Ballardian

J.G. Ballard has a new piece in the Guardian on the Bilbao Guggenheim — ‘the larval stage of a new kind of architecture’.

‘This is Disneyland for the media studies PhD,’ Ballard writes, in observation of the Frank Gehry-designed building. ‘Cascades of golden light overpower the sun, rising from a jumble of massive titanium forms piled on top of each other, part train crash and part explosion in a bullion vault. If the atomic bomb inside Fort Knox had exploded in James Bond’s face at the end of Goldfinger, the result would have been very much like the Bilbao Guggenheim.’

Ballard massages his fluorescent obsession with pop culture into his experience of the building, largely due to the failure of traditional criticism to make sense of this strange structure (which to me also looks like something Jodorowsky might have constructed for his unmade film of Dune):

…shielding your eyes from the glare, you first try to make sense of all this glowing geometry in traditional architectural terms. But it’s obvious from the start that there are no deferential nods to Egyptian, classical, modernist or postmodernist modes, no reassuring “quotes” like the over-cute pilasters that adorn the extension to London’s National Gallery by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Gehry’s Guggenheim is completely new, shrugs off the past and exists solely in a kind of imaginary future. In some ways the building is the larval stage of a new kind of architecture that will emerge from its chrysalis and finally take wing a hundred years from now.

…before he moves on to a secret analysis of the port of Bilbao, its ancient history coded into the landscape and the architecture, and the emergence of ‘a new kind of language’. As is abundantly clear from his books, Ballard is a very shrewd critic of architecture and he matches that here, with the observation that ‘There is a giant atrium, always a sign that some corporation’s hand is sliding towards your wallet’.

I like this: ‘Novelty architecture dominates throughout the world… Universities need to look like airports, with an up-and-away holiday ethos … everything has the chunky look of a child’s building blocks, stirring dreams of the nursery’.

RMIT University’s Storey Hall, just around the corner from me, is a prime example of the latter, a compelling, preternatural example of architecture as womb, now taking on new resonance with the deployment of this latest smart bomb from Ballard.

..:: Note: Ballard’s piece on the modernist obsession with an ‘architecture of death’ is a handy primer.