Another Pritzker Prize Winner& Quote of the Day

I recently singled out Zaha Hadid's Olympic Village design as anti-urban, anti-social, and the worst of a bad lot. Then she won the 2004 Pritzker Prize.

The next day, the architecture critic of the New York Times wrote,

The audience for contemporary architecture has come to recognize that architectural aesthetics cannot be decisively severed from social ideology. Buildings are pieces of cities, and cities have become the building blocks in the emergence of a culture that transcends national boundaries. The choices we make about architectural forms are integral to the argument over globalization. What values do we want to carry forward in a shrinking, heterogeneous world?

Ms. Hadid . . . observed that the primary objective of her work was well-being. "I want people to feel great about being in a space, and I believe this experience can change your outlook on life," she said Friday by telephone. "Architecture has an educational role to play. How do we want to live in the city? A building can convert our way of thinking."

Visitors to Ms. Hadid's first completed building in the United States, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, can see firsthand how her vision can alter a person's outlook. Though the building's forms relate powerfully to their immediate urban context, they also suggest a strong visual connection to a broader frame of reference: the changing status of the urban center in a time of global change.

The result is what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck has called "rooted cosmopolitanism," an almost musical sense of harmony with city life around the world.

It's hard to disagree with the first two paragraphs (unless you're familiar with Hadid's work), but what on earth are the last two paragraphs supposed to mean?

Hadid is the poster girl for the alienated artist pushing her personal vision above all else. Only recently has she been able to get a few works in the ground, but for 25 years she has doggedly done the same thing over and over until she succeeded in getting her basic ideas built. Her work is about as single-minded and uncontextual as architecture can be.

The Times critic gushingly (as is his wont when he talks about his heroes) praises Hadid's new Cincinatti building, her only building in the US. In the late 1970s, I wrote in a review of MOMA's Deconstructivism show that Hadid's drawings were very exciting, and that it would be interesting to see how they translated into real buildings.

That was because the drawings showed weightless, flying visions. Her actual building in Cincinatti is a leaden, inert mass: it could hardly be less weightless, even though it pretends to defy gravity.

The concrete shillelagh above the ground floor (and everything above it) precariously sits on small columns intentionally designed to look too small to hold the mass above them. The impression is that any minute now the concrete shillelagh could fall and fatally whap a passing pedestrian on the head. It's much like the sculptor Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, a rusting, leaning Corten multi-ton piece of steel that made office workers fear for their lives every time they went in and out of the Federal office building in downtown Manhattan.

Serra, the art community, and dilletantes were outraged when the sculpture was removed because of public demand. All felt Serra had a right as an artist to terrify the Federal workers.

That showed how far away from the general public much of the contemporary art world had gone. Today, the architecture promoted by the media has moved even further into its own esoteric, ideological world. As shown by the fact that the architectural mandinarate has designated as the best in the world an unpopular architect who has barely built.

Why is this the architect who won the Pritzker? And why does the Times critic say such patently ridiculous things about her? Ada Louise Huxtable and Paul Goldberger, the previous Times critics, were not so out of touch with their readers.

Huxtable was the critic when the corporate Modernism of the 1950s and 60s had the support of the Times readership. When that started to change in the 1970s, Huxtable stepped aside for Goldberger, a Vincent Scully protege from Yale who understood the work of Robert Venturi, Robert Stern and Philip Johnson's PostModernism better than her.

Since that time, popular culture has moved away from Modernism as the expression of the times, towards the idea that Modernist art and architecture are just styles. This has caused an ideological backlash in the architectural academy. Today, architecture professors at Columbia and Harvard are as doctrinaire as Trotskyites. And sometimes seem almost as driven and ruthless as Stalinists.

These are the last gasping bleats of an academy that sees that its alleged authority to tell people what to think is fading fast.