In 2006, the Serpentine Gallery's 24-Hour Interview Marathon hosted by Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist positioned the architect as cultural enquirer - as journalist, not subject of scrutiny. The starchitect-to-clerk trajectory tracks through the last few years of production. The result: a sublime toast to the almost ugly, pedestrian architecture of the period. Those images of blocky concrete edifices (already darkened with ominous weathering) are set against a life-sized, digitally printed mural of a present-day interior of one such structure - the Undercroft below Queen Elizabeth Hall in London's Southbank Centre - garishly tagged with graffiti. Given the timeframe, it's understandable that a Brutalist thread runs through the large black and white drawings and photographs illustrating each project. The title of each project itself a banal microdrama: County Hall Island Block Extension (1970) by the Greater London Council Department of Architecture and Civic Design Centre Administratif, Patin (1973) by the Architecte Conceil du Ministère de la Reconstruction et de l'Urbanisme or Akademie der Künste (1959) by Stadtbaurat, Berlin. The politics of these municipal organizations cover a spectrum from "left-leaning" to Socialist to Communist. The exhibition features fifteen civic buildings from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, designed by architects employed in public works departments across European cities. ![]() "Not the architects." Meanwhile, deep in the Biennale, Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants, OMA's contribution to Common Ground, counters the Austrian's lament. ![]() "Politicians and project managers, investors and bureaucrats have been deciding on our built environment for a long time now," he writes. Rebuking the curators for banality in the face of crisis, Prix's missive evokes a colourful vision of architects packed into a sinking gondola, a metaphor for the discipline's "powerlessness and irrelevance." And his prickling has a target. Prix, COOP HIMMELB(L)AU's resident avant-gardist issued a statement to the press. ![]() The day before the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale opened to the public, Wolf D.
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