Starchitects hit mainstream
Look what I picked up at the airport news stand recently: L’Uomo, Italian Men’s Vogue and the new lifestyle magazine by the Economist titled Intelligent Life. I was slightly amazed, cause the cover boy and girl were respectively Koolhaas and Hadid. And no, not their buildings, they themselves, dressed-up and photographed glamoursly on the covers of these, well … mainstream magazines. At least compared to our own professional media. Of course these magazines are still targeted at the airport-hoping-style-conscious-elite, but nevertheless.
But that’s not all. L’Uomo Vogue had the whole issue committed to designers and architects, in “a world wide gallery of most influential creative people’. Although this results in not so impressive articles (which are mostly Italian anyway), it does result in some great head-shots.
Close-up wrinkled faces with brushy eyebrows (Meier).
Posing with models (Libeskind)
A mysteriously dark genius (Nouvel)
See a full-sized slide show of some snapshots of the spreads of both magazine’s
Intelligent Life has a round-up of starchitects which is even nicer. Beautiful sketched portrait drawings with short, snappy and the most concise bio’s I have ever read about them.
The portraits are done by Kathry Rathke (bottom, click portrait>celebrities)
Check out some samples from the array of bio’s describing the archilebrities (starchitect gets boring, right…)
Niemeyer: Despite his great age the architect of Brasilia is still active, not least in restoring-some would say tarting up-his own oeuvre of buildings that are (or were) sensuous and curvaceous yet geometrically elemental and slightly austere.
Gehry: The one-trick pony’s one-trick pony. Canadian-born, California-based auto-plagiarist whose “iconic” deconstructions, three-dimensional logos, and boorish gesticulations look all very much the same and all out of place, whether they have been plonked down in Bilbao, Los Angeles or Seattle.
Libeskind: Polish-born, America-naturalised. Like Gehry but without the curves. Libeskind’s signature is instantly recognisable because it hardly varies. Possesses a conventional horror of rectilinear structures. His supposedly iconic Imperial War Museum of the Nort has sloping floors which are intended to simulate the experience of battle. They don’t.
Koolhaas: Rotterdam Based writer, architect and urbanist who was one of Zaha Hadid’s tutors, and her first employer. Made his name in the late 1970s with an eccentric and energetic book called “Delirious New York”. His buildings -Seattle Central Library and a new TV Headquarters in Beijing-are no less eccentric, or energetic: frantic exercises in counter-intuitive geometries whose components seem bent on misbehaviour.
The sharp pen is Jonathan Meades‘ who also wrote the article and interviewed Hadid. The article is about a female architect the male dominated world of architecture. But not just that, “For the first time, the world’s most interesting architect is a woman.” Quite a statement, but the article is thorough and sharp, unlike Vogue’s page sized photo captions.
So far the report from airport-news-stand-magazine-wonderland. Ciao!
