A new exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the first building created with the help of computer technology, seeks to explore just that: how art and architecture have evolved in a digital era. Mark C O’Flaherty explains how computers changed the face of architecture forever
Most of us can work out from looking back over the tonal quality of our photographs precisely when we made the transition from shooting with film to using digital cameras. But when did architecture make the move? CAAD (computer aided architectural design) goes back to the 1960s, yet its full potential wasn’t explored or appreciated until Franky Gehry’s Guggenheim building opened in Bilbao in 1997. Here was the power of 3D imaging really tested – working out the complexities of maximum weights, balances and stresses in a digital space that is a wholly accurate simulacrum. Rather than test what’s possible with flawed scale models, the computer can morph and join materials according to their actual inherent properties.
The result was nothing short of ground-breaking, and the impact of that building in Bilbao still can’t be overstated. It changed the path of architecture, and indeed cities, forever. It put its location in the Basque country on the map in a totally new way – those gleaming silver curls, twists and exaggerated boat-like elements captured the world’s imagination and showed how a contemporary landmark can change the fortunes of a place. It remains a genuinely thrilling building that inspires people to travel as much as any neo-classical institution or Roman colosseum ever has.
Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based Gehry had redefined his architectural style at the end of the 1980s when he created the Vitra Design Museum on the Vitra Campus in Germany. Previously known for a more squared-off feeling for the avant-garde, his Museum was a fitting building for its location – where the country intersects with France and Switzerland. The planes of the Museum are fantastical, particularly on the upper portions, where they curve in such a way as to suggest they have taken on a life of their own. Standing in front of it, one gets the sense that if you turn away, it may rearrange itself before you look back. It was a precursor of the magic to come in Bilbao, and also Seattle and Los Angeles. This winter’s exhibition at the Guggenheim in Bilbao – ‘Architecture Effects’ – looks at tipping points in the digital era in relation to building design, and references Gehry’s work extensively. Given the importance of the building it is in, it isn’t too far-fetched to consider the show ‘site specific’.
It is significant that the architects who are most synonymous with an aesthetic that might best be termed ‘digital’ began their careers in the analogue world of pencil and paper. Daniel Libeskind’s work has always had a touch of the impossible. With its angular extremes, certain examples (including his London Metropolitan University building in Holloway, completed in 2004, above) resemble futuristic sets for German Expressionist cinema. He continues to work extensively in pencil (his drawings have been exhibited globally), but he now relies heavily on computers to bring a new dimension to his work. “Previously, all the work was done by drawing,” he says. “Now it’s entirely 3D, on computer. You suddenly see something that you never saw before, that is able to respond to your desires in a more immediate and complex way. Computer in design is a lightning strike in architecture.”
When the late Zaha Hadid began her career, the starting point for her projects was the pad and pencil. Looking at her first building – the fire house at the Vitra Campus (1990) – and then looking at the crazed, partially abstract, partially constructivist sketches that gave birth to it, one wonders how practical building plans were ever achieved. But Hadid was always a visionary. She had revolutionary ideas for architecture, and in her case, it wasn’t that technology created the opportunities for her, more that technology finally caught up with her imagination. It is telling that the fire house was discovered to be, for all its beauty, unfit for purpose. Construction was ambitious, and spaces were conceived theoretically. Once computers were brought into the equation at the Hadid studio, the process was meticulous.
The landscape of the modern city has changed dramatically thanks to computers. And some of the most stunning work to date took place on the cusp of the revolution. Consider what the late architect Jan Kaplický was doing with his design practice Future Systems, including the media centre at the Lord’s Cricket Ground in London (1999) and the Selfridges building in Birmingham (2003). Both still look as radical as they ever did. And certain critics – the same ones who long for the days of vinyl and Kodak film perhaps – still can’t accept it. In 2014, Gehry was asked at a press conference for the opening of his Louis Vuitton Foundation Museum in Paris if his work was mere “spectacle.” He answered with fury. He dismissed 98 per cent of modern architecture with profane vocabulary, and said: “Once in a while, however, a group of people do something special. Very few, but God, leave us alone.”
‘Architecture Effects’ is on at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 29 April 2019
Images courtesy of Getty Images
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