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In 1996 the Dutchman Rem Koolhaas presented the design of a »hyper building« for 120,000 residents in Bangkok, but it was never realized: defeats that only made the architect's ego even bigger
Photo: Courtesy OMA
This book is a powerful warning to a specific professional group.
Everyone, it says, experiences failure - but this applies to architects to a much greater extent than to anyone else.
So many dreams accurate to the millimeter that didn't come true after all. The usual procedure alone, to call competitions for prestigious or expensive public projects, produces only one first winner and many losers and thus a lot of waste paper per project. But other reasons can also prevent the plans that have been drawn up with a lot of passion from being implemented: builders are fickle, they run out of money before the groundbreaking ceremony, and architects can also put a line through the sketch.
British author Christopher Beanland takes the phenomenon with humor. He wrote the book "Buildings That Were Never Erected"; it has just been published by Prestel Verlag. In his opinion, it seldom happens that architects actually have to put on protective helmets when entering a construction site. Quite often, on the other hand, it happens that they feel badly treated, Beanland quotes, for example, the complacent British architect Peter Smithson, who complained that Michelangelo was never so harassed by his Pope. In fact, the Renaissance man was used to recognition, as a sculptor, painter and even as an architect.
What unrealized ideas and thus frustration did the 20th century alone produce! A gigantic glass dome over Manhattan or a "superblock" in the middle of the district, walking tubes high above Berlin's Kurfürstendamm or completely different opera houses for Sydney than the one that is so well known today, either looking more like a prefabricated building or a UFO - all of that failed. In England, the automobile metropolis Motopia was to emerge, with elevated streets leading over the roofs and also with a lot of windows, because a glass manufacturer wanted to help finance the city.
All these castles in the air result in a fantasy world, which is all the more fascinating because many projects had a really good chance of becoming reality. Beanland's book is a pleasure to read, also because of another insight. In quite a few cases, gratitude arises that no stone was placed on the other. In the 1920s, for example, the Swiss Le Corbusier wanted to replace the old center of Paris with 18 identical skyscrapers, arranged even more compulsively than pieces on a chessboard. Nobody misses the Mikado-like nested, one kilometer high »hyper building« that the Dutchman Rem Koolhaas or his OMA office would have liked to have built for 120,000 residents in Bangkok in the 1990s, including high-speed elevators and cable cars.
In view of all the failures, it is all the more astonishing that many architects see themselves as demigods and present themselves as such, they want to be worshiped and in no way criticized. It is possible, however, that the frequent setbacks in particular lead to a similarly job-typical thinness, which some representatives of this profession compensate for by overestimating themselves. Each rejection obviously makes her architect ego even bigger, at least for the mostly male stars that seems to be the case.
How, on the other hand, do women have to feel in the industry? It is still difficult for women architects, they are much less seriously considered by clients. The Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, who died five years ago, became almost famous for submitting the boldest and almost picturesque designs, creating enthusiasm with them and still not being allowed to build them, even if she had won a competition. The second, male winner was more likely to be awarded the contract. The fact that she was allowed to put on a protective helmet came about relatively late, but then she could no longer be stopped.
If one were to pull the plans of all unbuilt buildings out of the drawers of this world and lay them on top of one another, the pile of paper would be as high as a skyscraper.
What is missing, however, is a treatise on those architectural sins that unfortunately have not remained a pure fantasy.
But a single volume would certainly not be enough for that.
