l os t Not any more. North Hill Shopping Centre has been ‘re-vitalized’. A 30’ drywall sun, extruded from the ceiling enhances the dining experience in the food court. Petcetera and Liquor Warehouse enjoy their own facade identity, a 6” deep barrel vault and a skeletal pitched roof form—house? The designer has created a pastiche of recent architectural history to create a cacophony of colour and vague formal reference. It is pastiche without irony, without intellectual content, without rigour. The hints, nods and winks to Venturi, Graves, Eisenman seem accidental, certainly without the awareness that these architects were responding with an idea to a culture. The new North Hill Centre is responding to the market, and is devoid of — even negates— the culture of contemporary architecture. A building that was something (and beautiful in that specific something) has become everything and nothing. As beauty it is lost. In ‘Undisclosed:Architecture in the New Public Land- scape’, Chris MacDonald’s recent essay for the upcom- ing publication Discrete City , he discusses the ‘tyranny of legibility’. In essence this refers to the ‘ inclination of the commercial domain...to establish — first, foremost and forever — a regard for its clientele as that of the urban novice’. This architecture is about recognition, recognition for a novice of a place to engage in a commercial transaction. But it is only this. It is not about a place to make a commercial transaction. It is certainly not about the political context in which we are free to make any and all commercial transactions. It is not an architecture about anything, it is a building to buy something in. It is empty. This emptiness of course, exists everywhere in the vastly expanding cities of George W’s North America. The warehouse stores and mega-centres. Emptiness here is expected, answered with another empty engage- ment. To leave Berlin, New York, Montreal, and be able to re-assemble a fractured memory of the ever present architectural culture of those places is a wonder of our time. To see what we have of an architectural culture disappear to thoughtless, vague commercial gestures, to the lowest common denominator of architectural communication is not. To destroy richness, a considered, layered richness that in a small degree reflects the potentials of a culture, and replace it with this emptiness that can only reflect the instantaneously superseded habits of a population is a reflection of how eviscerated the power of archi - tecture has become. Andrew King is currently editing Discrete City (about the North American urban condition), teaches at the University of Calgary and works in the Andrew King Studio. Angela Silver is a photographer and artist working in Calgary who has recently exhibited 2 Months: Budapest and Berlin in Berlin, Halifax and Calgary.
ON SITE review 6: BEAUTY
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