long rant
I would like to officially nominate the new
Selfridges department store in Birmingham as the architectural non-happening of the year. Future Systems' Jan Kaplicky and Amanda Levete continue to bang on endlessly (and with no real self-awareness) about the future, about blobs and the role of architecture in the Information Society. Yawn.
But I think the question which needs to be asked is this: what is actually high-tech about this building?
Let's say, hypothetically, that I bought a Toyota Corolla. I then re-cast its exterior in fibreglass to look like a flying, high-tech, car-of-the-future. I mean, the whole package: blinking lights, laser sounds, tons of spoilers, maybe even a "Flux Capacitor." Would we say that my car is "high-tech"? Of course not. It's just a Corolla, with a crudely-made veneer of ornaments that connote high technology. Would people think me a man from the future as I drove it down the street? No. The car doesn't DO anything "high-tech". Nor is it even constructed in a truly high-tech manner.
Architecture is not, as yet, a high-tech art. Buildings are some of world's cruder constructions. To talk about a "high-tech building" seems to me a bit like talking about a "high-tech fork." Excitable architects don't actually produce advanced technology--they merely represent it in a "style" that anticipates the arrival of the future. It's purely rhetorical, notwithstanding the weird idea that free-flowing spaces are somehow inherently "futuristic", "high-tech", and thus progressive.
Even if we were to accept the silliness that spatial blobbery is somehow high tech, though, there's not even a whiff of high-tech about Selfridges. It's just a standard department-store layout, a prismatic block / atrium, ho-hum, with the edges smoothed over a bit.
Moreover, the actual construction is hugely low-tech. The surface is actually shot-crete, painted blue and covered in aluminium hub-caps that do nothing except to remind one of Corey Feldman's cryptic line, from "Stand By Me", that 'a piece of shit has a thousand eyes.'
Even given Mr. Libeskind's recent contributions, I'd have to say that this is, for me 2004's most duplicitous, disingenuous building. Unsurprisingly, the ever-faddish British architecture press seems to love it.
* joshua, 4/11/2004 10:29:09 PM
