CALL FOR PAPERS San Rocco 5: Scary Architects

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kings, tyrants and dictators because they are the only politicians who think about buildings and infrastructure for the long haul, and not just in megalomaniac/ monumental terms, but also more reasonably in terms of the fortune they leave to their heirs; indeed, kings invest in palaces because their sons will inherit them. It is the time-horizon of dictators, not dictatorship itself, that is sympathetic to architecture. Despite all recent attempts to reduce the lifespan of architecture and dream up buildings that could easily disappear (from Futurism on), architecture still disturbs the perfect flatness of contemporaneity, suggesting a longer span of time. And maybe this is what is really scary about architecture: a longer time-horizon unavoidably ushers a new character onto the stage: death. Architecture is scary: this is a truth, not a choice. Still, scariness can also be a choice, a precise desire to scare (one’s enemies? one’s subjects? one’s allies?). The Parthenon, for instance, is a machine designed to scare people. Given the absurd amount of money invested in its construction (a gigantic potlatch?) and its incredible precision, the Parthenon’s emergence in the relatively shabby Athens of the 5th century can be understood only as a colossal menace. The precision of the Parthenon is the precision of a weapon of mass destruction. For all the legends about aliens building the pyramids, the most likely building to have been built by aliens is the Parthenon, the scariest object ever constructed on this planet. So architecture is scary, and making architecture can be a reaction to the discovery of how fundamentally scary architecture is. If architecture is the most tangible sign of an oppressive architecture of society, design can be understood as an expression of this original evil. Guido Canella understood architecture in these terms. The dedicated desperation of Canella’s architecture is committed to the exhibition of this primitive oppression. As much as Canella’s ideological construction is awkward, and as much as his architecture is repulsive (and we’re talking about his best period), he had something there. The offensive ugliness that Canella laboriously erectedin the 1970s in the barren outskirts of Milan is not just the consequence of the impoverished life of the proletariat, for these nightmares are not only 202 modern, and this oppression is not only that of the working class: it is also the oppression of the bourgeois architect as well as a deeper, somehow unspeakable oppression, a universal Unbehagen. Similar nightmares indeed appear in the work of architects as different as Ricardo Bofill, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Kiyonori Kikutake, Hans Poelzig, Paul Rudolph and Carel Weeber. San Rocco 5 tries to deal with the horror of architecture. What should we think of the architects who have decided to scare the rest of the world deliberately? And what about buildings that are not just big and uncanny, but deliberately dark, windowless, gloomy, repulsive, antihuman? Is scary architecture just a desperate quest for love? As Black Sabbath would put it, “Happiness I cannot feel and love to me is so unreal”.
Cases • Scary Architects: A Portrait Gallery • Send us a portrait of your favourite scary architect! • Ricardo Bofill, Scary Architect • Ricardo Bofill understood from very early on that he himself would be the most despotic and, hence, also the most rewarding client. After a bizarre stint during which he had practically taken over a project of former friends, enlarged it and famously/supposedly driven its developer bankrupt while at the same time building some of the most exciting megaliths on the Spanish coastline, he founded the Taller as a self-constructing, post-hippy “community”. The magnificent Walden 7 complex soon became the epitome of a social community driven berserk. As a city-within-the-city of gigantic proportions, it had more in common with the Death Star than a building. Unfortunately, after all of this the prolific mind of the (self-declared) genius began to suffer delusions of George Lucas–like proportions. New gigantic design opportunities inspired a bizarre version of an all-encompassing classicism. Bofill became the unstoppable Sun King of a new palace-inspired, mirrored-glass classicism. Only the French could embrace this Jean Michel Jarre–style complete lack of self-relativity without any irony; lasers and columns can be surprisingly similar. • Kiyonori Kikutake, Scary Architect • Kiyonori Kikutake fought a lifelong battle with the permanence of the built object. He started his research on impermanence with a project of an intimate character, the construction of the Sky House for his family in 1958. His research got progressively out of control, however, and ended with the creation of gigantic megastructures floating on the most extensive and generic surface on the Earth: the ocean. His tendency toward impermanence, material and spiritual lightness, and a social and physical interchangeability finally generated monstrous concrete accretions intended to provide the infrastructure for plug-in inhabitable cells. Kikutake’s designs for floating nomadic cities that were to be sunk to the ocean floor once no longer useful to humans, perhaps to serve as an artificial reef for marine life (Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo would have fun swimming through them), foresaw a romantic future for these massive cruise settlements, far away from Japan’s postatomic nightmares and the pressure generated by his native country’s explosive mix of land scarcity, overpopulation and brutal economic development. • Morris Lapidus, Scary Architect • During his long life, Morris Lapidus designed over 1,200 buildings, including 250 hotels around the world. He brashly said things to which culturally engaged architects would never confess and he coined slogans like “Too much is never enough” – pure treason for Miesian loyalists – or “I gave them the kind of backdrop to make them feel ‘I really have arrived’”. More or less consciously, Lapidus set the standard for both gaudy leisure architecture and the tastes of ambitious newcomers to the criminal milieu (the Scarface set designer definitely owes something to him). How can we not feel at least a little sympathy for someone who, after his retirement, feeling angry and bitter about his reputation, burned fifty years’ worth of his drawings? • Hans Poelzig, Scary Architect • In his book Das Antlitz der Zeit, August Sander described the state of society during the Weimar Republic. In a group whose every element had to represent an entire class, the subjects he chose were unavoidably caricatures: the notary wore a light-coloured coat and was accompanied by a black Doberman, the span of the sergeant’s moustache equalled that of his shoulders, the butcher was bald and fat . . . and the architect was Hans Poelzig. • Paul Rudolph, Scary Architect • Paul Rudolph (the Brutalist one, not the early modernist from Sarasota) liked to impress people, or better, he liked to daze and scare them. It’s at least as hard to confute this as it is to deny the fact that he was terribly good at it. Indeed, his preference for using the section as the main tool for controlling and describing his 203
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CALL FOR PAPERS San Rocco 5: Scary Architects

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