My friend Dorien just emailed me this article, a perfect companion to the previous one re architecture in Beijing.
The City of Tomorrow
by Mark Kingswell,
© Harper’s Magazine, February 2005
http://www.harpers.org/Newsstand2005-02.html
Ask anyone here and they will tell you: Shanghai is the future. But that is not so. Shanghai is not the future; it is every future, a palimpsest of urban visions, a history of what is to come. Visiting Shanghai is a journey to the very near future by way of the very near past, a fact that contributes to a strange form of urban vertigo: I came here looking for the city of tomorrow and was immediately overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu. Shanghai is a fantasyland of architectural grandiosity where any drawing, no matter how insane or adolescent, may come to life almost instantly, without the citizens' committees, building restrictions, and expensive labor that hamper architectural geniuses elsewhere.
To call the city science fictional is correct but too general. Yes, there are geodesic domes and massive cantilevers and huge expanses of neon and glass. But the landscape offers a full spectrum of sci-fi echoes and allusions. There are Buck Rogers ray-gun finials on the China Life building in Pudong. Portholed Jetsons-style flying saucers hovering over the People's Square in Puxi and atop the JJ Oriental tower in Pudong. The knifing faceted slash of the Tomorrow Tower is like Darth Vader's headquarters designed by Japanese toy freaks. For advanced students, there is Space Ghost whimsy to be found in the Shanghai Golden Beach Tower, with its crown of gold spikes, said to recall a lotus blossom but really looking more like a huge pineapple.
Or consider the Batman armor and cowling of the New World Plaza, over near the bustling shops of Huaihai Lu, capable not only of lighting every one of its windows but of making them play a rippling multihued symphony of light, a Laser Floyd extravaganza, every night. There are glass domes on almost every corner, from Meiluo City to the International Convention Center. Down at street level the Blade Runner globalization jumble, with some Terminator 2 overtones, of rickshaws and noodle stands washed in rain-softened neon or the Technicolor sunsets of pollution, is dwarfed by slabs of steel and glass stretching eight or nine hundred feet into the night above.
The buildings of Shanghai look kooky, overdone, self-consciously bizarre-a skyline conceived by Dr. Evil and executed by Virtucon Industries; but also compelling, witty, sometimes even beautiful. The city's structures are suffused with a peculiar nostalgia, an allusive novelty, the very slightly advanced techno-cultural mélange of Shanghai's plus-thirteen time zone. "He took out his hand organizer and poked a note to himself about the anachronistic quality of the word skyscraper," a Don DeLillo character muses. "No recent structure ought to bear this word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born." Maybe in Manhattan, but in this cosmopolis the anachronism of scraping the sky is precisely part of the enduring appeal-even as some of the newest designs, like Rem Koolhaas's eighty-story, $664-million China Cable Television building in Beijing, are crazy deconstructions of the soaring tower, twisted letterform, or elephantine structures sitting low to the ground. China may be the last place on earth where, pro and con, the word "skyscraper" cannot be retired. The narrative of aspiration and emancipation is not the same as it was in the olden soul of awe-it has acquired its own simulacral rewriting, reducing freedom to an allusion-but that says as much about the original narrative as about this metastasizing city.
"Modernization is really taking place" in China, Koolhaas said last year, calling Beijing's West-friendly planning "communism in the form of a state that can still have a purpose," while in the West there is "not potential alignment for architecture to a project that could be for the public good."* But what Koolhaas describes is not so much modernity as compu-global-hyper-mega-modernity; an accelerated; Version 2.0 of city life. Design ideas run riot around Shanghai, deployed by imaginations unfettered with a sense of proportion or strict zoning laws. There is no established aesthetic vocabulary, as in New York or Paris or Prague, where new buildings face pressure to respect their context, to fit in. Architects in Shanghai mix and match bits and pieces, drawing from every model and every conceivable style. The signature buildings of Shanghai, the two dozen highest downtown skyscrapers anyway, appear to have come together the way we used to mess around with scale models and airplane glue: sticking the wings of an F-86 onto a Ford Mustang chassis, dropping a tailfin on a Ducati roadster, fixing the conning tower of a submarine to the fuselage of a 707. I remember recognizing this same contrivance-happy exuberance at work in the wacky Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds episodes that made their way from British television to Canada in the 1970s. In this skyline we can recognize, with a pleasure equal parts kitsch and delight, the very same kooky Moonrakerish, Octopussified gadgetryfetish. Ordinarily that kind of what-the-hell design sense is confined to the rec room or the special-effects studio. In Shanghai it's called urban planning.
Shanghai has become the playground of world architecture. Whole blocks and districts materialize as though downloaded from an orbiting supercomputer, transforming the mundane big city of two decades ago into a head-turning showcase of material ambition. Virtually every major Western architect wants a crack at this unrestricted landscape, bringing a host of ideas both brilliant and bizarre. Ironically, the Utopian visions of the West, the soaring towers and radiant cities of the high-modern imagination, are rarely possible in the grand cities of the free world. They are realized instead in the authoritarian and dictatorial regimes of Asia, where life and steel are cheap. Europe's dream of heroic architecture has found its material realization in the People's Republic.
Always a threshold city, a roiling cauldron of old and new, Shanghai offers an absurd but appropriate showcase for a country at once feudal and hyperindustrial. Since the early 1990s, when Shanghai technocrats became the "third generation" of power brokers in Beijing, shifting financial aid from rural maintenance to the astonishing urban reconstructions of the last decade, money and connections-the twinned currencies of China-have been marshaled more and more to build high and build big. Now Shanghai is literally sinking under the weight of the 3,000 or so high-rise buildings that have gone up in the last ten years. Following decades of wariness and disavowal, this is once more the Communist Party's favored gateway to the West, edging out flashy prodigal son Hong Kong (though Hong Kong money remains welcome anywhere). With the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the World Expo coming to the city in 2010, Shanghai has never been more interested in Western visitors. Tourism is on the rise, and five-star hotels are being built at a brisk clip to accommodate them. And not just hotels-office towers, residential blocks, shopping malls, stadiums, and museums are springing up all over greater Shanghai.
Every architecture student, really every city dweller, should visit Shanghai for a lesson in the aesthetics of architectural ambition. Complain as we may about the design compromises forced in Western cities by overlapping interest groups, setback restrictions, health standards, and public financing, the results at the other end of the scale are far more unnerving. At the asymptotic edge of design freedom lies a sparkling, overgrown, hyperscaled city of bright nightmares, sometimes beautiful, often strange, always oppressive. Shanghai is modern urbanism on a speed high, rambling and incoherent, with a lump of shopaholic emptiness at its center. Nowhere else is the promise of architectural emancipation, that dream of modernism, more vividly broken. Architecture will not set us free, no matter how hard-how high and fast-it tries.
"It is glorious to be rich," Deng Xiaoping said, and Shanghainese have always enthusiastically agreed. But never more so than now. There are few places on earth where the bustle of urban life is more concentrated or unabashed, the sense of urgency so overpowering. Down at street level, there are times when it feels like every single one of Shanghai's millions of pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, mopeds, and cars is heading right for you. Cross Sichuan Nanlu at 9:00 A.M., or dodge through the rat's-nest intersection of Nanjing Donglu and Xizang Nanlu anytime, and a spiky roaring mass of traffic bears down on you like a semi-mechanized army division on chaotic maneuver. Above, there is a thick tangle of power lines, and telephone cable is thickly festooned with laundry airing in the toxic yellow air. Hundreds of boxy early-model air conditioners hang strapped to the sides of every wall, lending even the newest buildings an instant slum air. Pink and yellow and sky-blue apartment blocks march away to the west and south in closely packed orderly slabs.
The press of humanity here is multidimensional, omniolfactory, inescapable, and loud. Like its citizens, Shanghai's sights, smells, and sounds crowd in from every direction, thick walls of sensory noise that snap out signal as fast as your learning-curve brain can take them in: an English sign in purple neon, the mingled scents of frying pork dumplings and rotting watermelon rind, the unmistakable sound of a businessman in gangster-cut suit and broken-down leatherette loafers voiding his nostrils onto the sidewalk. Dirty water and fish guts spill into the street from sidewalk stalls that cluster under spaceship high-rises and five-star hotel ballrooms, all washed in KFC and McDonald's neon, Prada and Gucci signage, the inevitable Starbucks green.
A tiny man with the weathered face of an ancient god under a Nike toque huddles in a corner selling seven mismatched batteries and a bundle of wilted scallions. Touts with knock-off luxury goods are so persistent, repetitive, and hectoring that you may begin to think your name actually is Rolex Montblanc. Toddlers in embroidered split-crotch pants, imperial hats, and decorated surgical masks stare at you and point. In fact, everyone you pass stares hard, with an indecipherable mix of curiosity and hostility. Roundeye go home.
The city buzzes and stinks and knocks you over if you don't step nimbly. The Chinese are used to less personal space than almost any people on the planet, and especially on the streets of Shanghai, largest and fastest of China's cities, body contact is not optional; unlike the deft dancers of Tokyo or the sweet-feet dodgers of São Paulo, people here make no effort at all to avoid sidewalk collisions. Accidental slams that would prompt an offer of violence in London or an abject apology in Vancouver are here merely ignored, the routine tolls of walking the streets of the city. Shanghai is not for strollers, no refuge for dreamy Parisian flânerie.
Always a city of self-conscious newness, nothing at all like the ancient cities of Suzhou or Changzhou to the west, Shanghai dates from only the 1840s. The various concessions-French, British, and International-divided up the land along the west bank of the Huangpu River, building gateway houses known as shikumen and alleys in an East-meets-West fashion found nowhere else. More than 20,000 Chinese fled into the International Concession after the Small Swords Rebellion of 1853, and profits from shikumen rentals, often sublet and subdivided over and over, were mostly raked offshore-not the last time that would happen. Shanghai's heyday was the 1930s, when, as a free-movement zone where no visa or passport was required, it was a haven for crime and high life. A decade ago it was big and dull, a moribund hulk filled with people but no life, honored as the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party but distrusted, even reviled, by doctrinal hardliners in Beijing and country peasants alike.
Then, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's rule, a cadre of influential Shanghai technocrats, schooled in Western efficiency, found favor in Beijing and put urban improvement on the national agenda for the first time. Jiang Zemin, once party secretary in Shanghai, was made president; a former mayor, Zhu Rongji, was elevated to prime minister. The smart, go-ahead Shanghai boys replaced a conservative, suspicious, and corrupt leadership, mostly from Hunan and Sichuan, that had ruled in an unbroken line from Mao. China was changing, and Shanghai's legendary taste for novelty was a central focus, accelerating beyond all precedent due to huge injections of cash from the central government. Individuals began to flash their money, too, with most of China's estimated population of a quarter million U.S.-dollar millionaires calling the city home.
And yet, the city, for all its newness and international sophistication, remains irremediably Chinese, which is to say suspicious, even provincial, and racked by ancient conflicts and attitudes. Most of the city's inhabitants are, by North American standards, poverty-stricken, creating a disturbing First World/Third World dynamic found in many other "megacities."* Money and poverty combine uncomfortably with the city's familiar but strange visual field, which shifts from premodern to postmodern in a blink-like advertising on the moon-to destabilize your judgment constantly.
Of course, the Shanghai of cultural legend is still present here and there, perhaps most clearly in the shabby-elegant Peace Hotel on the Bund, the city's celebrated riverside strip. The Bund skyline is an essay in Art Deco solidity, a concentration of squat banks, customhouses, and hotels, mostly sandstone, that curves along the busy bend in the Huangpu, a tributary of the mighty Yangzi, about fifteen miles downstream. Shanghai means "up from the sea," and, though not a saltwater port, it retains a sense of connection to the East China Sea-the route by which the Japanese came and devastated the city in 1937, a reign of terror unforgettably depicted in J. G. Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun. The Bund defines Shanghai's last boom, the cinematic interwar vogue of gangsters, flappers, and opium-fanciers, when the city attracted bankers and financiers as well as the dissipated, criminal, and bored. Noel Coward, for example, is said to have written Private Lives while living at the Peace Hotel; even now its ancient wood-paneled jazz bar features a six-piece band whose players probably knew him. The band stayed, but the gangsters have either died out or moved on to larger stages, the most famous of them Chiang Kai Shek, who brought the same streetwise business sense he displayed while dominating the sex and drug trade to running the Guomindang.
The local taxis are all bright VW Santanas with uniformed, white-gloved drivers, innocent of both geography and regard for life, and with a pronounced proclivity for blind left turns. I got in one and we drove through the usual insane traffic to Yuyuan Bazaar, a combination cut-rate tourist mall and traditional Ming Dynasty garden. If taxis weren't so cheap, Shanghai's daylong traffic jams would be excruciating; as things stand, they're merely ridiculous and toxic. As I got out in a crush of people, street wardens began adding their piercing whistles to the standard cacophony of traffic noise and music. One of the pedestrians yelled at a street warden to stop the whistling, and then the two had a brief stylized argument about it, as if rehearsed for a bet. It ended as quickly as it started, with no apparent animosity on either side. Shanghainese are rarely physically violent, and the crime rate for such a large city is virtually nil by North American standards. Pedestrians or cyclists knocked to the ground by roaring cars or mopeds shout but don't push or punch. I did witness a shoving match in Shanghai, and that was at a Sunday matinee of the Beijing opera attended mostly by music students and old men in Mao jackets. For all I know it was a dispute concerning the purity of the singer's creepy falsetto. It was over quickly, and the larger of the two grapplers was then hissed and scolded by the old men nearby.
There was the usual incongruity of a KFC sign next to an ancient pagoda. There are more Christmas decorations and Muzak in Shanghai than in most Western cities. Neon and fur coats and fast food are everywhere. Shanghai revels in what Westerners schooled in upscale lifestyle porn would want to call tastelessness. Here excess is the point, conspicuous wealth like the clanging gold jewelry of an old-school rap star and his entourage. Yuyuan is China the way Times Square is America. The gardens themselves are an essay in grace, however, every passageway exactly proportioned, every space metaphorically charged and heavy with meaning. There is very little traditional Chinese architecture left as the building boom sweeps away the old city like so much floor dust, but what remains is a keen reminder of the deep genius of this culture, its centuries of aesthetic refinement and spiritual investigation. You can't entirely forget the hordes of aggressive merchants and junk purveyors outside, but for a moment the depressing spectacle recedes into the background.
Not far away is Renmin Square, the People's Plaza. Once a racetrack for the moneyed Westerners of Shanghai, it is now a grand sweep of parkland and civic architecture, far more urban and enclosed than Tiananmen Square, like something you'd find in Chicago or Houston. Shanghainese tend to be less political than their counterparts in the capital. When an upstart lawyer, Zheng Enchong, organized a class-action suit against the city over the massive enforced relocations demanded by the Pudong development, there were relatively few protests. In principle, land is owned collectively by "the people," and the deals offered to the displaced Shanghainese were dismal at best: some cash, maybe a chance to bid on a tiny expensive apartment in a new high-rise a dozen miles away. As the Canadian consulgeneral, Robert Mackenzie, put it to me dryly, "The compensation certainly does not satisfy any Western notion of human rights."
The jewel of Renmin Square is the new Shanghai Museum, a squat puzzle of a building clad in Spanish and Italian granite, pink outside and gray within. The exterior is hard to digest, a sort of circle-square affair intended to symbolize rectangular Earth surmounted by circular heaven as well as to resemble an ancient bronze ding, or three-legged vessel, a class of artifacts in which the museum is especially blessed. This is all more pleasing in theory than in practice, but the interior is probably the nicest museum space I have ever seen, serene, intelligent, and polished. (Contrast this post-prosperity institutional luxury with the old Shanghai natural-history museum a mile or so away, a deserted dilapidated shop of horrors now standing under a concrete overpass near the Bund, with glass cases full of moth-eaten taxidermy, gruesome biological samples, and questionable science.)
The north side of the square is more impressive, if also weirder. A forbidding civic administration building is flanked by two white steel contraptions: the famous Grand Theatre, Jean-Marie Charpentier's futuristic glass-and-plastic extension of traditional Chinese upturned eaves, and the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, with four huge metal florets on its roof meant to resemble magnolias. I got a coffee in the basement of the theater, then climbed the stairs of the Urban Planning building to visit one of Shanghai's most impressive places, the floorsized urban-planning model constructed as part of the hard sell for Expo 2010.
The model is 1:500 scale and covers 600 square meters, about the size of a couple of tennis courts. Steel viewing platforms are constructed around its perimeter, so the gaggles of Chinese tourists and visiting Hong Kong developers can stand in turn and eye the part of the city they want to denude. Little signs say DON'T JUMP. Like the Panorama of New York constructed for the 1964 World's Fair, now housed in the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing-its sole major attraction-the Shanghai model is the ultimate in idealized panopticon, vision. Clean plastic residential towers march away in tiny orderly rows from an elegant city center around Renmin Square. All white, the towers sprout no laundry lines or air-conditioner units; their roofs are uniform and pristine, with no trace of the hash of styles and hues to be seen in the Shanghai suburbs. Neither cars nor people crowd its little streets, and the air is of course unwashed by pollutants or noise, as though the miniature city had been neutron-bombed, swept for all mechanical contrivances, then abandoned.
Like most visitors, probably, I stood on the viewing platform nearest the model and located the Urban Planning building on its little grid, then imagined myself inside it, looking at a model of the model, and then at a model of the model of the model, and so on. Standing dumbly there, I had a sudden desire, probably just as common, to vault the white railing of the platform and stomp around the model in my sneakers, going Errrr! Errrr! while crushing blocks of Identikit apartment towers, shooting death rays from my eyes, and snatching up the Nanpu Bridge in one hand to hurl it across the room.
A poster near the model said: "Shanghai is a sparkling pearl of the East, a colossal earth-shaking dragon soaring the skies, a city where excitement is created. The target population of Shanghai is to be 16 million by 2020. It will have become a world-class metropolis." Too late: the local English-language newspaper reported that morning that the population had topped 20 million.
Western architecture firms love the massive Chinese market almost as much as electronics and running-shoe companies once did. With 1.3 billion people, there is no shortage of highly skilled labor, and it comes cheap. Sometimes the very people being displaced by a new high-rise work, often for pennies a day, on the scary bamboo scaffolding that shrouds the emergent skeleton. But the market picture is far from simple, not least because the Chinese are selling goods back to Western countries even as they keep their currency tightly controlled and sell off non-performing loans and other devalued paper to American and European banks. In 2003, for example, a consortium led by Morgan Stanley bought $1.3 billion in Chinese bad debt.
Meanwhile, the change from labor-intensive to capital- and knowledge-intensive growth has been steady during the past decade, a shift mirrored in the rural-to-urban building spike and a new encourage- ' ment for people to spend hoarded hard currency from the old days when only dollars could be used to buy consumer durables like TVs and washing machines. Westerners often find doing business in China tricky, prompting an MBA-program boomlet in handy guides to understanding face, diversionary politeness, and a host of related style matters baffling to the go-get-'em American negotiator. People are estimated by wealth, but guan xi-a combination of social position and personal leverage-operates more readily and often. Relative degrees of guan xi are intelligible to Shanghainese on a superfine scale, attended by minute modes of face loss and respect. Communism has done nothing to level this ancient hierarchical economy, merely changed the direction of its flow.
China's trade surplus with the United States last year was $125 billion and this year promises to be even larger. This is not the wonderful market for Western goods that Americans were promised back when George H. W. Bush granted China most-favored-nation status during, of all things, a Yale convocation speech. On auto parts, for example, the ratio in China's favor is roughly 6:1. China's recent entry into the WTO will only increase this imbalance. Unless, that is, the WTO forces China to lift some of its tariffs, or something drastic happens in a float of the yuan against other currencies. There are a lot of American dollars salted away in China. At the moment, Beijing holds something like $174 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, and nobody knows what the private holdings, once illegal and now an open secret, might be. Individual foreign banks are taking over China's bad debts, and multinational corporations are buying China's cheap labor, but the U.S. government is actually borrowing from the Chinese to finance the stability-threatening debt Washington is busy running up via tax cuts and foreign invasions. Which means more U.S. money is flowing into China, and Washington can't stop it. This is one reason George W. Bush is so accommodating to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's denunciations of democracy in Taiwan, a face-saving policy that Washington likes to call "strategic ambiguity." Meanwhile, the Communist government in Beijing is maintaining the same attitude to foreign investment the Chinese have always had: Come. Bring your money and your talent. Just don't expect to stay around for the payoff.
There may not be a payoff, of course. Although the automotive and electronics sectors are healthier than ever, and Shanghai shimmers every day with renewed boomtown energy, it's still far from clear who is going to inhabit much of the new square footage being thrown into the sky. Most of the country's population is still too poor to buy the goods they labor to make, and, unlike India or Malaysia, China has no large middle class to bridge the unstable gap between the slick superrich and a vast peasantry. Despite what Western investors-and tourists-seem to believe, you can't just shop your way out of a half-century of Communism.
I mentioned some of this to Brian McCluskey, a Toronto-based landscape architect, as we rode a chilly bus out to the farthest reaches of Shanghai. Here the city gives way to bottling plants, windswept industrial plazas, and forlorn amusement parks flanked by big swatches of elevated highway sweeping away to nowhere. Brian's firm, like many of the smaller Western outfits working in China, was busy chasing down a tender for a new commercial/residential development in a town about two hours' drive southwest of Shanghai, one of the small centers about to be swallowed up by the city's sprawl. In an effort to ease congestion in the city proper, planners were subsidizing projects that in effect would fashion nine new exurban downtowns, all with 35-40 percent green space. The mayor of this town had received a subsidy and wanted to deliver a contract within a few weeks-an unheard-of schedule in normal architectural practice. If the firm was going to compete, the architects would have to work overtime during the holidays just to come up with the preliminary drawings.
"Yeah, anything goes here," Brian said of the effect the building boom was having on his own practice. "Huge glass cubes. Hundred-foot reflecting pools. If you did any of that in North America, the client would say, 'Okay, next firm.' Here, the main problem is figuring out just how far they're willing to go."
That morning we were attending the opening of a new environmentally friendly house on the outskirts of Shanghai. Brian had done the landscape design. After years of shoddy, heedless construction in the approved Soviet mode-blocks of instantly old, effluent-belching concrete sheds found everywhere from Vladivostok to Prague, with walls that come to pieces in your hands-the Chinese were catching on to green building.
Or so they said. The experimental house was located where almost no one would see it, miles from the city center, past the mind-numbing expanses of pastel-colored apartment towers, each surmounted by every conceivable style of decoration from Greco-Roman to French colonial. Clusters of useless columns, gables, and dormers crowded the sky, floating high above industrial parks and deserted roads. You'd have to be either a truck driver or desperately lost to pass even within 500 yards of the house.
Brian and I stood with a few dozen others in the bone-chilling morning air, looking at what all building sites start as: a hole in the ground.
"They put it right beside this main road," he said, over the sound of reversing trucks and heavy traffic on the nearby dual carriageway. "And they didn't take down these other buildings." A couple of deteriorated warehouses stood hard by the site. I looked at the billboard drawing of the projected house, set next to a hard-hat warning featuring the angry-determined face of a Chinese construction worker, wearing his protective gear in the heroic style of a Maoist propaganda poster. The drawing showed a futuristic glass-and-metal edifice nestled comfortably in lush green parkland, like an old Star Trek backdrop.
"See, I've put a berm between the house and the road," Brian told me. I tried to imagine this desolate roadside hole, a place you might go to dump bodies, transformed into the image on the board.
We waited, shivering. A loud-speaker began to blare uplifting martial music at unreasonable volume. A man came and had his picture taken with me for no reason I could see. Long minutes later, four men wearing dull gray suits and sweater vests mounted the small stage. Five pretty girls in wool coats stood to one side with ribbons and bouquets. The man farthest left approached the microphone and began barking harshly into it. Chinese speech-makers do not tell jokes, move their bodies, smile, or talk with their hands. They never gesture or josh; they just stand, arms hanging straight down, and shout. The speech, predictable boilerplate about the joy we all felt at this new dawn of environmental sensitivity, was suffused with imperative urgency, like a desperate battlefield briefing.
We looked around, bored, cold, counting the minutes of life we would never get back. An ear-splitting wave of noise started up behind us-celebratory fireworks, rolling on for a minute or more of rising intensity, absurdly overdone as if intended as sound effect for a film firefight. Everyone clapped furiously. The pops and cracks died slowly away. Smoke and a sharp cordite odor wafted past.
"I'm not sure how environmentally friendly that is," Brian said.
The Chinese contingent trooped off to the bus to spend the rest of the day watching presentations about the green house. Brian and I exchanged a glance of mutual horror. Neither of us had had any breakfast or even coffee. Juliet Chang-the representative of two Toronto architecture firms, Brian's landscaping outfit, and a builder of large-scale stadiums and towers-came over to us, and we prevailed on her to get us a ride back to the city.
"I think this is good time to look at the apartment, Brian," she said when we were moving. Juliet had a scheme to buy this not-yet-constructed flat, near the center of Shanghai, then rent it to Brian's firm. The car snaked its long way back to the city, narrowly avoiding two serious accidents with no visible reaction from the uniformed driver. We approached the edge of the French Concession. This is probably Shanghai's favorite neighborhood, at least among Westerners, the site of numerous restaurants and cafés and, along Hengshan Lu, the neocolonial and Latinate mansions that once defined the best of the city's East-West grace. These sit comfortably alongside the few remaining shikumen structures in Shanghai, lovely terraced houses and alleys dating from the early twentieth century that are not long for this world unless smart developers get to them soon. It's easy to get lost here and so experience what Walter Benjamin celebrated as the underrated gift of urban life, losing your way. In Shanghai it feels more like a curse than a gift, though. The last section of Kazuo Ishiguro's haunting novel of Shanghai in the 1930s, When We Were Orphans, describes the mesmerizing disorientation of these close-packed streets, and there is nothing happy about young Jim's terrified movements through the French Concession in Ballard's novel.
I saw through the window a rising residential tower of surpassing ugliness, with absurd neoclassical doodads on top, as if a cheesecake model of the Parthenon had been flung across a room to land on a filing cabinet. Brian laughed when I pointed to it, then stopped laughing as the car, silently directed by Juliet, swung into the tower's parking lot.
"This building is by Charpentier," Juliet said, looking back at us, meaning the flamboyant Frenchman who designed the stunning theater on Renmin Square. If so, he must have been out of the office that day or else in the grip of rapid-onset madness. As yet another pretty girl in an overcoat guided us through the showrooms and model condos of the complex, known as Louis Triumphal Palace, the overwrought Caesar's Palace sensibility, heedless of reference or coherence, grew more pronounced and punishing. Concrete statuary of dryads and warriors lined the gravel walkways. All the interior floors were slick polished marble, hard and unforgiving. Gilt fixtures sprouted from every inside corner: gilt phones, gilt faucets, gilt doorknobs. Gilt-edged mirrors attempted to expand claustrophobic, gilt-wallpapered one-bedroom modules. The playground of the new Shanghai moneyed class, cut up into 100-square-meter gilt chunks. A place to go quickly and comprehensively mad, overwhelmed by the dead weight of desire.
But also, from the Shanghai perspective, a dreamspace, clean and shiny, hovering in the air above the filmy surfaces and dirt at street level. "I think is very beautiful," the guide said, smiling at me.
I left Puxi the next day to experience the other side of Shanghai, the fresh-from-the-box vastness of Pudong New Area. At one point in the 1990s, it was estimated that more than a quarter of the world's high-rise cranes were in Pudong, lifting piles of I-beams high into the sky, hanging floor on floor from thin steel spines jabbed into the earth. In Berlin during the 1990s the vast International Style towers of the Potsdamer Platz development, all thrown up in apparent minutes, was billed as "die Stadt von morgen"-the city of tomorrow. You could stand on the edge of it and see a sky filled with cranes, like trees in winter, for miles. But Shanghai's tomorrow has come sooner and bigger. Pudong is less frenetic now, but only barely: fewer cranes, more buildings. And more to come.
Here the wide stretch of Century Avenue, carved out of what used to be fishing villages and small farms, is an almost deserted, pedestrian-hostile slash of asphalt. Science-fiction office towers climb fifty, sixty, seventy stories into the air, thin glass splinters jammed into the wide-open ground, all of them dwarfed by the eighty-eight-story vertical pagoda of the J in Mao Tower, China's tallest building and-as of this writing anyway-the fourth tallest in the world. The Oriental Pearl Tower, a concrete-and-pink-glass phallus that resembles a chemical-lab model of molecular structure, thrusts stupidly into the air near the river, attracting a scatter of visitors and vendors hawking fruit, meat grilled on tiny braziers fixed to bicycle fenders, and novelty Polaroids of people apparently leaning against the tower like a lamppost. More people still are pushing into the Super Brand Mail across the street, thirteen stories of sweeping marble vistas and designer-clothing stores, most of them deserted, with a bright fast-food court and a vast Westernstyle supermarket in the basement, both jammed.
On the streets of Pudong, however, the contrast to Puxi-with the neon-overloaded pedestrian mecca of Nanjing Lu, Shanghai's famous old shopping drag, or the heavy midtown-consumer feeling of Huaihai Lu-is stark. No shops, no dumpling or omelette vendors, no early-morning clusters of middleaged people doing tai chi, sword art, or ballroom dancing. None of the kite-flyers, kids, soldiers, or people walking backward for their health who give the hazy sunrise along the Bund its untranslatable charm. Just big chunks of nothing. Pigeons and squirrels barely exist in Shanghai, and the rats, thankfully, stay mostly out of sight. An empty street is really empty-vacuumed clean, nude, voided. Shanghai boosters love to tell you that Century Avenue was modeled on the Champs Elysée, and it certainly possesses grand dimension, but it's an elegant boulevard the way Hallmark verse is Donne. There is no residential surround, no life to flank, this broad conduit running from the side of the river and off into eternity. The sidewalks are narrow and windswept, leading into concrete culs-de-sac that force you to back-track into eight-lane intersections, themselves impassable without a panicky last-minute run as traffic curves in from the side.
Century Avenue itself is more a river than a street; like a superhighway's, its natural movement is along rather than across, sluicing cars and buses from the sprawling new suburbs to the east and slamming them into the bottleneck valve of the Yan'an Donglu Tunnel, site of some of the city's worst traffic jams, as everyone tries to get to Puxi for work or leisure at the same time. A few shops are scattered along its length-electronics and food and some cheap clothing-but there is nothing that smacks of urban life.
True, this is a financial district, and therefore likely to be deserted now and then, but if the designers of the urban experiment of Shanghai imagined that Pudong would be a vi-brant mixed-use cityscape, they are badly wrong. The residential towers are here, and so the people must be too, but there is no sign of them. The Legoland blocks of high-rises range away to the south, toward the site of the 2010 Expo, and to the east, toward the new international airport, creating nodes of bleakness, one after the other, at their feet. Like the bad dreams of Le Corbusier's garden cities, where stacked apartment buildings isolated in green space that is meant to be Edenic merely establish vertical slums with people-free danger zones at the base, these blocks make the usual Utopian mistake-good on paper equals bad on the ground.
But they also project the even deeper Utopian melancholy, the empty promise of modern living, the banality of comfort. You get your room in the sky-and then what? In Delirious New York, Koolhaas revives grand dreams and old drawings of hundred-story fantasy skyscrapers that would lift whole houses into the firmament, a vision of heaven on earth. But there is always a worm coiled in the core of the Utopian fruit. No matter how high up you go, no matter how fantastic your space, it's still yourself you I meet there.
I had checked into the Grand Hyatt hotel in the Jin Mao Tower, a place whose lobby is on the fifty-third floor and rooftop bar is on eighty-seven, making it the highest aboveground hotel in the world. In between fifty-three and eighty-seven is an open columnar space around which the rooms are scattered along small corridors, so you don't exit your room and come immediately face-to-face with the yawning expanse of space, like a huge air vent in hell. The very luxury of the place, so wonderful but finally so prosaic, might prompt a desperate Japanese salaryman into sudden existential flight. Xing Tonghe, who also designed the Shanghai Museum and is guiding the Expo project, was the inspiration for the small corridors and glass railings, neat design tweaks that kept both architects and developers happy. It saved the open column but minimized the danger. I had met Xing Tonghe the day before, and he acknowledged that his solution, although imperfect, was practical. "Drunks will fall over anyway," he told me, not smiling. "You can't design the whole thing for drunks."
The reservation form at the Grand Hyatt asks you if you prefer a "high room," which is a joke no one here seems to get. I ticked the box and was given a room on sixty-six, which didn't seem that big a deal. In fact, height envy becomes an inevitable preoccupation in a place where height is the point.
Like all of Shanghai's dozen or so five-star hotels, the Grand Hyatt is an exercise in bizarre economics, a complicated mix of import taxes, controlled currency, and ridiculously cheap labor. Unlike the Peace hotel, there were no discarded carpet samples or piles of insulated cable strewn in the corridors. Instead, the Hyatt delivers the complete James Bond, postmodern, global luxury experience, providing handwave light switches, a "sky pool" that floats above the old city like a bath in heaven, and a glass-box shower with controls worthy of a nuclear submarine. Phalanxes of beautiful smiling girls greet you at every corner, exit, or elevator, and waiters in the jazz bar actually run to get your order in faster, and a cigar order prompts an elaborate geisha performance over the humidor, complete with low-cut dress, miniature jet-engine lighter, and ritualized waving to test the draw. All this with rooms for less than it would cost to spend the night in a mid-range Manhattan hotel.
At the same time, the drinks and sandwiches and coffee run more than in London or Paris, which is saying something. A martini costs as much as a local winter coat; a cigar, the equivalent of a four-hour taxi ride or enough pork dumplings to feed a block.
Jin Mao Tower was designed by a team from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Microsoft-or maybe McDonald's-of architecture firms. It cost $540 million. Skidmore, Owings are masters of the skyscraper, probably most famous for Chicago's Sears Tower, and they are everywhere, a firm so huge and powerful they've managed to get a finger in many a pie both East and West. For example, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings successfully muscled his way into the World Trade Center reconstruction, shoving aside Daniel Libeskind-who, to be sure, has never built a high buildingwith his arrow-smart Freedom Tower. Rem Koolhaas, speaking in New York a year ago, called the firm architectural colonialists and complained that their work in China is "so infantile and so regressive that they should be sued."
In fact, Jin Mao is a clever update of traditional skyscraper vocabulary, and not bad at all. Ridiculously tall, yes-1,380 feetbut it retains a sense of proportion. Clad in a complicated steel-cage curtain, like chain mail over glass, it has a distinctive latticed-metal appearance reminiscent of bamboo and pagoda details on top and sides, and every room has a spectacular glass-curtain window. Jin Mao's total number of floors (eighty-eight) and thirteen decorative horizontal bands, meanwhile, are references to Buddhist numerology. The tower's name means prosperity, finance, gold-the usual Chinese wish list. If this is global architecture, it could be a lot worse.
The tower occupies a wide-open site big enough to support its height, like an open book to its vertical stylus-though this will change when two taller buildings, already modeled at the Urban Planning Hall, rise next to it. One, the $850-million, 101-story Shanghai World Finance Building, looks like a sort of elongated glass spinnaker, like a knife blade embedded in the ground. It will rise 1,614 feet high, though that will still fall short of the Taipei 101 Tower in Taiwan.
The surrounding district is so far a bust. On a bright cold morning, I walked, a lone pedestrian, through a crumbling concrete plaza of abandoned Western-style restaurants. I dodged crash-happy taxis across the broad avenues. I was on my way to the Shanghai International Convention Center, the space-age site of the World Top Architects Forum, an event whose English publicity material oozed the funny grandiosity of all such documents. "Historically, every nation's renaissance will give birth to a glorious city," it said. "Every glorious era of a nation is always represented by its big city. For instance, Rome, New York, Tokyo, Paris, they are all alike. The essence of global economic competitiveness is always about the vibrancy of a city's brand. Now, the intelligence of the world top architects will gather in Shanghai basked in the time of China's Renaissance."
I looked around the grand venue for the intelligence of the world top architects, but in vain. The forum drew maybe a hundred black-clad men and women, most of them Chinese, all eagerly collecting their loot bags of glossy magazines and CD-ROMs. The major Western architects, as far as I could tell, had better things to do.
Which was too bad, because there was more to learn here than just how to take multiple cell-phone calls during a lecture or perfect the ostentatious don't-mind-me roadie crouch, scurrying unnecessarily before the peopled stage. There was naturally much pre-2010, glorious-era branding hype, Beijing's chosen line on Shanghai, but it was mixed liberally with criticism of the ham-fisted central planning and penchant for hugeness that have marred the city's boom-a refreshing dose of candor in face-obsessed China, where nothing is ever an error and nobody can ever say he's sorry.
The Hong Kong architect Chen Jianbang, a designer of the much-praised Xintiandi shopping district in the French Concession, a smallscale, pedestrian-oriented cluster of restored traditional buildings, had the last ironic word. Xintiandi means, literally, "new heaven and earth," and its small blocks and lowrise scale are gorgeous. It's also within sight of the building where the Communist Party was founded, a standard stop on school trips. The deal with the Hong Kong developers of the Shui On Group, backed in part by action-film star Jackie Chan, was that no commercial signage should be visible from the HQ. The Starbucks sign is on the north side, discreetly facing away from them.
"When blocks get too big, people stop walking," Chen said. "And when people stop walking, that's when all the trouble begins." He spoke persuasively about mixed use, integration into the urban fabric, and the wisdom of avoiding streets wider than twenty-five or thirty meters. "Building is not really building. We are trying to create spaces. Never mind the theory; what truly works is actually quite apparent: people know how to use good spaces."
Just as well, I thought, that the opportune location of the Architects Forum was a windowless cube. A glance outside the auditorium would have revealed a bleak vista in direct contradiction to every word. Zhen Shiling, chairman of the Architectural Society of Shanghai, spoke after lunch. "We must make sure that the foreign architects respect the traditions and values of China," he said, after praising the raze-the-ground buildings of Pudong. "Many foreign architects treat Shanghai as a blank piece of paper." Not only them.
I had agreed to join some Canadian diplomats at a bar back in Pudong, young guys I'd met at a stiff holiday dinner the week before where I sat between the homesick wife of a helicopter pilot from Vancouver and a costume designer from Los Angeles who was working on a science-fiction film starring Milla Jovovich. I told her I thought I'd already seen that one, with Bruce Willis opposite. She looked blank.
I thought the consulate guys just wanted to have a drink, but they each downed a quick beer and immediately started putting on their coats. A twelve-piece Filipino band in matching white jumpsuits and yellow sashes, complete with synchrostepping horn section, were energetically grinding their way through a set of Earth, Wind & Fire covers. I was happy where we were.
"Let's go," one of the demi-consuls said. "Shanghai nightlife."
I had visions of shady nightclubs and exotic drinks, slinky girls and tough-guy bouncers. But Shanghai nightlife, at least in Pudong, turned out to resemble nightlife in Staten Island or Bridgeport, only less appealing. We jumped the long taxi queue by running up an alley to grab an incoming Santana, then drove along endless deserted avenues looking for neon. There were sad discotheques in crappy strip malls, clumps of dispirited guys loafing and smoking on street corners, and dingy paneled rooms furnished with vinyl recliners, flocked wallpaper, and spongy shag carpet. Here, bored skinny girls offer to take their clothes off while singing to a portable karaoke-video machine. Along with the ubiquitous barber shops that turn into nighttime all-body massage parlors, this institution, known as a KTV, is Shanghai's sole novel contribution to the Asian sex trade, though those submissive Suzie Wongs in bright, tight silk cheongsams are a far cry from the iconic Shanghai butterflies of cinematic and literary legend.
One of the young diplomats had said to me that Shanghai is like a whore; all its faked-up charms are right there on the surface. I now saw that he had been drawing from personal experience. All the same, it seemed an uncharitable, maybe naive, metaphor for a city at least as interested in concealing as in selling itself. Anyway, after thirty minutes of depressing driving and talk of young girls, the evening was becoming all too reminiscent of aimless Saturday nights back in high school, driving and searching for something that wasn't there, or wouldn't be any good if it were. I begged off and hailed a cab to the Jin Mao, a brilliant pillar of light three miles away in the hazy dark sky.
I rode two elevators to the hotel's fifty-sixth-floor jazz bar, greeted repeatedly along the way. I sat at the bar, ordered a Manhattan, and looked over the split-level, couch-filled acreage of the place. A few Chinese couples canoodled under dim light. A middle-aged Western man with an outgrown white mullet sat beside an absurdly young Chinese girl, on whose knee his big bejeweled paw rested. A table was set up with a bottle of Chivas Regal, an ice bucket, and cut-glass tumblers-a luxury mise en scène. No one ever came to sit there. Groups of wealthy Shanghainese began to arrive. They shoved tables together and shouted orders for cosmopolitans and layered liqueur confections, sending the waiters hustling across the carpet at the trot. They spoke to the hovering bartender in a manner that suggested he had offended them in some deep, unspecified way. A torch singer in long white, backed by the obligatory lazy trio, began to sing Cole Porter in Chinese from a low stage in the back, ignored by everyone at the tables. When she took a break, the Chipmunks' Christmas album leaked from the sound system.
I waved off the cigar girl and lit my own smoke. I looked out the window at the view nobody was paying attention to. It felt like we were on a spaceship, a low-ceilinged, cozy cruiseliner to the future, cocooned by money and the biggest lucky break of them all, the lottery of birth, brought there by the brute reality of the six-billion-human globe, the indifferent energy of material injustice.
Shanghai, wonders and all, is still-is always-Ballard's "terrible city," gorgeous and awful. A forever promise of novelty and wealth that says, just as loudly, that nobody's that special. The Chinese know what we don't, that Western individualism is a myth of significance in a world where you're really nobody and nothing. You can build the buildings, but they stand as empty as the ideas of freedom behind them. The whiff of truth remains. Unlike New York, whose own 8 million souls, buoyed along by trillion-dollar debt and confused protectionist imperialism, keep crazy faith with a narrative of success and the false consciousness of social mobility, Shanghai is forever taking away with one hand what it gives with the other. Not a new New York; more the anti-New York.
"How long is the future?" Xing Tonghe had said to me when I asked him what Shanghai's future held. His point was prosaic, but the question itself isn't. Shanghai's lesson is the lesson of all futurism, modern architecture's dominant trope, the chancre at the heart of Utopia. Much as you might like to, you can't go home again. Not again, not ever. All future-desire is revealed as degrees of nostalgia. Because-look, look up-home has already been bulldozed to make way for another half-empty skyscraper, another simulacrum of wonder.
[Footnote]
* Koolhaas, who wrote the definitive essay on the Manhattan grid, Delirious New York, is building here, not in New York-unless you count his overhyped interior design for a Prada boutique in SoHo.
* Of the nineteen megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants in 2000, none were in Europe, just two were in North America, and thirteen were in debtor nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
[Author Affiliation]
Mark Kingwell is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is at work on a book about the Empire State Building.