NYT: The New, New City

NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF's piece in the June 8th Architecture Issue of the New York Times raises number of interesting issues around how we might begin to understand emerging urban cultural landscapes like Dubai and Shenzhen. Through the voices of architects caught up in the recent bubble of development, Ouroussoff seems to be constructing an argument that there is a continuous tension between the environments that this rapid development tends to privilege and the rich specificity of locality. Although he does gesture toward learnings from cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, he doesn't fully develop how this tension might play out.

“If 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.

Ouroussoff's visit with Wenyi Wu, a young architect working for a Chinese firm called Urbanus, is handled rather cursorily, when in fact it appears to offer a set of very promising interpretive tools for understanding these new urban settings.

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 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.

But Ouroussoff ends here, and gives far more print space to the squarely modern sentiments of architects Stephen Holl and Rem Koolhaas.

“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.”

“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.”

Rather than framing these sentiments as fact, we should be asking why these expressions of despair about the 'postmodern condition' exist, who is perpetuating the myths of Modernism in the built environment, and why. Architects themselves, and the process and frameworks they chose, are key points of critical examination here. But beyond this, we'll need to demand more from journalists, like Ouroussoff, who elide history and cultural landscape by dismissing these localities as empty places where architects are left with "nothing to sift through but sand."

For 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?

This reductive perspective is indicative of Modernism's potent (and insidious?) residue. It reminds me of a conversation I once overheard on a flight from Pittsburgh to Orlando. As we were beginning our descent over a vast stretch of wetlands, a middle-aged man leaned over to the person next to him, pointed out the window and said, "You see all that down there? All swamp...good for nothing but mosquitoes and alligators." Beyond the immediate clash his statement had with my own memories of canoing in those same waters, I began to wonder what the generations of Seminole natives would have to say about his view of their home land.