TT: Not in my front yard

In the New York edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review The Bilbao Effect, Oren Safdie’s new play about the splendors and miseries of postmodern starchitecture. Here’s an excerpt.
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Architecture is the only art form about which everybody has an opinion–because everybody has to live with it. Some buildings, however, are harder to live with than others, and in recent years a growing number of them have been the work of big-name “starchitects” who appear at times to be more interested in making a splash than ensuring the day-to-day livability of their buildings. Enter Oren Safdie, the son of the famous modernist architect Moshe Safdie, who in 2003 wrote a witty and knowing play called “Private Jokes, Public Places” in which he ran a sharp skewer through the pretensions of a generation of starchitects who give the impression of having forgotten that human beings live in and near the buildings they design….
Now Mr. Safdie is back at the Center for Architecture with a sequel, “The Bilbao Effect,” in which the principal characters from “Private Jokes, Public Places” return to the stage to conduct a furiously farcical debate over the wholly serious subject of the architect’s responsibility to the people whose lives he touches.
The play’s title is, of course, a nod to Frank Gehry’s 1997 branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, an avant-garde building so self-consciously spectacular that it has become a tourist attraction in its own right. Its success persuading other institutions to undertake the construction of equally over-the-top structures in the hopes of drawing visitors whose spending will galvanize the local economy and enhance their own bottom lines. In “The Bilbao Effect,” Mr. Safdie imagines that Staten Island’s city fathers have succumbed to a similar case of architectural hubris and allowed the egomaniacal Erhardt Shlaminger (Joris Stuyck) of “Private Jokes, Public Places” to build a Gehry-like urban-renewal project in the middle of town….
Good plays of ideas allow the audience to make up its own mind about the relative merits of the characters’ arguments. One of the best things about “Private Jokes, Public Places” was Mr. Safdie’s willingness to let everyone look stupid at one time or another, whereas in “The Bilbao Effect” Schlaminger and his smug lawyer (John Bolton) are too obviously the villains of the piece.
All this notwithstanding, “The Bilbao Effect” is both funny and cruelly smart in its portrayal of the lunatic excesses of the more extreme varieties of starchitecture. Perhaps the shrewdest of Mr. Safdie’s touches is the way in which he conceives of the debate over such architecture as a class war…
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Read the whole thing here.