I LOVE YOUR EARLY WORK

What do the first, pre-fame projects of today’s headline architects tell us about them? Was their success, or career path, predictable? Hugh Pearman gets nostalgic

This is the book of the exhibition of the same name at the AA in London, which runs until February 13. It’s based on a very simple, seductive idea: what were the early projects of now famous architects like?  Do they stand the test of time, could you tell by looking at them what greatness lay in store, what can they teach us? For that matter (this being a product of the famously conceptual AA school) was there any inkling as to which architects would get built, and which would remain theorists?

Some have managed to balance both careers, not least Bernard Tschumi. Now best known for buildings such as the New Acropolis Museum, he has maintained a strong theoretical stance alongside his practice. But back then (then being 1974) he was into fireworks. For him, architecture was not about form and function, but space and event. And what better way to define space than with fireworks? His notations and visualisations of how he intended (and in fact did) make architecture in the air with fire are beautiful and lucid.

More conventional – in the sense that they always intended to build – is that well-known early Norman Foster/Richard Rogers project, the cockpit-like ‘Retreat’ of 1963 near the hallowed Team Four house at Creek Vean in Cornwall.  It is rather touching that, in his accomplished sketches, Foster alternately calls it a ‘Wendy Hut’ or ‘Wendy House’, presumably after his then wife and partner. As he remarks today: ‘The Retreat established a recurring theme of partially buried, glazed structures that would be explored at a far greater scale’. Rogers simply describes it as a ‘house in miniature’ – but then this was not a line of exploration he was going to follow in the way Foster was.

Early Herzog and de Meuron is here, and very knowing it is too – the Blue House of 1979-80 in Oberwil. A commentary on Swiss suburbia, it ‘at once aligns with and distances itself from its neighbours’, as the pair explain. No hint here of what was to come in their later world-conquering projects – just a wry twist on a familiar form. Similarly with Rem Koolhaas: nobody expected this megalomaniac to go global, surely?  Back in 1972, with good cheekbones and a shock of unruly hair as the photos prove, he was story-telling through architecture. His ‘Exodus, or the voluntary prisoners of architecture’ project comes with a typed narrative: this is an allegory of good versus evil, where the good have become evil by constructing a wall around themselves. Ring any topical bells?  It looks a bit Superstudio, really, this orthogonal slash across the cityscape, this ultimate gated community, but it is designed in great detail and anticipates his later real (less overtly political) masterplans. Rem was always thinking big. The talent was clear, the direction it would take less so.

And so on through so many good names – Venturi, Price, Michael Webb of Archigram, Siza, Rossi, Moneo, Piano, Ito, Libeskind, Hadid and more. It is utterly fascinating. Steele remarks in his introduction: ‘I would argue that a re-examination of how to begin a critical architectural practice… is even more urgent in 2009 than it may have been four decades ago, when the proto-professional takeover of the field was still only part-way conceived, and yet prompted so many counter-projects and furious experimentation at the time.’ He’s referring to the way the business of architecture and the avoidance of risk have taken over from original thought, the widening divide between theory and practice. These people were able to bridge that gap – both re-imagine architecture and, in most cases, go on to build it. Shall we look upon their like again? Well, yes, of course we shall. But who, and when?

First works: Emerging architectural experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s
eds Brett Steele and Francisco Gonzalez de Canales
Architectural Association, £40

EDITORS’ SELECTION

One Planet Communities: A Real Life Guide to Sustainable Living
Pooran Desai. Wiley Publishers £24.00
Desai exposes misconceptions on how to build zero carbon communities, showing the aim as desirable and affordable, and offers a framework for structured thinking in sustainability. CK

Architecture on the Edge of Postmodernism
Robert AM Stern. Yale University Press. £30.00
This compilation of Stern’s essays, 1964-1988, spanning the global crossover of modernism into postmodernism covers two broad positions; pure history, and contemporary accounts as the style developed. CK

Why Architecture Matters
Paul Goldberger Yale University Press. £18.99
This Pulitzer-prize winning critic’s personal treatise argues that, in a capitalist society, if we want better architecture, it is up to the individual to take a personal interest in it. A lay-person’s guide on how to look at architecture and interpret it. CK