![]() ![]() Compared to what a building costs, most still offer cheaper thrills He seems to be able to attract vast resources for floating parks, garden bridges, and now scissoring stairs. Now artists such as Heatherwick are taking the medium to new heights and scales. It was too big and too bad as a building. An ungainly persiflage of Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, it failed as both spectacle and aesthetic object. When Turrell started using electric lights with changing spectrums, it was the art world equivalent of Bob Dylan playing electric guitar at the Newport Jazz Festival.Įliasson has similarly traded in delicate pieces that used water, simple prisms, and sometimes just shaded walls, for complex constructions that come out of the factory-like workshop in Berlin that employs more people than most of the good architects in that city.Īnish Kapoor reached what many thought was the limit of what was possible or good when he designed the ArcelorMittal Orbit for the London 2012 Olympics. Over the last 15 years, this installation work has become both larger and more reliant on technology. What is remarkable is that its effect is indeed to sum up Chicago: the famed skyscrapers, mirrored in the curving surfaces, become a halo around every person who takes a picture there, making everybody part of this most American of metropolises. ![]() It has become the most photographed site in the city and the ultimate selfie magnet. The one piece that really engraved this new art on people's consciousness was the "bean" – Anish Kapoor's polished mirror torus, called Cloud Gate, which he installed at Chicago's Millennium Park in 2006. Against Olufar Eliasson's and Carsten Holler's sophistication, the annual experiments at the Serpentine Gallery seem trivial Against Eliasson's and artist Carsten Holler's sophistication, the annual experiments at the Serpentine Gallery, which have become architecture's counterpoint to these installations, seem trivial. Starting with Olufar Eliasson's yellow sun in 2000, this vast space, which – at least architects might think – should be big enough to impress all by itself, has become the site for giant abstractions and slides that turned us all into children. Though the Guggenheim Museum in New York was the site of Turrell's most elaborate installation in 2014, it is the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern that has been the real engine through which the art of spectacle has motored through the public consciousness and into their hearts. Now Turrell can turn hotels and museums into kaleidoscopes that defy the diurnal rhythms and light and dark, replacing it with hues that directly affect how we perceive space. Related story "We can't stop super-blocks or sprawl, but we have to make space for life in between" Although you can trace the architecture of spectacle back to the masques of the early Renaissance, it was really not until the beginning of this century that the staging of effects and the contemplative dissolution of buildings that artists such as James Turrell had been developing for several decades reached such a scale and a sophistication that they could be truly effective beyond a small scale. Bigger and more expensive than most civic monuments, it is also better at the Wow Factor. The recent announcement of the $150 million Vessel, the Thomas Heatherwick staircase to nowhere slated for an office development in Manhattan, makes it clear that installation art has finally taken over the last bastion of architecture, namely the civic monuments that define us as a culture and society. ![]() We really don't need buildings anymore to thrill and chill us And if we need something more than that, something public and unifying or just grand and weird enough to take us out of ourselves, art can take care of it. We can socialise online, technology can keep us comfortable and safe in whatever form works most efficiently, we gain identity from the memes and images floating around us. Let's face it, we really don't need buildings anymore to thrill and chill us – or for anything. Gone are the days of the Eiffel Tower and the Parthenon, the Mall in Washington and even the Burj Khalifa. The infamous Bilbao Effect might have been the last gasp of great architecture giving us a thrill.
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