COMMENT POSTED TO A COLUMN BY OLIVER WAINWRIGHT IN THE
GUARDIAN
The darkest building
on Earth: 'An angular black hole waiting to suck you in'
Sprayed with
Vantablack Vbx2, a pavilion at the Winter Olympics in South Korea absorbs 99%
of light. We talk to its British architect Asif Khan, who also invented the
‘selfie-building’
While the intense darkness of the outside, penetrated by the
pinpricks of light, is interesting and certainly attention-grabbing, I think that
it sustains interest only briefly. A building like this can only be viewed as a
one-off, maybe even temporary, much like a pavilion for a World's Fair.
It makes almost no sense in any other context that I can
see, and the truth is that after the initial impression of interest, the
building is not inviting. Indeed, it is quite off-putting.
Inside is worse. The one picture that you have is an
interior devoid of humanity - white, bleak. I am reminded of a set from Stanley
Kubrick's 2001, but then in that film he was trying to create a rather
less-than-human atmosphere.
I'm sure others disagree, but I think the building a rather
costly failure altogether. This is not a space anyone would want to spend time
in or to pass by regularly in a neighborhood going to and from home.
I think it fair to describe it as a bit dehumanizing. The
soul of a machine, as it were.
But, sadly, that is often the case now with special-event
architecture. Just think of Tony Blair's utterly vacuous Millennium Dome -
uninteresting, ugly, and fairly useless from day one. I call it Tony Blair’s
because he had a role in promoting the empty nothing rather than encouraging
something which would make spirits soar on such an occasion. It suited him
perfectly, like an empty bag of gas.
