Seite 3: Stealth Architecture

Unlike the Florentine plan, the result of this London compromise has been the birth of a new architecture of sorts. An architecture with many of the characteristics of Esperanto, the artificial language whose purpose everybody understands, but no one can speak with authenticity. According to the directive of this new style, both 20th century Modern architecture (which required that a building be designed as a complete organism, von innen nach aussen, 'from the inside to the outside', as the Bauhaus taught), and the historical preservation of old buildings, have been re-evaluated. Both have been replaced by 'Stealth architecture', which is omnidirectional serviced floorspace clad in wafer-thin stonework shaped to look crudely 'historical,' like the backdrop to a play, or else inserted behind the retained facades of demolished historic buildings.

At the same time a strange and predictive new role for the great ecclesiastical relics of the past has been created. Westminster Abbey, one of the great cathedrals of England, dates from the 13th century. It was first restored in 1601. Since then seventeen successive restorations have been carried out on its fabric. All of these programmes have involved substantial alterations as well as remedial measures to preserve the fabric of the building. The most recent restoration programme at Westminster involved replacing, not original work, but the work of previous restorers, and it too involved substantial changes. All thirty Medieval Cathedrals of England spend an average of £4 million a year on restoration work of this kind. It amounts to an endless construction project that is in effect an undeclared revision of use. The 'use' of these Cathedrals today has become the business of restoring themselves like Japanese Shinto shrines.

Nor do such undeclared changes of use merely effect the Cathedral buildings themselves. Saint Paul's Cathedral in London now reaches out to monitor development all over the city because it has become a major element in its urban planning strategy. Ever since the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 there has been no height limit on buildings in Central London. Instead a complicated system of sightlines centred on the dome of Saint Paul's has been developed to provide a topographical height and bulk limit for all new buildings. Thus the 'use' of an early 18th century Cathedral has become the control of 21st century development.

Matters promise to go even farther in India. There the Taj Mahal, built as a memorial in 1650, is now visited by 11 million tourists every year. Its marble structure is disintegrating through age and acid pollution. A restoration fund has been established to repair it. At the same time a political campaign has been launched to declare a two mile exclusion zone for motor vehicles around it, and to remove all smokestack industries from the city of Agra by the year 2000. This political programme has not merely become the main business -- the real 'use' -- of the Taj Mahal. It has become part of the politics of India.

In Berlin the case is more complex. Trapped by the force of history for 50 years, the city emerged as from a dream into the post-urban world of reunification in 1990. Its attempts at comprehensive urban planning dated from the National Socialist period when a giant North-South axis was begun and abandoned. During the period of partition, planning in West Berlin had been confined to demolition and clearing, the construction of modern housing developments, and the building of the Culture Forum, whose Philharmonie and National Gallery were erected on land originally cleared for the great axis. Because no major interventions were carried out in the Western part of the city, in 1989, when the wall came down, West Berlin was a virtual time capsule of infrastructural inactivity. Since then the city's accession to capital status, together with the identification of half a dozen large development sites, has failed to extricate it from this paralysis. The arguments surrounding the Reichstag competition, the construction of the new Chancellery, the Stock Exchange complex, the Potsdamer Platz and even the rehabilitation of Kreuzberg, show that even the making-good of an epic lack of investment cannot save a city from a crisis of meaning. And today it is the meaning of cities that is threatened by the information revolution. Today a new electronic information environment is taking over the job that public urban space used to do. The urban space once used for transport, gossip, riot, demonstration, display, parade and spectacle is no longer necessary. Run down and neglected, it is now no more than a risk to public order. Its problems remain problems, even when approached afresh after 50 years. Urban space and public buildings have become meaningless.

Two Berlin examples are the former East German Palace of the Republic, and the Reichstag. The former is to be stripped of its 'Socialist' glass cladding and rebuilt as a palace. The latter, despite its notoriety, was the seat of German government for only ten years out of the one hundred and one since it was completed. The new transformation of this building threatens to continue this dismal history. By 1999 its will have become the largest facade-retention project ever executed in Europe. The architects are said to be Sir Norman Foster and Partners, but in reality there is no living designer. Despite its new transparent dome the Reichstag promises to be the biggest 'Stealth Bomber' in Germany. It will be a building whose old exterior reveals no hint of what goes on inside it.

What does this mean? Let me give you an example from another continent. In June 1995 the Los Angeles Variety Arts Center held an Interactive Media Festival. Part of the programme consisted of the world premiere of a play by the Firesign Theatre Company entitled "Anything You Want To" which was described as "William Shakespeare's Lost Interactive Comedy."

The advance publicity for this play described it as follows:-

'Firesign's Shakespearean parody will allow the audience to direct the plot of the piece and determine who lives and who dies... Will the next scene take place in a Venetian boudoir or in a storm at sea? The decision is in the hands of the audience. As Edmund sword fights to the death with the wicked Bishop, you will decide who is at the wrong end of the fatal thrust... Be there as Firesign turns ye olde Globe Theatre into the Global village.'

Now I did not seen this play, although it does sound interesting. What I want to point out is that something formerly thought crucial was missing from the production. The casualty was the original story, the play itself. It is that loss that parallels the disappearance of planning and architecture under the impact of information. In the Reichstag scenario it is as though the precise arrangement of all the components of the building -- the creative composition that constituted its 'architecture' -- were suddenly abandoned, and the world were to decide to apply the term 'architecture' instead to the inventory of materials of which a building looking like the Reichstag might be made. There is the impact upon architecture. No play, only characters. No architecture, only quantities of material to be arranged in different ways. Ways as different as the Christo cladding of June 1995 and the Foster internal transformation to be completed in 1999.