Architexturez Enaction wrote:
Shanghai is slowly sinking. It is, you might be forgiven for thinking,
karma. For the past 15 years it has been rising faster and higher than
any city in the history of the world. But the city's greedy
appropriation of the air is proving too much for the ground beneath to
bear.http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1346214,00.html
wow!i hope all renewal-and-redevelopment-experts who been raising hi-brows
skywards at ihc, etc, and saying shanghai-model while we been pleading
land-please-as-per-law noticed this!btw, re sinkings, there is chalk beneath ihc, etc, no?
Indians aspire to a Ballard-like dystopia, glad to drink from the drags
of the western cup. Gratefully they waddle-around the high table when
they might've taken their rightful place instead. We have spoken on this
list about the powdered ladies of IIC, and of men who could've been
contenders. Just wait till their lives fettered by mama, papa, and
whiskey soda comes to an end, slowly and catastrophically, as predicted
and in keeping with JG Ballard.
yes, on chalk-feet it stands. here's the whole article:
Where Blade Runner meets Las Vegas
Shanghai is mad for skyscrapers - it has more than the entire west coast
of the US, and still they keep coming. But, as Stuart Jeffries
discovers, preserving the past and planning for the future are rarely
part of the architect's vision. And now the city's planners are
grappling with the consequences.
Monday November 8, 2004
The Guardian
Shanghai is slowly sinking. It is, you might be forgiven for thinking,
karma. For the past 15 years it has been rising faster and higher than
any city in the history of the world. But the city's greedy
appropriation of the air is proving too much for the ground beneath to
bear. "Shanghai's ground condition is very soft," says Kuo-Liang Lee, an
associate of Arup and Partners architectural office in the city. "The
rock bed is about 300m from the surface and the underground water table
is higher, about 1-1.5 m from the surface. There are now more than 4,000
buildings more than 100m tall in Shanghai. That results in extremely
severe ground settlement." It's just one of the reasons why city
planners are now desperately trying to halt the architectural annexation
of Shanghai's skies. Dearth of greenery, horrible pollution, inadequate
transport and an almost unbearable press of humanity on the streets are
others.
Shanghai is now the world's most densely populated city, according to Wu
Jiang, deputy director of Shanghai's urban planning administration
bureau."Ten million people are living in central Shanghai and another 10
in the suburbs. We made mistakes and now we are establishing several
plans that will control the development of new skyscrapers and deal with
the problems that they have created." Among the solutions is a metro
system, a huge motorway network and massive greening of the choking and
dusty streets - matters that good city planners might have considered in
advance. But then, what city bureaucrat could have predicted that
Shanghai, the launchpad for Mao's cultural revolution and for decades a
stymied city, would become such a sucking vortex for Chinese workers,
foreign capital and international whizz kids?
In any event, Shanghai has never been good at thinking ahead. JG
Ballard, writing in his novel Empire of the Sun about the decadence of
the city in the late 1930s, observed that "life in Shanghai was lived
wholly within an intense present". Arguably, the key change between then
and now is the heightened intensity with which this most exciting and
fearful of Chinese cities inhabits its present, ignores its future and
viciously erases its past. For not only has Shanghai expanded
inordinately in the past 15 years, but it has also wielded the wrecking
ball with abandon, wantonly destroying much of what made this
architectural melting pot so cherishable in the first place.
"This is a country on steroids and Shanghai is its main artery,"
observes Andy Hall, a British architect and designer who is based in
Shanghai. China currently consumes 40% of the world's concrete and 90%
of its steel. Much of that is suspended above the heads of Shanghai's
pedestrians. At one point in the mid-90s, one quarter of the world's
construction cranes were at work there. For someone from London, the
can't-do city, the energy of Shanghai's renaissance is impressive,
whatever manifold aesthetic horrors and social problems this has caused.
None the less, one thinks of the French writer Guy de Maupassant who
used to dine at the restaurant at the Eiffel Tower in Paris because it
was was the only place where he didn't have to look at the thing.
Shanghainese of a similarly fastidious temperament are not so fortunate.
Even if they dined on the 88th floor of what is currently Shanghai's
tallest skyscraper, the Jingmao Tower, they would be rewarded with
360-degree vistas over what was what once called the Paris of the East,
but now has become something even more striking - and not, necessarily
in a good way.
Of Shanghai's 4,000 100-metre-plus buildings, 2,000 are skyscrapers (ie
habitable buildings higher than 152m or 500ft) - more than the total on
the entire west coast of the US. Many are daft confections, tailored for
the aesthetic sensibilities of small boys who like things that soar in
the sky and glow in the dark. But if you dream of driving over raised
motorways through a shouty neon cityscape where Blade Runner meets
Vegas, go to Shanghai and hire a convertible.
Several of those skyscrapers are among of the tallest human
constructions in the world. They make London's Gherkin (180m, 40
storeys) look like a petty pickle and dwarf Canary Wharf Tower (243.2m,
50 storeys). One of the dafter is called Tomorrow Square (285m, 60
storeys), a missile thrusting upwards from the city's Huangpu district;
another, called Plaza 66 (288m, 66 storeys), is a dull glass stump in
the Jing'An district.
Not all of these Johnny-Come-Highlies are grotesque or banal. The 420m
Jingmao Tower (slightly smaller than the 457m Oriental Pearl TV tower
which it sits beside in the Pudong district) is an extraordinary
skyscraper, arguably the building that gives the lie to Shanghai's
silliness of high rises. It is the fourth-tallest building in the world
and was designed in a style that quotes traditional Chinese pagoda
design while echoing the art deco of Manhattan's most beautiful skyscrapers.
The Jingmao is thus emblematic of the mingling of western and eastern
creative forces - something that the city has been good at ever since
the British, those lovely people, used their leverage to create millions
of opium addicts and compel the Chinese government to open up the city
as a treaty port in the 1840s. "Shanghai has always been a hotch potch
of east and west," says the Shanghainese architectural historian Lyn
Pann. "It is a hybrid, and the Jingmao is a perfect expression of that.
Most of the rest of the new stuff is rubbish though."
The Jingmao Tower is more giddily imaginative than anything one can
imagine rising from London's Docklands. A Feng Shui grandmaster blessed
the building at its opening in 1999 and its 88 floors are auspicious to
the Chinese (eight is a lucky number). The Grand Hyatt hotel occupies
its upper 36 floors, and if you're a vertigo sufferer, you could do
worse than indulge in some aversion therapy on the 88th floor
observation deck: look left to the model city below, then glance right,
down the hollow insides of this building, into the dizzying plummet of a
35-storey atrium. Or maybe not.
In 2007, the Jingmao will be joined on the Pudong skyline by the 492m
tall, 101-storey World Finance Centre. Again, this is a west-meets-east
development: designed by New York Architects Kohn Petersen Fox
Associates, developed by a Japanese consortium which has invested $1bn
in the building, including $200m for a post-9/11 strengthening of its
structures.
Shanghai's growth spurt was arguably the fault of Deng Xiaoping. In the
early 1990s, the Chinese leader initiated his open-door policy in order
to stimulate economic growth and create socialism with Chinese
characteristics. As part of that policy, Pudong, a then desolate area of
factories and paddy fields across the Huangpu river from the city's
historic centre, was made a special economic zone and quickly became an
international playground for foreign capital and international architects.
In the days before the second world war when the Bund - that Shanghai
riverside boulevard at the epicentre of Britain's Chinese adventure -
was the most impressive street in Asia, the neon of its art deco hotels
and pillared colonial corporate HQ was reflected in the paddy fields of
Pudong. Now Pudong returns the compliment in spades: Nestlé, Samsung,
Canon, Pepsi, Standard Chartered and many other brands of foreign
capital nightly shine their gaudy retort across the Huangpu.
"Until the moment that Deng changed the rules, Shanghai had been a city
frozen in time," says Lyn Pann. "It had been punished by the communists
for its capitalistic decadence during the pre-revolutionary era and for
being the centre of foreign influences in China."
The British influence on Chinese architecture was not confined to
colonial bombast. In the mid-19th century after the Small Swords
Rebellion, 20,000 Chinese sought refuge in Shanghai's international
settlements or "concessions", and the British and French built hundreds
of houses. Known as longtangs, they consisted of traditional Chinese
houses with rooms grouped around a courtyard, but squashed together in
British-style terraces. Arguably the city's only indigenous
architectural form, longtangs were designed to house a family, but rooms
rapidly became sublet, resulting in overcrowding and insanitary conditions.
Andy Hall, director of the Shanghai-based Surv architecture and design
practice, argues that the recent building boom mimics that time when
80,000 buildings were crammed into a few square kilometres in 20 years.
"Clearly this city gets some of its vigour from haemorrhaging
developments," he says, "but that doesn't mean there aren't terrible
social consequences."
More than half of Shanghai's population lived in these longtangs for
many years; but in the 90s, many were demolished as the city embraced
newness and decent toilet facilities. Only recently has it begun to
recognise that its past is worth preserving, converting some longtans
into luxury apartments, transforming the ancient Yu Yuan Bazaar, with
its lovely 15th-century Chinese vernacular, into a tourist mall, and
rebuilding traditional Shanghainese houses at Xintiandi as restaurants
and designer shops.
Hall's co-director, Thomas Chow, recently presented a paper called Five
Ways to Ruin a City to the Shanghai Design Biennale. He suggested that
the city's ill-considered and rapid growth had made it barely habitable.
"In downtown Lujiazhui in Pudong, the scale is hostile and everything
appears to have been enlarged on a photocopier; towers are towering,
boulevards are 12 lanes wide (and un-crossable), without any
relationship to human scale, activity, or urban life," he wrote. Worse
yet, Shanghai's character was being obliterated. It had become all
degraded style and no substance. The best international architects often
felt as though they were shut out of Shanghai as developers favoured
cheaper and tackier designs without creativity or soul.
In Chow's view, "the market's rapid pace of wholesale importation of
foreign imagery has resulted in a scary, perverse, and at times
ridiculous trend of turning modern cities into Disney-lands ... The
urban landscape is being littered with wholesale copies and replications
of foreign styles - a Dutch-style villa complex in Pudong, a
French-style apartment complex in Xuhui district, a Spanish-style home,
English-style gardens, the list goes on."
These are the grisly aesthetic developments that you can glimpse through
your fingers as the tourist boat takes you up the Huangputo to the
Yangtze and elsewhere in the city. But worse is the sheer density of
Shanghai's rapid expansion. Wu Jiang, who was roped in from academia to
help deal with the spiralling planning problems, wants to change all
that. He talks excitedly about reducing plot ratios and making central
Shanghai green and pleasant. But he also knows that such reforms will
not be enough. "If we want it to be the best city in the world, it's
impossible to carry on with this kind of building. You can't reduce that
density through political power. You have to make it attractive for
people to leave and live in new cities nearby."
And so, on the outskirts of Shanghai, connected by new massive motorways
and rapid transit railways, 10 new cities, each of one million people
and each with 10 satellite towns of 200,000 people, are being built.
One, New Harbour City, will have the biggest docks in the world;
another, An Ting, will be a huge car-manufacturing city; a third, called
Song Jiang, will be a university centre.
It is thus that Shanghai hopes to build itself out of the problem that
it built itself into. At a pace unparalleled in the rest of the world,
it is again racing down the fast track to somewhere - whether paradise
or ruin is anybody's guess.