This posting would normally be on my Culture Blog, but trade seems to have been somewhat thin here today, so I will put this here.
For some time now I’ve been wondering about this newly completed building, a new Selfridges in Birmingham. (Selfridges is a department store chain.) Some of the images at the other end of this link were faked up beforehand, others were photos of the real thing. It is the one that looks as if it is covered in giant white Smarties, or maybe frisbees.
I have not seen this building in the flesh, if that is the right word, and with architecture, no matter how good the photos, you can never really be sure unless you see it for real. But, based on what I have seen in photos, these and others, I dislike this thing a lot. It looks like the architectural equivalent of something you would find in a seriously tacky gift shop, the kind of shopt that is full of the kind of gifts that you really would not want to be given. Only the inside view of the covered-over footbridge rises above the worst sort of kitsch.
Here is what I think. It is the kind of building which needs to be surrounded by really stylish other buildings, old or new, but preferably old. This is because it makes you look very carefully at all the buildings around it, much more carefully than you normally would. For although not itself in any way beautiful, this is a building that definitely draws attention to itself. (In this respect it is not the only piece of new architecture which behaves like this. You see lots of new buildings which have this kind of effect.)
But the trouble with this Selfridges Birmingham is that it seems to be surrounded by utterly undistinguished buildings. The last thing you want is a building which draws attention to all these dreary structures. There is one church not that far away with a bit of style to it. But one semi-stylish church semi-nearby is not enough.
Let me rephrase all of the above. I think this is what I think about this thing. I am truly open to persuasion, especially of course from anyone who has actually set eyes on the real thing. It could be that if I actually saw the giant Smarties, I would be truly impressed.
The good news is that architects in Britain are now, and actually have been for some years now, at least trying to create stylish and exciting buildings. This one certainly gets A for effort. It certainly puts its head above the aesthetic parapet.
But personally, I just do not like it.
What does anyone else think?
I hesitate to judge it as architecture, however it screams to be used as a set for a new series of Dr. Who episodes.
My G-D that is hideous!
Sci-Fi? Maybe on some of the close-up exterior shots, but overall I get the impression of a tacky maritime theme. From a distance it looks like one of those cheap-arse home-made ‘art’ structures that poor seaside folk make out from clayey-mud and sun-bleached scallop shells. In due time there will be seagull droppings all over it to match, given how difficult something like that must be to clean. The inside shots of that walkway makes it looks like it belongs in some looney 70’s acquamarine engineer’s dream of underwater habitation – I was expecting there to be sharks and other marine creatures lazily swimming on by outside the enclosure!
Bleargh.
JJM
It looks like a giant, sequined footstool.
Or something out of one of those ghastly ’50s – ’60s “World of Tomorrow” disney exhibits.
Funny thing is, the “normal” looking half of the building is quite classy.
Looks like a sewage treatment plant.
Or a really tacky, early-70’s vintage lamp with a heavy lead glass shade.
I think I prefer the oil tanks off the highway (M-6?) for a scenic vista. Or perhaps the electric switching station off the same highway.
Definately a cartoon space monster. Ick.
1970’s special ed bottlecap sculpture.
The individual that came up with that was either on some serious mind altering medication, or needs to be on serious mind altering medication.
I’m pretty certain I read somewhere that is was designed to be easily pulled down after five years. Apparently, when you’re inside and look up, there aren’t really any ceilings as such. Just all raw piping and electricals.
“it screams to be used as a set for a new series of Dr. Who episodes.”
Ha ha. My thoughts exactly. It’s a giant amorphous blob that is about to terrorise the city and subsume all the buildings around it.
Architects have a lot to answer for. As guardians of our built environment they have a huge responsibility. This kind of puerile tat demonstrates only an ability to persuade Birmingham City Council planning committee that the emperor is in fact fully clothed and not the butt naked buffoon he blatantly appears to be. Those daft suckers probably thought they were being sold something cool, sophisticated and contemporary – ‘you know – a bit like Barcelona’. It’s an amorphous blob about as inspiring as my arse and must’ve required, oooh, at least five seconds to dream up.
This is the kind of architectural insult that blights our town and city centres for years to come. And this is what gets me – something that takes an unimaginative, lazy, egocentric five seconds to draw on the back of a napkin, has to be lived with for the next godknowshowlong. It will be a maintenance nightmare, an aesthetic embarrassment and will be considered about as endearing as halitosis.
Architects have a lot to answer for. As guardians of our built environment they have a huge responsibility
Err, no we don’t. We only have a responsibility to our clients, the property owners, to design something which is suitable for their purposes. Those clients tend to have a self-interest in buildings which don’t “blight the environment”. This won’t always pan out but most of the time it is the second-guessing planning process which buggers it up. It is hardly a coincidence that the buildings most regularly derided were commissioned by the “public sector” which has no market mechanism for determining its users’ priorities and instead delivers what it thinks they will want, which tends to be precisely what they don’t want.
As for Selfridges, Birmingham. I don’t like it. What bothers me most about it is that it is the “decorated shed “par excellence. There is no logical connection between the exterior and interior. I don’t have a problem with blob-like shapes and the form of it is the least objectionable thing to me. If you squint, it is at least in scale with its surroundings. But ultimately it is just an inert object, hardly architecture at all.
It is a shame because I think Amanda Levete, on joining Future Systems, has added a bit of colour, panache and glamour to Jan Kaplicky’s previously sterile and somewhat reductionist vision. Prior to her arrival, his schemes looked like NASA diagrams, in a bad way. Since she arrived they now resemble NASA diagrams crossed with a butterfly’s wing or an insect’s eyes, they have a design for a skyscraper which looks like an expensive designer dildo (can’t find an image for it). Their Lloyd’s media centre is also quite spectacular.
It isn’t a horrible cancerous blot, like your average Gehry, and it’s actually organic, as opposed to “organic”. Thus, it doesn’t automatically inspire pyromaniacal rage in me. If it were located in a neighborhood of modernist boxes, or in an open park, I’d approve of it. In the setting it was built, with that church in the background, I’m going to have to give it a vigorous “hell, no”. Architectually, context has to be key.
Frank, it’s seems convenient for architects to be able to abdicate all responsibility for some of the monstrosities we are burdened with in this way. Is this how they excuse the estates and city centres of the 50 – 60’s that are now being torn down – just blame the clients? Pretty disingenuous if you ask me. It suggests that architects don’t have a wider sense of social responsibility with the environments they design – only a responsibility to the client, the man with he cash. I’d like to think that there are architects who might not entirely agree with you…
I also worry about any architecture that you have to ‘squint’ at to get an idea of its sense of proportion. But the Lords Media Centre works for me, agreed.
It is interesting.
But then again, even a hair in a soup can be interesting.
Nevermind..
It grows on you.
I have some pictures of the space slug(Link) on my blog. There is a close of of the smarties.
“Err, no we dont.”
The scales have fallen from my eyes. Now I understand. Form has its consequences, but only for the client.
Pete,
You seem to have several collectivist assumptions I cannot share and you are certainly misrepresenting my point if you think it boils down to “blame the client”.
My primary point is that property rights must be respected, thus a building owner should be the ultimate arbiter of how her building should look, not “society”. Any architect’s primary responsibility is to his client, not society. Society doesn’t pay me any fees. This does not preclude the architect taking all sorts of other factors into account because the corrollary to this, once you accept property rights, is that a building owner may voluntarily instruct her architect to design, or accept her architect’s proposal for, a building which is pleasing to society and has additional “positive externalities”. She has a self-interest in doing so and so does her architect. This, generally, is what tends to happen. Anyone who believes in free markets and the voluntary nature of social interaction should understand this.
My next point is not to attribute blame but to point out that those “blights”, with which you are concerned, didn’t tend to arise spontaneously in the market because of “bad architects”, or indeed “bad clients”. They arose because the client tended to be the government – public housing schemes – or at least a monopoly maintained by the government – “favoured” developer provided with compulsory purchase orders – and thus had no market mechanism for determining the priorities of building users inclusing passers by. Nor indeed did they have the constraint of working around adjoining property owners – they could simply force them to sell.
Just on squinting:
It is a very useful way of gauging proportion or form with any building, crude or refined, ugly or beautiful. It is just a way of reducing the information, filtering out the noise to see the overall form.
Theodopoulos,
Forget about architecture for a moment. If you are a widget-maker, your primary responsibility is to the person paying for those widgets. It is in everybody’s interest that these widgets are used in something that they be effective and when used cause no harm. This is how safe effective widgets get made, not because there is some implicit “social responsibility” on the widget-maker.
The Lexx is what it reminds me off.
Love that Canadian-Euro TV crap, with a foxy chick thrown in to get viewers!
I am reminded of The Princess Bride, when Westley is describing to Humperdinck what “to the pain” means:
“Your ears you will keep, and here is why: So that every shriek of every child in seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out dear god what is that thing, will echo in your perfect ears. That is what to the pain means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever. ”
That is how looking at this building makes me feel.
Reading this, an image of ‘The Horse’ from the cartoon Ren and Stimpy popped into my mind:
‘No Sir!, ….I Don’t Like It!’
From what I have read here, having too beautiful a building is punished by authorities who “list” it, i.e. goodbye property rights.
Alan,
That is an argument against planning and listing, not against “beauty” per se. Building owners generally have an interest in buildings which are pleasing to the eye. This can be affected by intrusive regulation.
My point is that, should the whole planning permission/listing/building regulations apparatus miraculously disappear, there is no reason to believe that the building environment would descend into a chaotic mess, any more than there is reason to believe that free markets lead inexorably to disorder. The built environment is no more immune to the market than anything else.
Frank,
I must be missing something – you seem to be re-iterating the ‘blame the client’ theme, whilst telling me you’re not:
“My primary point is that property rights must be respected, thus a building owner should be the ultimate arbiter of how her building should look”
In your second point you again absolve architects of any blame by suggesting that government should assume responsibility as most of the buildings that blight our urban landscapes were publicly funded. Publically funded or not, architects provided the government with what were then innovative (but flawed) building solutions to our post-war housing and civic requirements that they themselves conceived, they designed. Just because the government paid for it, they weren’t responsible for designing these monstrosities. Architects did that and they got it badly wrong.
I’m sorry, collectivist or not, architects do have wider responsibilities – they aren’t making widgets – they are designing our environment. Perhaps this is where the problem lies. Too many architects subscribe to your point of view of only providing for the property owners requirements and, in the Birmingham Selfidges’ case, indulging in their own vanity.
Pete,
Actually you’ll find that few architects subscribe to my point of view.
Perhaps it would be more constructive to leave aside “blame” and examine why these architects got it wrong. The reason they did was because they had no mechanism for determining the users’ priorities. If I design a house for someone, it is tailored to their requirements. If I design an apartment block for a developer, it is tailored to what he anticipates his customers will want. Because he succeeds or fails by getting this right, he will have a pretty good idea what will work. This is the market in action.
Consider the case of a large public housing scheme. The architect is given a brief which is compiled from some bureaucrats idea of what people “need” and not what they “want” – “Who cares what they “want”? they’re not paying for it – is the unspoken assumption. This is an example of central planning in action and it is exactly the same process which leads to undesirable public housing schemes and bread queues in communist countries.
My interest is not so much in absolving blame, but in explaining the process which permitted and in most cases incentivised bad architecture. There were certainly objectively “bad” architects, there was also “bad” theorising, and much of this was to do with a socialist-collectivist mindset.
architects do have wider responsibilities, they are designing our environment
By what right do you assert ownership of that environment? This is one of those collectivist assumptions I reject. If I am deciding whether to paint my house bright lime green, your aversion to green is of secondary interest too me. Nobody is forcing you to walk past my house. Thus, the “environment” you claim “we” own is composed of many properties individually owned. The net effect of this tends to be an environment acceptable to most. This should be obvious to anyone who favours free markets and the voluntary society.
..your point of view of only providing for the property owners requirements
With the insertion of that word “only”, you not only intentionally misrepresent my point – that property-owners’ interests must be primary, other interests secondary – but also assume that property-owners interests must necessarily be in conflict with those of users and passersby. In fact, those interests tend to be congruent anyway.
I don’t think asserting “ownership of the environment” is what it’s about at all. In any cost benefit analysis it’s absurd to ignore externalities.
In any cost benefit analysis it’s absurd to ignore externalities.
Agreed, which is why I don’t ignore externalities but being aware of externalities doesn’t require accepting a wide-ranging obligation to society.
Also:
Theo, you may not assert ownership of society but Pete – “our environment” – implicitly does so.
sorry, should be “ownership of the environment”
Frank,
I think this ‘ownership of the environment’ thing is a bit of a red herring. By saying “our environment” I was referring to our common environment, the environment that you and I live and work in. I was not inferring any ideas about ownership. By extrapolating from this some assumptions about a “socialist-collectivist mindset” is pretty nifty, very elegant – but entirely inaccurate.
However, I do take your point about the process that allows and ‘incentivises’ bad architecture and that architects only play a part in that and cannot be held solely responsible.
But we have drifted away from the issue here – this lump in Birmingham….
Brummies have thankfully had that older canker of appalling architecture, the Bullring, destroyed, only to be replaced by what? A large glob.
Future Systems had an opportunity, a responsibility even, to give Brummies something excellent, something they could be proud of after the shame of the Bullring. And this is what they come up with. Some self-serving nonsense that looks (but probably isn’t) cheap and will, I’m willing to bet, develop some significant maintenance issues just as soon as the defects liability period expires. The exterior will become encrusted in guano, soot and graffiti and Brummies will be left with the familiar sensation of being ashamed of their city centre once again. Yes, architects do have a lot to answer for, and so do those fools in the council for allowing this.
Future Systems had an opportunity, a responsibility even, to give Brummies something excellent, something they could be proud of after the shame of the Bullring. And this is what they come up with…Yes, architects do have a lot to answer for, and so do those fools in the council for allowing this
Ok, my subtly different take is:
Future Systems had an opportunity to create a great building for their clients, Selfridges. One that would be considered a great benefit to Birmingham’s city centre and would be appreciated by more Brummies than it is derided. This is not that great building.
I take it as granted that the people in the council tend to be “fools” – if one defines a “fool” as someone without the competence or the right to make decisions about other people’s property – and they shouldn’t be granted the power to allow or disallow anything. You shouldn’t delude yourself that the system when “operating properly” will deliver great architecture for everybody.
There remain collectivist assumptions in your thinking and your argument. You still hark after this “our environment” in which, by virtue of us occupying it, we have some kind of say how it is to develop. Further, that “our” interests should supercede the interests of those who actually own the pieces of property which comprise that environment.
You also perhaps assume too much that “we” all concur with you. I happen to agree with you that this building is a bit of a failure but I am well aware that there are many who disagree with me. It is entirely possible that Sefridge-dislikers are outnumbered by Selfridge-likers or are at least roughly equivalent. It may well be that “we” don’t have a consistent opinion on it.
“You still hark after this “our environment” in which, by virtue of us occupying it, we have some kind of say how it is to develop”
Well, yes! I do believe that we should have some kind of say how it is to develop. You tell me that makes me a collectivist and I shall just have to learn to live with that. But you will have a hard job persuading me that what I define as a legitimate concern for our built environment and passionate dislike for lazy, ugly and ill-conceived architecture is somehow a bad thing and a symptom of my ‘socialist-collectivist mindset’.
You also tell me that I may be making too much of an assumption that people agree with me. Well, all I can say, it’s evident that on this thread, at least, they seem to. I am, of course aware that this opinion is not universal, unfortunately. But to suggest that I am deluded enough to believe that everyone agrees with me is a bit silly and completely wrong.
I might add that an assumption of any kind in this forum is a difficult game to play, even ones about people’s mindsets.
Pete,
I am happy to stand over my characterisation of your view as collectivist, you as much as admit it. I didn’t accuse you of socialism, what I referred to as the socialist-collectivist mindset was the prevaling architectural ethos in the post-war era.
But you will have a hard job persuading me that what I define as a legitimate concern for our built environment and passionate dislike for lazy, ugly and ill-conceived architecture is somehow a bad thing
It’s not your concern I object to and I can hardly object to a dislike I share. What I do object to is your claim of a collectivist right – to determine what a building should look like * – which supercedes individual property rights – to erect or modify any such building as one pleases.
*There is a further problem with this: Your notion that society should get to determine the appearance of buildings “society” doesn’t own rather depends on their being a consensus as to the merits of a building such as this. This is why I mentioned that “we” may not have a consistent opinion on Selfridges Birmingham and not to question the wider support for your view. If there is no consensus, your agument boils down to: I want the government to force property owners to only erect buildings I personally like.
“I want the government to force property owners to only erect buildings I personally like.”
Bloody marvelous idea.
What does this have to do with libertarianism? I come to this blog to read libertarian views and issues, not artistic commentary.
The Selfridege’s building is a shop. Please name me any other shop that has ever generated so much attention. I like it and think it looks great. You should have seen what was there before to appreciate what a vast improvement it is.
I just finished watching a documentory about this building and would love to see it in person. I think it is very exciting and new – architecture can do with a shot in the arm like this. I like Jan Kaplicky’s designs as a rule and feel this one is certainly one of his best (perhaps because of the added woman’s touch?). It doesn’t quite blend in with the background buildings, but surely that was the point? No corporation would be able to buy the amount of advertisement this building has generated, people would flock to see it, if only to pan it & ultimately Selfridge wins. In terms of design – I love the organic, honeycombed look. It seems to have grown instead of having been built.
I have been to the selfidges building and I was really impressed, especially travelling in to New Street sataion it rises up out of the rest of the city looking like something from out of space, but something beautiful, or at least not ugly. I agree with anet in that it’s meant to be different to the surroundings, that’s totally the point of it. And you lot seem to spend a lot of time arguing about it!!!
That’s what you get for letting London architects design buildings in Birmignham. Its always been the nation’s testing ground for new structures. Next time use a local architect someone who actually gives a damm about the city of Birmingham.
Well, if it was in London you’d all be raving about, like that hidious gherkin thing you got.
Have seen some photos of the demolition of Bull Ring from 2001 by Pogus Caesar on Virtual Brum website, nice grainy monochrome and colour prints. Then I wonder how the old Bull Ring gave birth to this multiple eyed baby…but hey mothers never know what their children will grow to look like..
“We only have a responsibility to our clients, the property owners, to design something which is suitable for their purposes.”
Frank, I think you’ll find that members of the RIBA have other obligations under the professional code of conduct –
http://www.riba.org/fileLibrary/pdf/Code_(Jan_05).pdf
“3.1 Members ……should (also) have a proper concern and due regard for the effect that their work may have on its users and the local community”
I like it, don’t care what rest of you think!!!!!
Love the shot of the workers posing next to the silver discs on the bull ring on pogus caesar site..wonder if these were the final fixtures to go on. also photo of people leaning on railings watching the structure take shape- this says so much about what happened in birmingham! love it and would like to see selfridges from the sky……
noway! it is a beautiful piece of work….. but it will take you guys another twenty or thirty years to understand it…. remember, there have been times, when gothic cathedrals have been considered as ugly and dreary and this perspective only changed in 19th century…… likewise “Le Corbu” and his functionalism….
this building and every other work of jan kaplicky is like kral´s or pinninfarina´s design of cars. it is a future.
kaplicky and sterile cold shapes? never….. they are neither overdecorative nor kitschy, just beautiful….. :o)
Went to Birmingham last week for the first time ever, what a great city, I was very suprised. Selfridges well, It’s beautiful fullstop.
I came upon this while researching info about blobjects for a book review. Thanks for the discourse. My view from down under (where Middle Earth, Narnia and Kong’s NY have been recreated of late) is that the Birmingham blob is a breath of fresh architectural air – catching up with fluidity in furniture and product design which reflects the fact that human beings are not stick figures. The test is how mundane everything else now looks. Roll on continuous improvement of our built environment!