Ordie
05-27-2008, 01:02 PM
China builds - and sometimes falls short
It is one boom with two styles: the prefab concrete deathtrap and the shining signature skyscraper
MARK KINGWELL
Professor of philosophy at the University of Toron
May 19, 2008 at 4:20 PM EDT
In Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men, the ruthlessly ambitious Willie Stark gets a foot in the door of gubernatorial politics by exposing corruption. A school contract handed out in a backroom deal has been filled with substandard materials. During a drill, the shoddy fire escape falls away from the building, throwing dozens of children to their deaths. Politics meets profit, with tragic results. (The populist Stark rides into power by campaigning against the capital, but in the grand tradition of power he brokers at least as many shady deals as his predecessors, if not more. He ends up being shot by his lover's brother.)
Corruption is proverbial in the building trades, of course, with everything from a carpenter's estimate to a contractor's concrete pour subject to a raised eyebrow if not a RICO investigation. This is unfair: Whatever you see in the movies, not all construction is controlled by organized crime. In present-day China, on the other hand, the cliché has gained a brutal new force. Here, corruption and construction really do go hand-in-hand, and among the incidental costs are at least some of the 50,000 dead and missing from the recent Sichuan province earthquake.
The most obvious reason is that China's central government has decided to showcase architectural innovation as part of its world-beating hyper-capitalist experiment. Shanghai and Beijing, in particular, have become urban riots of aesthetic and technical flair, with skylines that are futuristic, inspiring, and sometimes sublime. Provided that you can see them. With the boom of China's urban economy has come a volume of pollution that casts us back to the pre-emissions-standards era, just one form of temporal collapse in these marvels of city metastasization.
Another is that living conditions on the ground or at the outskirts can resemble that same site under medieval rule - or, possibly even worse, the same site developed in the style of mid-century Soviet expansion. The bulk of construction in China is not of the showcase variety, with the celebrity Western architects jet-classed in for consultations and photo ops. Instead, the vast majority of recent building has been non-descript, cheap and almost entirely ungoverned by safety standards or minimum building codes.
Looking at the vast serried ranks of residential high-rises and factories in China's largest cities recalls P. J. O'Rourke's riff on 1980s-vintage Eastern Bloc architecture: "Commies love concrete, but they don't know how to make it. Concrete is a mixture of cement, gravel and straw? No? Gravel, water and wood pulp? Water, potatoes and lard?" Everything seemed to be made of it, he reported, including some of the food. Concrete is not one material. It is, instead, a range of possibilities; and while the recipe does not extend to lard, the proportion and quality of the constituents can make a vast difference. High-quality concrete, with sand and stone elements bound together in a batter of water and Portland cement - the traditional limestone derivative - is strong, fire-resistant and versatile. Reinforced with recycled steel, it is even environmentally sound. Architects love concrete because it is a slurry that moulds and sets into almost any imaginable form. Builders love it because it's easy to use: no artisanal skill required, just basic mixing and pouring.
Developers love it because it's cheap. And even cheaper if you skimp on the treatment or proportion of sand. Good concrete, they say, can last for 10 millenniums. Bad concrete can be taken down with a casual sledgehammer blow.
China's recent growth is sometimes called a microcosm of modern capitalism, but a more accurate metaphor is the pressure cooker. The economy, growing at a double-digit rate while the rest of the developed world copes with three or four per cent performance, is overheated. Meanwhile, the entrenched culture of guanxi, or connections, means that everyone with an idea and some startup capital is making payoffs to smooth the way.
But note the strange pincer of Chinese building: It is one boom with two styles, the prefab concrete deathtrap, but also the shining signature skyscraper. In downtown Shanghai, height then becomes a measure of time as well as money: The more you rise above grade, the closer you come to entering the 21st century dream of position and power. At the pinnacle, in penthouse apartments and rotating cocktail bars of the showcase buildings, lies the dream-world of postindustrial success, the elite perch. Everyone else will have to make do with walls that pulverize from a decent shake and bricks that come apart in your hands like a child's mud pie.
In contrast to the vast fantasyland of Dubai, Shanghai and Beijing are real cities, on ancient sites. Workers have been forcibly relocated to clear the space for the new arrowing towers, but with the effect of stretching the city's limits, not rendering the city spectral (though many of the tallest towers still remain largely empty). Taken together, the Chinese and Dubai states have proven that, right now, the most interesting recent architecture on the planet, at least in the monumental forms, is the product of authoritarian regimes, not democratic ones.
This fact raises some difficult questions. Yes, it's easy - and necessary - to condemn subcode building practices and the hazards that attend to them, wherever they happen. China's record here makes a reassuring target, just as decrying its human-rights record by tackling an Olympic torch-bearer offers a surefire exercise in moral superiority. A little hypocrisy goes a long way. We like to think this would be impossible in a democratic country, where violations would have immediate costs, ideally reducing to nil the incentive for taking shortcuts on materials or practices.
In fact, building in North America and Europe routinely falls short of this ideal. Building codes are fat tomes of cross-referenced regulation and constraint, some of it philosophically confusing. Architects are required to conform to the code, of course, and most large projects include a code-compliance professional who makes sure that they do. But many smaller projects slip under this radar, and even large ones face the daily realities of budget and time. Nobody can police every rivet or wire of a building.
Still, the code is there, and it means that plans must gain official approval before a building is possible. This can take a while, sometimes years. Add other hurdles such as public consultations and environmental-impact surveys, and ambitious projects can find themselves stalled indefinitely.
Hence more troubling is the question of whether great architecture is any longer possible under democratic conditions. In a turn worthy of Ayn Rand's supreme individualist Howard Roark, firebrand architects such as Rem Koolhaas, frustrated with the maze of regulation and interest he faced just designing a clothing store in downtown Manhattan, have turned to China as a vibrant playground of possibility. His CCTV building in Beijing is a marvel of inside-out form that would be hard to imagine being built in North America.
Despite the surface plausibility, this is a dangerous position, and in its own fashion just as easy as the swift condemnation of Chinese corruption. Architecture has lately been dominated by the narrative of singular genius and bold vision. In fact it is the most democratic of applied arts. No architect builds alone, and no building belongs to one person. The greatest architecture works this dynamic tension between creation and reception, between personal vision and community use.
"The most popular story of the 21st century is the Rising of China," Danni Zheng of the Olympic Media Centre wrote to me in a recent e-mail, inviting me "to firsthand witness this time in history." I would welcome that too, only not under state largesse. The rising of China is not just one story, it's many; the lessons we will learn from those stories are not always about the Chinese.
Mark Kingwell's book Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City was recently published by Penguin.
Source:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080519.wcochina19/BNStory/specialComment/
It is one boom with two styles: the prefab concrete deathtrap and the shining signature skyscraper
MARK KINGWELL
Professor of philosophy at the University of Toron
May 19, 2008 at 4:20 PM EDT
In Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men, the ruthlessly ambitious Willie Stark gets a foot in the door of gubernatorial politics by exposing corruption. A school contract handed out in a backroom deal has been filled with substandard materials. During a drill, the shoddy fire escape falls away from the building, throwing dozens of children to their deaths. Politics meets profit, with tragic results. (The populist Stark rides into power by campaigning against the capital, but in the grand tradition of power he brokers at least as many shady deals as his predecessors, if not more. He ends up being shot by his lover's brother.)
Corruption is proverbial in the building trades, of course, with everything from a carpenter's estimate to a contractor's concrete pour subject to a raised eyebrow if not a RICO investigation. This is unfair: Whatever you see in the movies, not all construction is controlled by organized crime. In present-day China, on the other hand, the cliché has gained a brutal new force. Here, corruption and construction really do go hand-in-hand, and among the incidental costs are at least some of the 50,000 dead and missing from the recent Sichuan province earthquake.
The most obvious reason is that China's central government has decided to showcase architectural innovation as part of its world-beating hyper-capitalist experiment. Shanghai and Beijing, in particular, have become urban riots of aesthetic and technical flair, with skylines that are futuristic, inspiring, and sometimes sublime. Provided that you can see them. With the boom of China's urban economy has come a volume of pollution that casts us back to the pre-emissions-standards era, just one form of temporal collapse in these marvels of city metastasization.
Another is that living conditions on the ground or at the outskirts can resemble that same site under medieval rule - or, possibly even worse, the same site developed in the style of mid-century Soviet expansion. The bulk of construction in China is not of the showcase variety, with the celebrity Western architects jet-classed in for consultations and photo ops. Instead, the vast majority of recent building has been non-descript, cheap and almost entirely ungoverned by safety standards or minimum building codes.
Looking at the vast serried ranks of residential high-rises and factories in China's largest cities recalls P. J. O'Rourke's riff on 1980s-vintage Eastern Bloc architecture: "Commies love concrete, but they don't know how to make it. Concrete is a mixture of cement, gravel and straw? No? Gravel, water and wood pulp? Water, potatoes and lard?" Everything seemed to be made of it, he reported, including some of the food. Concrete is not one material. It is, instead, a range of possibilities; and while the recipe does not extend to lard, the proportion and quality of the constituents can make a vast difference. High-quality concrete, with sand and stone elements bound together in a batter of water and Portland cement - the traditional limestone derivative - is strong, fire-resistant and versatile. Reinforced with recycled steel, it is even environmentally sound. Architects love concrete because it is a slurry that moulds and sets into almost any imaginable form. Builders love it because it's easy to use: no artisanal skill required, just basic mixing and pouring.
Developers love it because it's cheap. And even cheaper if you skimp on the treatment or proportion of sand. Good concrete, they say, can last for 10 millenniums. Bad concrete can be taken down with a casual sledgehammer blow.
China's recent growth is sometimes called a microcosm of modern capitalism, but a more accurate metaphor is the pressure cooker. The economy, growing at a double-digit rate while the rest of the developed world copes with three or four per cent performance, is overheated. Meanwhile, the entrenched culture of guanxi, or connections, means that everyone with an idea and some startup capital is making payoffs to smooth the way.
But note the strange pincer of Chinese building: It is one boom with two styles, the prefab concrete deathtrap, but also the shining signature skyscraper. In downtown Shanghai, height then becomes a measure of time as well as money: The more you rise above grade, the closer you come to entering the 21st century dream of position and power. At the pinnacle, in penthouse apartments and rotating cocktail bars of the showcase buildings, lies the dream-world of postindustrial success, the elite perch. Everyone else will have to make do with walls that pulverize from a decent shake and bricks that come apart in your hands like a child's mud pie.
In contrast to the vast fantasyland of Dubai, Shanghai and Beijing are real cities, on ancient sites. Workers have been forcibly relocated to clear the space for the new arrowing towers, but with the effect of stretching the city's limits, not rendering the city spectral (though many of the tallest towers still remain largely empty). Taken together, the Chinese and Dubai states have proven that, right now, the most interesting recent architecture on the planet, at least in the monumental forms, is the product of authoritarian regimes, not democratic ones.
This fact raises some difficult questions. Yes, it's easy - and necessary - to condemn subcode building practices and the hazards that attend to them, wherever they happen. China's record here makes a reassuring target, just as decrying its human-rights record by tackling an Olympic torch-bearer offers a surefire exercise in moral superiority. A little hypocrisy goes a long way. We like to think this would be impossible in a democratic country, where violations would have immediate costs, ideally reducing to nil the incentive for taking shortcuts on materials or practices.
In fact, building in North America and Europe routinely falls short of this ideal. Building codes are fat tomes of cross-referenced regulation and constraint, some of it philosophically confusing. Architects are required to conform to the code, of course, and most large projects include a code-compliance professional who makes sure that they do. But many smaller projects slip under this radar, and even large ones face the daily realities of budget and time. Nobody can police every rivet or wire of a building.
Still, the code is there, and it means that plans must gain official approval before a building is possible. This can take a while, sometimes years. Add other hurdles such as public consultations and environmental-impact surveys, and ambitious projects can find themselves stalled indefinitely.
Hence more troubling is the question of whether great architecture is any longer possible under democratic conditions. In a turn worthy of Ayn Rand's supreme individualist Howard Roark, firebrand architects such as Rem Koolhaas, frustrated with the maze of regulation and interest he faced just designing a clothing store in downtown Manhattan, have turned to China as a vibrant playground of possibility. His CCTV building in Beijing is a marvel of inside-out form that would be hard to imagine being built in North America.
Despite the surface plausibility, this is a dangerous position, and in its own fashion just as easy as the swift condemnation of Chinese corruption. Architecture has lately been dominated by the narrative of singular genius and bold vision. In fact it is the most democratic of applied arts. No architect builds alone, and no building belongs to one person. The greatest architecture works this dynamic tension between creation and reception, between personal vision and community use.
"The most popular story of the 21st century is the Rising of China," Danni Zheng of the Olympic Media Centre wrote to me in a recent e-mail, inviting me "to firsthand witness this time in history." I would welcome that too, only not under state largesse. The rising of China is not just one story, it's many; the lessons we will learn from those stories are not always about the Chinese.
Mark Kingwell's book Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City was recently published by Penguin.
Source:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080519.wcochina19/BNStory/specialComment/