10 Ă— 10 by Haig Beck et al, Phaidon, ÂŁ35, ISBN 0714839221
Anyone who browses in book shops or works in a library occasionally loses
sight of the books’ content and experiences them exclusively for their covers
and shapes—the strong colours of the jackets, the pyramids of bestsellers,
or the ranked volumes stretching into the distance.
Colour, form and repetition of order are all vital ingredients of
architecture too: the library or shop you stand in also repeats and rearranges
elements of design and engineering. Most are familiar: like the column and
pillar. But open up 10×10 and you’ll find that this isn’t necessarily
so.
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10Ă—10 is a doorstep of a book in which 10 leading critics have each
picked their 10 favourite architects. But instead of an ordered, “here’s modern
architecture, let’s dissect it” approach, the critics have written a brief note
about the professionals, then let pictures of their work speak for
themselves.
On page after page, you’ll find eye candy of the most superior kind. Glowing
pools of light make an office look like a swimming pool. And the Photonic Centre
in Berlin, by architects Sauerbruch Hutton, uses paint and tinted blinds
to manipulate and stack colour in bookish slabs. I particularly liked Nox’s
Water Pavilion in Zeeland, Holland, a giant tube of metal shrugged around a
curved site, revealing a forest of struts and supports fit for a Borg ship from
Star Trek rather than a building for human use. Indeed, Nox often
mutates building plans in a computer.
That mutation in cyberspace is hardly surprising as this virtual world is
home to the work of many of the architects in the book. Ben Nicholson, who is
based at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, has an ongoing piece
of virtual work—the Loaf House—that looks like play at its
purest. Walls and other structures seem to float as they curve around each
other. And who could resist his Kleptoman Cell, a spiny concertina the
size of a small room which was once used for housing the stuff we accumulate
without meaning to?
You’ll find another set of 10s—quotes chosen by the 10
critics—lurking near the end of the book. Critic Tom Heneghan’s choice
speaks for itself: “I hate to spoil the party, if what we architects do is an
`art’, then it is the only art, in the present day, which costs thousands of
lives each year in its production—and sometimes, but rarely, the lives of
its artists. That monument to ourself might be someone else’s tombstone. Does
this affect the way we think of architecture?” His source? Census of Fatal
Occupational Injuries, from the US and Britain.
