"112 for towns with an image problem"

The confident mayor rings Frank Gehry’s office in Los Angeles – a type of emergency 112 call for towns with image problems. The on-call architect, who is prepared both night and day, packs his bag immediately and travels to the mayor’s rescue. The latest trip was to Sønderborg in Denmark.

On Swedish TV’s Cultural News recently we saw how the giant was taken around the town, which he found pleasant. It wasn’t clear what he was going to design. But I’m guessing that it will be the usual old thing. In some way it seems as though architects lose their interest for innovation once they have reached a certain rung on the career ladder. (Yes, naturally there are some exceptions).

Maybe it seems petty to make fun of this. If an architect manages to find a marketable concept, and demand seems good, then surely there’s no need to complain?

The mayor of Sønderborg believes that “Rome, Barcelona and Sønderborg” will be the natural stops on a European tour for Japanese camera tourists in the future. And Lillian Disney coughed up 50 million dollars for Frank Gehry to put a shine on Los Angeles’s unglamorous downtown.

At the beginning of the nineties, the Norwegian architect Niels Torp won a competition for British Airways’ new headquarters. The construction is a number of u-shaped office pavilions that are grouped around a central passageway. It is cosy, airy and the architecture seems to want to express British Airways’ flat organisation. Architecture that fulfils the demands of a good work environment and also gives a positive image of the company. But isn’t it just a bit too reminiscent of the competitor airline SAS’s headquarters in Stockholm? Maybe that’s not so strange, as Niels Torp designed that one too. About ten years earlier.

Gert Wingårdh is someone who is good at borrowing and is not ashamed of the fact. He happily name drops references for those who want to know. Are his buildings less original and unique because of that? No, but nonetheless he is criticised for borrowing. 

Why isn’t it OK to recycle other people’s ideas, but totally acceptable to recycle one’s own ad infinitum?

If Wingårdh hangs around in reference libraries for days on end, then Frank Gehry has made himself at ease in the copying room. Although maybe it isn’t so comfortable there as it’s becoming rather crowded. Mies van der Rohe, Zaha Hadid and the Utzon family are not alone in crowding in there with him.

Soon a new type of copying will mean the end of a whole profession. In Anders Rydell’s debate on page 155 you can read about the design equivalent to Pirate Bay.

 

Daniel Golling
Editor-in-chief
daniel.golling@forumaid.com