THE NEW NEW CITY
THE NEW NEW CITY
NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
The New York Times Magazine
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he 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 backwardlooking. 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.” oll 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 workingclass 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.
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How do you breathe life into a project at such a scale? “
I f 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. n 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? ities 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.” or 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?
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n 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.” oolhaas 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.”
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A city like Dubai is literally built on a desert
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he chall enges o f buildin scale cit g what a y from sc mounts realities ratch are to a sm of workin compou allg in a glo Koolhaa nded by bal mark s’s statu the e re tp lace. An the des may be ign of a grapplin architec televisio g simult t of in Beijin n aneous headqu g, a stoc ly a w r it te k h rs e xchange neighbo complex rhood in in Shen z D h u e Europe. bai, as w n and a The inte 20-bloc ell as a nse com k dozen b means uildings p e that arc ti ti o n for thes in hitects a out sed e comm re often uctive d issions forced to esigns in months churn w e , tweakin eks or g their m to fit loc odels al condit ions. everal y ears ago, the London -based, Iraqi-bo rn archit ect Zaha Ha did rece ived a phone call from a Chinese develop er askin if she m g ight be intereste in desig d ning a 5 00-acre urban d evelopm e nt on th outskirts e of Singa pore. Ha had nev did er met th e develo before. per She wa s soon w on the m orking aster pla n for “O North,” ne a mixed -use dev with a p elopme rojected nt populati 140,00 on of ab 0. Loca out ted on w military hat was site, Ha once a did’s de high-tec sign con h moun jured a tainous the “urb te rrain. Du an carp bbed et,” it w blend o as inten ffice an ded to d reside highway ntial tow s and p ers and ublic pa Against rks into the rigid a seamle lines of sinuous ss the trad curves o whole. it io nal stre f the fre mobile et grid, eways s society. the u g The roo gested a to string ftops, w more flu ent regu h o id, s e lations, heights a single looked a were su piece of b s ject if crumple they we a haunti re cut fr d fabric ng unity o , m g iv . ing the “We wa rather th compos nted to an eithe create a ition r the mo chaos y complex notony o ou find order f Modern in conte mporar ism or th et once y cities,” e constru Hadid s c ti on bega building aid. n s , th w e design as left to develop of the local arc er. As th e towers hitects h the site ired by th rose in c , it was lusters s e difficult than 20 cattered to read blocks n th a e c ro fo ss rm o w comp surprisin al inten lete, par t. With m gly conv ts of the o entiona re city look l.
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d e t n a We w ate a to cre order ex l p m o an c h t r e rath er the eith y of on t o n o m ism n r e d Mo chaos or the find in you orary p m e t n co cities
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souks were added as a nod to local traditions
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adid 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. f 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. ndeed, 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.
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he 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.” oll 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.
Anywhere else,they’d build it in phases over several years. “
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enyi 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. ther 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. s 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.”
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But is there time for a manifesto?
I don’t know.
THE NEW NEW
THE NEW NEW Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architecture critic of The New York Times. Published in The New York Times Magazine : June 8, 2008