December 13, 2005
'The Edifice Complex'
How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World
By Deyan Sudjic
403 pages. Penguin Press. $27.95.
Leaders Who Build to Stroke Their Egos
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The pyramids, Versailles, the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, the World Trade Center: it's hardly news that the rich and powerful have used architecture to try to achieve immortality, impress their contemporaries, stroke their own egos and make political and religious statements.
So how artfully does Deyan Sudjic explicate this highly familiar observation? His new book, "The Edifice Complex," is a fat, overstuffed jumble of the obvious and the fascinating, the tired and the intriguing - a volume that feels less like an organic book than a series of hastily patched together essays and ruminations. It is a book in dire need of heavy-duty editing, but a book that intermittently grabs the reader's attention, making us rethink the equations between architecture and politics and money, and the myriad ways in which buildings can be made to embody everything from national aspirations and economic might to narcissistic displays of potency and ambition.
Mr. Sudjic, the architecture critic for the London newspaper The Observer, looks at the architectural dreams of the great monsters of 20th-century history - Hitler, Stalin and Mao - and at the more modest fantasies of assorted tycoons and democratically elected politicians. He deconstructs the symbolism of the presidential libraries of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush; looks at the dubious construction of London's Millennium Dome on Tony Blair's watch; and re-examines the debates over ground zero in New York.
In addition, Mr. Sudjic provides some brisk assessments of such high-profile architects as Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind. And he examines the propensity of many prominent architects to hire themselves out to unsavory - and in some cases, morally reprehensible - clients. He notes, for instance, that Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier took part in a competition to design Stalin's Palace of the Soviets and points out that Albert Speer and Mies van der Rohe "were both ready to work" for Hitler, the only difference being that Speer "devoted himself entirely to realizing the architectural ambitions of his master," while Mies, for all his political expediency, "was unyielding about architecture."
As for Rem Koolhaas, who declined to take part in the ground zero design competitions because of what he saw as the project's "overbearing self-pity," he vigorously pursued the job of building the new headquarters of Central China Television, the propagandistic voice of the state.
In reviewing such cases, Mr. Sudjic comes to the conclusion that "the totalitarians and the egotists and the monomaniacs offer architects, whatever their personal political views, more opportunities for 'important' work than the liberal democracies." This is not an entirely persuasive argument, given the construction of iconic buildings like Jorn Utzon's Opera House in Sydney, Australia, and Mr. Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, on one hand, and the nightmarishly grotesque architectural plans of many tyrants, on the other.
In the most interesting chapters in this volume, Mr. Sudjic goes over some of those dictators' plans. We see Hitler, who once contemplated becoming an architect himself, working with Albert Speer to perfect the use of architecture as propaganda - as a tool for glamorizing his own rule while intimidating and impressing his subjects. The scale of Hitler's Chancellery was deliberately heroic - halls that were 30 feet high and doorways that were 17 feet high. And the plans to remake Berlin as "Germania," the Führer's own version of Rome, were similarly outsized, with a gigantic, 1,000-foot-high dome that would have accommodated 180,000 people and grand crossing street axes (possibly based "on Louis XIV's bedroom at Versailles, positioned at the crossing point of two of the most important roads in France").
Stalin's plans for Moscow were equally grandiose: his Palace of the Soviets was to be taller than the Empire State Building and topped by a gargantuan likeness of Lenin that was to be bigger than the Statue of Liberty. Stalin also set about erasing historic landmarks - like Moscow's great 19th-century basilica - in an effort to make his transformation of Imperial Russia into the Soviet Union irreversible. In fact, Mr. Sudjic notes that demolition can be "almost as essential a part of the process of transformation as new building" - as demonstrated by Haussmann's Paris and Ceausescu's Bucharest.
The decision by Brazil's leaders to move the national capital out of Rio de Janeiro and build a new seat of government in the empty heart of the country was, Mr. Sudjic writes, "a deliberate attempt to create a new identity" for the country: the use of "an architecture entirely free of historical memories" was meant to symbolize the rejection of "centuries of political and cultural subservience to Europe."
In the case of the new Germany, Mr. Sudjic reports, leaders were "less prepared to wipe out the traces of Hitler's Berlin" than they were ready "to eradicate the traces" of the former Communist-controlled East Germany. Indeed the physical legacy of vanished authoritarian regimes poses a difficult question for current governments. "Italy to this day," Mr. Sudjic writes, "is full of rotting buildings, many of real quality, that were put up by the Fascists to house their party organizations. They were confiscated by the postwar government, and nobody knows what to do with them. To demolish them all both would be profligate and would represent a historical whitewash, and yet to restore them could suggest a rehabilitation of the regime that built them."
It is in raising such philosophical questions about architecture and its symbolism that "The Edifice Complex" is at its most original and pertinent, persuading the reader that the volume is probably worth reading - or at least skimming - despite the huge amounts of dross surrounding its nuggets of insight.
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'The Edifice Complex'
How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World
By Deyan Sudjic
403 pages. Penguin Press. $27.95.
Leaders Who Build to Stroke Their Egos
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The pyramids, Versailles, the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, the World Trade Center: it's hardly news that the rich and powerful have used architecture to try to achieve immortality, impress their contemporaries, stroke their own egos and make political and religious statements.
So how artfully does Deyan Sudjic explicate this highly familiar observation? His new book, "The Edifice Complex," is a fat, overstuffed jumble of the obvious and the fascinating, the tired and the intriguing - a volume that feels less like an organic book than a series of hastily patched together essays and ruminations. It is a book in dire need of heavy-duty editing, but a book that intermittently grabs the reader's attention, making us rethink the equations between architecture and politics and money, and the myriad ways in which buildings can be made to embody everything from national aspirations and economic might to narcissistic displays of potency and ambition.
Mr. Sudjic, the architecture critic for the London newspaper The Observer, looks at the architectural dreams of the great monsters of 20th-century history - Hitler, Stalin and Mao - and at the more modest fantasies of assorted tycoons and democratically elected politicians. He deconstructs the symbolism of the presidential libraries of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush; looks at the dubious construction of London's Millennium Dome on Tony Blair's watch; and re-examines the debates over ground zero in New York.
In addition, Mr. Sudjic provides some brisk assessments of such high-profile architects as Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind. And he examines the propensity of many prominent architects to hire themselves out to unsavory - and in some cases, morally reprehensible - clients. He notes, for instance, that Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier took part in a competition to design Stalin's Palace of the Soviets and points out that Albert Speer and Mies van der Rohe "were both ready to work" for Hitler, the only difference being that Speer "devoted himself entirely to realizing the architectural ambitions of his master," while Mies, for all his political expediency, "was unyielding about architecture."
As for Rem Koolhaas, who declined to take part in the ground zero design competitions because of what he saw as the project's "overbearing self-pity," he vigorously pursued the job of building the new headquarters of Central China Television, the propagandistic voice of the state.
In reviewing such cases, Mr. Sudjic comes to the conclusion that "the totalitarians and the egotists and the monomaniacs offer architects, whatever their personal political views, more opportunities for 'important' work than the liberal democracies." This is not an entirely persuasive argument, given the construction of iconic buildings like Jorn Utzon's Opera House in Sydney, Australia, and Mr. Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, on one hand, and the nightmarishly grotesque architectural plans of many tyrants, on the other.
In the most interesting chapters in this volume, Mr. Sudjic goes over some of those dictators' plans. We see Hitler, who once contemplated becoming an architect himself, working with Albert Speer to perfect the use of architecture as propaganda - as a tool for glamorizing his own rule while intimidating and impressing his subjects. The scale of Hitler's Chancellery was deliberately heroic - halls that were 30 feet high and doorways that were 17 feet high. And the plans to remake Berlin as "Germania," the Führer's own version of Rome, were similarly outsized, with a gigantic, 1,000-foot-high dome that would have accommodated 180,000 people and grand crossing street axes (possibly based "on Louis XIV's bedroom at Versailles, positioned at the crossing point of two of the most important roads in France").
Stalin's plans for Moscow were equally grandiose: his Palace of the Soviets was to be taller than the Empire State Building and topped by a gargantuan likeness of Lenin that was to be bigger than the Statue of Liberty. Stalin also set about erasing historic landmarks - like Moscow's great 19th-century basilica - in an effort to make his transformation of Imperial Russia into the Soviet Union irreversible. In fact, Mr. Sudjic notes that demolition can be "almost as essential a part of the process of transformation as new building" - as demonstrated by Haussmann's Paris and Ceausescu's Bucharest.
The decision by Brazil's leaders to move the national capital out of Rio de Janeiro and build a new seat of government in the empty heart of the country was, Mr. Sudjic writes, "a deliberate attempt to create a new identity" for the country: the use of "an architecture entirely free of historical memories" was meant to symbolize the rejection of "centuries of political and cultural subservience to Europe."
In the case of the new Germany, Mr. Sudjic reports, leaders were "less prepared to wipe out the traces of Hitler's Berlin" than they were ready "to eradicate the traces" of the former Communist-controlled East Germany. Indeed the physical legacy of vanished authoritarian regimes poses a difficult question for current governments. "Italy to this day," Mr. Sudjic writes, "is full of rotting buildings, many of real quality, that were put up by the Fascists to house their party organizations. They were confiscated by the postwar government, and nobody knows what to do with them. To demolish them all both would be profligate and would represent a historical whitewash, and yet to restore them could suggest a rehabilitation of the regime that built them."
It is in raising such philosophical questions about architecture and its symbolism that "The Edifice Complex" is at its most original and pertinent, persuading the reader that the volume is probably worth reading - or at least skimming - despite the huge amounts of dross surrounding its nuggets of insight.
http://
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コメント(1)
これは権力者や金持ちがどのように建築物を自分の力の示威に使ったかというThe Observer紙の建築評論家の著作。類似本が無数に流通している中で、著者がどのように差別化するのか…しかし、
"The Edifice Complex," is a fat, overstuffed jumble of the obvious and the fascinating, the tired and the intriguing - a volume that feels less like an organic book than a series of hastily patched together essays and ruminations
で、
"The Edifice Complex" is at its most original and pertinent, persuading the reader that the volume is probably worth reading - or at least skimming - despite the huge amounts of dross surrounding its nuggets of insight.
である。ということで、一応褒めているのかしら。
このような、ありきたりな本ではあっても、取り柄である情報の詳細についてちゃんと書評中で紹介してあるので、それでもこの本が必要だ、という人は買いに走るのではないでしょうか。
"The Edifice Complex," is a fat, overstuffed jumble of the obvious and the fascinating, the tired and the intriguing - a volume that feels less like an organic book than a series of hastily patched together essays and ruminations
で、
"The Edifice Complex" is at its most original and pertinent, persuading the reader that the volume is probably worth reading - or at least skimming - despite the huge amounts of dross surrounding its nuggets of insight.
である。ということで、一応褒めているのかしら。
このような、ありきたりな本ではあっても、取り柄である情報の詳細についてちゃんと書評中で紹介してあるので、それでもこの本が必要だ、という人は買いに走るのではないでしょうか。
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