Artless in Architecture
If one were to drive through any city, any metropolitan area with a neighbourhood built in the last decade, they would be sure to find a seemingly identical array of buildings: an artlessly arranged zoning code, made out to fit the board's vision. Concrete 5s-over-1s stretching upwards, mid-rise housing clad in grey panels and wooden frames, surrounded by bold modernistic corporate offices in steel frame and glass-facade; squeaky-clean embodiments of an urban utopia. It is safe. It is family friendly. But most of all, it lacks character.
These neighbourhoods have become a cat’s cradle of smooth white square-housing, designated greenery and concrete walls. The air seems stifling with a hyperawareness about its own rigidity. There is no room for personality or creative innovation. They have, in a sense, become safe-zones for a vision contingent on pre-cut designs.
There is a temptation to place the blame on someone, be it on a lack of funding, or perhaps on the absence of architectural designers. The case, as it were, is less of an absence of said architects and funding: the money is there, that’s not the problem. Rather, it is an issue of fragmented authority. Behind the dullness of, say, a 5s-over-1s with their grey-plated facades, is a long list of actors dictated by the stakes-and-risks of new infrastructure. The zoning board, a locally elected body, has to consider the spacing of the city; all the while the insurer has to make sure the project has the potential to be insurable. An unprecedented building with outstanding characteristics differs from the sameness of known and established projects, which, in the eyes of the insurer, places the innovative project within a risk-zone of insurance claims. That is to say: it’ll cost, and nobody is willing to cough up the money for that. It’s no longer a lack of finances. It is instead what the money is afraid of. It is clear that capital isn’t scarce but rather it is unwilling to gamble on the unknown. Then there’s the predictable cost projections; estimations on labour-hours from standardized, repeated projects and the cash flow.
None of this makes the buildings structurally unsound; naturally, buildings are generally safer today than they ever have been; but safety and character have become a trade which one has to barter with, rather than being a package deal. It all comes down to money. Cold, hard money.
Long gone are the days of patronage, such as the House of Medici, the Florentine banking family which sustained much of the Italian arts during the early renaissance all the way through the turn of the sixteenth century. Art and architecture, as well as its wins and risks, were in the hands of authoritative figures who treasured the spiritual insurance and cultural heritage of a nation’s identity. Architectural monuments such as the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, The Laurentian Library and Medici Villas not only bolstered the heritage of Florentine history, it also fulfilled a function of marriage between beauty and the State. These patrons took the risk, and thus absorbed the blame were it to result in failure. Naturally, the concentrated authority of the Medici family was not free from fault; but it did locate risk and blame in a single accountable party, which is what has been missing today.
Today, the risk-assessment of individuality and beauty have been diluted since the authority no longer lies with the patrons, the church or the artistically inclined; instead it is found in a trickle-down hierarchy of zoning boards, insurers, construction companies and bankers. And who can blame them? Everybody is just doing their jobs; clocking in, assessing, cutting corners and creating new paths to save another buck. The zoning board is doing their job. So is the insurer and the bank. Authority, then, hasn’t disappeared fully, but rather, it has been dissected, torn apart and handed to different departments. Everything is neat, clean and safe from fallacy. We have traded character for capitalistic progress, and that trade is visible in most aspects of society.
You can see it anywhere you go. You see it in the airport lounge; a long hallway with generic art with a board’s stamp of approval letting you know that it has been vetted, and thus approved for consumption. You see it in the glass shards stretching upwards. It is in the white-coated buildings; in the bland nothingness of metropolitan utopia.
The dismemberment of authority has made architectural dullness disproportionately likely. It has left us, effectively, with nothing to lose and nothing to remember.
By Jack Ciontos