In Western Europe, I often hear the same refrain from people in the architecture world, lamenting the “star system”: always and everywhere, major commissions seem destined for the desks of Daniel Libeskind, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid. Some of the frustration with “starchitects” might be rooted in nations’ desires for distinct architectural identities, in the palpable wake of losing individual currencies. Every E.U. country contains at least one architectural relic that’s a millennium old, and generations have identified with local ancient man-made constructions.

But when Europe’s religious fundamentalists settled America four hundred years ago, they deliberately killed off the past. Much more recently, the post-modern era surfeited this country’s appetite for mock-nostalgia. Now we’re dining out with starchitects. So in architecturally conscious circles the starchitect phenomenon is celebrated, as it’s traced back to the Bilbao effect.

Though eulogies lately accredit Philip Johnson with bringing celebrity into modern architecture, his influence was diluted to near-anonymity by his own glib glass high-rises, which enjoyed rabbitlike proliferation while Reagan was president. The nineties marched progress with booming technology and ensuing apathy; the new generation was rich and stimulated by weekend escapades mixing fine wine and ecstasy. As agile as a scaly fish, Gehry’s shimmering titanium waves enraptured dot-com America. “Look what computers can do,” people said, “And look what a scruffy guy in Santa Monica can do with a computer, and look, he’s friends with Brad Pitt!” (The proof is in the picture; scroll down at www.pittcenter.com/news.htm).

Gehry now has commissions for wavy metal-clad public buildings in several U.S. cities. He’d already gone Disney with the Los Angeles Concert Hall (after seeing Bilbao’s Guggenheim, Gehry’s media giant client insisted that he change the cladding from stone to stainless steel. The architect complied). He recently finished a much-lauded outdoor concert space in Chicago’s Millennium park. His architecture isn’t garbage, but its plasticity slides into American values a little too comfortably, as in, it irks.

I can’t mention American values without a brief venture into American television. Statistics show that television is the primary news source in this country-TV trumps every printed newspaper. Network channels ABC, CBS and Fox rival for most-watched. The Bilbao effect has never been mentioned on any of these channels.

Meanwhile, back in the print world, architectural publications reach small niches of the U.S. population, never more than five hundred thousand. Scale up to big newspapers like the New York Times and the much larger USA today: You’ll find the larger the paper, the smaller its architectural coverage.

Architecture for the American majority is thus relegated to ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”, a top-rated weekly reality TV show in which impoverished families’ homes receive architectural makeovers. For example, the show’s crew of designers renovates a run-down shack where nine children live, having been orphaned by their parents’ cancers. Hired designers add a few thousand square feet, and include a bathroom with nine individual sinks for each child. They sponge-paint the walls and decorate with accessories from Wal-mart. At the end of each episode comes a hysterically happy moment in which the family that suffered brokenness, purportedly because their home was a mess, is reunited due to the renovation.

“Extreme Makeover: Home Addition” is an offshoot of the more concisely named “Extreme Makeover,” a reality TV show about plastic surgery. Aired on another weekly ABC primetime slot, this show focuses on fixing flawed human bodies of Americans who want surgery but can’t afford it. Liposuction is a popular intervention, accompanied with face-lifts, breast implants, teeth bleaching and many other surgeries, always personalized and videotaped, through doctor consultations, surgery and post-op rehabilitation. Several months’ surgery is compressed into an hour-long show; the concluding minutes feature the participants, a real-life husband and wife, being reunited with each other and their children after plastic surgery. The show praises their improved bodies and touts the “values” of families that endure hardships.

Architecture aside, the latter show’s existence feeds my growing hunch that this country is sick and dying. Architecture included, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” as an offshoot to “Extreme Makeover” carries countless implications on our society’s relationship to the built environment-ones for further research and future discussion. In the meantime, scaling down (by the powers of ten) to the America that actually knows modern architecture, meaning left-leaning architects, we are left in the shadow if George W. Bush.

The 90’s generation, Bilbao and all, has made good architects. They tend now to be working with grass-roots resources in U.S. cities, big and small, using their ingenuity and unprecedented technology to improve housing for impoverished urban residents. But this year, after a first term that ravaged the economy with pointless war and tax cuts benefiting the country’s richest 1%, Bush cut funds in half for the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The new generation of architects, despite good intentions, must fight to save their talents from being wasted. In the latest issue of Manhattan-based Metropolis Magazine, Karrie Jacobs’ “America” Column is titled with a mock newspaper headline: “Bush To Cities: Drop Dead!” Citing architects like North Carolina’s Bryan Bell, and KRDB of Texas, Jacobs writes, “Think of HUD cuts the way the scientific community might think of the abandonment of the Hubble telescope, a debilitating blow to a mission of exploration that’s allowing us to see farther and more clearly than we have ever seen before.”

The efforts to fix cities are losing funding, meanwhile corporations are taking over metropolitan centers. Aging Manhattanites lament the loss of local character, and they’re right-non-chain businesses are steadily struggling and selling out to multinational businesses. Manhattan’s delicious redolent sleaze has given way to clinical tedium. The old New York is relegated to the edges of the outer boroughs, and the city center is growing so fast it might soon engulf them. And this is the Big Apple, America’s most cosmopolitan city in population, and most European in urban plan. If you want to visit cities in Kansas, land is tax-free, but there are other problems. Check out www.kansasfreeland.com. Middle America wants you-it’s a bargain but strings are attached. Uncle Sam wants you too.
[Virginia Gardiner]

©copyright archphoto-Virginia Gardiner