I happened to catch the briefest glimpse of Shanghai last night on television, some architect being interviewed about something or other. I didn’t catch many of the details, except that he claimed that 90% of Shanghai’s architecture is dreadful, and that the scale of the city is dramatic, and becoming more dramatic (i.e., tall) by the minute. It is becoming virtually a city of skyscrapers, eliminating much of any Chinese-ness that may be lingering on the ground.
Looking at the picture, I would have to say that his claim of 90% dreadful is rather generous. It looks like someone was running to a planning meeting for EPCOT and tripped and dropped all the scale models, and then photographed the resulting random mess.
In the ongoing saga of the narrative of architecture, we’ve certainly touched on the idea of cities attempting to make statements for themselves. Up-and-comers who want to become big players have to look the part. The tallest buildings, and -- if we equate height with sonics -- the biggest statements, are, in order, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur (2 & 3), Chicago, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhau, Shenzhen, NYC, and Hong Kong. Of the next 10, Chicago gets two more hits (but you’ll never be NYC, guys), N. Korea, Dubai (another bowl of architectural leftover soup) and Australia come on to the list, but the rest are still in one of the Chinas. Are the Chinese trying to tell us something? Of that top 20, the newest American building is 1974; the oldest is 1931 (Empire State). The newest, in Wuhan, is still under construction.
What I like about some of the Asian buildings is the maintenance of a cultural sense despite all that height. Taipei 1 especially has that pagoda thing going for it, and there’s no question that this is a building that belongs where it is. The Oriental Pearl Tower, on the other hand, that thing in Shanghai that looks like some sort of tower-of-terror ride, which is taller than all the buildings on the list except for Taipei (it’s a tower, not a building), is a structure that belongs nowhere. Even if one likes it, and I don’t want to make a judgment from a couple of photographs, it doesn’t parse very easily. Aside from giving you a feeling that it belongs in a World’s Fair, it could be anything. Or nothing.
But then again, arguments could be made against a building holding to its ethnic roots, if that building is attempting to made a statement of modernism. The total lack of ethnicity in the UN Building certainly makes sense: which ethnic should it be? The Seagrams building, which is generally the same idea, could similarly be anywhere. Modern = urban untied to tradition. Should the business of the 21st Century take place in an ethnic-free environment? That would be a question architects would have to ask, given that the business of the 21st Century will, for the most part, not be building-bound: the internet does away with that.
The architectural overload of a Shanghai or Dubai does seem to have a dramatic effect on the ground level life. People still do, somehow, have to live in these places. As the scale of the places shifts to accommodate world trade, how does that shift affect the poor schmegeggie trying to run a hot dog stand (or a whatever-it-is stand, given that these and other striving countries are probably not of the franks-and-beans persuasion)? As I began, that architect I heard last night was bemoaning the passing of the old, street-level Shanghai. Do we end up setting aside urban preserves for tourists, ubiquitous “old towns” where people can see simulacra of the way people here used to live, and now you can buy trinkets and “tourist menu” dinners and get tickets to a genuine show of classical performance, locating these old towns in some easily accessible hotel-surrounded area with a fast train connection direct to the airport, and the entire place that once was no longer is?
Damn. I’m getting more postmodern by the minute.
2 comments:
History and the Texture of Modern Life, a book of essays by pioneering nineteenth-century historian Lucy Maynard Salmon, is a fascinating book about space, architecture, and its influence on our everyday lives. Salmon taught at Vassar and is generally acknowledged as the founder of social history; she also pioneered the use of primary sources as teaching materials and did a lot of groundbreaking work on immigration in the United States.
Anyway, this post really got me thinking about that (quite underappreciated) book. Her ability to philosophize about Main Street in Poughkeepsie reminds me a lot of your insight about the (constructed, literally) identity of cities. And that was before the city became littered with gas stations, fast food joints, and, well, litter.
It could be worse. It could look like all the rest of Chinese architecture in the last 50 years which, for lack of a more technical term, I can only describe as Big Ugly Concrete Boxes. (Communism: Say what you will about it as a political system, it is not good aesthetically.)
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