Writing on the LA Times’ Culture Monster blog, Christopher Hawthorne (probably the most essential architecture critic writing for a major newspaper in the States) notes a common flaw in both the recent Vanity Fair “World Architecture Survey” and the counter-list of “green architecture” Architect magazine put together:
“…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces results that give a skewed view of the way architecture — and more important, the way we think and write about it — has evolved in recent years.
Among critics and architects alike, there has been a rising understanding that architecture is not just about stand-alone icons but is tied inextricably to urban planning, real-estate speculation, capital flows, ecology and various kinds of networks — and similarly that architecture criticism means more than simply writing about impressive new landmarks, green or not, produced by the world’s best-known firms.
…
Maybe, in other words, the most important achievement in green architecture over the last 10 or 30 years is not a single building at all. Maybe it’s a collection of schools or linked parks or the group of advisors brought together by a young mayor somewhere. Maybe it’s a new kind of solar panel, a tax credit or a zoning change. Maybe it’s tough to hang a plaque on — or photograph for a magazine spread.”
It’d be hard to come up with a better description of what mammoth is about than “maybe the most important achievement of architecture over the last 30 years is a tax credit or a zoning change”.
More frivolously: the Vanity Fair poll is well worth reading, if only for the unintentional hilarity that ensues as architects shamelessly nominate their own buildings. (Mammoth congratulates every architect on the list who left off his or her own buildings on their tastefulness.) The humor is particularly acute when those buildings fail to appear in any of the other architects’ lists.
(Also, it has not escaped our notice that both Ben van Berkel (UN Studio) and Rafael Viñoly are biting mammoth. We congratulate them on their good taste.)
[…] Mammoth directs our attention to this post from LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, talking about the systemic flaws of lists of the best buildings (and architecture criticism in general): When Vanity Fair magazine recently released the results of a survey ranking the most significant pieces of architecture of the last 30 years — with Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, topping the list — the poll was met with more than a little grumbling. Some people griped about the many architects, including Richard Meier and Daniel Libeskind, who voted for their own work (talk about a vanity fair!); others noted that the average age of those polled, a group including architects, critics and academics, seemed to be pushing 70. […]