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The Serpentine Pavilion 2006; Criticism for Eisenman's Galician Multiplex; Artists "Invest" in Google
SERPENTINE'S FLOATING PAVILION
Die Süddeutsche Zeitung's Alexander Menden explores Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond’s Serpentine Pavilion 2006, an ovoid inflatable canopy whose height is controlled by helium to accommodate varying weather conditions. The sixth pavilion to be built at the Kensington Garden gallery—its forerunners include Zaha Hadid’s entry in 2000 and Álvaro Siza, Eduardo Souto de Moura, and Cecil Balmond’s construction in 2005—will be dismantled at the end of the year and sold for an estimated €1.2 million ($1.5 million). Until then, however, the pavilion will play host to a series of events, including photographic projections from the current Thomas Demand retrospective and two twenty-four-hour interview sessions hosted by Koolhaas and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist featuring such personalities as Brian Eno and Damien Hirst.
As Menden notes, the pavilion is the first design that Koolhaas has realized in London, although his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is now working on an urban-planning project for the city’s West End. While Koolhaas studied in London and has maintained a residence there for thirty years, none of his buildings have appeared in the city prior to the Serpentine pavilion, which was designed in three months and built in a mere three weeks. Does the star architect regret that his first London structure comes with an end-of-the-year expiry date? "No," Koolhaas told the newspaper. "The idea that this is not a permanent building makes me proud."
EISENMAN'S GALICIAN "CITY OF CULTURE"
"Too expensive, too big, and too short on content." That's how Die Süddeutsche Zeitung's Merten Worthmann sums up Peter Eisenman's design for the Cidade da Cultura de Galicia (Galicia's City of Culture), a cultural multiplex currently under construction on Monte Gaiás in Santiago de Compostela. Dubbed the "Magic Mountain," Eisenman's hilltop design comprises six buildings spread over approximately one-hundred thousand square meters (one million square feet) of space: a newspaper archive, a national library, a music theater, a museum for Galician history, a museum for new technologies, and an administrative building. To date, only one of the six buildings is near completion, although €350 million ($445.7 million) have already gone towards the project, which is slated to be completed by 2014.
Eisenman won an international competition to build Cidade da Cultura in 1999, shortly after the success of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao convinced local politicians that a grand museum would serve Galician cultural and economic interests. But after last year's elections transferred power from Spain’s main national conservative party to a coalition of left-wing and socialist parties, both regional and local politicians have questioned the cost and utility of Eisenman's biggest project to date. "If we could start all over again, if we had the choice between yes or no, then we would definitely decide against the project," said Galician cultural representative Francisco Carracedo, who has overseen Cidade da Cultura since last fall. Apart from the high budget, critics argue that the project is too big to serve the local population of Santiago de Compostela, which numbers a mere 100,000. Moreover, the function of some of the buildings is not clear. Since February, construction has been halted on the music theater and the museum for new technologies until the use of these buildings can be clarified. The moratorium on construction will continue until March 2007.
ARTISTS CANNIBALIZE GOOGLE
A group of Austrian and Italian artists have collaborated on the project GWEI—aka Google Will Eat Itself—to tackle Google's dominance of the internet. As Die Presse's Daniela Tomasovsky reports, GWEI—created by ubermorgen.com’s lizvlx and Hans Bernhard along with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio—exploits Google's own online financing-through-advertising system. "GWEI anonymously gives Google access to numerous advertising spaces, which are invisibly linked to each other," explains Tomasovsky. "Clicking on one of these pages triggers clicks on all of the other pages, and Google has to pay for them."
To date, GWEI has generated over $27,000, with the profits going right back to the source; the artists used the money to purchase seventy-five shares in Google. At the current rate, GWEI will fully own the search engine in 202 million years. In the meantime, the artists hope to raise questions without providing any definitive answers. "We are not really criticizing but making something visible," lizvlx told Die Presse, "Namely, the monopoly of power that Google enjoys. [Google] determines how it can make money with the help of others and, at the same time, it determines how much they will pay for it."