The continuous unfolding of the global economic crisis brings not only hardship for individuals and societies, but will inevitably create radical shifts in our aesthetic sensibility. Taken unguarded by the collapse of the world stock markets and the demise of financial institutions, we should not be surprised by the deepening of the moral-ethical breakdown that generated this economic crisis in the first place. This breakdown, caused by the decline of personal responsibility and institutionalized social inequality could be more destructive than a military force. History’s graveyards carry names of military powers that ran their course and disintegrated into a total collapse of their political structure, before their legions reached the battlefield. Rebuilding the moral-ethical foundations that underlie the present crisis, will be more laborious and will take longer than it would to arouse the appetite of the panic-stricken, credit-financed consumerism.
Architecture can’t be absolved from this. Nor is it immune from the fallout of the economic slowdown and the development of new aesthetic perceptions. For more than a decade, architecture sucked-in cheap and abstract money that has been channelled to fuel an excess of building construction, resulting in the infamous sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Abstract projects solidified into architectural form, and sponsored by oil and stock-market wealth, were ‘grounded’ in the most socially-unjust locations and environmentally-wasteful ways. Real-estate, disguised as architecture and falsely credited as sustainable, turned out to become the profitable terrain-for-surplus capital, absorbing money that could not have been invested otherwise.
The more obscure and environmentally irresponsible were the financial investments, the more excessive became the architectural form. In its most extreme version architecture’s mere existence became its function, just as the inflated growth of the financial market became its only raison d’être. Architecture, like the world at large, turned a blind eye on worldwide poverty and conflict. Unconcerned with ethics, architecture preferred to glorify the zeal and the leverage of financial wizardry. Draped in layers of ornate garments, glamorous and ornamental, it carefully disguised its narcissism.
Strangely enough, this self-referential architecture of little conceptual cohesion was welcomed as long-overdue evidence of the multifarious talents of the architect. Said to be inhibited to express his/her proficiency, the enterprising practitioner responded eagerly to the overseas requests by colonial patrons to adorn their repressive regimes with warmed-over-architectural images. Obsessed solely with its high-visibility, architecture relied on the image of the architect as an artist committed only to his/her fantasies and desires, Architect as Designer (engaged in designing clothes, fashion collections, ashtrays and bags) and Architect as Entertainer (staging pseudo-intellectual spectacles). No longer required to follow the rules of logic, coherence and clarity of the plan, the Architect as Architect became rapidly irrelevant. This may explain why in recent years so few significantly innovative designs emerged in architecture’s core fields of focus: solutions for housing; urban design, and the integration of the socially deprived – subjects which were the bedrock of the Modern Movement.
Denied any incentive to explore and innovate, architects thrived on the work of earlier generations as a kind of parasitic subsistence. Old architectural schemes and banal off-the-shelf plans were hastily recycled and wrapped within a dress of different materials, glass at the top of the list. To broaden its appeal, glass elevations were promoted as environmentally friendly. Heavily dependent on sophisticated technology for its functioning and maintenance, its environmental claims were never confronted nor seriously contested.
Paradoxically, however, the all-glass architecture found its partner, and prey, in banks and international business. With its claim of transparency, the glass architecture offered respectability and supplied the best possible alibi for the murky transactions it encased. In today’s crisis the glass alibi might be short-lived and insufficient in restoring trust in business operations.The crisis of the late-1920s, and the Great Depression that followed, was such an intensive force that it wiped out the ornate ornamentation of the late 19th-century Classicism. White, plain and undecorated, the emerging architecture was a clear break with the past and total anathema to what it replaced. The underlying roots of the two crises, though 80 years apart, stem from a soil contaminated by the dishonesty of financial institutions.
Moral-ethical positions will be needed to put into motion creative forces silenced by the widespread decadence. A natural change of our perception of aesthetics will follow. The developing slow-down of the building construction and the emergence of another aesthetic reality will provide a fertile ground for new ideas to germinate. They will be conceptualized, developed and codified, like musical notes, through architectural plans, built years later when the economy picks up again.Architectural form is a reflected image of the idea that inhabits the plan. Hierarchy of human scale is its measure, and clarity of intention its means of beauty. It combines needs and dreams into ever-new aesthetic sensibility. This inseparable duality is what makes architecture such a uniquely profound profession.
Centuries of creative commitment and endowment of new ideas generated a rich architectural tradition. It is entrusted to us on the condition that our own generation will enrich and broaden the horizons of such a great heritage. Architecture’s eternal relevance lies in its degree of idealism and responsibility to alleviate the contemporaneity of the human condition. New ideas are the sole means of its attainment. Architecture is a human art, never humane enough.
Zvi Hecker is an Israeli architect with offices in Berlin and Tel Aviv
