Borrowing and Ranting

From John Massengale's blog:

Frank Gehry experiments on your brain.



This is a sick joke. I don't even blame Frank Gehry at this point because a two-year old can predict (and model) what kind of design he might regurgitate.

I blame the Cleveland Clinic. First of all, you are one of the premier health care providers in the world. Is it really responsible to be paying the millions of dollars in fees that Frank Gehry commands, then passing these along to your customers, in this case those suffering from brain-related maladies?

Relatedly, as we discovered through work with Johns Hopkins, who desired to become the best medical school on the planet, what would take them to that level they found was really what is OUTSIDE the walls: the place, the safety, the activity, the livelihood of a true, authentic place. Where staff can go to a nearby bookstore, or a coffee shop, or visitors can hit a flower shop, or Docs and students can live nearby in suitably priced places for each.

Lastly, this is the center for BRAIN HEALTH. As Libeskind's expansion to the Denver Art Museum shows, "playful" expressions of planes (or blobs) become disorienting. This article further examines the unintended consequences of "Can we build it" architecture vs. Should we do it.

It opens with a quote from Georges Braque:

Art is made to disturb.

But, architects as much as they may wish to be are not artists. Certainly, it is appropriate in some cases, such as the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, the epicenter of such horrifying commands. In that case it can and should disturb. But, a memorial is an artwork. Certain buildings should be celebrated, such as bridges crossing physical barriers, houses of democracy or justice besting our inner barbarism, etc.

There is an argument to be made for an art museum being a work of "art" itself, but a center for health and rehabilitation? There money would have been better spent on cognitive and spatial awareness specialists, no?

I'm guessing vertigo and nausea weren't goals for the Cleveland Clinic at the outset of the design process. Hardly appropriate for a Brain Health Center, unless of course, you are trying to make new customers, which when you think about it is typically the end goal of a profit-driven health care industry: more customers, i.e. more sick people.

In fact, I think seeing the construction of another Eisenmann, Libeskind, Hadid, or Gehry, et al building will make me crazy as well.

Sprockets Prefer Communism

Obviously, American millennials don't share a similar history as these East Germans, but this is one worry that I have: swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. In this article, Der Spiegel discusses the causes and implications of the primarily young East German led re-emergent preference for Communism:

His verdict on the GDR is clear: "As far as I'm concerned, what we had in those days was less of a dictatorship than what we have today." He wants to see equal wages and equal pensions for residents of the former East Germany. And when Schön starts to complain about unified Germany, his voice contains an element of self-satisfaction. People lie and cheat everywhere today, he says, and today's injustices are simply perpetrated in a more cunning way than in the GDR, where starvation wages and slashed car tires were unheard of. Schön cannot offer any accounts of his own bad experiences in present-day Germany. "I'm better off today than I was before," he says, "but I am not more satisfied."

Naturally, I believe that capitalism, when done right, is the most democratic economy, but typically the bottom-up democratic version gets overwhelmed by cycles of business growth and monopolies. Thus, corrupting markets and showing protections are necessary.

As we know, Millennials are communitarians. The opposite of the more defensively individualistic Baby Boom generation. But, this is a pretty fascinating case of people, often not old enough to remember the Berlin Wall, concocting a fake history because the current system has abandoned them rather than simply fixing the system to adapt more appropriately to their needs.

Of course, if fixing the system were so easy, we would have been able to accomplish it already.