Elaine Meinel Supkis
‘Post-modern’ architecture is even worse than ‘modern’ architecture and both are dehumanizing as well as downright dangerous as we saw on 9/11, for example. The invention of elevators as well as other modern building materials has tempted designers to create increasingly bad or dangerous buildings all in the name of hubris.
Winners of the prestigious Stirling prize for architecture, which will be announced tonight, have been lauded by architects but are often beset by faults and loathed by the people who use them, according to one of the government's design advisers.Last year the judges were widely criticised for selecting the controversial new Scottish parliament building for the top prize in the face of a catalogue of problems that dogged its construction and forced it to go 10 times over budget.
Problems have also occurred at Peckham library, in south London, the winner in 2000. Librarians complain of dinginess inside and the fact that older people are put off from entering because it is on the fourth floor.
Many of the other buildings to scoop the prize have failed to live up to the praise heaped on them. Critics say architects have become detached from everyday life and are calling for a rethink of the prize so that buildings are judged on how well they stand up to use.
Irena Bauman, a Leeds-based architect and one of the government's design advisers, said architects had become seduced by style over substance.
"Even iconic buildings, as Stirling buildings undoubtedly are, suffer from a host of minor defects which is forgivable. However, some of them are inadequate for their purpose. This is embarrassing in buildings receiving the highest architectural accolade in the UK."
Defects? When someone sets out to build something, the chief thing to avoid is any ‘defects.’ The more defects there are, the more a building becomes a danger, a fiscal sink due to excessive repairs and of course, a nightmare to use. Flaws in building design can be fatal. Some designs are made to fail. The most spectacular failure in the history of architecture is the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.
Modern architecture is suffering from the same cultural euni that afflicts other fine arts. The building of museums leads the pack in crazed, inefficient, impossible to keep in repair buildings. Completely cut off from reality, the architect simply puts together a hodge-podge of planes and inclines and a wild variety of building materials, many of which must be replaced every 20 years or so, and sets everything out of whack so there are few verticals at 90 degrees giving a giddy, irrational explosion. Like the much celebrated and I think, totally irresponsible Getty Museum.
Designed by the North American architect Frank O. Gehry, this unique Museum built on a 32,500 square meter site in the center of Bilbao represents an amazing construction feat. On one side it runs down to the waterside of the Nervión River, 16 meters below the level of the rest of the city of Bilbao. One end is pierced through by the huge Puente de La Salve, one of the main access routes into the city.
As someone who fixes building flaws, it distresses me to see so many ill-concieved projects dominating the news and encouraging even more capricious, bizarre, useless expressions of distain for the laws of physics.
This arrogance is part of the race across the globe to build the biggest building. Instead of organically growing, powerful people want monuments to their hubris and the present rash of building basically useless structures that are too big is a symptom of a disease.
In today's news, a story of the latest foolish project to erect a target for ambitious terrorists who have many reasons to destroy it.
by Christian Chaise Mon Oct 30, 10:46 AM ETUnlike Manhattan, there is no logic in building this thing. In Manhattan, there was never really good logic for the WTC, either. The builders and the rich men directing them said quite openly, they wanted something overwhelmingly big and controversial. Right smack in the center of where wars are brewing like coffee at sunrise.
DUBAI (AFP) - Slated to become the world's tallest skyscraper and symbol of a city given to grandiose projects, "Burj Dubai," or Dubai Tower, is rising in parallel with the profits of its promoter, Emaar Properties.With two stories added every week, Burj Dubai is taking shape as the centerpiece of a 20-billion-dollar venture featuring the construction of a new district, "Downtown Burj Dubai," that will house 30,000 apartments and the world's largest shopping mall.
Launched in early 2004, the construction of the tower by South Korea's Samsung should be completed at the end of 2008 and cost one billion dollars, according to Greg Sang, the Emaar official in charge of Burj Dubai.
The World Trade Center was concieved by Rockefeller in New York. Along with flattening the Victorian brownnstone neighborhood in Albany to build a neo-Mayan temple to State Power, he wanted to put up the world’s biggest building in lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center still holds the record for square footage. Here is a description of the designing and building of the malformed WTC complex:
"After studying more than one hundred schemes in model form, Yamasaki decided on a two-tower development to contain the nine million square feet of office space. One tower became unreasonable in size and unwieldy structurally, yet several towers became too approximate for their size and 'looked too much like a housing project'; whereas two towers gave a reasonable office area on each floor, took advantage of the magnificent views, and allowed a manageable structural system. The twin towers, with 110 floors rising 1,353 feet, ... (are) the tallest in the world. From observation decks at the top of the towers it...(is) possible to see 45 miles in every direction....One distinct advantage of the project's enormity is the architectural opportunity to advance the art of building. Yamasaki re-examined the skyscraper from the first principles, considering no ground so hallowed that it could not be questioned, especially in view of the potential of modern technology. The usual economic prohibition on 'custom-made' was out, as virtually anything made for the Center would automatically become a stock item. 'Economy is not in the sparseness of materials that we use,' said Yamasaki of his $350 million estimated cost, 'but in the advancement of technology, which is the real challenge.'"The structural system, deriving from the I.B.M. Building in Seattle, is impressively simple. The 208-foot wide facade is, in effect, a prefabricated steel lattice, with columns on 39-inch centers acting as wind bracing to resist all overturning forces; the central core takes only the gravity loads of the building. A very light, economical structure results by keeping the wind bracing in the most efficient place, the outside surface of the building, thus not transferring the forces through the floor membrane to the core, as in most curtain-wall structures. Office spaces will have no interior columns. In the upper floors there is as much as 40,000 square feet of office space per floor. The floor construction is of prefabricated trussed steel, only 33 inches in depth, that spans the full 60 feet to the core, and also acts as a diaphragm to stiffen the outside wall against lateral buckling forces from wind-load pressures.
Gross area of 43200 square feet (4020 square meters) each per floor.
The tremendous weight of all that concrete, steel and glass was vividly displayed when the pilings supporting the outer skin of the building were severed on one side. The insupportable weight plus the raging fires caused the buildings to rapidly collapse. People who don’t know the buildings as intimately as I do, can’t understand the gross size of the place.
Looking at films and photos are no subsitute for understanding the weight bearing loads resting on precious few steel members. In order to make the interior as open as possible, the building was designed with few interior supports that were weight bearing.
Comparing the size of each floor of the WTC with other buildings is like comparing a professonal sports stadium to a school football field. When the WTC was proposed by Rockefeller, an ambitious man, he wanted it to be the final word in mega-pyramid building. Lower Manhattan was flush with money with the stock market going up and up and up.
The giddy feelings this caused allowed people to ignore the blinking red lights. The Empire State Building, for a long time the tallest building in the world, was planned and launched just as the stockmarket hit its greatest highs. Like with the WTC, the Empire State Building was actually built after the market crashed and the potential tenants evaporated along with a massive amount of elusive wealth.
Like the WTC, the Empire State Building was featured in disaster and monster movies. The unease of t his building was mirrored by the WTC. For example, a military plane crashed into it. Suicides used it to the point, a huge fence had to be erected on the roof to protect people from their own despair.
The fact that it never collapsed was due to lack of interest in building risky structures. Namely, the rooms in the huge tower are small, the windows are a smaller proportion of the outer wall compared to the WTC which was mostly tall windows. So when a plane hit, it put a hole in one side but it couldn’t topple the structure which was knitted together very tightly following ancient building codes that evolved over thousands of years.
According to Malott, before the advent of the World Trade Center towers, high-rise buildings shared two vital characteristics: one, they were supported by a grid of steel columns, and two, the columns were encased in a tough cladding of reinforced concrete. This concrete created a fireproof skin designed to withstand a four-hour inferno. (The four-hour rating is a building industry standard for fireproofing) As designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki the Twin Towers incorporated neither of these traditional features. These features were found in most tall buildings before the Twin Towers came along and changed the equation. Malott claims that it was the failure to use the traditional steel column grid design and concrete coating on the steel columns that was the fatal flaw of the buildings--not the initial crashes, not the exploding jet fuel and not the subsequent fire alone.In an attempt to cut weight--which is the enemy of all high-rise buildings--the designers of the Towers eliminated the traditional steel column grid. Instead, Yamasaki placed the steel columns in the perimeter of the outer walls of the buildings and in the perimeter of the small inner core of the buildings that housed the elevator shafts. This design allowed every floor to have unobstructed floor space with no interior supporting columns or beams.
In further attempts to save weight, time and money designers were allowed to fireproof the steel columns with spray-on mineral-wool fiber and layers of sheetrock instead of the traditional method of using reinforced concrete. The elevator shaft and the steel columns in those shaft walls were covered with sheetrock as well.
Today, thanks to modern building materials, people think they can ignore the lessons of the past. The Mall built by Rockefeller in Albany, for example, ignored the climate, the landscape and anything human. So in winter, it is a wind tunnel just like the WTC was, walking around the WTC in winter with the wind screaming around the corners was dangerous. Everyone used the underground tunnels just like they do today in Albany.
I once had to hail a cab outside of Building #1 in winter and the door of the cab was nearly torn out of my hands. In summer, the plaza was very hot and in winter, very cold. Ditto Albany. The WTC, when it was finished, opened right in the middle of a stockmarket crash that kept the market in the doldrums for years. Getting tenants was nearly impossible. It was regarded as a white elephant.
The Empire State Building along with the Chrysler Building, depressed rents in Midtown for many years too as the landlords tried to fill these buildings with tenants. The Empire State Building had less trouble than the WTC because it was a prestigious address.
The WTC, due to its big size, was harder to fill because it swayed in the wind during storms and the big size was oppressive. The elevators were really big and if one worked near the top, going up and down in the express elevators was like flying the Space Shuttle, you could feel the weightlessness as it dropped and the pressure when it shot up.
Even as the rich rulers of New York strove to break all records with a giant tower complex, a major corporation decided to play this game of the gods, too. So right on the even of their own destruction, the Sears corporation poured much of their money in their own mega-tower.
However, Sears' optimistic growth projections never came to pass. Competition from its traditional rivals (like Montgomery Ward) continued, only to be surpassed in strength by other retailing giants like Kmart, Kohl's, and Wal-Mart. Sears, Roebuck deteriorated as market share slipped away, and management grew paranoid and introverted through the 1970s.[1] The Sears Tower was not the draw Sears hoped it would be to potential lessees, and stood half-vacant for a decade as more office space was built in the 1980s. Finally, Sears was forced to take out a mortgage on their headquarters building. Sears began moving its offices out of the Sears Tower in 1993 and had completely moved out by 1995, moving to a new office campus in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.There have been several owners of the Sears Tower since then. The owners who purchased the tower in March 2004 were rumored to have plans to rename the building.
Considered one of the finest locations for business in Chicago, the Sears Tower is now a multi-tenant office building with more than 100 different companies doing business there, including major law firms, insurance companies and financial services firms.
The hubris, the mocking sense of power of the President and board of directors of Sears was broken by the very monument they sought to erect. This is very common. One can see when a culture or situation is at an apex because they build giant, inappropriate or even unusable buildings.
Virtually the same year the WTC opened its doors to virtually no tenants aside from government agencies, the City of New York went belly up and nearly went bankrupt and had to be saved from its own follies.
Here is a recent NYT article about a man in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn who built a hazardous structure because he wanted to make something bizarre.
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: October 18, 2006It may be art to Arthur Wood, 75, who has lived in the Brooklyn building known as the Broken Angel for 27 years. But to the Department of Buildings, the hulking brick, wood and glass structure at 4 Downing Street in Clinton Hill is a glaring jumble of code violations, and yesterday it issued a formal order for him and his wife to vacate.
Liz O. Baylen for The New York Times“I’m facing imminent eviction,” Mr. Wood, a self-taught architect and artist, said in a telephone interview. “This is Nazi tactics.”
The city’s Buildings Department inspected the four-story building on Thursday, two days after a fire in its rooftop addition. “Generally speaking, this building had numerous building-code violations that made it unfit to occupy,” said Jennifer Givner, a department spokeswoman.
After buying and moving in to the building, formerly the headquarters of the Brooklyn Trolley, in 1979, Mr. Wood gradually transformed it into a quirky piece of sculpture in and of itself, with an elaborate structure on top, partly exposed sides and intricate masonry. Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, has described it as “a Rubik’s Cube of a spaceship.”
LIke the WTC, this structure became a hazard for firemen trying to put out a fire that should have never started in the first place. Irresponsible structures kill people. There are many examples of this principle at work. In France, a country where frantic, strange, dangerous structures are praised and encouraged, a lunatical architect built a pedestrian way at the airport that suddenly collapsed totally, killing innocent users.
I consider this sort of ‘architecture’ to be criminal and anyone daring to build dangerous things should be charged with murder if they kill people.
The Hyatt Regency hotel walkway collapse was a major disaster that occurred on July 17, 1981 in Kansas City, Missouri, killing 114 people and injuring more than 200 others during a tea dance.
I was in the hospital when this happened. I remember looking at the destruction and just seeing pictures, I knew what went wrong. This was infuriating because it was painfully wrong, the method used to secure the platforms.
Recently, in France, a high-tech, bizarre design terminal at the airport in Paris collapsed.
February 16, 2005Both structural and design faults caused a large section of the newly constructed Terminal 2E at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport to collapse last May, killing 4 people and injuring 3.
An investigative commission under the direction of Jean Berthier, engineering Professor at France's Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausées, concluded that the building's structure had been fragile from the outset. It then progressively degraded under use - principally from the side walkways - to the point where the structure gave way.
Berthier's report pointed to four connected causes: 1) insufficient or badly positioned structural steel; 2) lack of mechanical "redundancy," in that the stresses were concentrated and could not be shifted to other structural components; 3) concrete beams that offered too little resistance to stress and use, and 4) the positioning of metal supports within the structural concrete.
This alarmed the Chinese who hired the same clowns to design stuff in China. Of course, the very fact it collapsed meant the designers should stand trial. There is no other way to stop madcap building that is not carefully crafted and thought out.
There is the arrogance of the tribe of financiers who are, like the infamous Donald Trump, building frantically across the globe as they colonize psychological frontiers, are similar in hubris as previous mad dashes for the extreme as an expression of faith and power. In ancient Egypt, there was a rash of pyramid building. Each one was bigger than before until the Great Pyramid of Cheops was erected.
Then the whole thing ended as the culture struggled to deal with the destructive side of such out of control expressions of power. In ancient Rome, every thing became gigantic. To this day, the huge aquaducts that lace the landscape of France and Italy still boggle the mind. In Rome itself, the building of mega-structures continued right up to the very end, the public baths and stadiums were the last buildings erected for nearly 500 years as the whole culture collapsed.
In Medieval Europe, after 1000 AD, the mad rush to build ever bigger and more elaborate cathedrals ended in a rush with the building of unsupportable giants which collapsed when the Nave or Crossing couldn’t support the weight over the span. Always, at the terminal end of a building boom, architects experiment with the impossible and people die.
The wild chase to build the biggest cathederals lead to some spectacular collapses.
Between 1307 and 1311 the central tower was raised to its present height.Around 1370 to 1400 the western towers were heightened.
All three towers had spires until 1549 when the central tower's spire blew down.
The central tower rises to 83 m (271 feet) and remains the tallest cathedral tower in Europe without a spire. Prior to the collapse of the lead-encased wooden spire, with the spire, the Cathedral rose to a height of 160 m (525 feet), making it at the time the world's tallest building. It was the first building to exceed the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Until the collapse of the spire, the Cathedral remained the world's tallest structure for more than two centuries. Looking eastwards, the next highest point was the Ural Mountains in Russia.
With growing assurance, architects in northern France, and soon all over Europe, competed in a race to conquer height. The vault of each new cathedral strained to surpass that of its predecessors by a few meters. The dramatic collapse in 1284 of the tallest among them, Beauvais, marked the vertical limits of Gothic architecture. Its choir and transept were rebuilt soon afterwards to the original 48 meters, now supported by twice as many flying buttresses.The building of ever bigger Gothic cathederals ended with great suddeness: the Black Plague hit and Europe underwent a spasm of worker/peasant rebellions and dynastic battles that, coupled with the split in the Papacy, eroded support for ever-wilder projects.
Europe is dotted with cathederals that have only one or no completed towers, for example. Notre Dame is the most famous, normally, towers rise much higher than the church and have steepled roofs. Many churches shortend the Naves or left off the Choir. By 1500, many of the very expensive stained glass windows are vandalized during religous upheavals.
When the Empire State Building was finished, democracy in the world was collapsing under the weight of the Great Depression and empires were preparing to destroy each other’s cities and not only did all mega-building cease, there was terrific destruction. Hitler fancied himself as an architect and spent many hours toiling on a plan that Rockefeller mimicked here in New York with the Mall and the WTC, a huge complex of inhuman buildings that dwarfed mere people.
Almost none of the other buildings planned for Berlin was ever built. Berlin was to be reorganized along a central three-mile long avenue. At the north end, Speer planned to build an enormous domed building, the Volkshalle (people's hall), based on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The dome of the building would have been impractically large; it would be over seven hundred feet (200 meters) high and eight hundred feet (250 meters) in diameter, sixteen times larger than the dome of St. Peter's. At the southern end of the avenue would be an arch based on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but again, much larger; it would be almost four hundred feet (100 meters) high, and the Arc de Triomphe would have been able to fit inside its opening.
Even as the flames rose over Germany, he dreamed of building inappropriate stuff. The same is true of Stalin. “Stalinesque’ means ugly, dreary, poorly planned buildings that don’t work with real humans. This madman was focused on humiliating, torturing and then working to death or killing many populations just as if he were the dwarf, Alberich, in the Wagner operas. Just like Bush thinks he, too, is an all-conquering Siegfried, so did Hitler presume. He, like Bush, noted all the 'victories' on the battlefield while ignoring the harsh truth that every trimumph simply make his defeat more certain.
When this latest cycle of hyper-building is done, people will shake their heads as one ‘great’ structure after another is demoished because they are impossible to use, dangerous or hideously expensive to repair. The Mall in Albany had to be entirely rebuilt, the outside marble covering falling apart very dangerously, everything leaking, upheaving in the frost/thaw cycles, my husband’s health was permenantly damaged by Rockefeller’s buildings. He worked in one and thanks to the poor air circulation, he was harmed by chemicals and had to retire early.
I wish I could kick the architect where it really hurts.
Anyone offering awards for buildings must first consider the people who are doomed to use the places. If they have any defects that endanger lives, the architect should be removed and forbiddenn to build. And don’t even ask me how many people have died building all these big places.
Too many. Way too many. Even the WTC had a steady stream of dead before the first terrorist even dreamed of making things worse.
I met a woman years ago whose fiance had been killed in the Kansas City Hyatt walkway collapse.
I hate the Sears Tower. Ok - it makes the skyline more interesting, I guess, but inside it is cavernous and huge and ridiculous to navigate. They lost tenants after 9/11, too.
I'll take some pics of Trump's Chicago monstrosity. The kiddies were flipping condos before the ground was broken practically. Trump is so odious - and the banks just keep lending him money. barf
Posted by: D. F. Facti | October 31, 2006 at 07:55 PM
Oh, do post some pictures! Thanks!
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | October 31, 2006 at 11:32 PM
Interesting article, Elaine.
Problem: today's big-deal architects see themselves more as sculptors creating art than builders designing buildings. The "human touches" that make buildings usable are just the things that diminish the 'greatness' of the (so-called) 'art'.
And because they aren't builders, or see themselves as such, their roofs leak and their doors and windows are drafty.
Posted by: JSmitth | November 02, 2006 at 05:07 PM
Correct. It is a form of hubris.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | November 03, 2006 at 08:31 AM
Update Broken Angel 10/29/06
On 10/10/06 Broken Angel suffered minimal damage from a fire at the top of the structure. The cause of the fire is unknown and still under investigation. Broken Angel has been an active project of construction by my family beginning in 1979. Major construction was finished in 2002, and all work done thereafter has been for the purpose of maintaining the building. The fire brought the attention of the Department of Buildings (DOB), previous interactions had occurred in 1986, and 2002 with no action taken against the building. During the course of building and maintaining the structure there have been no accidents or complaints. Compared with most modern construction projects, such as the Time Warner building in NYC, this is an excellent record. It raises questions as to why large developers are allowed to continue construction when they pose a risk to the community, whereas Broken Angel, which has no history of construction problems, has been singled out as a danger. My mother and father, the legal guardians and owners of Broken Angel were threatened with eviction for 6 days. On the 7th day they were vacated by the police without a court order or engineer’s report. We question the necessity and the humanity of this action. They were told that this was done for their safety; however action was taken prior to any inspection of the interior of the building by an engineer. Furthermore, we were told that the building would be demolished in 3 weeks if an architect did not submit plans to bring it to code. We have been compliant with this request. We are thankful to the firm of Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture http://www.jpda.net/news.html for all of their help and support. On Thursday (10/26/06) an engineer from the DOB toured the structure, and the next day the DOB released a different story. A DOB spokesperson recently commented to the Daily News (10/27/06) that any demolition orders, if warranted will take approximately 3 months to begin.
Photos of broken angel http://www.flickr.com/photos/onebadapple/
Posted by: christopher wood | November 11, 2006 at 03:43 PM
[url=http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/vasotec.htm][img]http://legalusdrugstore.com/18.jpg[/img][/url]
suzies pharmacy in progreso mexico http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/baclofen.htm pharmacy technician text books [url=http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/lasuna.htm]lasuna[/url]
percodan online pharmacy http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/pamelor.htm pharmacy bronx [url=http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/lioresal.htm]cvs pharmacy seminary place[/url]
mexico pharmacy suboxone http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/lasuna.htm national association of boards of pharmacy [url=http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/female-viagra.htm]female viagra[/url]
cvs pharmacy rockville va lifescan blood glucose meter http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/luvox.htm pharmacy workers [url=http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/products/sublingual-viagra.htm]purchase phenol pharmacy[/url]
http://nextdayshippingpharmacy.com/categories/hypnotherapy.htm codeine syrup pharmacy
Posted by: Livyelolo | December 16, 2011 at 03:19 AM