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 marginality and metaengineering I t may be hard to determine the exact lag in time when hindsight acquires the gray weight of circumspection. nonetheless, it may not be entirely inopportune to claim that one of the facets of the commercial extravagance of the recently deceased gilded age—the burst of financial speculation from the mid-1990s onward to the implosive doldrums of 2008—was the string of commissions meted out to a roster of “signature” architects with more or less one distinct mandate: to churn out iconic, formally arresting, often sinuous objects whose atypicality would create new points of visual focus for the urban environment . the icons were of a piece with dominant neoliberal ideology. in policy (or lack of thereof) terms this iconicism relied on two major funding doctrines: the use of sovereign or federal moneys to privilege particular “primary” cities within each nation-state as privileged attractors of global investment; and for “secondary” cities, given the directed retreat of public money for infrastructure support, to use the “cultural” heft from these icons to raise real estate values (and revenue). in the process this finite roster of auteurs has come to acquire a kind of brand identity equivalent with haute couture impresarios whose status in the consumerist universe they clearly envy: rem koolhaas, Zaha hadid, frank geh10 marginality and metaengineering: keynes and arup ◾ a r i n Da M D u t ta Why are the good so boring? The wicked full of fun? And citizens in conflict, how do we govern them? How can we hit the target while aiming East and West? And how make people toe the line when I know what’s best? —ove nyquist arup   arindam dutta ry, norman foster, herzog and de meuron, and daniel libeskind. and yet to term these auteurs as “authors” of these technologically intricate follies of the new global urban realm would be an overstatement. name a major iconic commission of the past two decades—whether it be the cctv tower, the Bird’s nest, or the water cube built for the olympics in Beijing, or that city’s gargantuan new airport, the v&a extension, seattle’s central library, mit’s simmons hall. note that very little of their signature flourishes would have been realized without the hybrid consulting expertise of a single firm whose practice now straddles across every one of the countries in which these architects may be located or may receive commissions: arup associates. arup’s global presence on the building engineering front increasingly means that in the current spate of iconic architecture, it does not matter which so-called star or signature architect sketches out what scheme for where. what is reasonably probable is that arup will design and build it and will be a key arbitrator in modifying design to impinging conditions, whether in terms of budgetary management or local bylaws, technological feasibility, or environmental parameters. the “signature” here is markedly a corporate one: the architect is merely a boutique practice reliant upon—if not in effect nestled within—a much larger global delivery operation to service its clients. arup’s professional reputation is exactly as pronounced as the prevalence of this genre of urban object, and it goes beyond so-called architecture to embrace “public art,” manifestations as much of the Potemkin structures of speculative finance: from the twenty-meter-high Angel of the North sculpture in newcastlegateshead to the anthony caro–initiated millennium Bridge in london. not to forget, also, the enduring collaboration between arup’s advanced geometry unit and anish kapoor, to which is owed both the latter’s Marsyas in the (also arup-designed) tate modern turbine hall for the 2002 unilever series, “the Bean” in chicago, and the arcelormittal orbit gallery at the london olympics. architectural, artistic, and technological frames of the imagination may be said to be underpinned by a kind of “economic rationale” that guides presumptions about the use of materials as the organization of society. for instance, the “modernist” assumption in aesthetics and engineering that dictated on the one hand an “honesty”—organic or industrial—of material usage and on the other rationalism in plan disposition is epistemically congruent with basic dicta in economics regarding the scarcity of resources, characterized by John maynard keynes as the “classical” tendency for thrift. modernist proposals from ebenezer howard’s garden city to frank lloyd wright’s Broadacre, from toni garnier’s cité industrielle to le corbusier’s ville contemporaine contained elaborate prescriptions, implicit and explicit, as to the basis and...

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