pace, their pride. Any one of these topics could have made for an engaging criticism - but instead Mr. Rybczynski chose to take on the Avant-garde - yes, all of it - at once.

Ultimately Mr. Rybczynski's argument does Architecture and its criticism a great disfavor by dismissing a whole swath of work without any attempt to understand it. Had any cursory examination been made he may have noticed that there are many more differences between the projects cited and the processes which brought them about than the mere fact that they all look futuristic to those unwilling or unable to look deeper. The assertion that "buildings belong firmly to their own time" is as naive as it is clearly untrue. At least since Adolf Loos' "Ornament and Crime", critics as well as architects have recognized the choking effect of stragglers who insist on doing things as they have always been done, when the rest of the world has moved on. The Avant-garde in this sense is merely all that which is not straggling, as Architecture has always been a conversation about the future - not simply in the all-encompassing formal paradigm-shifts that Mr. Rybczynski imagines, but increasingly, in the way in which we think about the design and production of buildings within larger geopolitical contexts. The future will not likely hold more bird's nests, eggs or twisted donuts - but I know a few people who think these projects are about a little bit more than that.

I can however think of a few "titanium eggs" that have hatched and "foreshadowed the future" - the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. These have subsequently spawned more than a few similar looking projects, with similar programs, clients and budgets around the world - in a sense defining their architects' work as a single formal gesture fitting in a new but equally rigid mold, willingly or otherwise. If this is the future Mr. Rybczynski argues individual works of architecture should but generally fail to predict, then that is precisely why he will never understand the broad field he calls “the fad for Avant-garde Architecture.”