Goooood!

Zeche Zollverein (Photographer: Florian Seiffert / Flickr) (click-2-enlarge)

“Our aesthetic suggests uniqueness while the practice is still multiplication. So we inhabit a territory of increasing discrepancy”, Rem Koolhaas says to Beatriz Colomina in the latest El Croquis, the second double issue about OMA.

A couple weeks ago I visited some of the abandoned industrial complexes in the Ruhrgebiet - also the Zeche Zollverein area on which OMA made a masterplan, and for which SANAA made a slick concrete cube.

What struck me was that all that I thought was good in architecture was there, in buildings mostly not designed by architects: spaciousness, scale, crisscross ‘escalaters’, brutal concrete, minimalist detailing, fascinating textures, and so on. In fact, these architectures were often way better than the spaces we architects produce.

I encourage everybody to go there and see it for themselves, but this confrontation made me think about the current state of architecture. If the industrial buildings from the end of the nineteenth century, and beginning of the twentieth century could be better at aspects at our current architecture, is it not about time we change the way we make architecture, completely. Not from a socialist or Marxist point of view, as tried by so many, but from an esthetic point of view. Can we make an architecture that easily surpasses that of the industrial buildings?

I have to note that architects trained by Walter Gropius designed the Zech Zollverein complexes. They were modernists.

Where better to start than our current fashion in architecture, which is not by coincidence very, very similar to the architecture of the finest industrial complexes.

Of course, I am exaggerating. There is some overlap. And there are of course also big differences, like the scale. The void inside a Gasometer for instance is unprecedented in scale – nothing ever comes close to that. And the echo…

I ended up making the list as written here: A list of elements that make architecture goooood! today.

(Image: Michiel van Raaij / Eikongraphia)

It might just be the dumbest list ever, but the line between courage and dumbness is at some moments pretty impossible to notice, so I take the chance.

A lot can be said about these parameters of goooood! Important is the evaporation of anything that would specialize a piece of the building in relation to the air or the ground, like a plinth or a roof. A contemporary building is coherent like a sculpture: the roof is the same as the walls is the same as the underside of a cantilever. Sometimes that sameness is continued in the ceiling.

As each building has to become more and more unique to distinguish itself from others, the buildings themselves become increasingly coherent. The ideal is ‘solidness’. Not in the sense of that the material you see is also the construction, but in the sense that the ‘wrap’ is everywhere. Except for the interior, when that is conceived like a space inside that wrap.

It is the victory of object that is architecture. Iconography comes with that ‘object-hood’, although not necessarily. Sculpture also comes with that being-an-object of architecture. That, by necessity.

Another striking thing is the deleting of construction, of load-bearing structure, out of our sight. It is integrated or hidden in ceilings and walls, or exploded in an ambient space filled with columns that don’t stand up right, but dance all around. It is a trend that is connected to the increasingly ‘solidness’ of the architectural object. But I suspect it also proves that architecture’s legibility – show how it works, display how it stands up – is in crisis. And I don’t say I feel bad about that.

One thing we should learn from the Ruhrgebiet (or any other industrial architecture) is to be less afraid of scale in architecture. We can and should build much larger.

And when I write this I already know this idea is already lost on everybody living in Holland. The Dutch are just too afraid of scale.

This new bigness in architecture should not be used to house a bunch of people, nor should it be applied to impress people, nor should it be fully programmed.

The Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern is the best example I can think of right now. Consider that space the starter, the sperm cell.

Big brutal spaces are goooood! spaces.

Zeche Zollverein (Photographer: Florian Seiffert / Flickr) (click-2-enlarge)

Zeche Zollverein, Kocherei (Photographer: Clod 79 /Flickr) (click-2-enlarge)

Zeche Zollverein (Photographer: Florian Seiffert / Flickr) (click-2-enlarge)