IF THE WORLD ENDS NOW...

Phaidon’s follow-up to the Atlas of World Architecture, the Atlas of 21st Century Architecture, came not a moment too soon, argues DON ALBERT, an architect who also features amongst its 800 pages.

Although often overlooked at the time of its completion, architecture is generally acknowledged as one of the most enduring repositories of culture. That is why, every year ordinary people spend billions traveling to far away places and record their experience, usually in front of notable buildings.

At the Cape Town launch of Phaidon’s second monumental Atlas of World Architecture, University of Cape Town architecture professor Iain Low quipped that it was rather myopic for a book to claim to be a compendium of a century’s best buildings, especially only eight years into the century concerned.

However, given the world’s staggering output of so-called high quality architecture over the last decade, and viewed through the rapidly emptying glass of global economic opportunity that is 2009, perhaps Phaidon had 20/20 vision after all? Perhaps these are the ‘best’ buildings the world will see for quite some time. Mammoth as it may be, I made my way fairly easily through the 800 pages featuring 1037 showy projects from every corner of the globe, and emerged enervated with the following observations…

Firstly, the book is the definitive resource it claims to be. A train-spotter’s delight crammed with data, especially demographic information including population projections per country, the number of architects versus students per country (South Africa for example has 800 architectural students compared with Egypt’s 5000!), rates of urbanization, carbon footprints and so on, the book sits somewhere between a regular atlas and an architectural tour guide of the most modern edifices du jour. The pocket version would be worth its weight in gold for travelers.

Secondly, despite the fact that the European projects account for at least half of the book, Asian projects take up an equally unsustainable quarter of the book, largely on the back of China’s rampant recent growth. Projects such as Hertzog and de Meuron’s “bird’s nest” Stadium in Beijing only just trumping Toyo Ito’s prolific output in the region from a budgetary and tonnage perspective. In the last decade Toyo Ito has embraced the trend of an almost graphic synthesis of structure and skin, and run amok with concrete steel and glass in genuinely innovative ways, never repeating himself, though often imitated by others.

Thirdly, the hotspots of the world are easy to pick out. Spain, South America and South Africa demonstrate a significant output of prestigious buildings compared with say, Italy, the Middle East, and Australia. Even the USA appears to have been in the doldrums since the last Phaidon, with only OMA’s Seattle Central Library, UNStudio’s Villa NM (which recently burned down), and Diller, Scofidio and Renfro’s Boston Institute of Contemporary Art having any resonance on my Richter scale, and two of those architects are Dutch! So far it is safe to say the 21st Century is not going to be America’s.

Nor Australia’s for that matter. The same old flapping eaves and boxy spaces abound in residential architecture, counterpointed by meaningless gymnastics and brash colour in the public domain. It must be a real release to design a public building in Australia! Indeed, the world awaits the emergence of an Australian architecture that is authentic, and I don’t mean the uptight Victoriana of Glenn Murcutt, I mean a robust debate that engages socially and culturally with a population that is much more complex than the travel brochure’s make out.

In South Africa we have the usual suspects, Stephan Antoni Olmesdahl and Truen’s bleached-out Germanic “glitz” occupying two full pages where one would have sufficed, Design Workshop and Urban Solutions’ ‘architecture-as-collage’ that came together in their winning entry for the New Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, and of course the irrepressible Van der Merve Miszewski’s Bridge House – an intelligent response to the site, although hardly a contribution to architectural discourse.

And this brings us to the flipside of the Phaidon. An atlas of the “best works” selected by “a team of experts” and “specialists” is obviously going to be a subjective starting point fraught with local politics, but more dangerously, any presentation of the work in terms of themes, issues and deeper context is impossible to achieve, thus meaning and merit are equally impossible to grasp. They simply are not on the radar.

Having said that, if the world ended now, the conclusion I would draw as an archeologist from another dimension would be that the elite of the world had a particularly bawdy ball at the turn of the 21st Century, and the band were rather dexterous.

It is going to be a long time until the world sees another book like this.

Don Albert is the design principle of Don Albert & Partners, whose project the Proud Heritage Clothing Campus is also featured in the Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century Architecture. Don Albert & Partners are releasing their monograph SOUND SPACE DESIGN through Pythagoras Media & Bell-Roberts in September 2009. For advance orders log on to www.pythagorasmedia.com

[This review originally appeared in The Tribune Sunday Magazine - 1st Feb 2009]