You know that giant Bird's Nest stadium they're building in Beijing for the Olympics next year? Well, a couple of guys made a documentary about the process, featuring starchitects Herzog and de Meuron (hip glasses and all). It doesn't appear to have any major release dates or places, save a screening in Switzerland this spring, but here's the trailer:
I'm not sure why it's not getting more press -- I only found out about it through my brother, who found out through his wife (they're both architects). I mean, maybe the film is crap. But it seems to bring together two incredibly popular topics of conversation these days: China and all of these starchitects leaving their imprint much more boldly, and with much more fanfare, than ever before.
I live in New York City, so the whole business with the Freedom Tower and the battles between architect Daniel Liebeskind and what stands in for New York design ethos (read: practical, tight-fisted, and ultimately ugly) has been in my public eye for a while now. But the intersection of civic mindedness, singular vision, and the desire for monumentality is everywhere: witness Benjamin Moser's "Cemetery of Hope: Brasilia at Fifty" piece in this month's issue of Harpers (whoops -- not yet available online -- sorry update: you might need a subscription, but try here), or the 849,000 entries in Google if you type in "starchitects." Or it's seemingly everywhere, anyway.
Architecture is first and foremost about an experience with, and in, space, so it's something that everyone can access -- even if one never actually has a direct, tactile relationship with a specific space in particular. The collision of collective unconscious and individual ego when it comes to the built environment is a source of endless fascination for me -- it's in the news and in commentary everywhere, and yet the collectivity itself doesn't really seem to care all that much -- they want the building, and they want it now. The squabbling that I find intriguing as a reflection of the disparate understandings of civic good -- the general public couldn't care less. And yet -- isn't this sort of dialogue necessary in order to at once break down the presumption of uniformity in thinking and come to a new consensus?
There are a bazillion films about love; why not at least 1,001 films about space? Differently universal, but still universal. Anyhow, if anyone knows if/when Bird's Nest is going to screen here in the States, or if there's some way I could obtain an advanced copy, please let me know.
one magnificent film about space:
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/498912/index.html
Posted by: jb | December 19, 2007 at 08:42 PM