Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

The reasons for choosing Le Corbusier as the architect for Chandigarh (Figure 6) are similarly complex. He was not a local architect, but had established himself as a significant figure in Western architectural culture. His culture was in many respects the culture of the departing colonial powers, from which the new state wanted to distinguish itself. By showing that high-status modern buildings could be produced by local workforces, the state showed its aspiration to belong internationally in the modern world. A neoclassical building that looked like the imperial buildings of New Delhi would have been inappropriate, given the state’s aspirations. The designs, by being authoritatively modernist, suggest that the state was making a fresh start, but it is an irony that Le Corbusier would not have been commissioned had it not been for the sustained efforts of representatives of the former colonial power (Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew) to persuade both the authorities and Le Corbusier himself that he was the right person for the job. It is very much a postcolonial design, which can command the respect of the former colonials, while presumably satisfying the needs of the local community. In many respects it exactly reverses the attitudes to Indian culture on display at the Brighton Pavilion (Figure 3) where the idea of India is conjured up as an exotic fairyland. At Chandigarh we have an image of India, or more specifically the Punjab, as a modern working state that has a serious role to play.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao belongs very securely in the realm of global tourist culture (Figure 24). It is a building that has had importance in reviving the fortunes of a small city, by making it a place that people from all over the world want to visit. The benefits to the city are much greater than the cost of the building, extravagant though that might seem. The collection of art works that it houses could have been seen just as clearly in a modest and inconspicuous building that excited no one. The cultural tradition to which the building belongs owes little to northern Spain, where it is located, and rather more to Los Angeles, where it was designed. Its form is part of a family of shapes for buildings developed in the remarkable and idiosyncratic studio of Frank Gehry, and it recognizably belongs to his own personal tradition, which has been developing for decades. More broadly, it makes sense in the tradition of the avant-garde, that was developed in the art world, and which makes the building highly appropriate for the housing of works of avant-garde art, which again are the works not of local artists but of internationally recognized stars of the art world. So the museum’s collection has more in common with the collections of contemporary art to be found in the great American cities than it does with collections of contemporary art in nearby provincial towns. By participating in the global culture of the international art world, the city is able to cut a dash on the international scene and attract visitors and investment, and the building is successfully assimilated in two cultures (of the artistic avant-garde and of tourism) which in this case work together to bring about that success.

The architect’s own culture is something else again. Gehry’s compositional sense might have developed by crumpling cardboard and arranging it loosely on a site plan, but there is a huge difference between having some crumpled card glued to a board and having a working art gallery built on a site in Spain. A host of technical questions arise, and they must be addressed with sensitivity and skill if the idea is not to be spoiled in the execution. If for example the shapes could not be built, then they would have to be changed, so a way of building them has to be found, which in this case involved making use of a steel frame to form the basic shapes, and then covering it with titanium-coated tiles that could adapt to the curving geometries. It would have been impossible before computers became a routine part of an engineer’s equipment for such a form of building to be seriously considered, because the mathematics involved are so complex. The steel and titanium pieces were cut into shape away from the site, in factory conditions, where the work can be done with much greater precision. That they could be brought on to the site and assembled is little short of miraculous. It is a world away from the studio conditions in which Gehry invents the building form. He once made an armchair by gluing corrugated cardboard into a large block, and then modelling it with a chainsaw.