Architects' Struggle

Today, I ran into a small protest: a squadron (herd? platoon? pack?) of young architects protesting dismal working conditions. Other than the obvious questions of 1. why the character emitting the speech bubble is a duck, and 2. what's with the set squares?, it was encouraging to see that young architects have finally decided to organize, and to do so with some humor and good cheer despite the dismal outlook here.

Architecture is one of the hardest and most rigorous fields of study in Spain, and to have to go through six years of sleep deprivation and humiliation--while the business students seem to be permanently drunk--only to work for peanuts upon graduation--whereas the drunken business graduates soon, for the most part, go on to make a killing--is not exactly the definition of a meritocracy. If that's not living proof of the old adage "it's not what you know, but who you know", then I don't know what is.

Architourism

Tourists at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona

Tourism is the only 'industry' in Spain that is not downsizing in the current (well, actually it's been five years now) economic downturn. On the contrary, the number of visitors to Spain has been growing steadily. And it's not beach tourism that's growing, but urban-cultural tourism, which includes architecture. In Barcelona, the Gaudí industry is doing molt bé.  Even the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion seems to be receiving more visitors than before.

But while architecture as cultural tourism is doing better than ever, architecture as building is in the doldrums in Spain, a country with a high number of living (not to say 'working') architects who are internationally respected. Something is surely wrong when an entire generation of talent sits idle while the talent of previous generations is increasingly consumed like fast food. But then again, it's a perfect sign of the Zeitgeist, isn't it?

The Politics of Crap

Architectural competitions to design *only* the facade of a building are increasingly commonplace in Germany, according to an op-ed piece in the German magazine Bauwelt. These kinds of competitions provide a compromise solution between a city's qualitative interest in maintaing a certain image on the one hand, and property developers' quantitative commercial interest in nothing but the maximum leasable floor area on the other. Architecture is thereby increasingly limited to superficial image, proving Philip Johnson right when he categorized it as "a branch of cake decoration." 


It also proves Peter Eisenman wrong when he says, as he so often does, that architecture built under rightist governments is better than that built under leftist ones. While indeed a very small élitist fraction may be better, the vast majority is utter crap. Perhaps the real question we should be asking this: in which part of the political spectrum does the most crap get built?