Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:50 PM by Gene

A eulogy for architecture, and perhaps for our culture too, from Jonathan Yardley:

"Sometimes it seems as if there are just thirty architects in the world, a flying circus of the perpetually jet-lagged that consists of the twenty who take one another seriously enough to acknowledge the presence of another member of the magic circle when they meet in the first-class lounge at Heathrow and another ten running on empty -- the others are on to them, but for the time being they can still pull in the clients on the strength of past glories. Taken together, they make up the group that provides the names that come up again and again when yet another sadly deluded city finds itself laboring under the mistaken impression that it is going to trump the Bilbao Guggenheim with an art gallery that looks like a flying saucer, or a hotel in the form of a twenty-story-high meteorite."

These are the architects "licensed to be weird," and they take full advantage of that license. Viz., Gehry. The result is a lot of showy, self-regarding architecture that will be worn out almost as soon as it's unveiled. In a culture of celebrity and glitz, it comes as no surprise that architecture has gone celebrity and glitz, nor is it any surprise that most of the buildings this produces are piles of junk.