Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

In fact, though, both buildings belong to the same tradition and have some points in common. Of course there are differences, of attitude and atmosphere, which are so obvious that they hardly need to be pointed out. However each building is an artistic showpiece, that houses art treasures. In the case of the Parthenon, the much-admired statue of Athena dominated the interior space, but the holier relics were housed a short distance away in the Erechtheion. The Centre Pompidou exhibits major art works in changing exhibitions, but the art works to which the most serious reverence is due are housed a short distance away at the Louvre. Each building presides over an external space, which in the case of the Parthenon was more formally designated a sanctuary, but which in the case of the Centre Pompidou is a well-defined public square. The innermost part of each building is restricted and reserved for quiet contemplation, whether of the statue that embodied a god, or the works of art with their ineffable value. The area outside each building is equally festive. On days of sacrifice, the gods being immaterial beings were well satisfied with the aroma of the slaughtered oxen, and the citizens of Athens would feast on the flesh — a feature of Greek sanctuaries used to be the suites of dining rooms, arranged in stoas. In the Place Georges Pompidou there is street entertainment, and there are cafés. The Parthenon’s sculpted frieze depicts a procession, while the Centre Pompidou avoids sculptural decoration, but the visitors enact a procession as they queue and then ascend by the escalators that run across the front of the building. Moreover this procession is in more or less the same place in each building, somewhere between the outside and the inside, in the peristyle of the Parthenon, visible between the columns, and in Paris in a glazed tube visible from the square. It is possible that both buildings look the way they do because of concerns to express the building’s construction. There is a tradition (which is questionable) that the Doric frieze on temples such as the Parthenon is a memory of the time when these buildings were constructed in timber, and the geometric triglyph panels represent the ends of timber beams. In the Centre Pompidou the parts of the building are joined together in highly visible ways, so that the assembly of the elements itself becomes decorative. Also it is not incidental that both buildings seem to have well-defined rectangular footprints on the ground: an impression that is less than straightforward in the case of the Centre Pompidou, where parts of the building extend underground beneath the sloping square. It may seem that these points of comparison are trivial, and are less significant than the differences between the buildings, but the point to be made is that there is no doubt at all that we look at the Centre Pompidou with reference to other buildings, whether they be great cultural monuments or oil refineries. The same cannot be said of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is to an astonishing degree unlike most other buildings we have encountered in images. It does not look like an authoritarian monument. It does not look like an oil refinery. It does not look like any other art gallery, but as its image becomes more familiar, we learn to recognize it as one. What, then, are we to make of it? Far from being the be-all and end-all of architecture, originality is a mixed blessing, because to be totally original is to be totally meaningless. In fact the building is not meaningless, because it connects strongly with another tradition that is entirely appropriate given the building’s function: it looks like a sculpture. We tend to look at it by the standards of sculpture, and are willing to enjoy its shapes for their own sake, regardless of the fact that they do not reflect the way the building is used internally, or articulate the means of contruction. The steel frame is entirely covered, so one need not notice that it is there. The interior spaces are as different from the external envelope as the Chinese interior of the Brighton Pavilion is different from its Indian exterior. Unlike most sculpture, the museum has an interior, but when seen from the outside it has more of the character of a useful habitable sculpture than it has the character of a building. This impression needs to be corrected if one is familiar with Gehry’s other buildings, which show a steady line of development that constitutes a personal tradition, in which each new building makes sense as a further step, which it would have been impossible to predict but which in retrospect seems to make sense.