The New, New City
The Architecture Issue
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
New York Times
June 8, 2008
NEW SHENZHEN ENCIRCLES OLD: In the center, one of the city’s original urban
villages, with its signature “handshake buildings” — so close together you could reach
across to your neighbor. - Sze Tsung Leong for The New York Times
“Don’t tell anyone,” Rem Koolhaas said to me several years ago as we headed down the
F.D.R. Drive in New York, “but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach
us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.” Koolhaas’s viewpoint is widely shared by
close observers of the evolution of cities. But not even Koolhaas, it seems, was
completely prepared for what would come next.
In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable in size to New York have sprouted
up almost overnight. Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing village of a few
thousand people, and Dubai had merely a quarter million people. Today Shenzhen has a
population of eight million, and Dubai’s glittering towers, rising out of the desert in
disorderly rows, have become playgrounds for wealthy expatriates from Riyadh and
Moscow. Long-established cities like Beijing and Guangzhou have more than doubled in
size in a few decades, their original outlines swallowed by rings of new development.
Built at phenomenal speeds, these generic or instant cities, as they have been called, have
no recognizable center, no single identity. It is sometimes hard to think of them as cities
at all. Dubai, which lays claim to some of the world’s most expensive private islands, the
tallest building and soon the largest theme park, has been derided as an urban tomb where
the rich live walled off from the poor migrant workers who serve them. Shenzhen is often
criticized as a product of unregulated development, better suited to the speculators that
first spurred its growth than to the workers housed in huge complexes of factory-run
barracks. Yet for architects these cities have also become vast fields of urban
experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, who first envisioned the
city as a field of gleaming towers, could have dreamed of.
Sze Tsung Leong for The New York Times
The Frontier: Southwestern Shenzhen under construction.
“The old contextual model is not very relevant anymore,” Jesse Reiser, an American
architect working in Dubai, told me recently. “What context are we talking about in a city
that’s a few decades old? The problem is that we are only beginning to figure out where
to go from here.”
The sheer number of projects under construction and the corresponding investment in
civic infrastructure — entire networks of new subway systems, freeways and canals;
gargantuan new airports and public parks — can give the impression that anything is
possible in this new world. The scale of these undertakings recalls the early part of the
last century in America, when the country was confidently pointed toward the future. But
it would be unimaginable in an American city today, where, in the face of shrinking state
and city budgets, expanding a single subway line can seem like a heroic act. “In America,
I could never do work like I do here,” Steven Holl, a New York architect with several
large projects in China, recently told me, referring to his latest complex in Beijing.
“We’ve become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look
new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For
some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost our
nerve.”
Holl has reason to be exhilarated. His Beijing project, “Linked Hybrid,” is one of the
most innovative housing complexes anywhere in the world: eight asymmetrical towers
joined by a network of enclosed bridges that create a pedestrian zone in the sky. Yet this
exhilaration also comes at a price: only the wealthiest of Beijing’s residents can afford to
live here. Climbing to the top of one of Holl’s towers, I looked out through a haze of
smog at the acres of luxury-housing towers that surround his own, the kind of alienating
subdivisions that are so often cited as a symptom of the city’s unbridled, dehumanizing
development. Protected by armed guards, these residential high-rises stood on what was
until quite recently a working-class neighborhood, even though the poor quality of their
construction makes them seem decades old. Nearby, a new freeway cut through the
neighborhood, further disfiguring an area that, however modest, was once bursting with
life.
“If you take Venturi’s ideas about the city,” Holl said, referring to Robert Venturi’s
groundbreaking work, “Learning From Las Vegas,” which called on architects to
reconsider the importance of the everyday (strip malls, billboards, storefronts), “and put
them in Beijing or Tokyo, they don’t hold any water at all. When you get into this scale,
the rules have to be rewritten. The density is so incredible.” Because of this density, cities
like Beijing have few of the features we associate with a traditional metropolis. They do
not radiate from a historic center as Paris and New York do. Instead, their vast size means
that they function primarily as a series of decentralized neighborhoods, something closer
in spirit to Los Angeles. The breathtaking speed of their construction means that they
usually lack the layers — the mix of architectural styles and intricately related social
strata — that give a city its complexity and from which architects have typically drawn
inspiration.
In Dubai, for instance, what might once have been the product of 100 years of urban
growth has been compressed into a decade or so. Given such seismic shifts, even the
most talented architects can seem to flounder for new models. No one wants to return to
the deadly homogeneity associated with Modernism’s tabula rasa planning strategies. The
image of Le Corbusier hovering godlike above Paris ready to wipe aside entire districts
and replace them with glass towers remains an emblem of Modernism’s attack on the
city’s historical fabric. Yet the notion of finding “authenticity” in a sprawling
metropolitan area that is barely 30 years old also seems absurd. How do you breathe life
into a project at such a scale? How do you instill the fine-grained texture of a healthy
community into one that rose overnight?
Cities like these, built on a colossal scale, seem to absorb any urban model, no matter
how unique, virtually unnoticed. A project that could have a significant impact on the
character of, say, New York — like the development plans for ground zero — can seem a
mere blip in Beijing, which has embarked on dozens of similarly sized endeavors in the
last decade alone. “The irony is that we still don’t know if postmodernism was the end of
Modernism or just an interruption,” Koolhaas told me recently. “Was it a brief hiatus, and
now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is it
something radically different? We are in a condition we don’t understand yet.”
For architects faced with building these large urban developments, the difficulty is to
create something where there was nothing. If much of contemporary architecture depends
on sifting through the cultural and historical layers that a site accumulates over time —
whether neo-Classical monuments or Socialist-era housing — what can be done if there
is nothing to sift through but sand?
In a recent design for a six-and-a-half-square-mile development in Dubai called
Waterfront City, Koolhaas proposed creating an urban island inspired by a section of
Midtown Manhattan. The design linked a dense grid of conventional towers to the
mainland by a system of bridges. A series of stunning “iconic” buildings — a gigantic,
hollowed-out Piranesian sphere at the island’s edge; a spiraling tower that winds around
an airy public atrium — were intended to give the city a distinct flavor. Koolhaas said he
hoped, in this way, to infuse this entirely new development with something of the feeling
of an older city. But while the outlines are intriguing, he is still coming to terms with how
to create an organic whole. In the early stages of the design, Koolhaas experimented with
somewhat conventional models of public space: a boardwalk along the island’s perimeter,
a narrow park cutting through its center, classical arcades lining the downtown streets.
But the majority of Dubai’s inhabitants are foreign-born, and the arcaded streets could
easily suggest a theme-park version of a traditional Arab city. Koolhaas is painfully
aware of how hard it is to escape the generic.
“A city like Dubai is literally built on a desert,” Koolhaas conceded when I asked him
about the project. “There is a weird alternation between density and emptiness. You
rarely feel that you are designing for people who are actually there but for communities
that have yet to be assembled. The vernacular is too faint, too precarious to become
something on which you can base an architecture.”
Koolhaas says he hopes that the plan will gain in complexity as the buildings’ functions
are worked out; he says he was thrilled to learn that the government wanted both a
courthouse and a mosque on the island. “Another option that I personally find very
interesting,” Koolhaas told me, “is the modernist vernacular of the 1970s — buildings
that once you put them in Singapore or Dubai take on totally different meanings. Some of
the modern typologies work in Asia even though they are totally dysfunctional in
America. Typologies we’ve rejected turn out to be viable in other contexts.”
The challenges of building what amounts to a small-scale city from scratch are
compounded by the realities of working in a global marketplace. An architect of
Koolhaas’s stature may be grappling simultaneously with the design of a television
headquarters complex in Beijing, a stock exchange in Shenzhen and a 20-block
neighborhood in Dubai, as well as a dozen buildings in Europe. The intense competition
for these commissions means that architects are often forced to churn out seductive
designs in weeks or months, tweaking their models to fit local conditions.
Several years ago, the London-based, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid received a phone
call from a Chinese developer asking if she might be interested in designing a 500-acre
urban development on the outskirts of Singapore. Hadid had never met the developer
before. She was soon working on the master plan for “One North,” a mixed-use
development with a projected population of about 140,000. Located on what was once a
military site, Hadid’s design conjured a high-tech mountainous terrain. Dubbed the
“urban carpet,” it was intended to blend office and residential towers and highways and
public parks into a seamless whole. Against the rigid lines of the traditional street grid,
the sinuous curves of the freeways suggested a more fluid, mobile society. The rooftops,
whose heights were subject to stringent regulations, looked as if they were cut from a
single piece of crumpled fabric, giving the composition a haunting unity. “We wanted to
create a complex order rather than either the monotony of Modernism or the chaos you
find in contemporary cities,” Hadid said.
Yet once construction began, the design of the buildings was left to local architects hired
by the developer. As the towers rose in clusters scattered across the site, it was difficult to
read the formal intent. With more than 20 blocks now complete, parts of the city look
surprisingly conventional.
Hadid revived the concept several years later, when she won a competition to create a
1,360-acre business district in a former industrial zone on the outskirts of Istanbul. This
time, the context was more promising: a hilly landscape at the edge of the sea flanked by
older working-class neighborhoods on either side. To allow the development to grow in a
more natural way than at One North, it would be built in phases that would begin at the
waterfront and spread inland, eventually connecting to the street grid of the older
neighborhoods. In an effort to preserve the texture of her original concept, Hadid
developed a series of building prototypes, including a star-shaped tower and a housing
block organized around a central court, and staggered the heights of the buildings to
reflect the existing terrain.
If Hadid’s plan is formally inventive, it is still unclear whether it has escaped the
homogeneity that was a hallmark of Modernist urban-renewal projects. Its sheer size
coupled with the fact that the shapes of the buildings were conceived by a single architect
means the result may well be more uniform, and ultimately more rigid, than Hadid
intended.
Indeed, contemporary architects’ urban plans may be less tied to location than they would
like to admit. When a Chinese developer approached the New York-based Jesse Reiser
and Nanako Umemoto to design a 1,235-acre development in Foshan, on the Pearl River
Delta, they (with a Chinese partner) came up with a system of urban “mats”: a
multilayered network of roads and low-rise commercial spaces, topped by a park
surrounded by residential and commercial buildings. The park followed the contours of
the roadways below; sunken courtyards allowed light to spill down into the underground
spaces. Last year, the Chinese project fell through, and Reiser and Umemoto reworked
the idea for a developer in Dubai. The layout was reconfigured to fit the new waterfront
site; souks were added as a nod to local traditions. The result is a remarkably nuanced
view of how to knit together the various elements of urban life, but it also seems as if it
could exist anywhere.
The walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods celebrated by Jane Jacobs may seem impossibly
remote, but encouraging signs of a more textured urban reality can still be found. Take
Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing, for example, which has a surprisingly open, communal
spirit. A series of massive portals lead from the street to an elaborate internal courtyard
garden, a restaurant, a theater and a kindergarten, integrating the complex into the
surrounding neighborhood. Bridges connect the towers 12 to 19 stories above ground and
are conceived as a continuous string of public zones, with bars and nightclubs
overlooking a glittering view of the city and a suspended swimming pool. “The
developer’s openness to ideas was amazing,” Holl says. “When they first asked me to do
the project, it was just housing. I suggested adding the cinematheque, the kindergarten. I
added an 80-room hotel and the swimming pool as well. Anywhere else, they’d build it in
phases over several years. It’s too big. After our meeting, they said we’re building the
whole thing all at once. I couldn’t believe it. We haven’t had to compromise anything.
“But what makes it possible is the density. The Modernist idea of the street in the air that
became a place of social interaction never worked in Europe. Beijing is so dense that I
can keep all of the shops functioning on the street, and there’s still enough energy to
activate the bridges as well.”
Holl is continuing to explore these ideas in another megaproject, this time on the outskirts
of Shenzhen: a zigzag-shaped office complex propped up on big steel columns that make
room for a dreamy public garden. The density in much of Shenzhen can make Beijing
look spacious. The imposing skyline of glass-and-steel towers, plastered with electronic
billboards, was built mostly within the last decade, part of the boom that followed foreign
investment in the area, when it was declared a special economic zone in the early ’80s.
The Chinese government initially allowed many of the small villages that lined the delta
to hold on to their land. As land values rose around them, the villagers remained in their
increasingly populated districts, where they built cheap, and often instantly decrepit,
towers that were so close together they were dubbed “handshake buildings”: you could
literally reach out your window and shake hands with your neighbor across the street.
The villages are poignant testimonies to the hardships that young workers, recently
transplanted from the countryside, face in the new China. Many live packed a half dozen
or more in one-bedroom apartments. But if Shenzhen is an emblem of what can happen
when free-market capitalism is allowed to run amok, it is also an example of the
spontaneous creativity that occurs when people are left to fend for themselves. On a
recent visit, the alleyways, dark and claustrophobic, were thick with shops. Elderly
people played mah-jongg on card tables in the street; two young children sat at a small
desk doing their homework in a tiny storefront that doubled as their bedroom.
Wenyi Wu, a young architect working for a Chinese firm called Urbanus, led me around
the area. The firm has been studying how people carve a living space out of seemingly
inhospitable environments, hoping to develop an urbanist model more deeply rooted in
the spontaneity of everyday life. He took me to a small museum Urbanus designed on the
outskirts of the city. A series of stepped galleries stand at the base of a hill between an
urban village and some banal housing complexes above. A series of long ramps pierce
the building, joining the two worlds. More ramps encircle the exterior, so that you have
the impression of moving through a system of loosely connected alleyways. The idea was
to transform the unregulated character of the urban village into something more formal
and humane — to extract the essence of its character without romanticizing the squalor.
The circuitous paths of the ramps echo the surrounding alleyways; the layout of the
galleries suggests the footprint of the migrant workers’ housing but on a more intimate
scale.
Other architects, hoping to build in ways that reflect an emerging vernacular, are taking a
similar approach, looking at more modest and more informally constructed urban
neighborhoods for inspiration. Shumon Basar, a London-based critic and independent
curator, recently described a number of small, unplanned settlements in and around
Dubai. The dense and gritty neighborhood of Deira, for instance, has little in common
with Sheikh Zayed Road and its fortified glass towers. Built mainly in the 1970s, Deira’s
low concrete structures and labyrinthine alleyways are home to a lively population of
Southeast Asian workers. Similarly, the thriving, traditionally Muslim middle-class
neighborhoods of Sharjah, the third-largest city in the United Arab Emirates, were built
without the flashiness of more recent developments. Basar wonders if, despite their
modesty, these areas could form the basis for a fresh urban strategy based neither on
imported Western models nor on clichés about local souks.
As Holl told me recently in his New York office, working on a large scale doesn’t mean
that the particulars of place no longer matter. “I don’t think of any of my buildings as a
model for something, the way the Modernists did,” Holl said. “If it works, it works in its
specific context. You can’t just move it somewhere else.”
But is site specificity enough? “The amount of building becomes obscene without a
blueprint,” Koolhaas said. “Each time you ask yourself, Do you have the right to do this
much work on this scale if you don’t have an opinion about what the world should be
like? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I don’t know.”
Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architecture critic of The New York Times.