Shanghai Reections. Architecture, Urbanism, and the Search for an Alternative Modernity. Princeton University, Hong Kong University, and Tongji University. Essays by Mario Gandelsonas, Ackbar Abbas, and M. Christine Boyer
EDITED BY MARIO GANDELSONAS PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS
Shanghai Reflections is the third volume in the series Princeton Papers on Architecture Princeton University School of Architecture Princeton, New Jersey 08544–5264 Editor: Mario Gandelsonas Design: 2 x 4, Alice Chung, Michael Rock Project Coordinator: Nancy Eklund Later Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1 800 722 6657. Visit our web site at www.papress.com. ©2002
School of Architecture, Princeton University All rights reserved Printed and bound in China 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Ann Alter, Amanda Atkins, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Megan Carey, Penny Chu, Jan Cigliano, Clare Jacobson, Mark Lamster, Linda Lee, Evan Schoninger, Jane Sheinman, Lottchen Shivers, Jennifer Thompson, and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gandelsonas, Mario, 1938– Shanghai reflections : architecture, urbanism and the search for an alternative modernity with essays/by Mario Gandelsonas, Ackbar Abbas, and M. Christine Boyer.––1st ed. p. cm. –– (Princeton papers on architecture; 3) ISBN 1-56898-326-3 1. Architecture––China––Shanghai. 2. City planning––China––Shanghai. 3. Shanghai (China) I. Abbas, Ackbar. II. Boyer, M. Christine. III. Title. IV. Series. NA1547.S5 G36 2002 711'.4'0951132––dc21 2001007562
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PREFACE Ralph Lerner I . E S S AY S
20 I.A.
Shanghai Reections Mario Gandelsonas
36 I.B.
Play It Again Shanghai: Urban Preservation in the Global Era Ackbar Abbas
56 I.C.
Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: the Case of Zhang Yimou and Shanghai Triad (1995) M. Christine Boyer II. PROJECTS
90 II.A.
Princeton University School of Architecture Students: John DaCruz, Rachel Doher ty, Gregor y Luhan, Christy Schlesinger, Alex Schweder Critics: Diana Agrest, Jennifer Bloomer, Mario Gandelsonas, Kevin Kennon
142 II.B.
Hong Kong University Department of Architecture Students: Sebastien Chabber t, Chan Ho Kei, Lam Ching Hang, Law Chi Chung, Emmanuel Petit, Tsui Ka Man Critics: Ackbar Abbas, Diana Agrest, M.Christine Boyer, Mario Gandelsonas, Heidi Gilpin, Leslie Lu, Eric K.C. Lye, Gayatri C. Spivak, Peter Wollen
168 II.C.
Tongji University School of Architecture Students: Cen Wei, Huang Hua, Kang Man, Liu Yaqun, Liu Yuxing, Lu Di, Lu Shaoming, Miao Yingzhen, Xu Houcong, Yao Hairong, Critics: Mario Gandelsonas, Lu Jiwei, Leslie Lu, Mo Tianwei, Wang Bowei, Zhang Linwei, Zhao Xiuheng III. CONCLUSION
212
Exchange/Translation/Identity Mario Gandelsonas
215
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
216
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
PREFACE
The initial motives for Princeton University’s establishing the Joint Studio in China were brought about by enormous changes taking place in higher education and architectural practice. About ten years ago it became apparent to us that the composition of the School of Architecture’s graduate student population had become far more “international” than ever before and that this trend was on the rise. The Joint Studio in China was established in 1995 primarily through the effort and interest of Professor Mario Gandelsonas, and it has now become a regular activity at the school. With initial support from Princeton University, we subsequently secured Robert and Saw Kheng Ng’s generous support, which will enable the program to continue for ten years beyond the inaugural year supported by the university. Today, about half of our graduate students come from every conceivable corner of the globe. The reasons for this change are obvious; the same forces that drove economic expansion and globalization in the 1990s, transforming architectural practices with only regional or national reach into global enterprises, have radically altered the composition of the academic population in this country. As a result a group of students far more diverse than those of previous generations has been drawn to the exceptional culture of architectural education available in North America. The changed circumstances of practice, and our own critical view of these changes, provoked us to modify our curriculum for the education of an architect. The transformation of our approach was both exciting and challenging. Without abandoning that which had always been the heart of the school––an interdisciplinary approach to the education of an architect, based on the idea that architectural form cannot be taught or evaluated separately from its cultural and technological contexts––we attempted to “internationalize” what had formerly been a “national” approach. Toward this end we established a program of joint studios in Asia and Europe, both to create a forum for the exchange of ideas with respect to methods of architectural education and to introduce our students to the issues involved in global practice, cultural identity, and new forms of urbanism.
– Ralph Lerner, FAIA , Dean and George Dutton ’27 Professor of Architecture at Princeton University
17 PREFACE
The importance of the task of educating architects for the special challenges of global practice was clear, if not within practice initially than within the academy. This was because the architectural results of globalization on architectural production, where the everyday commercial pressures to perform quickly exert themselves, were somewhat disturbing. In Pudong, for example, Western architects are busily at work creating the new city, which is a prime example of the lack of new approaches for new problems. It is accurately described by Ackbar Abbas in his essay as “an everyday cinematic illusion, capable of conjuring whole skylines into being as if through special effects.” Each project taken on by the Joint Studio has been carefully constructed to investigate several interlocking formal, cultural, and technical problems facing architecture, landscape, and the city. This book documents the efforts of just one of the seven studios held in China thus far and, in doing so, stands in for all of the others; its subject, the “problem” of the revitalization of the Donjiadu Church and its surrounding district in Shanghai. The project challenged students and their teachers to confront issues as diverse as the legacies of colonialism and the Cultural Revolution, and the contemporary modes of urban renewal, historic preservation, and cultural memory. Working with Tonji University, joined early on by the University of Hong Kong, the Joint Studio Program has helped us all to assume new vantage points and develop new and compelling approaches to design and building outside our own cultural preoccupations. It has also introduced us to many wonderful colleagues. With them, in the four years to come, we will continue to examine the nature of international education and practice, even as we influence it, and to carefully survey the horizon to assess the course of our progress in this vast and changeable world.
I. ESSAYS
I.A.
SHANGHAI REFLECTIONS
20
Mario Gandelsonas
SHANGHAI REFLECTIONS
Ruled by an emperor—the mediator between heaven and earth—and organized according to Confucian precepts, China isolated itself from the rest of the world for much of its history. Its agrarian economy largely self-sustaining, Chinese civiliza-tion kept pace with or exceeded the advances of other civilizations. As with any autocracy, however, this did not come without a cost. Despotic and detached, the Chinese state traded an interest in its people for the proper management of its vast territory, consequently directing its energies away from its subjects and toward the control of rivers, irrigation systems, taxation, feudal relations, and the maintenance of secure borders. Eventually China became aware of its weaknesses and limitations. Humiliated during encounters with the imperial powers of Europe during the nineteenth century, China realized that it would have to modernize. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the daunting task of reforming the country’s economic and physical structure fell on the shoulders of a new entrepreneurial class. Early efforts at modernization by this class, marked by a crude attempt to import foreign liberal ideas and to graft them outright onto the existing social order, failed to provide a sound ideological foundation for a new modern China. This was to be the case until China experimented with a western ideology more in keeping with its own. Marxism, a social system congruent with Chinese notions of state and class, found fertile ground with China’s cultural soil. First modified by Mao Zedong in 1949 to fit the particular Chinese context, Marxism was successfully used to transform China into a world power. Mao’s Marxism, however, ultimately failed to propel China into the twentieth century. Entangled in bureaucracy and still isolated from the rest of the world, China remained a backward country. Recognizing the limitations of Mao’s economic strategies, in 1978 Deng Xiaoping proposed the creation of a hybrid system, a “socialist market economy.” Eagerly anticipating the economic benefits that would result from interaction with the outside, Deng believed that reform and openness were essential to China’s modernization. While support for the modernist project’s claims to reinvent society and change the world has faded in the West, in China, where modernity is the focus of current
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reform, that project seems alive and well. Calling to mind the modernist zeal of the 1920s and 1930s, the revolutionary legacy that shaped much of China’s twentiethcentury imagination is still deeply embedded in China’s social consciousness and plays a key role in the current development of a Chinese modernity. Put off by the universal claims of modernism in the industrialized West, however, China has been searching for an “alternative modernity”; that is, a modernity transformed to meet the particular cultural, political, and economic conditions that exist in China today. Now undergoing a radical restructuring of its infrastructure and urban fabric, Shanghai has become the stage upon which the search for an “alternative modernity” is most prominently enacted. With the restructuring of its old city and the development of the new Pudong district across the Huangpu River, Shanghai is the city that best represents China’s search for an “alternative modernity.” It is also the city in which this process can best be understood as part of the larger historical dialogue between East and West. This dialogue, a defining characteristic of Shanghai’s colonial period (1840– 1940), was responsible for transforming a small town, located in an agricultural region equidistant from Western Europe and the United States, into an international metropolis and a major port in the Far East. Occupied by the English, the French, and the Americans after the first Opium War (1840–42), Shanghai was soon broken up into “settlements,” or concessions independent of the Chinese authorities, established adjacent to the old Chinese city in 1854. In 1863 an International Settlement was created as an “Independent Self-Governed Republic.” The presence of these western settlements was most visibly manifest in the Bund, a waterfront development of Western-style buildings along the Huangpu River, the present configuration of which dates from the 1920s and 1930s. The iconic image of the Bund, popularized on postcards and in travel guides, dramatically illustrates the influence of Western cultures on Shanghai. In contrast to the European looking Bund, the old walled, radio-concentric Chinese city located nearby presents the other face of Shanghai, with its vernacular fabric and central garden. A combination of East and West, Shanghai—China’s most international city during the early twentieth century—was the place where foreign businessmen, Chinese migrants, and adventurers of all kinds wanted to be. It was an extraordinary mixture of conspicuous consumption and poverty, refinement and decadence. After the 1949 Chinese Communist victory, however, foreigners and wealthy Chinese
23 I.A. G A N D E L S O N A S : S H A N G H A I R E F L E C T I O N S
Fig. I.A.1–2 Patrick Keane, Shanghai Stock Exchange, Shanghai Studio, 1995
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Fig. I.A.3–14 Eunice Seng, A reading of the main urban axis, Beijing Studio, 1997
I.A. G A N D E L S O N A S : S H A N G H A I R E F L E C T I O N S
25
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Fig. I.A.15 Erik L’Heureux, Jewish Chinese per formance center on the site of the Jewish ghetto, Shanghai Studio, 1998
27 I.A. G A N D E L S O N A S : T H E R E T U R N O F S H A N G H A I
Fig. I.A.16–18 Marisa Yiu, A museum of contemporary art located in a subway station, Hong Kong Studio,
1999
28 SHANGHAI REFLECTIONS
fled, the drug trade and nightlife vanished, and the “Paris of the East” became a depressed industrial city forgotten by the world. One of the key components in the economic restructuring of China in the late 1980s and 1990s was the decision to modernize Shanghai—to transform it into a global economic center and to physically reinvent it as a turn-of-the-millennium city. Dead to the world for over forty years, Shanghai was reborn in the 1990s as an international business hub and financial center. At the same time it also became one of the most important new sites for architectural production as demonstrated by numerous architectural projects and buildings. With unmitigated speed, glittering skyscrapers, elevated highways, and major cultural institutions radically rose from the rubble, dynamically transforming the city. The razing of Shanghai’s urban fabric that has taken place over the last ten years to allow for the restructuring of the city’s infrastructure and the creation of entirely new districts is reminiscent of the modernist tabula rasa approach to city planning. In particular, it brings to mind the urbanism of Le Corbusier’s “Ville contemporaine” and of his Plan Voisin presented at the 1925 Esprit Nouveau pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, one of the most noted expressions of the modernist project in the West. Modernist urbanism originated in the more developed European countries as a response to the urban crisis that resulted from the radical economic and cultural changes brought by new advances in technology and mechanization. As is the case in China’s redevelopment, Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, a project for the renovation of the center of Paris, depended heavily upon the economic and political involvement of the state. It proposed replacing the “dreary,” “ugly,” and unhealthy fabric of the historical city, with its clogged streets and lack of light, with a modern green city of gridded avenues and crystalline “Cartesian” skyscrapers. Interestingly, the rhetoric advanced by those attempting to modernize Shanghai seems strikingly similar. However, while Le Corbusier included the old monuments as relics of the past, envisioning the city as a museum, Shanghai sees its monuments as vital sites for the articulation of Shanghai’s memory. They are seen as important elements within the city experience. Alive for the city’s inhabitants, they are also active in drawing tourists and stimulating new development. The process of modernization is affecting not only architectural production in Shanghai but also architectural “reproduction,” that is, architectural education. In the early twentieth century Chinese architects educated in Europe and the United
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States created the first schools of architecture in China. Around the same time the Chinese character for “architecture” was also created. After 1949 the schools were not just centers of architectural knowledge but also became places for architectural practice through the establishment of associated “institutes.” These “institutes” are still responsible for the design of most of the buildings and urban projects in China, performing the role of architectural offices in a country in which private offices either do not exist or have only recently been opened. This book presents work developed in 1996 within the context of a joint studio, conducted simultaneously at the School of Architecture at Princeton University, the Department of Architecture at Hong Kong University, and the School of Architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai. Intended to explore the particular ways in which the globalization of culture affects the contemporary practices of architecture and urbanism in the People’s Republic of China, the studio focused on the process of modernization that is rapidly altering the urban configuration of Shanghai. What emerged was an understanding of an “alternative modernism” that China has recently forged as it opens itself to a dialogue with the West. The chief objective in creating the Joint Studio Program at Princeton—organized in 1994 in conjunction with the Department of Architecture of Hong Kong University and the School of Architecture of Tongji University—was not only to establish the channels for a continuous and fluid communication among the different schools but also to create the mechanisms that would guarantee the exchange. Intended to shed light on the new issues facing a contemporary global culture, the joint studio does not attempt to develop a universal viewpoint but rather hopes to pierce the ideological veil that separates two very different cultures and foster a new understanding between them. Toward this end, the set-up of the joint studio was designed to play on the expected (and/or unexpected) differences, rather than similarities, between the two cultures and their pedagogic approaches. Each school acted as observer and critic for the other two schools—confronting them with their respective assumptions about the world and their fantasies about themselves, challenging their very identities in the process. First conducted in the fall of 1995, the joint studio began with the parallel development of three different projects—the students of the three schools worked simultaneously with the same site, although not necessarily with the same program. Students developed a preliminary project during the first six weeks of the
30 SHANGHAI REFLECTIONS
semester and met in Shanghai on the seventh week for a joint review of all three studios. At the conclusion of the semester, each studio completed its projects and reconvened individually for a final review. To date six joint studios have taken place. The second studio, published in this book, examined the questions raised by new development taking place around one of Shanghai’s historically significant buildings, the Dongjiadu Church and Catholic Cathedral. Proposed by Tongji University, the modernization and redevelopment of the Dongjiadu Church and the surrounding Nanshi district in Shanghai presented a unique opportunity for the examination of an issue that is specific to China: the reconsideration of the past as an integral element in the development of an alternative modernity. The Dongjiadu Church in Shanghai, a neoclassical structure, built in the midnineteenth century adjacent to the South Bund and the Old Chinese City, was the first cathedral in China. The church is now one of the newly designated landmarks in the city of Shanghai. An effort to suppress the visual presence of the church during the Cultural Revolution led to the construction of various structures both residential and industrial in the open spaces surrounding the cathedral. Over time squatters built a number of precarious structures adjacent to the side of the church, and the church’s apse was walled off and used for storage. In the last few years the Nanshi district has been rapidly developing into a new commercial area. The city decided to propose a master plan for the district and to build a public place in front of the church, restoring a view to its long-obscured façade. Starting with the city’s plan, the studio began with a specific question—how to improve the area—and moved toward a more general one; namely, how to restore historic buildings and monuments in Shanghai. In addressing these questions, the studio participants were forced to confront one of the most crucial issues in contemporary urbanism: how to negotiate the obstacles to the contemporary process of modernization created by the city’s existing fabric and sites of memory. They were also forced to examine the complementary issue: the depletion and destruction of cultural capital by the forces of modernization. In Shanghai the relationship between the economic forces of development and modernization and the cultural dimension of the city is not perceived as conflictive, since no cultural value has been attributed to the Chinese historical fabric. Everything is seen as dispensable, except the Western looking buildings of the Bund which represent the colonial past and remain integral elements of the city’s identity.
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Fig. I.A.19 Dongjiadu Church, surrounded by residential and industrial structures
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The question concerning the structure of the contemporary city, then, acquires specific dimensions in Shanghai. The city must confront not only a past of its own making but a past created by other cultures. Raising the impossibility of continuity—the ability to fix one’s experience of the present in the memory of the past— Shanghai’s colonial history mobilizes the present and the past, keeping them in perpetual motion relative to each other. The Dongjiadu Church project in particular points out the futility of the Cultural Revolution’s attempt to erase the past; but also, more generally, it suggests the impossibility of any attempt to erase the past. In Shanghai, for instance, the imperial and colonial past, having been transformed, is quickly returning to China in the form of contemporary Western technology and architecture. Theoretical work, however, provides a way to detach the present from the past, through the elaboration of the one by the other, opening up a very deliberate game without submitting to its rules. The joint studio project for modernizing the context of the Dongjiadu Church—a building designed according to a Western typology to house a Western religion, surrounded by worker housing during the Cultural Revolution, and now the object of modernization—provides a paradigmatic example for examination. The two questions that were the focus of the joint studio are discussed and developed in articles by Ackbar Abbas and Christine Boyer: the relationship between preservation and development in the process of modernization of Shanghai, and the question of nostalgia as one of the forms through which the relationship between the past and the present acquires presence in the physical and cultural context of Shanghai. For Abbas the return of Shanghai rests on the answer to a question outside of the economic or political realm. Underneath the considerations“Where do we invest?” or “How do we rule?” lies an even deeper question: “What will we remember?” In Shanghai memories are selective, rendered incomplete through a particularly persistent kind of cultural amnesia. The city’s multifarious past and complex colonial history problematizes the question of urban preservation. The “preservation” of the past as symbolic capital in Shanghai has allowed for the establishment of cultural differences previously blurred by globalization. The landmarking of the Dongjiadu Church is one example of this appropriation; within the city’s imaginary, the church’s reappearance represents Shanghai’s rebirth as an international city. Abbas argues persuasively that a reconsideration of the complex play between the new and the old is crucial to the process of recreating Shanghai as a City of Culture.
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Boyer’s text starts by describing the decadent cosmopolitan culture and the physical context of Shanghai in the 1930s and moves through the war years to the break produced by the 1949 revolution. Her text examines the question of memory in architecture through the “lens” of contemporary Chinese cinema, focusing in particular on the issue of nostalgia for the past. Shanghai Triad (1998), a film by the “Fifth Generation” director Liu Chang that takes place in 1930s Shanghai, presents an opportunity to consider this question in terms of the notion of reflection. For Boyer the constant play with mirrors that formally structures the film suggests the impossibility of preserving or restoring a Shanghai that no longer exists, or that only exists in memory. For the Princeton students the Dongjiadu Church and the Nanshi district were points of departure for the examination of a number of architectural and urban questions. At the most general level, the projects investigate the status of the monument in the contemporary city, as opposed to the twentieth-century or classical city. At a more specific level, the church—a Western building in a Chinese city—not only raises questions inherent to designing within another culture but also challenges the intent of those who would intervene in a context radically different from their own. Finally, at the architectural and urban level, the studio examined questions surrounding the attempt to “frame a monument” and “activate a district,” or, in Chinese terms, “modernize” a district, as part of the general goal of “modernizing” Shanghai. The projects approached the subject through the detour of the Chinese garden. Conceived through an interdisciplinary dialogue and created as a choreography of both space and time, the Chinese garden remains an important study of architecture and spectatorship. The goal of this first exercise was to introduce the students to a formal and textual analysis, placing special emphasis on the notion of reading. The students were then asked to propose different programs for the church and the district and to develop them along different paths in a process that would lead to maximum differentiation. Each student proposed a very different architectural and urban strategy: a museum that frames the building to reveal the traumatic events that transformed the church during the Cultural Revolution; a cluster of public facilities for tourists located on a sliver of land adjacent to the church presently occupied by a row of dilapidated shacks; a subway station that transforms the church into the main space of the subway entrance; a public library that frames a new public space for the district; and a project for a university library within a new
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campus that explores the question of violence exerted historically by the church in the West and on the church during the Cultural Revolution. Professors K. C. Lye and Leslie Lu directed the Hong Kong studio. More interested in the neighborhood than in the church itself, the students in the Hong Kong studio proposed a critical re-examination of the government master plan, a scheme that called for the systematic clearing of the existing urban fabric including the historically significant gardens, temples, and lilong housing. In their counterproposal, the students developed a strategic method of erasure that provided for density while simultaneously retaining the memory of the place. After first organizing the area into a grid 200 meters square, extending the Bund, and creating a series of parks, the students then proposed a cultural program focused on the arts, cinema, and recreation. The “review” of the Hong Kong studio project took place in the context of the Megacities Conference, which occurred at Hong Kong University in January 1997. The project became the locus of discussion for a variety of urban issues, including the role of the grid, the exurban condition, and the cultural implications of implementing Western urban moves within the Chinese context. The inevitable “Rashomon” atmosphere suggested by the three views of Shanghai—American, Hong Kong, and mainland Chinese—is made complete in Wu Jiang’s introduction to the Shanghai studio, which was directed by Professor Wang Bowei. Wu Jiang’s text focuses on the architectural discontinuity between the contemporary city and the feudal Chinese city of Shanghai. It presents the general ideological and economic restructuring of Chinese society produced by the new policy of modernization from a Chinese perspective. Adding to our understanding of exactly when and how China has modernized, it also provides another perspective on the question of development versus preservation previously examined by Ackbar Abbas. The Tongji University students developed six very different projects, each seeking to provide the church and its surroundings with a new narrative. They varied from a reflection on the difficulty of integrating the church with its surroundings because of its removal from the present Chinese cultural moment, to a transformation of Shanghai’s lilong housing type, to the development of a filmic metaphor that confirms the strong presence of cinema in Shanghai’s cultural context. A project structured along a temporal axis, a project that dealt with the role of the elderly in Chinese society, and a project in which a computer metaphor established a relationship between four urban fragments rounded out the group.
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Of particular interest to the joint studio were the unique conceptions in China concerning the relationship between architecture, buildings, and the process of architectural production. Questions arising from the confrontation between the local and the global were also central. How do we deal with the friction between local cultures and the global network of information constituted by books, media, and the Internet? How do we address the lack of formal and conceptual connection between traditional local architectures and the “universal” curriculum being taught worldwide in today’s schools? How do we deal with the particular traditions of symbolism, representation, and technology—all integral parts of the process of identity construction—when confronted with the pressures of international capital and design. These questions, taken on in different ways by the students that participated in the program, will reverberate in future joint studios, which will continue as a forum for the constant re-asking and re-evaluation of these questions as China moves forward into the twenty-first century.