This is an excerpt from an email I wrote in reply to a request to give thoughts on the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston as well as respond to an article, also furbished here:
"Die Another Day"
I should make a disclaimer that I only had seen images and working drawings before I wrote this response and that it would be pleasant to be proven wrong about the material expressions I foresee when I actually go. But the building really becomes secondary in my response, regardless. Enjoy:
"...As far as the ICA, I have yet to see it in person, but now from the
article you sent and the pictures and reviews I've read, I am pretty
intrigued. I'll hold off my opinion on the experiential and material
quality until I go there, but the article did peak my interest about
something else. When the critic asked of other critics "Do they
imagine that promoting innovation—even just the look of innovation—is
such a pure good that the defense of all other values must be
suspended along with our disbelief?" I think he is exaggerating a
pretty interesting point. I know that you have often said that
computational/visual design leaves you cold, and I think that the kind
of expressions the critic is offering might be similar; but there is
something else in his rant and questions that makes me want to reply
and raise him on his ante. Innovation at this kind of civic level
(and DSR call it "civic") needs to be at a much larger scale than this
building offers. I couldn't care less about how it looks at the sea
or how spectacular the cantilever seems to be (although it does seem
an engineering feat, albeit one that has many predecessors) or how
bamboozled we all are by pretty pictures or how that fits into the
socio-capitalistic monster of visual consumption, but I do have a beef
with people who talk about innovation and architecture (perhaps like
many Starchitects do) but fail to push the bounds of the low ceiling
(thank you Kafka) of codes, social norms, and program through their
material expression. My favorite and most-influential set of
exercises in Microcosm were those that asked us to question the
program, to, perhaps, think completely in the opposite way one might
usually regard, in this case, how one experiences a museum. From what
I've seem so far about this project, it is not the boxy quality or
'innovation/worldsheet" fix or bourgeois-facing windows that leave me
cold, it is the idea that it completely doesn't DO anything in the
city. What an interesting site, what an interesting project, and it
doesn't innovate at the scale of the civic at all. Stair-cantilever
is nice... but why not make the stair disappear down into the water
and make people baptize themselves if they want to enter? Why not
make the museum span the docks in succession and create courtyards out
of ancient pools of docks? Why? I suppose the low-ceiling of codes
again cannot allow those ideas to stand up fully, but they could
certainly bend over humbly and make a go of it, pushing boundaries and
innovating at the civic scale truly. Instead they just kind of sit
back, as he said, and take their laurels from the critics, who, I
think, he's right, are blinded by stardust that is actually dust, but
also numbed by never being shaken up. They too sit under the low
ceiling and never think what would happen if we cut a hole in the
roof, if not to be able to stand straight, then to look up and see
true stars, instead of just dust. (oh, and this critic might be
blinded too, he sounds like a new-urbanist... I mean, I think entering
a building by its industrio-like back near a pastry shop sounds
delightful)..."
