Age of blockbusters

In the mid- and late ‘70s, blockbuster films such as “Jaws” and “Star Wars” brought an end to the American auteurist cinema that had fermented in the years before. The same thing, Witold Rybczynski wrote recently, is happening to architecture, which is more and more about dazzle and star architects, about structures as tourist attractions.

Buildings “are built for the ages,” wrote the professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania in an eloquent Atlantic Monthly article that provoked a recent discussion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “They are not one-night stands, like blockbuster movies or blockbuster art shows.” He called the growing problem “the Bilbao effect” after Frank Gehry’s celebrated Iberian installment of the Guggenheim Museum, whose flowing sails and sculpted curves have revived the fortunes of Bilbao, Spain.

It was a fascinating premise for a discussion, especially with the growing interest in architecture in Los Angeles and with the city’s tradition of unconventional construction. For better or worse, the ensuing conversation at the museum last week -- which included Rybczynski; New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger; and moderator Paul Holdengraber, head of LACMA’s Institute for Art and Cultures -- never quite got there. Or it came, and it went. The evening veered from topic to topic, some aesthetic, some architectural, some more broadly cultural, with a combination of engagement and raggedness.

The event took place only a few days after LACMA’s announcement that it is postponing, perhaps canceling, its ambitious renovation by Rem Koolhaas for lack of funds as well as on the eve of the opening of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, a work by Tadao Ando, a great architect, said Goldberger, “who’s not interested in getting into a war with art.”

The event, which had been rescheduled, became more timely, if substantially less focused: The conversation circled around these two issues, with questions from the audience concentrating on the work of Gehry and his Walt Disney Concert Hall under construction in L.A.

The mention of the delayed LACMA plan brought, oddly, a spontaneous burst of clapping -- museum plants, perhaps? -- from the crowd. Goldberger gave the museum’s original buildings a backhanded compliment: “I used to feel that the only cultural achievement of this building was to inspire that painting by Ed Ruscha, ‘The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire.’ ” But over the decades, he said, he’d “stopped hating” the “problematic, difficult building.”

Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, with its fractured Star of David, came in for substantially more praise; Goldberger called its visual metaphor the rare one that doesn’t seem glib and literal but rather deepens in meaning by eerily shaping its internal spaces.

LACMA’s Bing Theater, capacity 600, was packed with the usual audience drawn by Holdengraber’s institute: a mix of greasy-haired art kids, suited Westside professionals and mink-clad matrons, plus a heavy dose of architects, designers and architecture groupies. There was a strong showing from the city’s cultural elite, including Los Angeles Philharmonic’s executive director Deborah Borda; gazillionaire philanthropist Eli Broad; UCLA Performing Arts Director David Sefton; CalArts president Steven Lavine (who offered a brief introduction); and a clutch from KCRW and the Morphosis architectural firm.

When Goldberger, who is writing a book about rebuilding the World Trade Center site, called Los Angeles the most creative city in America “next to New York,” he drew hisses from the crowd. It was the kind of lively audience whose members didn’t hesitate to shout “louder!” when they couldn’t hear.

Some of the conversation was familiar fare. It may be time, for instance, for a moratorium on slams at London’s Tate Modern. Architecture specialists seemed to leave the conversation less satisfied than the general audiences who had come out to eavesdrop.

As for Bilbao and its effect, Goldberger gave Gehry’s museum its due. “It’s as if you had a serious composer writing a modern symphony that beat out everything on the Billboard charts.”

Bilbao’s damage, as Rybczynski put it, came from the false expectations forced on other structures: “You weren’t building a building anymore: You were building a generator, a reviver of downtown.” In most cases, he said, mentioning Philadelphia’s new Verizon Hall, a museum is just a museum, a concert hall just a concert hall, inhabited only by a small group and open for a specific part of the day or night.

When asked to conclude something about the future of architecture, Goldberger mentioned the impact of virtual architecture: “Cyberspace, threatening to take us away from real space. At the end of the day, technology will always have its way.”

Though they didn’t seem to have any root disagreements -- which might have framed the discussion more firmly -- the two panelists managed to puncture each other’s arguments and to demonstrate, at least, a contrast in manners: Goldberger witty, physically wiry, speaking with a Woody Allen speed; Rybczynski stoic, physically solid, with a heft to his thinking.

In the end, what the evening was about more than anything wasn’t “Architecture and the Wow Factor,” the conversation’s official title, but flashes of light, accidental pleasures.

Many of the issues existed more as questions than answers: Should architects design buildings only in cities they know well? Does a city need “background architecture” that facilitates street life and makes the monuments stand out more boldly? Should curators shape museum architecture the way acousticians do a concert hall? Do cultures build monuments when they’re in decline, the way a quarreling couple might build a new house to save their ailing marriage?

Near the night’s end, Rybczynski offered a memorable parting shot as he recalled the days when architecture was less glamorous and an interest in it was like a secret affair.

“It was something, for instance, your parents didn’t know anything about.... It was like working for the CIA or something.”

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Punching bag

When a restored brick electric generator on the Thames’ South Bank was opened in 2000 as the Tate Modern, Europe’s largest contemporary art space, the building received mixed reviews.

Dubbed the anti-Dome, it was eviscerated by some, and even many of the forgiving critics said it was an uncomfortable place to view art.

Over time, the assessments have actually grown harsher. In an appearance at LACMA in June, art historian Kirk Varnedoe called the Tate Modern “a Fascist building worthy of Mussolini.”

Said Paul Goldberger last Wednesday: “It was better when it was a power plant ... utterly and completely joyless.”