A View from Nowhere: The Point of Pointless Architecture
Downtown Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, now the tallest building in the world, briefly opened in January with a stunning celebration. In photographs, the building’s inauguration, replete with fireworks and video projections, looks like a cross between Cinderella’s Castle and Battlestar Galactica. Yet, only weeks after it debuted, the Burj Khalifa closed down, electrical problems and a snafu with the elevator apparently to blame.
Over 2,700 feet tall, the tower magically crests high above the rest of Dubai’s spotless skyline. The Dubai tower, begun during a moment of opulence, seems both of its era and slightly behind. A purely commercial structure, it grew out of a need to commemorate the prowess of the Middle East and acknowledged the commingling of Eastern and Western money that globalization has allowed. It also championed Dubai’s own success. According to the building’s website, Dubai’s “success was not based on oil reserves, but on reserves of human talent, ingenuity and initiative.” However, over the past year, ingenuity has suffered at least as much in Dubai as in the rest of the financially over-extended world. The tower required a bail-out from neighboring ruler Sheik Khalifa al-Nahyan and is still deep in the red, according to a recent feature in Time Magazine. But, no matter how foolish it may seem to break already-extravagant world records during an international recession, the Burj Khalifa makes sense. It’s a claim to power, economic and social, evidence that East and West can both play the big-money game.
MOCA Pacific Design Center. Photo Credit: Brian Forrest
A different kind of foolishness, the obsessive, nonsensical, sans-power kind, is currently the subject of an exhibition at MoCA Pacific Design Center. A collaborative project between curator Philipp Kaiser and architecture duo Frank Escher and Ravi Gune Wardena, Follies: A View from Nowhere surveys everything from The Pantheon at Stourhead, an English revision of Hercules’ Temple, to the Watts Towers. A large white, climbable look-out structure in the center of the galleries is Escher and Gune Wardena’s attempt at a folly of their own.
According Gwyn Headley, who published a history of follies in 1996, “Follies stem from passion, obsession, and suspicion. . . They can take any form, any style. A folly is a state of mind, not an architectural style.” In other words, follies are emotive, usually irrational, and always deeply subjective. Kaiser, Escher and Gune Wardena culled images of follies from history, hanging them in a continuous horizontal line that travels along each of the gallery’s walls. Brief explanations accompany each photograph, giving the show the feeling of a cool-headed survey. Yet no amount of cool-headedness could squelch the fun out of images like these.
Lucy the Elephant, Margate, N.J.
Lucy the Elephant from Margate, New Jersey, is one of the highlights. Built out of wood and tin in 1881, the brainchild of a young entrepreneur named Lafferty, the 90-ton Lucy was modeled after images of Elephants from the romanticized British Raj. Lafferty, who took out a patent on animal-shaped buildings in 1882, initially devised Lucy as a publicity stunt—he thought, incorrectly, that a building like that would be an irresistible attracter to his beach front properties. Later, Lucy became a mini hotel, cottage, tavern, and a dilapidated cause around which people who cared about history’s peculiarities rallied. Finally, after her supporters saved her from the wrecking ball, she became a museum. With over-eager porthole eyes, rounded tusks, a swooshing tale, and a festive howdah on her back, Lucy looks brazenly optimistic, as she should.
Another building featured in the exhibition is far less whimsical. Central Los Angeles Area High School # 9, designed by the firm Coop Himmelblau and completed in 2008, cuts an unnerving figure, its industrial silver tower angling over the Hollywood freeway like a post-human fortress. The school would qualify as a big money attempt at grandeur, similar to the nearby Disney Concert Hall, if not for the fact that its presence in downtown Los Angeles seems totally irrational and thus rebellious. Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times, said of Coop Himmelblau’s head architect, Wolfgang Prix, “Prix’s style is what you might call mesmerizingly inefficient. Like a baroque architect piling ornament into the upper reaches of a church interior, he tends to make his most highly wrought spaces inaccessible and essentially decorative.” An essentially decorative high school? The whole project seems politically subversive, yet the fact its subversion doesn’t have any tangible target makes it a folly through and through.
Central High School #9 for the Visual and Performing Arts, Photo Credits: Allen
J. Schaben for the Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2009
South Los Angeles’ Watts Towers, spiraling steeples hand-built on a non-existent budget by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, make an appearance in Folly. So does the very building that houses the exhibition, designed by Cesar Pelli as a mini-me that sits beside the Pacific Design Center, also designed by Pelli and one of L.A.’s biggest, costliest buildings. Next to the Design Center, the diminutive museum seems like a self-referential joke that pokes fun at excess. The exhibition surveys an impressive range of small and big ventures, each of them refusing to fit into any clear-cut model of functionality—each of them but one.
Escher’s and Gune Wardena’s own folly, an obviously temporary structure, includes a rickety staircase that spirals up to a fort-like observation deck, from which visitors can see an impossibly comprehensive view of Los Angeles, an effect that has been created by pasting large-format photographs to the walls. It’s like a school project—something that checks off all the boxes in the most literal way possible: non-functional, unrealistic, obsessive (a note at the foot of the structure explains how the dimensions were painstakingly calculated). It evidences understanding of an idea, but doesn’t dig into what obsessive, inefficient architecture should actually feel like. Because Escher and Gune Wardena’s folly exists to show people what a folly should be, it can’t be successful as a folly.
Watts Towers, Photo Credit: Lucien den Arend
In a recently published interview with online magazine The Millions, Novelist John Banville, whose recent work merges classicism with contemporary comedy, says art should be “absolutely gloriously useless.” This sounds like an easy task, until Banville continues: “Good art recognizes . . . our peculiar predicament in the world, that we’re suspended in this extraordinary place, we don’t know what it’s for or why we’re here.” It’s hard to recognize precariousness and extraordinariness and uselessness all at the same time, which is why good art and good architectural follies are so hard to come by.
Building something like the Burj Khalifa may be excessive but it serves a specific agenda: it portrays a world in which progress is linear and people are always improving upon themselves. Building two towers out of concrete and found material in a poor neighborhood like Watts makes no sense at all. But it reminds us that life doesn’t make much sense either, and, in a moment in which so much economic prowess has been exposed as fantasy, concrete nonsense suddenly seems reassuring.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.
Top Image: Burj Khalifa. Dubai, UAE. Official Burj Khalifa Website. www.burjdubai.com
