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SCENIC DRIVE (p. 2 of 3)

1 | 2 | 3 | JUL '04

By the 1970s, the driving landscape had been reduced to "big ducks" and "decorated sheds" – terms used to describe purely sculptural or functional buildings in the book Learning from Las Vegas by three Yale University architecture professors. Architecture’s new tools were distance and speed, not scale and mass. Nature gave way to artifice. Toronto architect Peter Berton recently echoed the "duck" theory, slamming Will Alsop’s new Ontario College of Art & Design building in the National Post: "I call this stuff ‘drive-by’ architecture. These are forms which you can ‘read’ instantaneously as you fly by in your car… They’re one-liners. That’s why the public likes them."

Things changed when driving became a necessity, not just a luxury or pleasure. Wide multilane highways linked the urban with the suburban rather than the rural. The eye candy of shopping centres and bright blinking signs signalled something new about culture: our love for the larger-than-life, our need for speed and efficiency. That’s why much carchitecture revolves around commerce. "Carchitecture is also marketecture – it’s market-driven," says Tom Lewis, a professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the author of the book Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life. "And the highways put marketecture on steroids." Consider the ubiquitous Autogrill restaurants on Italian autostradas, the welcoming palms of the Fashion Island shopping complex in Newport Beach, Calif., or the shimmering new aluminum blob of a Selfridges store in Birmingham, England: You see, you stop, you shop. (Ironically, Toronto – a city known worldwide for its waterfront-destroying urban highways – recently became the first North American city to pass a bylaw attempting to ban new drive-in retail facilities.)

As culture sped up, carchitecture got bigger. Passing motorists had only a few seconds of viewing time, so buildings bulked up to be noticed. Formerly functional public structures like bridges became monumental, almost sculptural. The evolution of mega-vehicles also supersized carchitecture: From the wraparound windscreens of the 1950s to today’s gigantic SUVs, the windshield, our frame for viewing carchitecture, keeps getting bigger. As The New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp recently described the Los Angeles urban landscape, "If you want to make unity of the city’s architecture, you must get in the car and zigzag around town, turning the windshield this way and that, as if it were a lens, piling image next to image like a David Hockney photomontage."

This must have been the way planners imagined viewing Olympic-era Barcelona. The specially built Ronda del Litoral (ring road) framed the city’s best assets – its coast, its skyline, the Olympic village – for vehicular viewers. One of Santiago Calatrava’s glorious bridges (like others in Seville, Rotterdam and Bilbao) swoops across to a Barcelona suburb. Similarly, drivers assemble a visual puzzle of primary-coloured building blocks as they enter Melbourne through the International Gateway. A yellow beam forms a futuristic arch over the skyline; an orange wall is a sophisticated noise barrier. Changing with distance and speed, 39 crimson columns appear first as a solid red mass, then splinter as you approach. Visitors experience a dynamic vision of Melbourne before ever setting foot in it; it’s life lived from the seat of a car.

1 | 2 | 3 | JUL '04