moderne wandgestaltung badezimmer
imagine that when you walkedin here this evening, you discovered that everybody in the roomlooked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically good-looking. that person sitting right next to you might have the mostidiosyncratic inner life, but you don't have a clue because we're all wearingthe same blank expression all the time. that is the kind of creepy transformationthat is taking over cities,
only it applies to buildings, not people. cities are full of roughness and shadow, texture and color. you can still find architectural surfacesof great individuality and character in apartment buildings in riga and yemen, social housing in vienna, hopi villages in arizona, brownstones in new york,
wooden houses in san francisco. these aren't palaces or cathedrals. these are just ordinary residences expressing the ordinarysplendor of cities. and the reason they're like thatis that the need for shelter is so bound up withthe human desire for beauty. their rough surfacesgive us a touchable city. right? streets that you can read by running your fingersover brick and stone.
but that's getting harder to do, because cities are becoming smooth. new downtowns sprout towers that are almost alwaysmade of concrete and steel and covered in glass. you can look at skylinesall over the world -- houston, guangzhou, frankfurt --
and you see the same armyof high-gloss robots marching over the horizon. now, just think of everything we lose when architects stop usingthe full range of available materials. when we reject graniteand limestone and sandstone and wood and copperand terra-cotta and brick and wattle and plaster, we simplify architecture and we impoverish cities.
it's as if you reducedall of the world's cuisines down to airline food. (laughter) chicken or pasta? but worse still, assemblies of glass towerslike this one in moscow suggest a disdain for the civicand communal aspects of urban living. right? buildings like these are intendedto enrich their owners and tenants, but not necessarilythe lives of the rest of us,
those of us who navigatethe spaces between the buildings. and we expect to do so for free. shiny towers are an invasive species and they are choking our citiesand killing off public space. we tend to think of a facadeas being like makeup, a decorative layer applied at the endto a building that's effectively complete. but just because a facade is superficial doesn't mean it's not also deep. let me give you an example
of how a city's surfacesaffect the way we live in it. when i visited salamanca in spain, i gravitated to the plaza mayor at all hours of the day. early in the morning,sunlight rakes the facades, sharpening shadows, and at night, lamplightsegments the buildings into hundreds of distinct areas, balconies and windows and arcades,
each one a separate pocketof visual activity. that detail and depth, that glamour gives the plaza a theatrical quality. it becomes a stagewhere the generations can meet. you have teenagerssprawling on the pavers, seniors monopolizing the benches, and real life starts to looklike an opera set. the curtain goes up on salamanca. so just because i'm talkingabout the exteriors of buildings,
not form, not function, not structure, even so those surfacesgive texture to our lives, because buildingscreate the spaces around them, and those spaces can draw people in or push them away. and the difference often has to dowith the quality of those exteriors. so one contemporary equivalentof the plaza mayor in salamanca is the place de la dã©fense in paris, a windswept, glass-walled open space
that office workers hurry through on the way from the metroto their cubicles but otherwise spendas little time in as possible. in the early 1980s,the architect philip johnson tried to recreate a graciouseuropean plaza in pittsburgh. this is ppg place, a half acre of open spaceencircled by commercial buildings made of mirrored glass. and he ornamented those buildingswith metal trim and bays
and gothic turrets which really pop on the skyline. but at ground level, the plaza feels like a black glass cage. i mean, sure, in summertime kids are running back and forththrough the fountain and there's ice-skating in the winter, but it lacks the informalityof a leisurely hangout. it's just not the sort of placeyou really want to just hang out and chat.
public spaces thrive or failfor many different reasons. architecture is only one, but it's an important one. some recent plazas like federation square in melbourne or superkilen in copenhagen succeed because they combine old and new, rough and smooth, neutral and bright colors,
and because they don't relyexcessively on glass. now, i'm not against glass. it's an ancient and versatile material. it's easy to manufacture and transport and install and replace and clean. it comes in everythingfrom enormous, ultraclear sheets to translucent bricks. new coatings make it change mood
in the shifting light. in expensive cities like new york,it has the magical power of being able to multiplyreal estate values by allowing views, which is really the only commoditythat developers have to offer to justify those surreal prices. in the middle of the 19th century, with the constructionof the crystal palace in london, glass leapt to the top of the listof quintessentially modern substances. by the mid-20th century,
it had come to dominatethe downtowns of some american cities, largely through somereally spectacular office buildings like lever house in midtown manhattan,designed by skidmore, owings and merrill. eventually, the technologyadvanced to the point where architects could designstructures so transparent they practically disappear. and along the way, glass became the default materialof the high-rise city, and there's a verypowerful reason for that.
because as the world's populationsconverge on cities, the least fortunate packinto jerry-built shantytowns. but hundreds of millions of peopleneed apartments and places to work in ever-larger buildings, so it makes economic senseto put up towers and wrap them in cheapand practical curtain walls. but glass has a limited ability to be expressive. this is a section of wall framing a plaza
in the pre-hispanic city of mitla,in southern mexico. those 2,000-year-old carvings make it clear that this was a placeof high ritual significance. today we look at those and we can seea historical and textural continuity between those carvings,the mountains all around and that church which is builton top of the ruins using stone plundered from the site. in nearby oaxaca,even ordinary plaster buildings become canvasses forbright colors, political murals
and sophisticated graphic arts. it's an intricate, communicative language that an epidemic of glasswould simply wipe out. the good news isthat architects and developers have begun to rediscoverthe joys of texture without backing away from modernity. some find innovative usesfor old materials like brick and terra-cotta. others invent new productslike the molded panels that snã¸hetta used
to give the san franciscomuseum of modern art that crinkly, sculptural quality. the architect stefano boerieven created living facades. this is his vertical forest,a pair of apartment towers in milan, whose most visible feature is greenery. and boeri is designing a version of thisfor nanjing in china. and imagine if green facadeswere as ubiquitous as glass ones how much cleaner the airin chinese cities would become. but the truth isthat these are mostly one-offs,
boutique projects, not easily reproduced at a global scale. and that is the point. when you use materialsthat have a local significance, you prevent citiesfrom all looking the same. copper has a long history in new york -- the statue of liberty, the crown of the woolworth building -- but it fell out of fashion for a long time
until shop architects used itto cover the american copper building, a pair of twisting towerson the east river. it's not even finished and you can see the waysunset lights up that metallic facade, which will weather to green as it ages. buildings can be like people. their faces broadcast their experience. and that's an important point, because when glass ages,
you just replace it, and the building lookspretty much the same way it did before until eventually it's demolished. almost all other materialshave the ability to absorb infusions of history and memory, and project it into the present. the firm ennead clad the utah natural history museumin salt lake city in copper and zinc, ores that have been minedin the area for 150 years
and that also camouflage the buildingagainst the ochre hills so that you have a natural history museum that reflects the region'snatural history. and when the chinesepritzker prize winner wang shu was building a history museum in ningbo, he didn't just createa wrapper for the past, he built memory right into the walls by using brick and stones and shingles salvaged from villagesthat had been demolished.
now, architects can use glass in equally lyrical and inventive ways. here in new york, two buildings, one by jean nouveland this one by frank gehry face off across west 19th street, and the play of reflectionsthat they toss back and forth is like a symphony in light. but when a city defaults to glass as it grows,
it becomes a hall of mirrors, disquieting and cold. after all, cities are placesof concentrated variety where the world's culturesand languages and lifestyles come together and mingle. so rather than encase all that variety and diversity in buildingsof crushing sameness, we should have an architecture that honorsthe full range of the urban experience. thank you.
(applause)
