This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.
At what point do designers start recycling themselves, or take their iconoclastic style to the breaking point? How do you break out of a style, like Frank Gehry or Richard Meier, when clients come to you for the next Guggenheim or Getty Center? Or conversely, what happens when you become a chameleon flirting with styles from year to year? Philip Johnson quipped that, “After 50 years, you shouldn’t do the same thing,” but there seems to be a fine line between steady refinement and abject oscillation.
Case in point: Pritzker winner Zaha Hadid is world-renowned for her idiocentric style and design sense, and yet there are distinctly similar motif’s in the following projects; first the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Rome begun in 2003 and the Dancing Towers in Dubai, a mixed-use series of three towers combining a hotel, speculative office space, and residential space.
It is superficially easy to say that the Dubai project is merely the Rome project turned 90 degrees. It is hard not to pass judgement on Hadid’s projects from a merely visual standpoint: her projects are so iconoclastic and surface/skin dependant that it makes superficial critique easy.
A couple of questions cross my mind.
Is it a bad thing that this happens? What if it’s well designed even if it does become very similar to other projects by the same architect?
Are architects not allowed to dabble within the same style for too long? Artists spend years in a style trying to hone their skill and master it before moving on, why not architects?
Is it a worse occurance when it happens with a “starchitect” who has a handful of similar projects in the world, or when it is done by some small firm that produces countless numbers of nearly identical projects (a clothing store for example)?
I’m not taking any sides, just asking the questions.
sweetchuck, those are the same questions I was dealing with regarding these designs.
I think the answer to your question of identical projects from the designer’s point of view has to take into account client(s), what sort of requirements for the project.
I have to say, I think this is a pretty misleading set of images to use to make a case about designers repeating themselves. One image is very conceptual and doesn’t really contain programmatic implications, while the other shows a bit more development. Regardless, most starchitects (and even us little pedestrian architects too) go through several phases in a career defined by overarching themes and motifs that are–as grubby notes–influenced by the requirements of a client and the program. If you can’t see echoes of the Peak Hotel in the above images, then you can’t see one of Zaha’s classic motifs refined and represented in these newer works.
To me, the really interesting question is whether Zaha can transcend becoming a brand–Gehry is the ne plus ultra in this category–and develop in other directions in the future.