Second oldest
I sat down the other day to have a serious conversation with my godson about his career prospects.
“I’ve been giving the matter consideration over recent months, and I’ve finally reached a decision. I want to do nothing useful in life,” he said.
“Why not take a more positive approach towards your future?” I advised. “Why not become a petty criminal? Mug people in the streets, swindle money out of old ladies, work in Telefónica, snatch purses in supermarkets, perhaps become a genuine scumbag and take up a trainee position in the banking sector.”
He rolled another joint and reflected on what I had said. “The bank sounds good,” he replied, “although I’d rather rob them. If I have to work, I’d like to make a more permanent impact on society, something that people will remember me for. If I decide to be a criminal, I’d like to be a real criminal.”
“Why don’t you become an architect?” I suggested.
If he takes my advice, he will have plenty of scope for his talents. He can design apartment blocks in Madrid with holes in the middle costing more per cubic metre than the apartments themselves. He can design opera houses in Valencia without views of the stage. He can design pedestrian bridges over the rivers of Europe that pedestrians can slide across. He can design airport terminal buildings in Northern Spain that will give people terminal pneumonia waiting to greet passengers. He can design concert halls that flood and museums that leak. And best of all, he can design ugly high-rise towers that destroy the skylines of some of the most beautiful cities in Spain.
With the ridiculous argument that contrast complements, he can design buildings that do the opposite of fit in with their surroundings.
Architects and artists are one of a kind, with a fundamental difference: we are not all forced to live with the work of the artist. He can do as he pleases, and we can see it or not, as we please. What we are forced to see by the architect may be a delight to the eye, as is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, to give just one example, but too often the result is more a delight to the architect’s sense of self-importance.
The shockingly new of today will become the classically aged of the future, they tell us, but they are wrong. The material and technological limitations of even the recent past ensured that works of architecture were anchored in time and place, regardless of how far architects had strayed from the fundamental aesthetics of form and the space it occupies. We have some magnificent buildings in this country, designed by both foreign and Spanish architects and built in hi-tech materials without severing the link between building and location. But we have also fallen victim to one of the diseases of our time, which is to value impact over aesthetics and choose difference for its own sake.
My godson was impressed by my little speech. “I like the idea of becoming an architect,” he said. “It’s very old profession, isn’t it?”
“The second-oldest in the world,” I assured him.
Filed under: General by Vivion O'Kelly
