The advent of “starchitect” cities could herald a brave new world of design opulence coupled with environmental responsibility.
In 1997, Frank Gehry changed the architectural world with his Guggenheim Museum outpost in Bilbao. The curvaceous, titanium-clad building made Gehry a star and put the industrial city in Spain’s Basque region on the map. A flood of tourists came to Bilbao to see the architecture that signalled a new century.
The building’s extravagance was a deliberate strategy by the city governors to shift the economy of the city from its declining industries into a new economy based on culture and tourism. With Gehry, Bilbao aced it. The Guggenheim Bilbao has attracted more than 10 million visitors, last year generating more than 220m ($362.7m) in economic activity.
Cities have since been trying to repeat the magic equation of “one times absolutely extraordinary building equals new economy”. Enter the “starchitects” whose brief is often to create an image for a city as much as to design a building.
Hot architects
In this new architectural order, the old principle of “form follows function” doesn’t apply. It is “form finds fame”. Buildings have to have the wow factor and the starchitects are called on to put their wildest dreams down on paper.
The dreams of the dozen or so starchitects come from different places – Frank Gehry, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava and Japanese master architect Tadao Ando spent their formative years with artists and/or in sculpture and craft. Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Jean Nouvel travelled a more traditional route, starting with small buildings and working their way up to significant commissions in their 30s or early 40s. Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl spent their early careers teaching at universities, developing theoretical propositions for buildings and space without the crushing realities of the construction and finance industries.
They are all able to generate enough publicity with their presentations to kick off the branding of a cultural institution, corporation – or sometimes a city – with a press conference and a few three-dimensional computer renderings.
Hotspots
In Beijing in August, funky forms and starchitects combined in the two key stadiums for the Olympic Games: the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. Both buildings cleverly play with the micro and macro scale. Chinese birds’ nests were previously best known outside China as a delicacy in a traditional soup. Now the bird’s nest is blown up to a global scale as the main Olympic stadium, made of giant steel twigs and designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron.
The Water Cube design has a similar origin at the micro scale. Based on the natural formation of soap bubbles, the building has a steel frame, an inner and an outer layer, and “bubbles” made from an inflatable, transparent Teflon-like material called ETFE. The original design idea came after the Bird’s Nest, not from a starchitect, but through almost the opposite process – an international collaboration between Australian architecture firm PTW, Arup engineers, China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) and the CSCEC Shenzhen Design Institute.
Representing the circle and the square – the Chinese cosmology symbols for heaven and earth – the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube bring a cultural balance to the Olympic site as they sit side by side across Beijing’s main north-south axis.
Though the games were broadcast from the site, the soon-to-be-completed China Central Television (CCTV) tower, designed by Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA, will be broadcast headquarters for China. At 54 storeys, it will contain about 500,000sq m (50ha) of floor space. It stands out from the crowd, appearing to be a typical office tower twisted into a kinked loop to form two towers.
Athletes and spectators in Beijing disembarked in the Sir Norman Foster-designed terminal building, at 130ha the largest airport building in the world, with a bright red interior that draws its inspiration from the form of a dragon.
Shanghai, determined not to be outdone by Beijing, has secured World Expo 2010, with the theme Better City, Better Life. Expos have always been about showing off a nation’s latest technology and inventions. The pavilions are often a laboratory that symbolises this spirit. The pavilions themselves are relatively small-scale buildings, so are designed by up-and-coming architects, not established stars.
The UK pavilion competition winner is Heatherwick Studios, which works on product design, sculpture and architecture. The building is conceived as “a pavilion of ideas… clad in a mass of spines… each spine is tipped with a tiny coloured light source, which can be programmed with a variety of images, colours and messages.”
The Polish pavilion, designed by Wojciech Kakowski, Marcin Mostafa and Natalia Paszkowska, wraps a traditional Polish paper cut-out pattern around the building as a contemporary reference to folk art, creating a striking light screen, day and night.
The Ren Building, designed by PLOT architects (which has since split into BIG and JDS), is proposed as a hotel, leisure and conference centre on the Expo site, and is based on the Chinese character for people – ren. Criticised as being too literal, it could nevertheless become a striking symbol for the exposition in 2010.
Very hot spots
Dubai has taken architectural and urban magic tricks to a new level. In the 1950s, Dubai was a Bedouin trading port with a population of some 40,000, clustered around a protected harbour on Dubai Creek. Oil was discovered in the 1960s and the ruler, Sheikh Rashid, had the foresight to recognise that the oil supply would be limited. His strategy was to use oil money to build infrastructure and an economy based on trade, building up their seaport and airport to become major hubs of the Middle East.
His son and current ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, added a tourism focus, beginning a program of commissioning the biggest and the best. The ultra-luxurious Burj Al Arab hotel – described as “seven-star” – was first in 1999, followed by the Palm islands. The three Palms – The Palm Jumeirah, The Palm Jebel Ali, and the largest, The Palm Deira – will house more than a million people. Dubai’s desert location makes water a precious commodity, and waterfront land the most valuable. In simple real estate terms, The Palms look like inverted canal estates, maximising the waterfront real estate. They also play games with global scale, being the largest manmade islands in the world, visible from space.
Nakheel developments, responsible for The Palms, has added another scale to the waterfront with The World, a set of exclusive private islands in the shape of a map of the world and, responding to demand, has recently announced The Universe, a set of islands drawing inspiration from the solar system and sitting inshore from The World.
Rem Koolhaas has designed a proposal for the city centre district of the Dubai waterfront project, a square island just inland from Palm Jebel Ali. Always controversial, he has proposed office towers set on a regular grid that he terms “the generic city”. Then, as if to highlight just how bland the city that he has designed is, he proposes two architectural statements on the waterfront to liven things up. One is a sphere with a central hole, like an eyeball, dubbed the Death Star; the other a less extraordinary spiralling office tower.
Dubai also has the tallest building in the world under construction, Burj Dubai, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP. While its final height remains a tightly held secret, it is due for completion in 2009.
Taking the starchitect syndrome to the extreme, Zabeel Properties has commissioned Brad Pitt, the actor with a passion for architecture, to design a new hotel in Dubai.
Two hours’ drive south is Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, a city planning to move out of the shadow of Dubai by creating a more upmarket tourism and business niche courtesy of an association with some of the most sophisticated cultural brands in the world.
It has snared the Guggenheim/Gehry combination and has also ordered a Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre outpost – the first in the world; a Zaha Hadid-designed performing arts centre; a Tadao Ando-designed maritime museum; and, recently announced, a Norman Foster-designed Sheikh Zayed National Museum. All will be set in a cultural precinct on the tip of Saadiyat island, a short drive from downtown Abu Dhabi.
Hot institutions
The five starchitect-designed projects on Saadiyat Island have raised the bar. How will other institutions and cities garner such attention from a single building?
Climate change challenges may give new purpose – beyond the brave and beautiful form making – to how and why we build. Architects, institutions and city governors, looking for advantages over the competition, will need to invest in content as well as style to explore low carbon emission buildings and sustainable concepts. Renzo Piano’s new California Academy of Sciences building adopts this approach with clever climate control and a “living” green roof to replace the park space annexed by the building.
Perkins + Will architects consulted on Antilia in Mumbai, a 27-storey residential tower for Mukesh Ambani, head of India’s largest private sector firm, Reliance Industries. Antilia will have the largest and tallest “living wall” in the world, a vertical garden climbing 40 storeys. If the private sector in India is entering the “form-finding-fame” game, it’s the sort of game the world wants to see them playing.
Hot planet
It’s not just buildings – entire cities are now racing towards sustainability. Masdar is proposed as the world’s first zero-carbon, waste-free city, located on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi and designed by Foster + Partners. It aims to help solve the problem that the Gulf States’ oil exacerbates – climate change. It will be a centre of development for new energy production ideas, designed in the old tradition of a high-density, mixed-use, walled city. Narrow streets and paths provide shade and keep energy requirements low. It is also going to be car-free.
Dongtan claims it will be the first “eco-city”. Construction is scheduled to start in early 2009 on Chongming Island near Shanghai. Designed by Arup engineers as low-consumption and zero-carbon, it will provide a methodology for improved sustainability in the many cities across China undergoing rapid urban growth.
The urban laboratories next to Shanghai and Abu Dhabi are likely to spin off some exciting concepts. Whether these concepts can be adopted by other developing cities is the question, as these countries urbanise at breakneck speed. More traditional centres of architectural innovation might have the answers. In the Netherlands, for example, with much of the country below sea level, architects are used to designing for adversity and are preparing for new challenges.
Wherever new ideas are generated and developed, architects will be critical to their implementation. In a world where buildings account for about half the greenhouse emissions, a new architectural principle might be “form fixes future”.