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THE BEST ARCHITECTURE OF 2013.

12/22/2013



   It was a year of unintended consequences for architectural icons. The convex walls of the Walkie Talkie tower in the City of London concentrated the sun's rays in such a way as to melt cars, and it was renamed the Fryscraper. The multiple shortcomings of Santiago Calatrava's buildings were brilliantly exposed by the New York Times in such a way that you wonder if he will eat lunch in that, or any other town, again. Except that his insanely expensive transit station at the World Trade Center site is unstoppably under construction. Zaha Hadid's architectural practice, meanwhile, designed a football stadium that some people thought looked like a vagina.

   You might think that these misadventures would be some sort of reality check, fate's way of telling architects that they have disappeared so far into their shape-making fantasies that they fail to spot the bleeding obvious when it is staring them in the face. But don't hold your breath.

   Meanwhile, the Southbank Centre managed to annoy many people, including the London skateboarding community, Antony Gormley and Nicholas Hytner, with its plans for turning public space into a food, drink and shopping experience. Hytner could speak with authority, as his National Theatre commissioned the Shed, a temporary theatre designed by Haworth Tompkins which shows how to activate the concrete terraces of the South Bank more smartly than anything the Southbank Centre has managed to do.

   In further evidence that designers find it impossible to leave this stretch of the Thames alone, Thomas Heatherwick and Dan Pearson proposed a garden bridge over the river, a possibly lovely idea that would be lovelier without the sci-fi mushrooms with which Heatherwick is proposing to hold it up. And without the sponsorship/marketing opportunities which, one suspects, will make it necessary to pay its way.

   Back at the One World Trade Center, its main tower attained the title of tallest building in America (and the western hemisphere) with the help of a large spike on top, but as it's a long way short of being the tallest building in the world, this didn't seem very meaningful. Miami did better with its symbolic architectural commissioning, at least with the Pérez Art Museum, designed by Herzog and de Meuron. Deceptively plain at first sight, it becomes more subtle and complex the more you see it.

   The most significant architectural/urban event of the year was in Istanbul, where plans to gobble up a park with an Ottoman-themed shopping mall sparked riots. The consumption of public space by financial speculation is a worldwide issue, Britain very much included, and the Gezi Park protests show how much it matters to people.

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