Can All Skyscrapers Be Tasteful Modern Architecture?

The Dos and Don’ts of Tasteful Architecture

First Published Date: Oct 03, 2009

In the present day, so much of building seems to be obsessed with size. There was a time when you could build the world’s tallest building – assuming you had a spare few hundred million dollars, anyway – and sit back and relax for a decade or so, knowing that if anyone asked about the world’s largest building, your name would come up. Now, the moment someone builds a dizzyingly tall skyscraper which surpasses all that has gone before, you can be sure that there is someone sitting, taking notes and saying “Right – I want it about ten meters taller than that one, OK?”

The upshot of this is, increasingly, a dislike among many for such grandiose statements of intent. People are uncomfortable with massive buildings – mostly not out of a sense of vertigo, but simply from personal taste. The Ryugong Hotel in Pyongyang, as well as being about a half of the way to completion, is enormous – and at the present time, grotesque. Although the Burj al-Arab is to many people’s tastes – including the tennis legend Roger Federer, who spends time there – to others it is a statement of pointless size, a standing monument to dimension rather than architecture. If we keep building them taller than the last one, sooner or later we will have revolving restaurants in lower earth orbit. The food will be terrible, but the waiting lists will still be epic.

This is not to say that large buildings cannot be aesthetically impressive, and anyway, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. However, it has to be said that there could be a lot more concentration on other aspects of what makes a building impressive. Invention and subtlety can go a long way, so why do we always insist on a building which breaks the clouds and keeps on going?

There are other mistakes made by architects who simply hear the bit where the person commissioning the building says “.and I want people to talk about it!”. Building something that will be memorable can just be about complementing your surroundings in the most attractive way, but all too often architects – through their brief or through their overarching ambition – will look to assault the senses. If they can’t build it taller than the others, they will use more lights. If they cannot do that, then they’ll try and shape it like something no-one else has thought of. Ambition does not have to equal grandiosity.

Then again, there are probably many of us who will admit to having a keenness for a particular building which conforms to all of the lazy standards and that may well be the reason they keep getting built. However much we may wince at what we see most of the time, we look at – for example – Dubai’s Rose Rotana and think “I should be appalled, I should be feeling sick, but for some reason it works”. Well, some of us do, anyway. And that is the point – there are so many ways in which a building can offend, but if enough of us say “Hmm, I like that!”, then they will continue to be built.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the realestateexpedition.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to A Dawn Journal. This article originally published on the above website on Oct 3, 2009.