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Architecture as PropagandaRecent events have played into the hands of those who believe that architecture has lost its way and become - in some cases fatally - too fancy for its own good. Last week's report on the collapse in May of the Paul Andreu-designed terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris, which killed four people, came amid the sudden critical scrutiny of and public scandals over Andreu's opera house under construction in Beijing.
There were the problems with Santiago Calatrava's roof for the Olympic Stadium in Athens. The Whitney Museum in New York dismissed Rem Koolhaas's plans for its extended galleries on the grounds that they were too bold and expensive. And in the squabble over Ground Zero, the only thing the competing designers seem to agree on is the need to build a Freedom Tower vastly taller than most New Yorkers would feel safe living and working in.
These setbacks and controversies have allowed sober-minded skeptics to accuse the profession of abandoning its original purpose - holding up a roof and keeping out the weather - in favor of reckless and phantasmagorical aesthetic effects, best exemplified by the wavy titanium surfaces of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim or the angled walls of Koolhaas' new Central Library in Seattle.
Thus the fate of Andreu's "prestige" airport terminal seems a most old-fashione
more: www.iht.com/articles/529013.html... (272)
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13/7/2004 | Viewed 6,213 time(s)
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