Getting High or the End of a Bad Trip
The first speaker of the Rice Design Alliance’s fall lecture series spoke Wednesday until the wee hours of the morning. At least, that was the time according to the inner clock of Peter Buchanan, who was fresh off a flight from London.
(Click here to watch an mp4 video of Peter Buchanan’s talk.)
Buchanan’s presentation did not seem to be that of a person with jet lag. The architect, writer, urban planner, and critic gave a charged lecture that asserted that the United States trailed much of the developed world in building sustainable, community-enhancing skyscrapers.
Buchanan slammed the majority of towers being built today as “rubbish” and endemic of the final throes of a dying way of thinking. “Basically things have gone bananas. This is certainly the end of an era,” he said as he neared completion of his hour-long presentation at the Brown Auditorium of the Museum of Fine Arts.
“The tall building is anachronism,” he said. “The tall building because of the green agenda is being reinvented….the tall building is associated with a corporatism, a way of doing business that is in trouble.”
Buchanan was the first of four scheduled speakers in the RDA series, “Getting High: Towers in Architecture.” The lecture series focuses on the present trends in architecture to build up, the slow-down with many large-scale projects, and what it all means for the future skylines of the world. The series will continue on Wednesday, Sept. 23, with Ali Rahim of Contemporary Architecture Practice of New York. For a complete schedule of speakers click here. To download Buchanan’s slideshow, click here. For Jesse Hager’s response to the lecture on OffCite, click here.
Buchanan was not shy in his opinion of towers. “Energy-guzzling buildings like this are not sustainable and contribute to an urban alienation.”
Buchanan claimed that the tall building that is most common today is reflective of a way of thinking that can trace its roots all the way back to the Renaissance. As thinkers of the day were unearthing and rediscovering the rationality of ancient Greece, they were also divorcing humans from nature and their more intuitive faculties.
This way of thinking has also been the forbearer of the modern tall building. Buchanan compared the flamboyance of many of the latest towers to the dramatic colors of a sunset before the day —the era— goes dark. “We’re in the process of epochal change…(the) confusion that reigns in architecture is because of a period of transition.”
Buchanan said that “modernity and its disassociation with the natural world” is in the process of giving way to a more holistic thinking that places building into a more cohesive vision uniting structures to community. “Modernity is concerned with objects, it is not concerned with fabric,” he said. “A word of warning; you can aspire to the avant-garde or you can aspire to shape the future.”
Buchanan railed against what he called the “slick squalor” of tall buildings. The imposing structures give only cursory attention to the life of the city around it, Buchanan said. “The tall tower destroys the street, it destroys street life,” he said. The structures divorce its inhabitants from grass and sky. “For many tall buildings you might as well be underground as up in the sky.”
The cluster of towers that can be found in most American downtown areas are lamentable, Buchanan said. “That’s not a city, it’s a collection of objects,’ he said. “We must rethink the use of the tall building. They suppress a sense of the people inside.”
He said that Germany has taken the lead in constructing tall buildings that consume fewer resources while adding more to the surrounding urban landscape and sense of community. “Architecture is one of the last fields to grasp the return of ideals that give meaning to human endeavor,” he said. “It’s not necessary for the tall building to be this isolated object.”
The future of the tall building is still emerging, Buchanan said. He pointed to several examples of buildings that, according to Buchanan, attempt to be part of a greater narrative — be it a cultural identity or simply a greater awareness of the communal fabric surrounding it.
The tall building’s improved integration with its surroundings will not only exists in abstractions, Buchanan said. Green features will further integrate not only the building, but also its inhabitants to nature. “More and more architects and engineers are looking to biological systems,” he said.
Buchanan held up examples by Renzo Piano’s Maison Hermes building in Tokyo and Norman Foster’s Commerzbank in Frankfurt, Germany as notable examples.
Buchanan said that the overly litigious nature of the United States would stand as an obstacle to construction of advanced tall buildings. The building process for these structures demand highly collaborative teamwork, which blurs questions of liability and make some American builders nervous.
Erecting tall building is “becoming a very complex art,” Buchanan said.
Architect and urban planner, writer and critic, consultant and curator, Peter Buchanan was born in Malawi in 1942, schooled in Zimbabwe and studied architecture at the University of Cape Town, graduating with a B. Arch in 1968.
In 1972 he moved to London and worked until 1976 for Halpern + Partners on a variety of commercial, urban design and planning projects for the UK, France, Germany and Israel. From 1976 until 1979 he worked for Sidell Gibson Partnership in charge of masterplanning the extension of the city of Arak in Iran and some of its major architectural ensembles. During this whole period he designed entries for a number of architectural competitions, particularly for housing developments.
In 1979 he joined The Architectural Press (later to become part of Maxwell Business Communications and then EMAP) as an editor and writer on the Architect’s Journal and The Architectural Review, becoming Deputy Editor of the latter in 1982.
Since 1992 he has worked as a freelance writer, exhibition curator and consultant in environmental design and planning. He was curator of and helped design two exhibitions for The Architectural League of New York: Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Selected Projects in 1992 and Ten Shades of Green in 2000. He wrote the catalogues for both exhibitions, which travelled extensively. He also provided ideas and design concepts for exhibitions in Japan on Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier.
Peter Buchanan has written a number of books, including the five volumes of Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Complete Works (Phaidon Press), which has appeared in six different language editions, and Ten Shades of Green: Architecture and the Natural World (WW Norton). Other books include Gabriel Fagan, Twenty Cape Houses (Bree Street Publications) and a volume on the Japanese sculptor, Susumu Shingu (Circle d’Art).
Email This Entry
Filed Under: Lectures,
The Sobering Peter Buchanan | Offcite Blog writes:
09.18.09
4:42 pm
[...] Peter Buchanan is one of those individuals touting many titles: writer, architect, critic, urban designer. It was primarily as a critic that Mr. Buchanan approached the subject of the evening, Towers in Architecture, as a critic of the decadence of the architectural object and of the American influence on the inhabitation of our cities. (For Zeke Minaya’s report on the lecture, entitled “Getting High or the End of a Bad Trip,” click on this link to ricedesignalliance.org.) [...]