Differences and similarities

West Workroom towards a new sobriety in architecture theory + practice, by Paolo Conrad-Bercah+w office (including contributions from Daniel Sherer, Pierluigi Panza and George Baird)

‘This is not a book….’ These are the opening words of this initially unfathomable paperback volume of architectural ramblings. It has been assembled as an account of the work of a Milan-based architecture practice, West Workroom. The firm designs commercial, residential and institutional buildings, with a special emphasis on functional offices and other workplaces. It was founded by the New York architect, Paolo Conrad-Bercah and since 1999 it has gradually become internationally well known for emphasising, ‘what seems to be gradually vanishing from daily life — namely, cultural differences’.

Because Conrad-Bercah was educated at Harvard and trained as an architect in the New York office of I. M. Pei and Harry Cobb and also in the Milan office of Aldo Rossi and Ignazio Gardella, he aims in this, his first monograph, to emphasise the different qualities of the cultures of Europe and America.

He likes to call one culture the North-Atlantic Protestant Area (NaPA) and the other the Mediterranean Catholic Area (MeCA). In the book they are identified by illustrations of a nice, clean, fat pig for the USA and a chic black-and-white cat for the Mediterranean part of Europe. Only an architect could design such a confusing and mad book about his own work. Only an architect in the first decade of the 21st century would feel confident enough to write that his own projects ‘add cultural specificity to the global heterogeneity of contemporary architecture’. You need a stiff drink after you have struggled through the introduction, which is subtitled ‘towards a new sobriety’, because it is so hard to grasp. I think he is trying to tell us that Europe and America think differently about everything (no surprise there) but also that globalisation tends to make everyone think the same way and share the same non-values.