Modern" architecture, "Modern" materials and "Modern" technology

Citation

Cannon-Brookes, P. (2002), "Modern" architecture, "Modern" materials and "Modern" technology", European Business Review, Vol. 14 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2002.05414cab.006

"Modern" architecture, "Modern" materials and "Modern" technology

Peter Cannon-Brookes

Keywords: Architecture, Buildings, Design

September 11, 2001, and the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York, have come as a sharp reminder of the fragility of Man's creations when subjected to a determined attack by terrorists. The mechanisms by which these huge buildings collapsed have been analysed at length by armchair engineers, and comparisons have been made with other scenarios involving similar attacks on high profile buildings constructed to different specifications. Much less attention has been paid to the motivation of these attacks and the criteria adopted for the selection of these specific targets. However, taking into account the public statements made by those claiming to have organised the attacks, the perceived invasion of cultural space has been an important factor. "Modern" high profile buildings represent to many – and not only in the Islamic world – a rejection of traditional value systems and the increasingly brutal intrusion of rampant materialism and Western economic hegemony.

Far from being a "popular" architectural language, that of Modernism, coupled with its exploitation of "modern" materials and its reliance upon brute-force technology to ignore the outside world, has for over half a century signally failed to capture the hearts and minds of all but a cultural elite. Museum buildings – the cathedrals in which Man's creations are worshipped – are, not surprisingly, generally built in accordance with the Modernist criteria prevailing in those circles, and regardless of the appropriateness of those criteria to the fundamental archival function performed by museums as public institutions. Consequently the relationship between museums as institutions collecting and preserving material evidence of cultural and scientific significance, for the benefit of this and future generations, and "Modern" architecture is particularly sensitive. Furthermore, both the analysis of it, and the conclusions to be drawn, have a much wider application.

As part of this process, April 2001 brought together in Sarajevo an unusual gathering of museum professionals to discuss "Catastrophes and Catastrophe Management in Museums". Organised jointly by two partner museums, the Zemaljski Musej of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum based at Innsbruck, the immediate intention was to share constructively the lessons to be learned from the damage sustained during the hostilities which accompanied the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The choice of the "wounded city" of Sarajevo as the venue for such a congress was highly appropriate and delegates were able to experience at first-hand both the devastation wrought by the extended siege of the city and the impressive recovery already being achieved by its courageous citizens. As might be expected, many of the 58 contributions presented there described aspects of the massive damage sustained by museum collections and museum buildings in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), while others reported relevant experiences from across the world – natural disasters as well as violent attacks – including information dating back to the Second World War. Rather less attention, however, was directed towards those material factors which are liable to influence both the type and the extent of the damage likely to be sustained as a consequence of natural disaster as well as violent attack, not least the locating, design and construction of museum buildings.

Even to the determined researcher in this field, frighteningly little detailed information is available concerning the particular problems to be encountered when a violent attack or a natural disaster strikes buildings constructed of "Modern" materials to "Modern" designs. This problem is compounded when the mechanism of a violent attack also involves "Modern" materials and "Modern" technology. Most of the generally available technical data on the impact, for example, of military explosives dates from the Second World War when relatively few buildings of cultural importance were of "Modern" design and constructed on "Modern" materials, and the impact of a Second World War tank shell on a traditional brick or stone structure is very different to that of a high velocity round tipped with depleted uranium on a concrete, steel or glass structure. Delegates driving from Sarajevo Airport to the centre of the city soon became only too aware of these differences – the Austro-Hungarian brick buildings of c.1900 absorbed a remarkable amount of punishment, while Tito-era buildings simply collapsed. Those who visited Mostar during the course of the congress noticed similar phenomena in that city.

The differences are not limited to the structural damage sustained, and so those responsible for cultural property also have to be increasingly alert to the collateral problems posed by both the residues left by the propellants of missiles, warhead casings and explosive charges of offensive weapons employed by both official military forces and terrorists, and the combustion products of cocktails of plastics, synthetic coatings, insulating materials, etc. Depleted uranium in the museum environment has been the subject of an editorial in Museum Management and Curatorship&/it; (2001) and Mladenko Kumovic's account of the damage – mercifully limited – was entirely collateral, but the impact was greatest on the new wing where all the glass walls on two levels were reported to have been destroyed (circa 500 square metres), while fragments of rockets penetrated deep into the permanent displays within. In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, it has been tacitly assumed that depleted uranium was not involved in this particular intervention, though on future occasions that assumption may not be able to be made quite so readily.

Estate agents are fond of prefacing the valuation of their real estate with the assertion to their clients that, above all, property values depend on "location, location, location", and in this context the same mode of thinking has to be applied to museums and the location of their buildings. The future safety and preservation of a museum's collections should always be the prime consideration, and the finest building, replete with the latest technology but at risk from flooding, for example, is fundamentally unsuitable for museum purposes. Prevention is always better than a cure, and museum authorities have a basic responsibility to build museums, or adapt existing buildings for museum purposes, in sensible locations to sensible designs which reflect their prime functions rather than bend to seductive non-museum considerations, including the bolstering of the egos of architects and patrons. This way of thinking accords well with the traditional but currently unfashionable view that in respect of security and conservation considerations museums must be "object-driven" and not "people-driven", not least because the preservation of collections undamaged the benefit of both this and future generations must take precedence over other considerations no matter how desirable today. Underestimation of the potentially awesome destructive power of natural forces and quite small quantities of "modern" explosives, or choosing to disregard them, continues to be all too evident, leading to repeated and often avoidable catastrophic losses.

Museum buildings are by their nature special buildings, and the safety of their contents is paramount. Consequently, on both economic and security grounds, the need is always to work with nature and to avoid relying excessively upon technological expertise to neutralise natural forces. Basement storage of collections, for example, is on occasion unavoidable, or the least hazardous of a variety of less than satisfactory solutions, even when protected by the best technology available; there is however little excuse for its adoption for a new development when less dangerous provision can be made instead. This is not the context in which to name names. Nonetheless, the hubris of all too many museum designers and their clients remains the greatest single threat to the future safety of their museum buildings and the collections housed in them. Nobody in his right mind would choose to locate a museum on a flood plain with a history of flooding – least of all containing stored collections – and would only locate their limited displays composed of readily transportable items after taking special precautions. However, it is unhappily not enough to build a sensible structure in a sensible location, in harmony with nature, because it is Man who is the great destroyer.

The Mafia bombing of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (1993) demonstrated the very extensive damage able to be inflicted on a robust historic structure and its contents, and this outrage also serves to remind all museum professionals of the implications of the growing dependence of local and national economies on the earnings to be derived from cultural tourism. This dependence greatly increases the vulnerability of museums and their visitors to attacks from those seeking to impose their political wills on those economies, or, as in Egypt for example, rejecting the perceived cultural values of those visitors. Cultural tourism is both a tender plant and a crucial component of too many economies. Political activists in an ever-growing number of countries, in Europe and beyond, deeply resent the "invasion of cultural space" by tourists and threaten violence in an attempt to exclude them. In this environment individuals, collections and buildings are all potentially at risk, and a violent attack on any one is likely to involve collateral damage to the others. The huge damage sustained by the Modernist Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City by, it is reported, 4,800lb of homemade explosives, planted by disgruntled citizens, should have provided a salutary lesson to all in the West.

In Sarajevo the plate glass windows on the exterior of the Historical Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina were amongst the first casualties of the recent hostilities (some 1,600 square metres) and, unable any longer to maintain its security perimeter adequately, part of its collections were looted notwithstanding sniper fire (as reported by Ahmed Hadzirovic). The bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York by terrorists in 1993 also served to remind museum designers of the incompatibility of uncontrolled public car parking and irreplaceable museum collections. In London, the folly of proposing to locate, on the Hampton Site, the extension to the National Gallery over such a car park was rapidly exposed and those plans abandoned, but a number of important collections elsewhere in Europe are in acute danger from such car parking and inadequately controlled access by vehicles into the close vicinity of museum display and storage areas and/or their security control centres. It would be rank irresponsibility to identify in these pages the major collections in Europe currently at risk from planning and design failures which leave them open to even unsophisticated terrorist attack, but such is the wilful lack of realism demonstrated by many museum authorities and their architects that such "soft" buildings continue to be constructed, to house collections of unique cultural property, totally disregarding the hazards thereby created. Within the International Council of Museums, which is closely related to UNESCO, the ICMS (International Committee for Museum Security) has for many years provided practical professional advice directed at reducing these hazards, though such advice tends to be sought much too late in the planning process. Nonetheless, as a general principle intended to minimise the risk of catastrophic losses, uncontrolled car parks should only reluctantly be located immediately alongside "soft" museum buildings and never beneath or within even the most robust structure.

Glass is an extremely attractive building material for architects working in the Modern idiom and, cladding a steel-framed structure, it has for the patrons the benefit of enclosing relatively large volumes of space at low cost: "you get more building for your buck". As a building material it is very cheap and resistant to weather if installed correctly, and it can be transparent – revealing the interiors and their contents – or translucent and back-lit, or opaque, etc., according to taste, but transmitting powerful messages of Modernity, inclusivity and all the other buzz-words of contemporary marketing and cultural politics. On the other hand – as demonstrated by the museums in Sarajevo and Novi Sad, and indeed the Oklahoma City bomb – it is easily breakable and a relatively small amount of even homemade explosive will wreak spectacular havoc on glass-clad buildings, leaving the contents exposed to the wind, rain, thieves and vandals, and the occupants virtually helpless. The obvious, if unfashionable, conclusion must be that a minimum of glass should be employed for the external walls of museum buildings, and whenever possible relatively costly laminated glass should be used in those locations. The property, including libraries and archives, should not depend upon external glazing alone, and glass walls, etc., should be confined to areas within the secure perimeters enclosing those collections. The example provided by the Historical Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina is by no means unique, and the governing bodies and designers of museums must learn from past experience. Prevention is always preferable to a cure.

Having constructed a museum building to a sensible design in a sensible location, and avoided gratuitous hazards such as building directly under established low-level flight paths, the museum still needs to address the possibility of the unthinkable happening. In the museum world considerable literature has grown up around the demand for "disaster planning" by all institutions, not least the Getty Conservation Institute's (1999) substantial publication Building an Emergency Plan&/it;. However, this otherwise admirable document fails to address the fundamental issues involved in minimising the need for one! A new breed of experienced "hazard mitigation consultants" has emerged and they are increasingly in a position to feed back into the architectural and museum professions the grim experience gained in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, as well as Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon and other areas recently afflicted by formal hostilities, terrorism and natural disasters. Nonetheless, by their very nature, published disaster planning documents tend to draw overwhelmingly on past experience and their authors have been reluctant to speculate about scenarios yet to be experienced outside the fertile imaginations of Hollywood film directors. September 11, 2001 should in this respect prove to be something of a watershed, but there is growing evidence that its lessons have not been learnt. Standard practice in fire-fighting, for example, focuses first on the evacuation of all persons within the building and the minimisation of injury suffered by them. Only then can the focus be transferred to the second priority, that of minimising the damage to the structure of the building. If those contents are commercial goods and readily accessible, then this course of action is entirely reasonable and the building constructed to house them can be designed accordingly, but museum collections, like historic libraries and archives, are composed of unique objects which rarely can be replaced and the design of museum buildings should always respect their archival function. Indeed, the contents of museum buildings are with few exceptions considerably more precious than the buildings housing them.

Although the Getty Emergency Plan poses the question: "How could the presence of a chemical hazard interfere with emergency procedures?" it offers little advice as to how it should be addressed, or indeed avoided in the first place. Conspicuous among the omissions from most published disaster planning documents are the acute problems posed by the impact of such contaminants on those called upon to rescue the occupants and then the museum collections in the aftermath of a disaster. The uncomfortable truth is that, outside the small circles of specialists, in reality the gaps in our collective knowledge concerning collateral hazards are truly stunning, and these are not limited to blue asbestos and the combustion products of plastics, adhesives, surface coatings and synthetic insulating materials smouldering in ill-ventilated spaces.

Human life is infinitely precious and special breathing apparatus is available for use by fire crews to counter the hazards posed by these potentially lethal contaminants. Reckless heroics with regard to rescuing museum collections and other cultural property cannot be encouraged, in the interests of preserving life and future health, but catastrophes will continue to occur and those responsible for collections of cultural property need to have considered carefully their responses to these issues before they are faced by an emergency and required to act immediately. Again, prevention is better than a cure, and a high priority must be given to reducing the sources of potential contaminants in the first place during design and construction. Consequently the special problems posed by museum buildings provide useful lessons with regard to the location, design and construction of other buildings intended to perform to less exacting requirements.

ReferencesEditorial (2001), Museum Management and Curatorship (2001), Vol. XIX No. 1, March.Getty Conservation Institute (1999), Building an Emergency Plan: A Guide for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions, Dorge, V. and Jones, S. (compilers), Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, CA.