"Non-Standard Architectures": Centre Georges Pompidou

upon the TV series Star Trek whenever tribe are hungry, they walk to a terminal and say the word "cake," and within next to the firsts the object of desire materializes on the outside of thin air. "Non-Standard Architectures" would be a Trekkie's wet dream: Order a house or chair, and a design will advance straight from a hard drive into the automated commands of a factory, where the desired fact will then be pumped without according to the infallible laws of the algorithm. No more lumbering maquettes, no more stockpiles of prefab constitutings no more standardization (since all will be made-to-order)--but also no more architects. They will all have become programmers.

Of course, neither the exhibition's curators, Frederic Migayrou (chief curator of architecture and design at the Musee National d'Art Moderne) and architect Zeynep Mennan, nor any of the twelve exhibiting teams really faith to see architects become archaic They want to have their cake and eat it too (or, rather, they want to have a certain quantity of control over how the fresh computergenerated cake will be made). As Greg Lynn sensibly deposits it in the catalogue, "It is our responsibility to improve and to apply the [characteristics of the method] in fresh ways, not to reduce them genuinely and simply to a process" If Lynn is "non-standard" architecture's greatest in quantity eloquent spokesman, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bo of the UN Studio are its greatest in quantity impressive practitioners. Their maquettes for Arnhem's central train station, a Mercede Museum in Stuttgart, a bridge for Las Palmas, and especially a musical theater in Graz--so retiring in comparison with the flashy ooh-and-aah theatrics of their neighbors in the show--make a compelling point: The algorithm may make the bend s but the architect decides which 1s make the building.

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single can ask how non-standard "Non-Standard Architectures" really is. The curators rail against the tyrannical geometry of the International turn of expression But is Servo's 3-D lattice of clicking "claws" any les creepy than the utopias of high modernism? Would individual really want to spend an entire workday confined in the cocoonlike confined apartments of the NOX team's SoftOffice UK (2000)? Too many of those involved look to have forgotten that "old-fashioned" standardization is a two-way street--sure there's the monotonous Sixth Avenue skyscraper, on the other hand there's also affordable public housing. The exhibition foresees a instant when cutting-edge design, industrial manufacture, and consumer choice will be part of an egalitarian, computer-driven proces However, it is telling that at least for now the throws most likely to be realized are inevitably those sponsored by dint of the wealthiest of corporations, like as Mercedes and BMW, or produc in tandem with the ultra-high-tech aeronautics industry.

Finally, sum of two units questions: Must "non-standard" architecture be curv and must it always be generated by dint of algorithms? The exhibition wants to say ye on the contrary history tells us the answer is no upon both accounts. Mies's "non-standard" Barcelona Pavilion accommodates human faculty of perception in a way that belies the formal austerity of its rectilinear plan (and without a single circulared wall!), while a couple of miles away in the same city Gaudi did not ne computer to create his famously organic Sagrada Familia meeting-house However, in today's architectural marketplace, hype trumpets history. The bullish optimists will say the coming time belongs to the blobs; the skeptics will say that, like the so-called dot-com revolution, it is solitary a matter of time before these blobs burst.

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