by Hugh Pearman
Phaidon £59.95 pp511
Bryan Appleyard
This is a formidable and essential book. It is formidable because Hugh Pearman's scholarship, good manners and wisdom survive through a project that must have seemed aesthetically and functionally endless. Many, many buildings have been built since 1970 (Pearman's starting point) in an improbable variety of styles. Merely recording this bewildering and occasionally triumphant architectural era requires an extraordinary seriousness and commitment. Pearman never falters. Nobody, as far as I know, has been so thorough. Architects and lay observers are destined to be in his debt for many years to come.The book is essential because it offers a unique opportunity to stand back and judge this global frenzy of construction. Architecture has always been the "Queen of the Arts" and it remains that one aesthetic category in which, daily, we are all involved. Yet, like all the other arts, it has been cut adrift by the hiatus of modernism and the complex fruits of technology. There is no contemporary consensus on what buildings should look like nor even how they should work. We cannot, like the Victorians, choose classical or gothic and leave the rest to the historic logic of style. Rather, with each foundation stone, we are obliged to start again. Architecturally, every year since 1970 has been Year Zero.
For Pearman, who is The Sunday Times architecture, interiors and design correspondent, the importance of 1970 is that it was the point at which one world - that of "international modernism, but also of craftsmanship, or conservatism" - gave way to another - that of "high-precision, machine-made, radical architecture". In terms of personalities, it was the point at which the poetry of Carlo Scarpa and Louis Kahn gave way to the industrial aesthetic of Rogers and Piano's Pompidou Centre or Norman Foster's Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters. It was, in a word, the point at which architecture was globalised.
From this point onwards, architects were working, financially, in a world marketplace and, aesthetically, in a single, global gallery. As a result, where a building was sited became less important than the specific solutions it offered to certain generic problems. So, wisely, this book is divided into categories - visual arts, learning, consumerism, houses, religion, and so on. This allows Pearman to resolve some of the chaos. He can assess the response of architects to similar projects - the sports arena, the house, the airport or the skyscraper.
This frees the reader from the impossible task of comparing styles. This is impossible because we still live in the aftermath of the purist and broadly functionalist strictures of international modernism, the one real attempt to create a global style. Once this collapsed (in about 1970) the stylistic floodgates opened. Pearman gives the flavour of the ensuing deluge by listing a few of its contents: new vernacular, neo-regionalism, new classicism, high-tech, post-modernism, organic architecture, deconstruction, eco-architecture, cosmological architecture, ultra-minimalism and a heroic return to "white" modernism.
But he even resolves this chaos by illuminatingly contrasting the rich, pure, high, white modernism of Richard Meier's Getty Center in California with the wild, cubistic deconstruction of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Both serve the same function - they are art galleries - but no two objects could more precisely capture the fundamental conflicts in the contemporary imagination. Are we Platonists like Meier or Aristotelians like Gehry? Simply asking the question reveals the continuing importance of architecture in our lives.
Pearman does not offer an answer. On the one hand he sees the value of order. Look, for example, at the soothing, transcendent spaces of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, who "cannot help building temples, whatever their ostensible function may be". And he sees the value of chaos. Look again, at the strange brilliance of Gehry, who produces architecture so radical and so distinctive that the theme of the buildings becomes Gehry himself. "His architecture," comments Pearman, "wields its own signature." Pearman thinks too much and is too fair-minded to dismiss either approach. Not that his book is too well-mannered. This is not a neutral book. It may not be on the side of one style or one approach, but it is, overwhelmingly, on the side of excellence. He plainly wants architecture to be the best that it can be and, to that end, he is prepared to listen and to look.
Occasionally, there is a flash of mild anger - as when he remarks on the depressing business of studying shopping malls. And, once, there is a note of perfectly valid moralism when he notes the irony of affluent, healthy westerners self-consciously adopting the style of "garbage architecture" - the use of recycled materials and shanty-town styles - to advertise their eco-consciences when poor, sick third-worlders have no choice in the matter.
But, on the whole, he is relentlessly non-partisan because his intention is to assess buildings on their own terms and catalogue the best. His problem is, of course, that the art's constant self-questioning and the variety of its responses make it difficult to know what is meant by "the best". Are we looking at how buildings look or how they work? What they say or what they do?
This problem is further compounded by the fact that global architecture means that most of us must rely most of the time on photographs. Pearman quietly but significantly notes that high-tech buildings, in particular, photograph dramatically. And, I would add, architects in general are suspiciously fussy about how the camera captures their buildings. This is, of course, advertising, but it provides the imagery for which we tend to rely for our judgments. I can think of many buildings that, in the three-dimensional flesh, fall far short of their photographs - the stumpy, dull-looking Hongkong and Shanghai Bank being perhaps the most celebrated.
As a result, architecture exists in a virtual realm alongside other consumer goods. We see clothes on one page, recipes on another and buildings on a third. They are not real, but we act as if they were. Architecture, the Queen of the Arts, is reduced to the level of a frock or a sauce. You can see the effect in British cities scarred by bloodless, paper-thin copies of buildings seen only in two dimensions. In this context our native mastery of high tech has done an awful lot of damage. But that, of course, makes this book even more valuable. Beautifully illustrated as it is, its main strength is that Pearman has done our travelling for us and his careful, sober criticism subverts the easy effects of glossy photography.
The conclusion of all his work is optimistic. He sees in the forest of ever-higher towers now springing up around the world "a cause for optimism rather than despair". In these the damaging contemporary split between inner and outer is being resolved and, I would add, we are attempting to find precisely what it is about ourselves and our world we wish to celebrate. I would also add that, on the strength of this book, the Japanese - notably the meditative Ando and the awesome Kenzo Tange - appear to have come closest to investing buildings with a true contemporary spirituality to match that of the past.
As all great architects have known,it is the spirit, the magic of a building that matters far more than its form or its function, because that is what makes it survive, what makes it a part of all our lives. Other arts seldom achieve as much and, for that reason alone, architecture remains our central and most profound concern. With this book, Pearman proves once again that he is our most engaged and level-headed guide.
