Frank Gehry, Berlin & The Master Builder. Or, Bilbao am Spree

A week or so ago it was announced that Los Angeles based Gehry Partners had been selected to build a new tower block on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz.

As a general rule we read such announcements. And then carry on with more important things.

However, the day after the announcement the Berlin based, Dutch architect/curator/critic Lucas Verweij tweeted in response to a Guardian article on the project: “Ohh Please, not this standard gentrification trick for Berlin”

And immediately the words of American art critic Hal Foster as penned in his Gehry critical essay “Master Builder” began tumbling, uncontrollably, through our collective concious. And haven’t left us in peace since.

Published in his 2002 book Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) “Master Builder” is as much a controlled criticism of the dangers of the lauded “star architect” as it is a critical overview of Frank Gehry‘s oeuvre.

Following Gehry’s career from his first residential properties in Los Angeles “Master Builder” charts the development of an architect as he responds to changing fashions, changing commercial realities and changing technical possibilities.

Although not without praise, Gehry’s Vitra HQ building in Basel-Birsfelden, for example, is described as “beguiling”, the text largely highlights the problems of architects who work to a personal manifesto rather than to the challenges, peculiarities and locality of the project in hand.

Something that is beautifully illustrated in context of Gehry’s proposed Berlin tower.

Composed of three elements, each of which is slightly turned around the central axis, the Gehry tower is very reminiscent of many other Gehry tower block projects.

Now we’ve nothing per se against an architect revisiting elements of building A in building B, C, D, E, F, ad infinitum. But each building must have its own character based on its own reality.

Describing Gehry’s early work Hal Foster writes “The unfinished look of his early style seemed right for LA: provisional in a way that was appropriate to its restless transformations, but also gritty in a way that resisted the glossier side of Tinsel Town”¹

Berlin may revel in its “Poor but sexy” image, but far from seeming “right”, the unfinished look of the Alexanderplatz tower just looks insulting, largely because it lacks any reference, any sense of place, any justification for its existence. Other than that a developer is paying for it.

It is simply a generic Gehry Partners tower block.

The building is, to paraphrase Foster, an “extravagant but also detached sign of “artistic expression””, an object that arises from a belief that the work of an architect such as Frank Gehry can “be dropped, indifferently, almost anywhere in LA, Bilbao, Seattle, Berlin, New York….”²

It of course can’t be.

No architects reputation alone is strong enough to allow such.

The problem of course isn’t that of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and all those other contemporary architects who work formulaically rather than in a project specific manner. Or at least not theirs alone. Principally the problem lies with those who commission the buildings, those looking for a work that is easily identifiable as being from this or that architect, looking, as Hal Foster so delightfully contends, for the brand equity a “star architect” brings the project and so by extrapolation their company.

And one can’t really blame the architects for taking the developers dollars, and then generating the desired, near as damn it, carbon copy of a previous work.

The justification for such buildings, and at the same time the shroud behind which the obvious parallels to previous works are hidden, is invariably that through the presence of a work by a “star architect” the city will experience magical regenerative effects. Specifically in this case, Alexanderplatz will be transformed from the slightly menacing, unkempt location it currently is into a sophisticated, cosmopolitan urban square that lifts Berlin to the elite of global metropoli. And all because Frank Gehry has built a slightly skewed tower block in one corner. Announcing the decision to build Gehry’s tower, the CEO of the developers behind the project commented “we are creating something new and exceptional, to positively transform the location”³

The absurdity of such arguments should be clear to anyone who understands that urban regeneration is a composite of processes, of which architecture is an important component; but only when the architecture is of a type that supports and encourages a planned process of change. Something an object such as Gehry Partners’ Berlin tower can’t do because it hasn’t been planned with such ideals and isn’t integrated into either the existing environment or any future development plan aimed at urban regeneration. It’s a tower of private flats to be sold at above average prices. Nothing more.

That such arguments are, despite all logic to the contrary, not only believed but propagated and advanced by the mass media is largely based on the curving back of Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao: the unshakable belief that the Guggenheim Bilbao alone has revolutionised the fortunes of the Basque capital held aloft as the shining example of the power of architecture in urban rejuvenation. Regardless of how many other components Bilbao’s rejuvenation plan is and was composed of.

Hal Foster ends “Master Builder” with the words, “”The singular economic and cultural impact felt in the wake of its opening in October 1997”, we are told of the “Bilbao effect”, “has spawned a fierce demand for similar feats by contemporary architects worldwide”. Alas, so it has, and (terrorist targets notwithstanding) it is likely to come to your home town soon.”⁴

And how do the apologists of Hasso Plattner’s perverse Palast Barberini in Potsdam justify the unjustifiable object: “That through a museum not only a city but a whole region can profit considerably, has been proven by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao”⁵

What does Lens expect from the recent opening of the Louvre in the city? According to Le Figaro “l’effet Bilbao”⁶

And how did the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent headline the article that provoked Lucas Verweij’s ire? Correct: “Berlin hopes Germany’s tallest residential tower has the ‘Bilbao effect'”⁷

Nice call Lucas!

1. Hal Foster “Master Builder” in Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) Verson Books, 2002

2.ibid

3. “Gehry Partners gewinnt Architekturwettbewerb für den Neubau des ersten Wohnhochhauses am Alexanderplatz in Berlin-Mitte” Press Release, 27.01.2014 http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/aktuell/pressebox/archiv_volltext.shtml?arch_1401/nachricht5155.html Accessed 06.02.2014

4. Hal Foster “Master Builder” in Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) Verson Books, 2002

5. “Beschlossene Sache: Plattners Kunstmuseum ins Palast Barberini”, Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, 05.06.2013 http://www.pnn.de/potsdam/758345/ Accessed 06.02.2014

6. “Louvre : Lens attend «l’effet Bilbao»” Le Figaro 30.11.2012 http://www.lefigaro.fr/arts-expositions/2012/11/30/03015-20121130ARTFIG00275-louvre-lens-attend-l-effet-bilbao.php Accessed 06.02.2014

7. “Berlin hopes Germany’s tallest residential tower has the ‘Bilbao effect'” The Guardian 28.01.2014 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/28/berlin-germany-tallest-residential-tower-frank-gehry-alexanderplatz Accessed 06.02.2014