Issue #9, Summer 2008

Conscience of a Constructor

Why it matters when good architects take on big projects for bad governments.

In a speech in Belfast earlier this year, the architect Daniel Libeskind announced that he would not accept any commissions to work in China. “I won’t work for totalitarian regimes,” he told an audience in Belfast. “I think architects should take a more ethical stance…It bothers me when an architect is given carte blanche and told here’s a great site, build X…[architects have a] role to play at the forefront between practical issues and issues that affect people’s lives. It’s not enough just to have a good site.”

If Libeskind meant to embarrass other architects, his timing was impeccable. While most of the world’s architects are hurting from the global housing slump, the leading lights–the 20 to 30 so-called “starchitects” and their firms–are riding high on a bounty of commissions from resource-rich, developing countries. The problem is, many of these nations are also among the more oppressive. Sir Norman Foster just completed an enormous pyramid for Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, a country cited by the State Department for countless political and religious rights abuses. Zaha Hadid is building a museum in Azerbaijan to commemorate the father of the country’s dictator. A herd of starchitects are falling over themselves to win commissions in autocratic Gulf States like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

But in recent years no country has enriched the architectural world quite like China. Libeskind is actually among the few leading architects not to have a major commission in the Middle Kingdom. His fellow architectural bigwigs–Rem Koolhaas, Paul Andreu, Steven Holl, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, among others–are building airports, skyscrapers, Olympic facilities, even entire new towns, and getting rich off it. The 2008 Olympics will be in part a rollout of Beijing’s new trove of cutting-edge architecture, from Herzog and de Meuron’s bird’s nest-like National Stadium to PTW’s diaphanous National Swimming Center. In many ways, building in China is an architect’s dream: huge budgets, efficient bureaucracies, and no inconvenient public to intrude on one’s vision. As Koolhaas said a few years ago, “What attracts me about China is that there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost no body that we know of today could ever afford or contemplate.”

Today we are experiencing a signal moment in the long and intricate history of the relationship between architecture and politics, a development borne of several strands. Never have so many architects made the successful transition into celebrity-hood, a migration driven by an expansion of cultural literacy beyond the elite. People value name-brand architecture as just that–a name brand, a marker of legitimacy, what critics call the “Bilbao effect,” after the overnight fame that befell the Basque city when Frank Gehry opened his Guggenheim Museum there. Now every city wants a Gehry, or a Calatrava, or a Morphosis, and their residents want the chairs, watches, and even jewelry that the designers have spun off for a little extra coin. As a result, even casual observers can probably rattle off the names of half a dozen famous designers; in the past, they would be considered insiders if they knew anyone beyond Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s no longer enough to own a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan; it has to be one designed by Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, or Annabelle Selldorf. Architecture is now a luxury consumer good–a Fendi briefcase on a much larger scale.

At the same time, the global construction boom has created a demand for these architects’ work in corners of the world once thought inhospitable to anything but yurts and cinderblock piles. High-profile architecture is no longer the exclusive property of Paris, London, and New York; now every city, state, and emirate wants to gild its lily with a top-shelf design by a top-shelf designer. Herzog just oversaw a competition by young architects to design housing in Inner Mongolia. Hadid is redoing a city square in Cyprus. I.M. Pei just finished a museum of Islamic art in Qatar.

All of this, in turn, comes at a critical moment in global history. The old order is shifting, if not collapsing. Established political powers are finding themselves challenged by upstarts. Capital is unmoored from national boundaries, even as resource-rich nation-states reassert their power by capturing capital through sovereign wealth funds. Multinational companies are finally truly multinational, but as a result find they must establish new grounds of legitimacy in a borderless world. Developing nations are discovering new opportunities to grow rapidly by exploiting natural resources, providing low-cost labor, and serving as regional hubs for international finance. To prevent everything that is solid from melting into air, all these new power bases, like those before them, seek to ground their claims to legitimacy in stone, steel, and glass.

These trends reinforce themselves. With publics learning more about architecture, super-wealthy clients, be they private citizens, corporations, or states, are willing to spend more to buy the legitimacy that high-profile design can bring.

And that is why Libeskind’s stand is so trenchant, and so uncomfortable. Architects will not decide the future of the global power balance. But their work will play an important part in granting legitimacy to those who are fighting to dominate it. Architects thus have an important choice to make: Do they imagine away this crucial relationship to power, conveniently claiming neutrality in the face of immense fees? Or do they make the difficult, and perhaps damning, decision to inject morality into the practice of building?

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Issue #9, Summer 2008
 

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