ARCHITECTURAL IDENTITY + GENDER IDENTITY POLITICS

Robert Adam

Some comments from architect Robert Adam:

Identity was discussed at two architectural conferences in Barcelona at the end of last year. This unique assembly of leading international practitioners provided valuable evidence of how the architectural profession currently thinks about identity.

There’s a growing consensus in the architectural profession that the special identity of places matters. This seems to be based on the perception that globalisation is creating an undesirable uniformity in cities around the world. This concern can come from the most surprising sources. Lee Polisano, global president of the American architects, KPF, one of the world’s leading designers of tall buildings, said, “there’s a large danger of repetitiveness and sameness taking place in our cities.” The source of the problem is well-understood by major practitioners. Stefan Behnisch, principal of leading German practice, Behnisch Architekten, notes that, “one of the errors of international architecture is that we thought we could build the same thing everywhere.”

Two techniques for giving new architecture an identity to relate a building to its locality emerged: the spirit of place and the symbol of place.

The principle of the spirit of the place was summarised by Ken Yang of the leading British firm, Llewellyn Davis Yeang, “Every site is different and by responding to the locality we create a natural diversity.” He calls this “systemic identity”. Alison Brooks, a Canadian architect practicing in Britain and one of the winners of last year’s leading architectural award, described this succinctly as an abstract reaction to “found conditions”. It is this principle that allows Lee Polisano to claim that a tall office building, of a similar height and identical materials in the Middle East and London, has a local identity because it responds to individual aspects of its site, its orientation and the limitations created by adjacent sites. He says, “Local forces become local manifestations of local circumstances.”

Choosing a symbolic identity relevant to the location was described by the Berlin conceptual architect, Jurgen Mayer, as finding “certain elements that are local that we could interpret and make into something architecturally new.” It is this process that lay behind the imagery that the Catalan architect Enric Mirales and his Italian partner Benedetta Tagliabue chose for the Scottish Parliament. Using boats as a symbol of Scottish identity is not how most Scots see their national identity but was, as Tagliabue said, because as architects “you have to get the best of what you perceive”. Alejandro Polo of Foreign Office Architects similarly describes the choice of abstracted lacework imagery for the John Lewis Store in Nottingham as an attempt to “synthesise identity”.

And whilst were at it, a view of political identity, gender and feminism.