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The 20
0th-century city is over . “Don’t tell anyone,” Rem Koolhaas said to me several years ago as we
headed down the F.D.R. Drive in New
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
York, “but the 20th-century city is
first envisioned the city as a field of
anymore. Our job is simply to maintain
of. “The old contextual model is not
over. It has nothing new to teach us
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
gleaming towers, could have dreamed 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.”
have sprouted up almost overnight.
The sheer number of projects under
small fishing village of a few thousand
investment in civic infrastructure — entire
Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a
construction and the corresponding
people, and Dubai had merely a quarter
networks of new subway systems,
population of eight million, and Dubai’s
airports and public parks — can give the
million people. Today Shenzhen has a
glittering towers, rising out of the
desert in disorderly rows, have become
freeways and canals; gargantuan new
impression that anything is possible
in this new world. The scale of these
playgrounds for wealthy expatriates from
undertakings recalls the early part of
speeds, these generic or instant cities,
country was confidently pointed toward
Riyadh and Moscow. Built at phenomenal
as they have been called, have no
recognizable center, no single identity.
the last century in America, when the the future.
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.
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“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 Holl has reason to be exhilarated.
His Beijing project, “Linked Hybrid,” is
one of the most innovative housing complexes anywhere in the world:
But it would be unimaginable in
spirit to Los Angeles. The breathtaking
network of enclosed bridges that create
afford to live here.
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
their vast size means that they function
a pedestrian zone in the sky. Yet this
budgets, expanding a single subway America, I could never do work like I do
center as Paris and New York do. Instead, primarily as a series of decentralized
exhilaration also comes at a price: only
line can seem like a heroic act. “In
They do not radiate from a historic
eight asymmetrical towers joined by a
an American city today, where, in the face of shrinking state and city
like Beijing have few of the features we
associate with a traditional metropolis.
the wealthiest of Beijing’s residents can
Climbing to the top of one of Holl’s
towers, I looked out through a haze of
smog at the acres of luxury-housing
neighborhoods, something closer in
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.
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.
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.”
somehow lost our nerve
5
literally built on a d esert
The density is 6
so incredible.
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,
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
say, New York – like the development
plans for ground zero – can seem
But while the outlines are intriguing,
a mere blip in Beijing, which has
he is still coming to terms with how
endeavors in the last decade alone.
early stages of the design, Koolhaas
embarked on dozens of similarly sized 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.
to create an organic whole. In the
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
metropolitan area that is barely 30
asked him about the project. “There is
you breathe life into a project at such
and emptiness. You rarely feel that
years old also seems absurd. How do
a scale? How do you instill the fine-
grained texture of a healthy community into one that rose overnight?
a weird alternation between density
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.”
weird alternation and emptiness density between 7
noth ing to sift th roug h but
8 7
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e
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. w o 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 “The irony is that we still don’t know
them in Singapore or Dubai take on
totally different meanings. Some of the
if postmodernism was the end of
modern typologies work in Asia even
Koolhaas told me recently. “Was it a
America. Typologies we’ve rejected turn
to something that has been going
challenges of building what amounts
Modernism or just an interruption,”
brief hiatus, and now we are returning
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
though they are totally dysfunctional in
out to be viable in other contexts.” The to a small-scale city from scratch
are compounded by the realities of working in a global marketplace.
An architect of Koolhaas’s stature
these large urban developments,
may be grappling simultaneously
where there was nothing. If much of
headquarters complex in Beijing, a
the difficulty is to create something
contemporary architecture depends
with the design of a television
stock exchange in Shenzhen and a
on sifting through the cultural and
20-block neighborhood in Dubai, as
over time — whether neo-Classical
The intense competition for these
what can be done if there is nothing to
often forced to churn out seductive
historical layers that a site accumulates
monuments or Socialist-era housing — sift through but sand?
In a recent design for a six-and-a-half-
well as a dozen buildings in Europe.
commissions means that architects are designs in weeks or months, tweaking their models to fit local conditions.
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.
9
f the traditional street grid,
Against the rigid lines
in contemporary cities 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
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.
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
To allow the development to grow in
several years later, when she won a
a more natural way than at One North,
business district in a former industrial
begin at the waterfront and spread
time, the context was more promising:
street grid of the older neighborhoods.
sea flanked by older working-class
her original concept, Hadid developed
competition to create a 1,360-acre
zone on the outskirts of Istanbul. This
it would be built in phases that would inland, eventually connecting to the
a hilly landscape at the edge of the
In an effort to preserve the texture of
neighborhoods on either side.
a series of building prototypes,
including a star-shaped tower and
a housing block organized around
Dubbed the “urban carpet,” it
a central court, and staggered the
residential towers and highways and
existing terrain.
was intended to blend office 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
heights of the buildings to reflect the
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.
of Modernism or the chaos you find in contemporary cities,” Hadid said.
11
litera
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esert
signs
of a m
o
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
Take Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing, for
acre development in Foshan, on the
communal spirit. A series of massive
Nanako Umemoto to design a 1,235-
Pearl River Delta, they (with a Chinese
example, which has a surprisingly open, portals lead from the street to an
partner) came up with a system of urban
elaborate internal courtyard garden, a
and low-rise commercial spaces, topped
Bridges connect the towers 12 to 19
“mats”: a multilayered network of roads by a park surrounded by residential
restaurant, a theater and a kindergarten, stories above ground and are conceived
and commercial buildings. The park
as a continuous string of public zones,
below; sunken courtyards allowed light
a glittering view of the city and a
followed the contours of the roadways 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.
with bars and nightclubs overlooking
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
ore te xture
the bridges as well.”
d urb
an re ality
13
poignan t testimo nies
to the
hards
imposing skyline of d-steel glass-an
ships
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
But if Shenzhen is an emblem of
what can happen when free-market
lined the delta to hold on to their land.
capitalism is allowed to run amok, it is
villagers remained in their increasingly
creativity that occurs when people
cheap, and often instantly decrepit,
recent visit, the alleyways, dark and
As land values rose around them, the populated districts, where they built
also an example of the spontaneous are left to fend for themselves. On a
towers that were so close together they
claustrophobic, were thick with shops.
you could literally reach out your
card tables in the street; two young
were dubbed “handshake buildings�: window and shake hands with your
neighbor across the street.
The villages are poignant testimonies
Elderly people played mah-jongg on
children sat at a small desk doing their homework in a tiny storefront that
doubled as their bedroom.
to the hardships that young workers,
Wenyi Wu, a young architect working
countryside, face in the new China.
me around the area. The firm has been
in one-bedroom apartments.
space out of seemingly inhospitable
recently transplanted from the
Many live packed a half dozen or more
for a Chinese firm called Urbanus, led
studying how people carve a living
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.
15
? o t s e f i n a m a for e m i t e r e h t s i but
I don’t kno
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 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.
ow.
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
Basar wonders if, despite their
modesty, these areas could form the
basis for a fresh urban strategy based
Asian workers. Similarly, the thriving,
neither on imported Western models
neighborhoods of Sharjah, the third-
Holl told me recently in his New York
traditionally Muslim middle-class
largest city in the United Arab Emirates,
were built without the flashiness of more
recent developments.
nor on clichés about local souks. As
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.”
d
Nora A. Zei