Arquitect Retoric

This study has shown that there is a distinct continuity and homogeneity in the competition architecture over the period of fifty-one years from 1939-90. The series of prize-winning designs features good and also exciting projects, many of which have been carried out with elegance and consistency. As a whole this series of selected competition designs is not characterized by exceptional,brilliant “threshold” designs, nor does it appear as a institutional “barriers” that has reject apochal or the “best” designs. It supports the notion of competitions sustaining the core value orientations of the prevalent energies in the profession, which they, the competitions, serve by continuous publications of the ideas and codes that are being developed. The competitions architecture reflects acertain hegemony, a certain layer of these codes.
The threefold rhetoric which consist of the architectural design, the verbal and the visual rhetoric of the competition publication, allows a broad advocacy of the hegemonic competition architecture. It mediates the implicit value orientations both as response to the major energies and immediate issues in society, and as a more specific expression ofthe underlying artistic drives, and codes, within the profession of architecture. The competition material and its rhetorical advocacies have been studied from three angles : the overall attitudes with respect to new architecture versus the old, the spatial aspect including conceptions of use, and the façades and interfaces. These aspects, which together constitute the architectural totality,follow different rhythms and lines of development. As the development of the different aspect has its turning point or breakthrough at different points in time, important changes in the hegemonic architecture can occur while, at the same time, a continuity is manifest.

The competition rhetoric relates the new architecture to the current and most urgent issues in society, supporting a fervent beliefin progress in the first period, and the more pluralistic energies embraces by the market consumerism of the later years. Both verbally and visually the rhetoric presents the new welfare state and alienates the old architecture in the first period, whereas later, adaptation of the new to the old is emphasised. At the same time the question of the monumentality elucidates the more subtlealienation of the old, by which the rhetorical advocacies perpetually legitimate the artistic liberty to create newness and contrast. The relative valuation of the old, whether attributed with negative connotations such a “crooked and ugly” and “unpleasant monumentality”, or positive as “magnificent” and “humanly alive”, is in tune with the general soundboard of a society with egalitarian idealsand goals for the new, irrespective of whether better hygiene or general attractiveness and accessibility are stressed.
With respect to space and conceptions of use the threefold rhetoric illuminates the complex problem of creating permanent , physical structures in an area devoted to the cult of monument, change and expansion, in both a technological and a social sense. The rhetoric appears witha dual advocacy: on the one hand the new architectural spaces are clear, simple and rational and, on the other, great emphasis has been placed on invoking a sense of vitality and multiplicity. The rhetoric tones down conflict and attempts to persuade its audience of a harmonious unity, suggesting an infinite and inclusive interplay between life an architecture. Verbally this advocacy is achievedby using metaphorical expressions which create vivid images of harmonious and pluralistic human life, such as the “chess metaphor”, the “living organism” and “nature” connotations persuasively suggest. A certain confusion of the architecture and the projected use is apparent. The most striking feature of the visual rhetoric is the degree to which it exaggerates the openness and boundless...