LONDON: What are the architectural icons of our time? Which buildings - or bits of buildings - will be the contemporary equivalents of Gothic cathedrals with flying buttresses, Palladian porticos or the flashy facades of Art Deco cinemas?
Will it be the surreal shapes of digitally designed structures like Herzog & de Meuron's Olympic Stadium and Rem Koolhaas's China Central Television headquarters in Beijing? Or a visionary eco-home? Almost certainly is the answer to the first question, and let's hope so to the second. But if we were to assess the candidates in terms of quantity, rather than design quality, a strong contender would be what is probably the commonest architectural feature of the early 21st century - the plastic window frame.
That's right, those ugly plastic (or, to be precise, unplasticized polyvinyl chloride, alias PVC-u) frames that come in bilious shades of white with clumsily shaped handles. They're not very nice to look at, or to touch. Ask architects what they think of them and they'll either sneer, or say something unprintable. Yet millions of windows now have plastic frames. You'd be hard pressed to walk along a street in any European city or town, without spotting a few of them, probably more. You'll find them in most newly built homes (except for very, very expensive ones) as well as office buildings, warehouses, factories and the recently renovated tower blocks on British council estates and in France's grungier banlieues.
They even appear on architectural landmarks. Take the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage in Moscow, which was designed in 1926 by the great Soviet architect, Konstantin Melnikhov. After being neglected for decades, the building was restored before reopening last year to house the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, a nonprofit art gallery run by the Russian socialite Dasha Zhukova and her oligarch boyfriend, Roman Abramovich.
Cladirea restaurata cu ferestre din PVC a garajului de autobuze Bakhmetevsky
As the original windows were broken, new ones were installed in the same geometric style as Melnikhov's originals, but in a different material - plastic.
Jarring as it is to see plastic windows in a Constructivist gem like the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, most of the time we barely notice them. They are the architectural equivalent of cheap monobloc plastic chairs, which are so ubiquitous that they've become invisible. We deal with plastic windows and chairs in the same way as with other unappealing elements of daily life: by editing them out, usually without realizing it.
Is that right? Or is it silly and snobbish of us to ignore something that's (literally) such a large part of our lives? There are, after all, sensible reasons why plastic windows have become so popular. They were introduced in the 1980s and sold so well that, by the end of the 1990s, more than half of all replacement domestic window frames in Europe were made of PCV-u. One reason is that they cost less than the old-fashioned softwood windows used in housing, and the metal ones in public buildings. Another is that plastic frames last longer, and are easier to maintain. Unlike softwood, plastic doesn't rot, nor does it need to be painted as protection against the elements.
So far, so good, but plastic windows also have their drawbacks. One is aesthetic. They don't look as good as wooden or metal frames, in fact they often look cheap and tacky. Another is environmental. Like most plastic products, PVC-u frames can't be repaired if they break. Moreover, the PVC-u production process releases what the ecological pressure group, Greenpeace, describes as "some of today's most damaging industrial pollutants," as does its disposal, regardless of whether it is incinerated or dumped on landfill sites. Greenpeace has called for PVC-u windows to be banned, and replaced by less damaging alternatives, such as sustainable wooden frames.
In other words, PVC-u window frames score highly on practicality, but poorly on environmental responsibility. They belong to the new category of objects that are both modernist dreams and post-modernist nightmares, because they have many of the qualities required of "good design" in the last century, but few of the sustainable virtues demanded in this one.
Again, there is a parallel with plastic monobloc chairs, which are inexpensive, light, stackable and easy to clean, but impossible to repair and doomed to swamp landfill sites for decades to come. Another example is the Nano, the "people's car" that Tata Motors hopes to sell to millions of Indians. If all goes well, it will be the sort of cheap (if not quite as cheap as Tata's original target price of 100,000 rupees, or about $2,000) compact family car, which would once have been hailed as a democratic design coup. But that won't happen unless Tata can also squash fears that the Nano will belch out pollution and clog up India's roads.
Tata's plans for an electric Nano may crack the first problem, though not the second. It is harder to see how the cheap plastic chair can redeem itself, but there is hope for plastic windows. On the environmental front, the simplest solution is for frame manufacturers to ditch PVC-u for less damaging types of plastic. Greenpeace favors the use of polyolefin-based plastics, such as polyethylene and polypropylene, on the grounds that they are cleaner to produce and easier to recycle. Some companies have already made the change.
There is even hope for plastic windows in terms of aesthetics. Problematic though it is in other respects, plastic has fantastic sculptural possibilities. It is equally versatile when it comes to color. That's why postwar designers, such as Verner Panton, loved it, and why it still appeals to their successors, like Konstantin Grcic, whose MYTO plastic chair has been hailed as the contemporary equivalent of Panton's famous 1959 S-shaped chair. There is no reason why plastic window frames should not be equally adventurous, if - and it's a big "if" - architects and designers felt inclined to invest their time and energy in making the most of them.
