Editorial Design II

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NewThe New,

City

By Nicolai Ouroussoff

The New York Times Magazine

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was completely prepared for the coming for what would come next. In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable in size to New York have sprou- ted 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 Shen-zhen has a population of eight mil-lion, and Dubai’s glittering towers,

“Don’t tell anyone,” Rem Kool-haas 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 any- more. Our job is simply to main- tain it.” Koolhaas’s viewpoint is widely shared by close obser- vers of the evolution of cities. But not even Koolhaas, It seems

disorderly rows

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 out-lines 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.

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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 r ich l ive wal led 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. “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,

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where to go from here

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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, he 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,

Bursting with life

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“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 decentral-

ized neighborhoods, something

closer in spirit to Los Angeles. The

breathtaking speed of their construc-

tion means that they usually lack

the layers — the mix of architec-

tural styles and intricately related

social strata — that give a city its

complexity and from which architects

have typically drawn inspiration.

the rules have to be rewritten.

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something radically differentIn 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 met-

ropolitan 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 colos-

sal scale, seem to absorb any urban model, no matter how

unique, virtually unnoticed. A project that could have a sig-

nificant 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 dif-

ferent? 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.

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If much of contemporary architec-

ture 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 de-

sign for a six-and-a-half-square-mile

development in Dubai called Wa-

terfront City, Koolhaas proposed

creating an urban island inspired

by a section of Midtown Manhat-

tan. The design linked a dense

grid of conventional towers to the

mainland by a system of bridges.

organic whole

A series of stunning “iconic” build-ings a gigantic, hollowed-out Pi-ranesian sphere at the island’s edge; a spiraling tower that winds around an airy public atrium were intended

to give the city a distinct flavorKoolhaas 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 some-what conventional models of public space: boardwalk along the island’s perimeter, a narrow park cutting through its center, classical ar-cades lining the downtown streets.

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that the plan will gain in com-plexity as the buildings’ functions are worked out he says he was thrilled to learn that the govern-ment wanted both a courthouse and a mosque on the island.“Another option that I personally find very interesting,” Koolhaas told me, “is the modernist ver-nacular of the 1970s — build-ings 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 to-tally dysfunctional in America. Ty-pologies we’ve rejected turn out to be viable in other contexts.”

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

built on a desert

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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 build-

ings 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 archi-

tect 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 project-

ed 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.

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“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 welIndeed, contemporary architects’ urban

plans may be less tied to location than they would like to admit.

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When a Chinese developer ap-proached the New York-based Jesse Reiser and Nanako Ume-moto 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 court-yards 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 reconfig-ured to fit the new waterfront site;

souks were added as a nod to local traditions. The result is a remark-ably nuanced view of how to knit together the various elements of urban life, but it also seems as if it could exist anywhere. Thewalkable, mixed-use neighbor-hoods 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 res-taurant, a theater and a kindergar-ten, integrating the complex into the surrounding neighborhood.

multi-layered network

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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

openness to ideaswindow 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 mu-seum 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 surround-ing alleyways; the layout of the galleries suggests the footprint of the migrant workers’ housing but on a more intimate scale.

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Other architects, hoping to build in ways that reflect an emerging

vernacular, are taking a similar approach, looking at more mod-

est and more informally constructed urban neighborhoods for in-

spiration. Shumon Basar, a London-based critic and independent

curator, recently described a number of small, unplanned settle-

ments 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.”

informally constructed

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The architecture critic of The New York Times. Nicolai Ouroussoff

June 8, 2008

Published in The New York Times Magazine