Architecture Out of Context
You may recall that a while back I was lamenting how our public architecture has evolved into "post-postmodern" monstrosities that may function as individual works of art but fail to integrate with their more prosaic surroundings. Here's an extreme illustration of what I was talking about: the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall in LA is undergoing some renovations because its reflective surface is focusing ordinary sunlight into high-temperature heat-rays that are frying pedestrians and annoying residents of nearby condos.
And this isn't the only Gehry building that has issues with its neighbors. The Peter B. Lewis Building in Cleveland has a nasty tendency to drop ice and snow on pedestrians as well as producing the same kinds of heat and light effects as the Disney Hall. It appears that it's not only aesthetically unsettling to be in the vicinity of a Gehry building, it's also downright dangerous.
I'm just being smart-alecky, of course, but I think these incidents perfectly illustrate what I dislike about Gehry's designs: they are objects unto themselves. They appear to be have been created without the slightest consideration for the environment that would surround them. In other words, the design that looked so cool in the model stage doesn't work so well out in the real world where it must stand in the middle of a pre-existing city block and play host to swarms of puny humans who would like to go about their days without getting (a) toasted or (b) clobbered by a falling 'berg.
I'm not so blinded by my distaste for Gehry's designs as to believe that his are the only buildings that have ever had these kinds of growing pains. The history of architecture is brimming with stories of unforseen problems; that's natural whenever you're dealing with new, possibly revolutionary designs and technologies. However, in the case of these particular buildings, it seems to me that the problems are born of a kind of arrogance produced by the whole "post-postmodern" mindset.
Perhaps "indifference" would be a better word than arrogance, but regardless of semantics, I think the problems we're seeing in the Disney Hall and the Cleveland building is the end result of placing art and design into an academic vacuum where practicality and context are not believed to be important, or even relevant. Back in college, I was often annoyed by the insistence of the post-modernists and post-postmodernists that context didn't matter. Their thesis was that the time period in which a particular text was produced and the intentions of the author simply didn't matter, that the text itself and whatever it did or did not contain was all there was to consider. I never agreed with this idea. It just isn't logical. Everything is about context. It absolutely mattered that Hemingway's attitude toward women was shaped by a culture that's 100 years out of step with our own. And it absolutely matters that Gehry's weird, wacky, swoopy and reflective buildings are going to be built in locations where they will impact on nearby buildings and pedestrians and traffic and all the other factors you can think of when it comes to urban areas. And yet Gehry doesn't seem to think about those factors. If he did, we wouldn't have people getting sunburned just by walking past a concert hall on a clear day.
But that's just my opinion.