The Starchitect

3 Jan

These guys apparently know better

 

I’m still not totally settled in, having arrived just a day ago.  There is lots of work piling up as well as an imminent trip to China in the next few days.  This all means that I have not really gotten into the Bangkok Blog swing of things yet, but I’ll get there.

To fill in the gap while I wait for some true Bangkok Blog activity to take place, I thought I would share a video that CNN put up on its site a couple of weeks ago.  The video shows an architect, Ole Scheeren, describe a building he designed in Bangkok.  The building, called the MahaNakhon, is the tallest structure in Bangkok.  I have written about it before, in an entry on March 4th and then another on September 24th.  The building is a rectangular glass structure with chunks taken out of it.  It looks like a giant insect has eaten bits of it.

I thought I would talk about MahaNakhon again not so much because of the design or its height, but more because of its architect.  When I was in architecture school many years ago, we had to read ‘The Fountainhead’ by Ayn Rand.  This is a story about Howard Roark, the misunderstood ‘starchitect’ who felt that his work was above criticism.  He had many wonderful lines in the book, such as, “The question isn’t who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me” and “I don’t build in order to have clients, I have clients in order to build.”  I am not sure, to this day, what we, as students, were supposed to take away from this book. (I once asked a client of mine if she had read ‘The Fountainhead.’  Apparently she had.  She then looked at me and suggested that if I ever acted like Howard Roark on her project, she would have me murdered. Not fired, but murdered. Whoa, that Howard Roark sure had enemies.)

I wonder if we were supposed to gain some professional insight, or maybe some political savvy by reading the book.  Perhaps the professor who assigned it was trying to turn his students into ‘Randitarians.’  Or maybe our professors wanted us not be be like Howard Roark, or in some cases, some wanted us to emulate him.  Whatever the reason, that book spawned a lot of good architect as protagonist movies, including The Fountainhead starring Gary Cooper.  (That same client did suggest that it was too bad that I was not as good looking as Gary.  However she did also say that even if I was, and I acted like Roark, I would still be murdered.)

‘The Fountainhead’ helped spawn an image of the architect as being an elitist with an ‘I know better than you persona’ and a genius searching for the perfect solution.  It also led to an era where the starchitect has become something of a Hollywood type celebrity.  People like Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind are hired for their brilliant insights in building and their marketing appeal.  They almost always wear black.  They are cool.  They are thoughtful.

This leads me to the CNN video.  Here we see the architect, Ole Scheeren, describing the design of MahaNakhon.  It’s a tour de force, a brilliance.  As an architect who practiced for many years, I didn’t understand what he was talking about in this video.  Maybe you will.  But he wears black; he is good looking; the video is slick with an air of mystery.  The building is magnificent.  It must be.  Ole has said it is.

Take a look at the video below and see what you think.  Perhaps you can let me know what Ole was talking about.  If so, I would appreciate it.

I’ll be back with some new Bangkok Blog entries as soon as possible.

6 thoughts on “The Starchitect

  1. Well, he may not be wearing black in the style of Gehry. Certainly no Howard Rourke. (I must confess to a secret lust for Ol’ Howard in my youth. After all, the starving artist in the garrot was also attractive in those days…) Maybe I was always a fool for a black turtleneck.
    This guy certainly made no sense to me at all. Maybe because his suit was blue.

    • You always had a better sense of colour than me. Blue…Black. I was close. Ole was never a starving artist. Let’s face it, taking a cube, made up of smaller cubes, and extruding it and then taking some of those smaller cubes away is not that original. But maybe his way of explaining a pretty straightforward process sounds a lot cooler. I love when he ripped the plastic away from the window. It was very theatrical. I should have tried that when we did Freeport.

  2. We have a similar building here in Guadalajara that is across the street from a hospital. It is built to look like it is about to topple over and fall onto the hospital. Probably creates some anxiety in those patients who have that particular view.

    • It’s probably a genius move on the part of the hospital, which, I bet, secretly owns this adjacent topply building. Health care administrators all over the world continue to try to figure out how to reduce hospital stays. The guys who run this hospital concluded that if patients feel they might be crushed by a neighbouring building, the decision to get out of bed and out of the hospital quickly would be a good idea. How smart is that?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *