Check out this very poignant article by Witold Rybczynski from Slate.com. He paints a pretty dismal picture about the state of the Architectural profession, both in the midst of the boom, and now in the great valley beyond.
Building booms often encourage excess—think of the Gilded Age—but this time large budgets, a celebrity architectural culture, and computer-aided design combined to produce a spate of distinctly odd buildings…
It indeed will be difficult for a generation of young architects trained the age of Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, and Greg Lynn to come to terms with a new rational architecture; but quite frankly, in the years I’ve spent in the field since college, rational, cost effective, and pragmatic design was the name of the game. In fact, if anything, working in the piedmont of North Carolina has taught me, it’s that you have to really push clients to take chances on designs. And nine times out of ten, they will still decide against it.
I’ll admit to being a closet fan of Gehry’s early work, I was particularly struck by his own residence when I first saw it in college.
Frank Gehry's Home - Santa Monica, CA
Whether my appreciation for the seemingly random slices, apparent confusion, and general chaos of the structure was born more out of of adolescent angst and my own indecisiveness about the world or something deeper, I’ll leave for you to ponder.
But now that I’m a little more grown up (my wife would beg to differ) I find his newer works to be, not only less palatable, but somehow less mature. Take the ‘apocalyptic Stata Center’ for instance.
Frank Gehry's Stata Center at MIT
I look forward to seeing what the long term effects on the mental health of individuals who spend good portions of their lives in these buildings is… not to mention the maintenance costs… but I digress. The point being that I think, and so does Rybczynski, that there is a new age of great rational modernism ahead of us.
Trained in the arcane arts of parametric design and generative architecture, they will find themselves facing a world of chastened clients who demand discipline, restraint, and common sense.
Three cheers for common sense, and rational structures.