This was the decade of excess. It began with the Millennium Dome and now comes to an end with the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building, due to open on January 4. These bold structures frame the Noughties — and all its outrageous buildings — like a pair of eye-popping follies.
The Millennium Experience was a triumph of spin and scale. Talked up as ‘Britain’s proudest creation”, it was housed in a tent so big and strong that its roof could, apparently, support the weight of a jumbo jet.
The whole shebang cost close to £1-billion (about R12-billion), so, at £40-million (about R482-million), at least the Richard Rogers-designed venue in London seemed something of a bargain.
The Burj Dubai looks set to open its doors just as Dubai’s whole economy totters. And although it’s true that the Empire State Building was completed during the Depression and is now one of the world’s most famous buildings, the Burj Dubai’s staggering ambition suddenly looks a lot like hubris.
The Noughties were bound up with financial speculation and rampant consumerism; architecture inevitably followed suit. (As Mies van der Rohe once said: ‘Architecture is the will of the epoch translated into stone.” Or steel, or titanium.)
In fact, you could say the decade actually began in 1997, with the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. This spectacular gallery was designed by Frank Gehry, one of the stars of the Noughties, with Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Norman Foster.
Rapturously received, it set the tone for the years of ‘iconic” architecture that followed. Here was architecture as a tourist magnet; travel agents offered weekend breaks to Bilbao simply to see Gehry’s voluptuous sensation. British politicians started calling for the ‘Bilbao effect”: it had what they called ‘the wow! factor”.
Gehry had let the cat out of the bag. A wave of fantastical new buildings followed, sci-fi-like structures that seemed to have sprung from the writing of JG Ballard. Advances in construction techniques, materials and computer software meant a museum, art gallery, office or mall could be anything a client wanted, provided they had the cash.
Hadid’s Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Koolhaas’s Casa da Musica in Porto, Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe in London (aka the Gherkin), Future Systems’s Selfridges in Birmingham, Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue’s Scottish Parliament Building — these were eye-catching examples.
The most extreme I saw was the skilful yet strangely nightmarish BMW Welt in Munich, designed by Viennese practice Coop Himmelb(l)au. Here, visitors are given the ‘BMW experience” as they wander a kind of film set. But what was it all for? To glorify cars. If only such talent could have been channelled into the design of schools, hospitals and public spaces.
This culture of excess brought its own counterculture. Arguably its most extreme adherent was Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born al-Qaeda operative who flew one of the jets into the World Trade Centre.
Atta had trained as an architect in Cairo and as an urban planner in Hamburg. He wrote his thesis on what he saw as the destruction of Syria’s Aleppo, his ideal city, by crude, modern, commercial development and, in particular, by tower blocks.
When he attacked New York, his vicious crusade was as much against skyscrapers as it was against Western values and the United States.
Would skyscrapers survive in the age of terror? If anything, the attack nurtured a culture of defiance: Middle Eastern cities have shot up — and the Burj Dubai is higher than ever before.
The Noughties were underpinned by a revival of engineering structures, many of which involved architects. The list is long, but my highlights include France’s Viaduc de Millau, the ‘Winking Eye Bridge” at Gateshead by Wilkinson Eyre, the London Eye by Marks Barfield (and their Treetop Walkway above Kew Gardens) and the Millennium Bridge by Norman Foster, Arup and Anthony Caro, which famously wobbled before settling into a busy life of guiding people in their thousands over the Thames.
Is the age of bling over? Will the new austerity be translated into stone? Only last week, while walking over London Bridge, I saw the first physical evidence of the ‘Shard of Glass”, the new London Bridge Tower. Designed by Renzo Piano, it will be Britain’s first building to top 304m on completion in 2012. Does this skyscraper represent the beginning of a new decade or is it the last sensational blast of the Noughties? I’ll get back to you in 10 years’ time. —