Seite 4: Honey, I shrunk the kids

A few months ago I took part in a debate held to celebrate the 100th anniversary of an English magazine called the Architects' Journal. In order to support the motion -- almost embarrassingly titled 'British architecture can only get better' -- I found myself in need of a stirring phrase or two, the kind that comes more naturally to Americans. Something along the lines of 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself'; 'I have a dream,' or 'Ich bin ein Berliner'. But when I searched my lexicon of memorable American expressions for something appropriate to the prospects for architecture and urban planning under the impact of information technology, the most apposite expression I could find was distinctly anticlimactic. It was; 'Honey, I shrunk the kids.'

Those of you familiar with this Disney epic will not mind if I summarise the plot. In the film of this title, the speaker -- a boffin bearing a close physical resemblance to Microsoft supremo William Gates III -- develops a machine for making large objects very small. Ironically the first victims of his machine are his own children, who suddenly find themselves on the floor of an attic as vast as the great outdoors, and then, as tiny as ants, hopelessly fleeing an advancing lawnmower in their own garden.

As a result of their shrinking, their whole conception of space, and their place in the order of things, has been turned upside down.

And this of course is precisely what is happening to the architectural profession in our time.

As the depredations of those half-mythical beasts, the Information Superhighway, Virtual Reality, and Cyberspace are reported in the offices of the great property agents and developers of London, so are the 'Kings of Infinite Space' (as Charles Jencks once christened the great stars of the architectural profession), beginning to tremble on their thrones. Long since stripped of a popularly credible ideology, they increasingly fear that even 'culture' is betraying them. They feel as though they are dwindling to the size of pygmies while their most ambitious creations are growing massively overlarge, outgrowing any possible profitable use.

It is as though the built environment they have worked with for years has suddenly been magnified one million times and they, its former masters, have become no more than micro organisms. And that is what has truly happened for today there truly is infinite space, but its Kings and Princes are not architects. Even the word, 'architecture' now belongs to the machine world of the designers of silicon wafer chips ...

I have made a number of trips to America recently, talking to the senior partners of some of the largest practices -- nowadays called 'design firms' interestingly enough, for the phrase 'architectural practice' is seldom used over there. One of these conversations sticks in my mind. It concerned the fate of the Burger King World Headquarters in Key Biscayne, Florida. Completed in 1991, this building was gutted by Hurricane Andrew a year later. The architect I spoke to remembered visiting the scene.

'It was deathly quiet. All the glass was gone. There were hundreds of computers out on the grass everywhere, blown right through the building, all covered in sand and soaked in sea water'.

The original architects immediately refurbished the building, but in doing so they 'downsized' Burger King's use of it so that only half as many people work there now.

'Corporate America is walking away from architecture,' is how the same architect puts it. 'Corporate America is walking away from city centres. There is no more private money for urban renewal. Nobody knows when another downtown high-rise will be built.'

I also talked to the senior partner at Hellmuth Obata and Kassabaum, the largest architectural practice in America. He told a surprisingly similar story, based upon an examination of the runes of another natural disaster, the Los Angeles earthquake.

'What I would call the age of corporate frivolity is over,' he says.

'The Los Angeles earthquake led to the opening of a lot of temporary satellite offices on the fringe of the city. They are now permanent, so we know the demand for big downtown addresses can vanish quickly. But we were the last to know that.'

We are also the last to know that the kids have been shrunk, and their box of tricks, the magnificent display of forms under light, has been turned into a video game. With the same electronic swiftness as the eclipse of Barings Bank, a 200-year old London bank of impeccable reputation that was ruined by dealing on the Singapore stock exchange, the legatees of 4,000 years of architectural history have been left holding a fistful of worthless currency. Today the architectural profession gazes out over millions of square feet of redundant floorspace, rather as polar explorers must once have gazed out over endless sheets of pack ice, incapable of supporting human life.