Loopy designs reflect our age of crisis published: 22 June 2012
On television it looked like a live action version of a crude political cartoon. Spanish bankers scurrying in and out of the country’s Bankia headquarters, refusing to answer questions about the imminent bank run and all the euro havoc that this would entail. The potential collapse of one of Spain’s largest banks, which could cause the eurozone to fall over, represented by an immense steel and glass tower leaning over the plaza at a precarious 15 degrees. The Bankia tower was designed in 1989 by Philip Johnson and John Burgee as one half of a monumental ensemble of two mirrored towers, leaning towards each other and thus forming the Puerta de Europa. But since the cameras only focus on the one tower housing the bank, Johnson’s neo-classicist concept is replaced by an apocalyptic allegory of the euro in mid-topple. In his lectures at the Collège de France, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu taught that the state’s monopoly of violence does not limit itself to the physical realm but extends to symbolic violence too. “Symbolic violence” may be one of those French philosophical notions that are difficult to grasp, until you start seeing iconic art and architecture in its terms. For example, the tangle of red steel in Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Olympic Park sculpture has never really been explained except in terms of “London needs its own Eiffel tower”. If this meaningless symbol represents anything, it is the corporate state’s monopoly on creating symbols of this magnitude. There is a violence in this sort of randomness, a bullish arrogance in its wilful emptiness. To the cheesiness of Johnson Burgee’s “gate”, and the randomness of Kapoor’s sculpture we might add the difficult, avant-garde angularity of Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building
in Beijing, which has recently been completed. The loop of “transparent” and therefore public spaces (or vice versa?) through the building introduces a seed of openness into the closed culture of state propaganda, or so claims the architect when defending the morality of the brief. The fact that such a convoluted, idiosyncratic explanation would never convince anyone but the already convinced gives this building the same emptiness of meaning as the former two examples. Its impressive, awe-inspiring dimensions only underline the already crystal-clear monopoly of symbolic violence that the Chinese state maintains. But Johnson Burgee’s leaning tower also shows that the weaponry with which the state exerts its monopoly of symbolic violence is of a volatile nature. Especially in times of economic and political upheaval, shapes that are empty of meaning will take on meanings of their own. Suddenly, the bland diagonal of Bankia became a pitiless parody of the failure of Europe’s financial politics. Similarly, after the Olympics have gone and east London is left with a legacy of broken promises, the writhing steel of Kapoor’s Orbit might come to represent the slippery, snakelike, great regeneration swindle, purported to bring the games to London. Finally, Koolhaas’s loopy, perspectivity-defying CCTV design could turn out to be the perfect postcard image of the Kafka-esque labyrinth of state oppression, in which this building plays such a key role.
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