Sarah Williams Goldhagen on Architecture: Valuable China
It has a centralized, repressive
government for which its citizens do not vote. Local
authorities come to people’s houses in the middle of the
night to arrest them on bogus charges. Censors control
access to information, monitoring the Internet and approving
or even writing elementary school textbooks. Corrupt
government officials routinely elevate to power the
obedient, the well-connected, and the cash-plentiful above
the meritorious. Laborers, skilled and unskilled, work
breathtakingly long hours. The country occupies foreign
territory and affords its colonized people freedom neither
of speech nor of worship.
It’s China, and part of you—maybe
the best part of you—wants
to dislike it. In all likelihood you do not wish its
government well, even, or especially, as its economy
flourishes, extending the country’s political reach and
perhaps portending the progressive diminution of the United
States as global leader. A number of the articles that you
read and the newscasts that you hear fortify your unease,
although you concede that, while poverty levels in the
United States have become a rising tide, the Chinese
People’s Communist Party (PCP)—less
ironically named than you might imagine—has
decreased the share of its rural population living in
poverty by over 35 percent in fifteen years. Indeed, in the
past twenty-five years, 70 percent of all the world’s
peoples who have been lifted out of poverty were Chinese: to
a people who have had their feet stuck in the mud of rice
paddies for generations if not centuries, paying jobs,
improved schooling, and homes with running water and
electricity sound like a very good deal.
Modernization goes hand in hand with
urbanization, riding on new infrastructures for
transportation, power, and waste removal; growing with
industries high, medium, and low; heavy and light; service
and financial. This means building. Industries need
manufacturing plants and offices. The people who work in
them need housing, and their children need schools, parks,
and playgrounds. Everyone needs service and retail
establishments where the newly un-impoverished can spend
their RMB.
Currently China’s urban population is
expanding at the rate of one million people per year, and
since the 1980s well over 100 million Chinese, and probably
closer to 200 million, have moved from rural areas into
urban areas. Projections estimate that in order to
accommodate these new urban dwellers, China will need to
build fifty cities housing one million people every year
between now and 2030. Unlike most Latin American countries,
whose politicians content themselves with favelas
where cheap laborers reside in shantytowns, pirating
electricity and lugging home buckets of water, the PCP is,
as quickly and efficiently as it can, actually building
those new cities. All over the country new metropolises are
bursting into being like Magic Rocks rising on surprised
land.
China is re-configuring its built
environment at an astonishing pace and scale. To read the
American media on how the Chinese ride this self-constructed
juggernaut of modernization, one would think that as in
human rights, so also in the domain of built environment:
there is much to protest, or at least to disdain. And so
there is: grotesque pollution; edifices so poorly
constructed that they collapse at the slightest earthquake
tremor, killing schoolchildren and other innocents; building
and zoning codes written primarily so that the hands of
government officials with the power to override compliance
can be more handily greased; foreign architects hired, then
left unpaid like brides at their own weddings while local
officials steal their ideas and their drawings and
subsequently hire Chinese architects to construct the jilted
architects’ designs without their supervision. Visual
representations of the Chinese urban landscape tend to
depict soul-numbing, characterless high-rise apartment slabs
that seem plucked from any pre-1989 Soviet satellite
republic and cloned by the hundreds.
Pollution, unsafe buildings, corruption,
ugliness—it
all exists. China is productive but predatory, at home and
abroad. But it is also spectacularly large and a real
country, more than the place, for better or worse, that the
American media tend to present. Recently I went to China and
other Asian countries—Singapore,
South Korea, and Japan—to
examine their built environments. Regarding China, I came
away with some notions refined and others turned upside
down, both because of what China is—namely,
a rapidly modernizing dictatorship—and
because of how China is depicted by our media.
SEVERAL BASICS MUST be established. China
covers a land area roughly the size of the continental
United States but is far denser: whereas the current
American population is approximately 311 million, China’s is
more than four times larger, at 1.3 billion. The scale of
the PCP’s modernization project is thus not only
unprecedented in human history, it is also objectively
overwhelming. To manage the challenge, the PCP has chosen to
delegate progressively more power to the local
administrations of its many provinces. Some of these
provinces, especially for what are known as first- and
second-tier cities (provincial capitals and each province’s
other largest cities), have developed and are employing
intelligent strategies to manage their urban growth.
Here is the problem: there is much to
admire, even to emulate. Infrastructure presents the obvious
example. Few need to be reminded that America’s
infrastructure is in shambles, and judged by how federal,
state, and local authorities are managing the problem—delaying
infrastructure maintenance again and again, stalled on
re-thinking its basic organization—one
might surmise that Americans enjoy digging themselves
further and further down into ever deeper financial and
actual ditches. China manifests the political will to invest
serious money into infrastructure of all kinds, not just on
its touted high-speed rail system: the country spends 9
percent of its GDP on infrastructure building and
maintenance to our 3 percent, although admittedly, they
started from a figurative zero.
Not only the fact of China’s
infrastructure spending, but also the manner of its
execution, at least in some provinces, deserves study.
First- and second-tier cities in and around Shanghai (itself
a first-tier city) offer a potent example. According to the
Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center—that
the city would devote an entire museum, placed prominently
in its central cultural district, to urban planning bespeaks
the municipal government’s commitment to the built
environment—the
urban greening coverage in Shanghai is well over 30 percent,
up from 12 percent several decades ago. Laws mandate that
new infrastructure, including any important newly
constructed municipal road, must be 30 percent green—and,
driving around, one does not get the impression that this
law was made only to be broken. Edging highways and major
thoroughfares are two, three, or even four levels of
planting on both sides, divided by a lushly planted median.
To be sure, this planting is not innovatively composed, and
it would receive no awards from the American Society of
Landscape Architects—but
there it is, pleasant enough arrangements of trees, shrubs,
grasses, and flowers cooling and aerating the environment,
buffering neighboring communities from vehicular noise and
activity, absorbing runoff, and mitigating the sensory
overstimulation that necessarily accompanies contemporary
urban life. Driving on highways, surely one of the more
aesthetically unpleasant but necessary urban rituals, is
enormously less trying.
Emphasis on light and greenery shapes
other aspects of Shanghai’s urban fabric as well. Since the
PCP remains the largest landholder, new buildings and
complexes get built when the government sells land to
private real estate developers. The party typically
establishes conditions for the parcel’s use, and those
conditions usually fit into an overall regional plan that
serves the public interest in the long term. This contrasts
with practices in so many countries, including the United
States, where little planning and only short-term profits
drive the manner in which real estate parcels get developed.
By law, new housing projects in Shanghai
and its environs must be 30 percent green, and many are. (It
is more than a little ironic that, nearly a century after
the Francophiliac and somewhat xenophobic Le Corbusier
insisted that towers in parks were the ideal datum for the
modernized city, that vision has become a reality in China.)
It would be better still if all the gardens in these
residential projects were open to the public (many of the
higher-end ones are not), but still they exist, contributing
to the betterment of the city’s overall environs, absorbing
runoff, helping to mitigate pollution, allowing sunlight to
reach the ground plane.
Historically, China may have kept people
out with walled cities and the greatest wall of all, but
today, in the arena of urban design, Chinese government
officials, and the architects and developers with whom they
work, are anything but walled off from the world, evincing
an openness to learning from the best urban design and
settlement practices of other countries. For managing
metropolitan growth and preventing sprawl, Shanghai built
satellite cities, nine of which are modeled after urban and
architectural traditions of different foreign countries.
(Europe reigns: Anting, known as “German New Town,” was
designed by the firm Albert Speer [Jr.] and Partner;
Songjiang, “Thames Town,” by the U.K.-based Atkins
Consultancy; Pujiang, “Italian Town,” by Vittorio Gregotti
and Associates.) The results of this openness are
predictably uneven. Songjiang resembles a British
Disneyworld without rides, but Pujiang offers a sober,
elegant model of high-density urban design that the Chinese
would do well to replicate. Wealthier Chinese have taken
also to building megavillas of the sort that, from the
standpoints of urban design, environmental sustainability,
and social justice, should not be built anywhere.
Yet positive examples of China’s
willingness to explore the aesthetic and planning practices
of other cultures and traditions are common. This includes
mixed-use developments such as Kohn Pedersen Fox’s Pudong
Kerry Parkside in Shanghai, a handsome office, residential,
and retail complex broken into different components to
respond to the variable scales of the buildings’ functions
and the neighboring environs. Another example is Sanlitun in
Beijing, where the American firms SHoP and LOT-EK, the
Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and the Chinese Beijing
Matsubara & Architects collaborated to create a lively
outdoor pedestrian retail district that breaks from the
city’s overscaled, monotonously regular grid to create small
pockets of street life filled with giggling teenagers in
tight jeans. And although China has come late to historic
preservation—Beijing
has been sorrowfully denuded of much of its built historical
fabric by the government’s excessively exuberant slum
clearance program—Shanghai
districts such as Taipingqiao (with a master plan by
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) and Xintiandi (Wood + Zapata,
Inc.) mitigate the supertall scale of the city’s downtown
business district through a felicitous combination of
preservation, adaptive reuse, and new construction that
confers upon these areas at once contemporaneity and a
welcome sense of the city’s historic evolution.
When covering architecture in China, the
American media tend to focus on one-off buildings, many of
them designed by internationally celebrated architects:
Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest and Rem Koolhaas and
OMA’s CCTV building, both in Beijing, or Zaha Hadid’s new
Opera House in Guangzhou. Standing under the double
cantilever of Koolhaas’s CCTV, or indeed standing inside it
and gazing down through one’s feet and glazed flooring to
the plaza many stories below, would activate a
fight-or-flight response in just about anybody, and seems
deliberately designed to do so. Perhaps Koolhaas managed his
ethically questionable decision to monumentalize the
headquarters of the party-controlled media by making the
building as unappealing to enter and inhabit as possible.
Hadid’s Opera House in Guangzhou, by contrast, presents an
extraordinary melding of abstract metaphor, engineering,
digital technology, and spatial experience; it follows two
other equally successful projects, her MAXXI museum of
twenty-first-century art in Rome and the Evelyn Grace
Academy in Brixton, buildings for which Hadid justly earned
Britain’s prestigious Stirling Prize two years in a row.
These three projects, of which the Opera House in Guangzhou
is the largest, suggests that Hadid has hit her stride
professionally, earning her place as one of our era’s most
talented and innovative designers.
However feted, justifiably and not,
high-end icons by flashy Western stars such as Koolhaas and
Hadid matter less—to
most Chinese people, and ultimately to architecture—than
the more general Chinese openness to experimentation that is
evident not only in such large-scale cultural landmarks, but
also in less wellpublicized public and private buildings at
all different scales. Architectural innovation of the sort
that is rare to nonexistent in the United States, except in
private homes and the occasional museum, is to be found in
bookstores and restaurants, in art galleries and in shopping
centers. You see it in developer-built residential towers
and mixed-use complexes, in headquarters for private
corporations, in school buildings, in public libraries.
China’s modernization is often portrayed
as one step toward its eventual Westernization. The facts on
the ground suggest a much more interesting phenomenon. The
Chinese are not prospecting a path toward Western ways but,
having borrowed, felicitously and infelicitously, from the
West, are now modernizing with means and results that are
thoroughly Chinese. We can loathe the PCP’s dictatorship and
human rights policies and still recognize its real
accomplishments in the built environment, and consider how
those accomplishments might be replicable in countries with
more open political systems. Judge, yes; but also look and
learn.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen is the
architecture critic for The New
Republic. This article appeared in
the November 17, 2011, issue of the magazine.