7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

1/13

NICOLAI OUROUSSOFFThe New York Times

The New, New City

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

2/13

ell anyone, Rem Koolhaas

me several years ago as wedown the F.D.R. Drive in New

ut the 20th-century city is over.

Dont tell anyone, Rem Koolhaas 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 anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it. Koolhaassviewpoint is widely shared by close observers of the evolution

of cities. But not even Koolhaas, it seems, was completely

prepared for what would come next.

In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable

in size to New York have sprouted up almost overnight. Only 30

years ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing village of a few thou-

sand people, and Dubai had merely a quarter million people.

Today Shenzhen has a population of eight million, and Dubais

glittering towers, 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

outlines swallowed by rings of new development. Built at phe-

nomenal 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. Dubai, which

lays claim to some of the worlds most expensive private islands,

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

3/13

the tallest building and soon the largest theme park, has been

derided as an urban tomb where the rich live walled off from

the poor migrant workers who serve them. Shenzhen is often

criticized as a product of unregulated development, bettersuited 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 any-

more, Jesse Reiser, an American architect working in Dubai,

told me recently. What context are we talking about in a city

thats 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 inAmerica, 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. InAmerica, 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. Weve

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 com-

plexes 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 Beijings residents can afford to live here. Climbing

to the top of one of Holls 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

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

4/13

as a symptom of the citys unbridled, dehumanizing develop-

ment. Protected by armed guards, these residential high-rises

stood on what was until quite recently a working-class neighbor-

hood, even though the poor quality of their construction makesthem 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 Venturis ideas about the city, Holl said,

referring to Robert Venturis 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 dont 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

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

5/13

social strata that give a city its complexity and from which

architects have typically drawn inspiration.

In Dubai, for instance, what might once have been the

product of 100 years of urban growth has been compressedinto 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 Modernisms 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 Modernisms attack on the citys historical fabric.

Yet the notion of finding authenticity in a sprawling metropol-

itan 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 colossal scale, seem to

absorb any urban model, no matter how unique, virtually unno-

ticed. A project that could have a significant impact on the char-

acter 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 dont 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 returningto something that has been going on for a long time, or is it

something radically different? We are in a condition we dont

understand yet.

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?

In 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 Man-

hattan. 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 islands edge; a spiraling tower that winds around an

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

6/13

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 termswith 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 islands perimeter,

a narrow park cutting through its center, classical arcades lining

the downtown streets. But the majority of Dubais 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 that the plan will gain in com-

plexity 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 ofthe modern typologies work in Asia even though they are totally

dysfunctional in America. Typologies weve rejected turn out to

be viable in other contexts.

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 Koolhaass

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 buildings 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

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

7/13

plan for One North, a mixed-use development with a projected

population of about 140,000. Located on what was once a

military site, Hadids design conjured a high-tech mountainous

terrain. Dubbed the urban carpet, it was intended t o blendoffice and residential towers and highways and public parks

into a seamless whole. Against the rigid lines of the t raditional

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.

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 r ead

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 t ime, 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 streetgrid of the older neighborhoods. In an effort to preserve the tex-

ture 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 Hadids 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.

Indeed, 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

PREV

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

8/13

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 Umemotoreworked 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 r esult 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.

The walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods celebrated

by Jane Jacobs may seem impossibly remote, but encourag-

ing signs of a more textured urban reality can still be found.

Take Holls 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 swim-

ming pool. The developers openness to ideas was amazing,

Holl says. When they first asked me to do the project, it was

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

9/13

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 windowand 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-bed-

room apartments. But if Shenzhen is an emblem of what can

happen when free-marketcapitalism 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 habeen study-

ing how people carve a living space out of seemingly inhospi-

table environments, hoping to develop an urbanist model more

deeply rooted in the spontaneity of everyday life. He took me t o

a small museum Urbanus designed on the outskirts of the city.

just housing. I suggested adding the cinematheque, the kinder-

garten. I added an 80-room hotel and the swimming pool as

well. Anywhere else, theyd build it in phases over several years.

Its too big. After our meeting, they said were building thewhole thing all at once. I couldnt believe it. We havent had to

compromise anything.

But what makes it possible is the density. The Mod-

ernist 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

theres 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 zig-

zag-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 impos-

ing 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

PREV

34

0

2

12

14

15

16

17

PREV

13

PREV

PREV

ESCAPEM

ENT

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

10/13

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 theimpression 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.

Other architects, hoping to build in ways that r eflect an

emerging vernacular, are taking a similar approach, looking at

more modest and more informally constructed urban neigh-

borhoods 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, Deiras low concrete structures and laby-

rinthine alleyways are home to a lively population of Southeast

0

8

7

6

5

2

37

3

4

PREV

PREV

ADI

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

11/13

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 mod-esty, these areas could form the basis for a fresh urban strategy

based neither on imported Western models nor on clichs about

local souks.

As Holl told me recently in his New York office, working

on a large scale doesnt mean that t he particulars of place no

longer matter. I dont 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 cant 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 dont have an opinion about what the

world should be like? We really feel that. But is there time for

a manifesto? I dont know.

18

17

9

10

8

7

11

16

6

5

12

13

32

31

14

28

3534

29

33

4

30

15

PREV

PREV

PREV

PREV

PREV

ADI

ADI

5

3

19

20

21

PREV

EV ADI

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

12/13

ont

now

7/25/2019 VIS301 F14 48444 Editorial I

13/13

Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architect

critic of The New York Times

June 8,2008