The suburbs, where life today is mostly lived, have been abandoned to an architectural wasteland. It wasn’t always so. A century ago, long before the march of the bland McMansions, Frank Lloyd Wright opened a door on a new world with his sweeping, horizontal Prairie houses in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.
In Europe, the early successes of Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier, J J P Oud, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe — which formed the backbone of the heroic period of modern architecture in the 1920s — were, for the most part, worked out in suburbia.
After the war and post-war reconstruction inflicted near-terminal damage on many European cities, however, architects’ concept of urbanism became almost religiously tied to models of the centred city. The suburbs — repetitive, mono-functional zones created by speculation, planned according to the uniform codes of road engineers and delivered through a free market unencumbered with collective ideas and responsibility — just couldn’t compare. As Gertrude Stein said about her native Oakland, California: “There’s no there, there.”
The results of the biennial European Union prize for contemporary architecture — the Mies van der Rohe award may be a straw in the wind, however. The purpose of the prize, worth ¤50,000, is to “detect and highlight works” — such as van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, where the award was presented last Wednesday — “whose innovative character, in both conceptual and constructional terms, acts as an orientation, or even a manifesto”, for architecture. On that basis, suburban architecture is on the way back. Thirty-one countries, stretching from Iceland to Turkey — but, bizarrely, under the terms of the EU’s Culture 2000 programme, excluding Switzerland — generated 269 nominations for assessment.
The international jury of nine members — of which I was one — was made up of architects, critics and theorists in contemporary architecture. Chaired by David Chipperfield, who designed the installation of Francis Bacon’s London studio in the Hugh Lane gallery, the jury selected 41 finalists and visited a short-list of five works.
With the exception of Lacaton & Vassal’s contemporary art gallery, occupying the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, all of the shortlisted works deal with suburban conditions. As far as the prize’s symbolic value is concerned, the jury has pinned its colours to the mast: suburbia is the part of the European city that is of most architectural interest today.
Two of the visited sites — in Breda, in the Netherlands, and Ostfildern, outside Stuttgart — were former military bases, areas that, after the cold war, are being reintegrated into civil society. Another, designed by young Dutch stars MVRDV, was a social housing scheme of two-storey houses at Hagen Island, in the new Ypenburg suburb of The Hague.
Contemporary Dutch housing — much of it market-driven, like our own — is cheap, experimental and individualistic, offering choice that the Irish can only dream of.
MVRDV adopted a provocative approach to everyday housing by taking the standard spatial organisation — terraced and semi-detached houses with their endless moments of isolated private space and empty public space — and attacking it. It shuffled the houses forward and back from the surrounding streets and what emerges is an ambiguous quality to what is private and what is public.
By varying house placement, differences in character of the houses and gardens are highlighted: there are houses with large front gardens, with gardens at the rear only and with equal front and back gardens, all separated by hedges.
Displaying an almost sceptical approach to design, different materials and colours are employed to cloak the houses’ familiar form — grey wooden shingles, red clay tiles, silver aluminium, black fibre cement. No distinction is made between roof and wall cladding, yielding a surreal, childlike effect.
Strasbourg has been developing a new suburban tram service — like Dublin’s Luas — to combat increasing congestion and pollution by encouraging people to leave their cars outside the city in special car parks.
Strasbourg’s ambition is greater than Dublin’s — artists such as Barbara Kruger and Mario Mertz have been commissioned to create installations along the system. The winner of this year’s EU prize, Zaha Hadid, was invited to design the tram station and car park for 700 cars at the northern apex of the city’s second line.
Like Daniel Libeskind before he won the World Trade Center competition, Hadid, who was born in Baghdad in 1950, has been an influential figure for 20 years — since she won the international competition for a private club at the Peak, overlooking Hong Kong — even though she has built little.
She first came to international attention with her entry for the ill-fated 1979 competition for a taoiseach’s residence in Phoenix park. Often referred to as a diva, she has been likened to a ball of fire — a comet-like presence that whizzes through all the astonished provinces of architectural chatter.
This week, with the EU prize and the inauguration of Cincinnati’s contemporary arts centre — her first building in America — Hadid has moved from the avant-garde to the establishment. Her work, with its distinctive pursuit of Russian Suprematist and constructivist manoeuvres, has become universally appreciated.
Hadid responded to the Hoenheim site with elegant, but deceptive, simplicity. She folded a plane of concrete up from the ground to form a canopy that stretches diagonally across bus and tram lanes, towards the parking lot and Strasbourg beyond. It is a theatrical event — infrastructure framed by architecture. She has created a piece of land art without having to go into the desert to do so — by taking an everyday “lieu vague” and tying it back into the city.
Surprisingly, the jury’s decision in selecting Hadid’s project above some of the others rested on its conventional architectural qualities. Despite its obvious scenographic power, the physical presence of the “building” is totally convincing. There is a palpable emptiness, even a sadness about it. The colour range is virtually monochrome, the geometry sharp.
Jürgen Mayer H was awarded the special mention for emerging architects under the age of 40 for his quirky town hall at Scharnhauser Park, a former US military base next to Stuttgart airport.
The European architectural heartland — Austria, England, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands — is well represented. Ireland, with Grafton Architects’ Dunshaughlin civic offices and O’Donnell and Tuomey’s furniture college at Letterfrack among the finalists, finds itself the leading representative of the periphery. Our presence is equivalent to all of Scandinavia or central and eastern Europe combined. Letterfrack was among the final eight projects considered.
Jury member Deyan Sudjic recently compared the Irish architectural scene to that of Switzerland and the Netherlands. Confirming our unaccustomed position at a symposium in Barcelona, Grafton’s Shelley McNamara, en route from its building site at Milan’s Bocconi University, quoted Proust on the artist’s ability to “convert horizontal speed into flight”.
In terms of Irish architecture, we have lift-off.
www.miesbcn.com/Premioseng2003.htm
Website of the Mies van der Rohe award
