In June, 2014 The New Yorker published a widely-debated critique of a trendy business theory titled, “The Disruption Machine.” As the article pointed out, since the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma – which popularized the theory that technology is disruptive to traditional businesses – disruption conferences, consultants, and seminars have proliferated. But the theory is no longer contained to merely explaining the effects of technology on business. Proponents advocate disruption as a desirable end in itself, and extrapolate that to higher education, health care, journalism, the arts and politics – even donuts. (The 2014 Annual Disruptive Innovation award was given to the inventor of the “cronut.”) “Disrupt or be disrupted,” the gurus expound.
Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a disruption theory of architecture, and perhaps that is because it goes by another name: starchitecture. The rise of starchitecture coincides precisely with the era of “disruptive innovation” – Frank Gehry’s Bilbao museum opened in 1997, the same year The Innovator’s Dilemma was published. This is not a coincidence. Information technology had indeed emerged as a major force in business at the same time that Frank Gehry’s Bilbao museum was made possible by advances in computer-aided design. As the now-famous story goes, software that assisted the design of French jetfighters was repurposed by Gehry’s firm to enable construction of the swooping titanium facade.
Like the theory of disruption, the trouble with starchitecture is not where it began but where it ends up. In architecture, disruption for its own sake translates into spectacle for the sake of spectacle – with cultural, academic and other public institutions paying a premium for what amounts to expensive decoration in hopes of creating an “event.” Meanwhile secondary consideration is paid to program, site, context and institutional mission – often at the expense of the user, and sometimes the institution itself. Misunderstanding this model has blown holes in the budgets of academic, governmental and cultural institutions far and wide.
Starchitecture in its purest form is a commodity: a means of selling something at a premium, such as skinny condo towers on West 57th Street. And this is precisely why Gehry—who reportedly hates the term—really is the quintessential starchitect. While Bilbao solidified Gehry’s career as the most famous architect in the world, his most recent masterpiece, Fondation Louis Vuitton, is the perfect alignment of private resources and architecture to achieve radical formmaking for its own sake. As Justin Davidson, architecture critic of New York magazine put it, “[I]f you’re going to make an architectural argument for excess, this is the way to do it. Harrumphing that the building is overdesigned and flamboyant is a little like complaining that Champagne has too many bubbles: Theatrical extravagance isn’t an incidental quality, it’s the essence of this $135 million tour-de-force.”
For institutions in the public realm, creating a unique experience that can be shared in real time with other human beings is the ultimate design challenge, which radical formmaking very often fails to do.
But here’s the rub: disruptive architecture—i.e. radical formmaking for its own sake—doesn’t necessarily translate, as The New Yorker piece pointed out, to institutions in the public realm with a larger mission to fulfill. Sometimes it’s even disastrous. While everyone lamented the loss of the American Folk Art Museum building at the hands of MoMA, rarely was it pointed out that the museum made a huge miscalculation by investing in such an expensive building in the first place.
Blowing budgets on starchitecture is bad enough, but it’s made even worse by missing a critical point about the real “disruptions” to our lives. In addition to our increasingly divided attention, images of fantastical architecture are everywhere, leaving one with the impression of having experienced it without ever being there. For institutions in the public realm, creating a unique experience that can be shared in real time with other human beings is the ultimate design challenge, which radical formmaking very often fails to achieve. No one expresses this better than Juhani Pallasmaa: “Instead of creating mere objects of visual seduction, architecture relates, mediates and projects meanings. … Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings; in fact, this is the great function of all meaningful art.”