The top 10 buildings of the decade | The Guardian

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Review of the decade: Jonathan Glancey on architecture

Taller, shinier, crazier … architecture in the noughties was an outlandish celebration of wealth

In pictures: Top 10 buildings of the decade

Jonathan Glancey guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 December 2009 21.30 GMT Article history

The world's tallest building … Burj Dubai. Photograph: Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2009/dec/07/best-buildings-noughties">More photos</a>

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday 11 December 2009

Mies van der Rohe defined architecture as "the will of an epoch translated into space", not into stone as we had it below.


This was the decade of excess. It began with the Millennium Dome and now comes to an end with the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building, due to open in a matter of weeks. These bold structures frame the noughties – and all its outrageous buildings – like a pair of eye-popping follies.

The Millennium Experience was a triumph of spin and scale. Talked up as "Britain's proudest creation", it was housed in a tent so big and strong that its roof could, apparently, support the weight of a jumbo jet. The whole shebang cost close to £1bn, so, at £40m, at least the Richard Rogers-designed venue seemed something of a bargain.

The Burj Dubai looks set to open its doors just as Dubai's whole economy totters. And while it's true that the Empire State Building was completed during the depression and is now one of the world's most famous buildings, the Burj Dubai's staggering ambition suddenly looks a lot like hubris.

The noughties were bound up with financial speculation and rampant consumerism; architecture inevitably followed suit. (As Mies van der Rohe once said: "Architecture is the will of the epoch translated into stone." Or steel, or titanium.) In fact, you could say the decade actually began in 1997, with the opening of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. This spectacular gallery was designed by Frank Gehry, one of the stars of the noughties, along with Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Norman Foster. Rapturously received, it set the tone for the years of "iconic" architecture that followed. Here was architecture as tourist magnet; travel agents offered weekend breaks to Bilbao simply to see Gehry's voluptuous sensation. British politicians started calling for the "Bilbao effect": it had what they called "the wow! factor".

Architect Alastair Lansley told me he was asked by one senior minister why his new Eurostar station in Ebbsfleet, Kent didn't have the wow factor. Lansley had designed a concrete-and-glass box that spoke honestly of its role as a modern railway station. He didn't want wow, but the minister was unimpressed.

Gehry had let the cat out of the bag. A wave of fantastical new buildings followed, sci-fi-like structures that seemed to have sprung from the writing of JG Ballard. Advances in construction techniques, materials and computer software meant a museum, art gallery, office or mall could be anything a client wanted, provided they had the cash.

Hadid's Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Koolhaas's Casa de Musica in Porto, Foster's 30 St Mary Axe in London (aka the Gherkin), Future Systems' Selfridges in Birmingham, Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue's Scottish Parliament Building – these were eye-catching examples.

The most extreme I saw was the skilful yet strangely nightmarish BMW Welt in Munich, designed by Viennese practice Coop Himmelb(l)au. Here, visitors are given the "BMW experience" as they wander a kind of film set. But what was it all for? To glorify cars. If only such talent could have been channelled into the design of schools, hospitals and public spaces.

Equally, while preaching "sustainability", the British government presided over the spread of poor housing across the country, nearly all of it designed with little or no thought for local jobs, schools, nurseries, youth clubs or public transport – and all of it heavily reliant on the car. This might have been the decade of environmental awareness, yet Britain kept building airport terminals, supermarkets, and mega-malls such as Bluewater and Westfield – as if sustainability just meant sticking a wind turbine on the roof.

This culture of excess brought its own counter-culture. Arguably its most extreme adherent was Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born al-Qaida operative who flew one of the jets into the World Trade Centre. Atta had trained as an architect in Cairo and an urban planner in Hamburg. He wrote his thesis on what he saw as the destruction of Syria's Aleppo, his ideal city, by crude modern commercial development and, in particular, by tower blocks. When he attacked New York, his vicious crusade was as much against skyscrapers as it was against western values and the US.

Would skyscrapers survive in the age of terror? If anything, the attack nurtured a culture of defiance: Middle Eastern cities have shot up – and the Burj Dubai is higher than ever before.

It wasn't all excess, though. Some of the most moving new buildings were the simplest. The Faith House at Holton Lee in Dorset is a quiet space for contemplation. Designed by Tony Fretton for a charitable foundation, it was built in sight of Poole Harbour, in the spirit, says the architect, of a "poor village church". Made of cedar, glass and birch for just £150,000, it's a modern temple providing a still point in a turning world. "I would go to any length," he says, "to avoid architecture as self-portraiture."

In Northumberland's Kielder Forest, the darkest place in England, Charles Barclay designed a delightful, low-key observatory. Visitors can gaze on stars, planets, meteors and satellites from the fir and larch decks of Barclay's pier-like structure. Built for scientists and amateur star-gazers alike, this is a building that, without any fanfare, promises the universe – and delivers it.

Just as noteworthy was the An Turas ferry shelter on Tiree, the Hebridean island. Built by Sutherland Hussey architects for £100,000, and designed with a group of artists, this shelter is a piece of architectural poetry; the way its concrete, glass and timber structure frames and reframes the island, people and the sea is haunting and lyrical.

Inspired by, and respectful of, their locations, these unshowy buildings are testament to the wonders of imagination, rather than depth of pockets. Their spirit – more "Ahh" than "Wow!" – could have informed a very different type of architecture. That's not to say there isn't room for energy and a little madness in the architecture of cities, but excess backfires when it becomes the norm.

The noughties were also underpinned by a revival of engineering structures, many of which involved architects. The list is long, but my highlights include France's Viaduc de Millau, the "Winking Eye Bridge" at Gateshead by Wilkinson Eyre, the London Eye by Marks Barfield (and their Treetop Walkway above Kew Gardens), and the Millennium Bridge, by Norman Foster, Arup and Anthony Caro that famously wobbled before settling into a busy life of guiding people in their thousands over the Thames.

Is the age of bling over? Will the new austerity be translated into stone? Only this week, while walking over London Bridge, I saw the first physical evidence of the "Shard of Glass", the new London Bridge Tower. Designed by Renzo Piano, it will be Britain's first building to top 1,000ft on completion in 2012. Does this skyscraper represent the beginning of a new decade – or is it the last sensational blast of the noughties? I'll get back to you in 10 years' time.

in http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/dec/07/review-of-the-decade-architecture


A Lista é do Jornal Inglês The Guardian.

1 / 10

Millennium Dome, London, 2000

Designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership and engineers Buro Happold, this was a £45m politically-driven folly. Often compared to a giant jellyfish washed up on the Greenwich peninsula, today this huge tent has been reborn as the successful O2. With a diameter of 365m and topping 100m, its titanic scale remains impressive



2 / 10

Blur, Expo 02, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2002

This sensational pavilion, which was designed by New York architects Diller + Scofidio, was the star of Switzerland’s Expo 02. A cat’s cradle of tensile steel, 20m high and 100m long, it brooded at the end of a steel-and-glass jetty over Lake Neuchatel. Inside, some 30,000 water jets created clouds through which mesmerised (and damp) visitors could walk, again and again



3 / 10

Serpentine Pavilion, London, 2002

This lyrical pavilion, designed by architect Toyo Ito and engineer Cecil Balmond, was a suggestion of an architecture of the future, in which boundaries between walls, floor, ceiling, interior and exterior might dissolve. In a decade of bombast, here was profundity and simplicity



4 / 10

30 St Mary Axe, London, 2003

Norman Foster’s Gherkin was admired and scorned. Most were awed by his office tower, although some thought it symbolised the cocksure ambition of the City. Its pleasures are chiefly for those who work here: the skygardens are impressive, and the restaurant is one of the world’s most breathtaking new rooms



5 / 10

European Southern Observatory Hotel, Cerro Paranal, Chile, 2003

This "hotel" for astronomers working in the Atacama desert is a perfect fusion of architecture and landscape, from the Munich practice Auer and Weber and engineers Mayr and Ludescher. Coolly geometric red concrete walls form a quasi-monastic courtyard, behind which rooms are stacked in orderly rows. Ostentation is left to the heavens

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6 / 10

Beijing National Stadium, Beijing, 2008

This eye-catching 80,000-seat stadium, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron with the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, was the architectural highlight of the 2008 Olympics. It consists of two buildings, one inside the other: a red concrete bowl for seating surrounded by the steel “bird’s nest”. Since the Olympics, this charismatic building has been largely redundant



7 / 10

St Pancras station, London, 2007

Magnificent revival of the Victorian Gothic railway terminus, now one of the world’s finest stations. Alastair Lansley led his team over a decade, transforming this fusion of 19th-century architecture and mind-searing engineering into a place for 21st-century trains. The hotel and penthouse flats high in the rafters have yet to be completed



8 / 10

Le Viaduc de Millau, Aveyron, 2004

Awe-inspiring bridge carrying the A75 autoroute across the Tarn Valley in southern France. Designed by the engineer Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster, the Viaduc de Millau is best seen from the tops of the valley sides, especially when its Eiffel Tower-high pylons spear the summer clouds



9 / 10

Neues Museum, Berlin, 2009

After 10 years of painstaking reconstruction, this magnificent 19th-century cultural pantechnicon, closed in 1939, was reopened to popular and critical acclaim. The complex and intelligent redesign was by the British architect, David Chipperfield, who has allowed the old building to breathe while fitting it out with all the new technology it needs



10 / 10

Burj Dubai

Dubai’s economy totters as the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest structure, prepares to open. At 818 metres, it is the equivalent of the Empire State Building with the Chrysler Building on top. Designed by Adrian Smith and Bill Baker of Chicago-based SOM, the Burj has 160 storeys of hotel rooms, Armani-styled apartments and sky-high offices




in http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2009/dec/07/best-buildings-noughties?picture=356536529