Is the Bilbao Age over?

Blair Kamin writing the the Chicago Tribune thinks so in his article entitled: "Goodbye, icons; hello, infrastructure: Obama inaugurates a new era of architecture." As an architectural critic he finds a lot to like about "starchitecture" "...yet, icons divorced from infrastructure are nothing more than empty set pieces, objects divorced from the fabric of everyday life."

As The Donald finishes America's tallest building since the Sears tower, I have to mourn the passing of an era that brought us Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In both direct and subtle ways, this icon had a huge influence on the way our interiors products and spaces looked.

The raw material suppliers had pearlescent pigments available, but it was not until the brilliant reception of Gehry's building that pearlescence and metallic looks made their way into interior finishes.The end of this exciting era speaks to the fact that there will be little "material" innovation during this recessionary period. Judging by the recent GreenBuild, there is not much in the way of aesthetics to get excited about. My post and images of GreenBuild are yet to be processed, as I found it to be generally uninspiring.