New World, Old World
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008While recently perusing the New York Times, I came upon yet another article about Beijing’s massive architectural makeover (yes, it would certainly seem that media obsessions die hard). This piece has all the signature themes you’d come to expect from something called “In Changing Face of Beijing, a Look at the New China” : awe of the scale and speed of change; fawning over Chinese dynamism and inevitable ownership of the future; lamenting of perceived Western stagnation and inability to bulldoze whole cities to make way for audacious architects.
However, something in this one really caught my eye. Consider its opening paragraphs:
If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it’s understandable. It’s not just the grandeur of the space. It’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust.
The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.
Designed by Norman Foster, Beijing’s glittering air terminal is joined by a remarkable list of other new monuments here: Paul Andreu’s egg-shaped National Theater; Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium, known as the bird’s nest; PTW’s National Aquatics Center, with its pillowy translucent exterior; and Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for the CCTV television authority, whose slanting, interconnected forms are among the most imaginative architectural feats in recent memory.
Norman Foster? British. Paul Andreu? French. Herzog & de Meuron? Swiss. Rem Koolhaas? Dutch.
So, Europe is culturally obsolete- and yet its architects are designing the Chinese future? I’m confused. But this strange juxtaposition of paragraphs gets to the heart of gushing adulation that pours out of various points of Western media onto Beijing and, to a larger extent, the great Chinese remodeling- just what is the symbolism of these gargantuan building projects taking place in the Middle Kingdom?
The easy way out is to succumb to the popular hysteria and announce China’s immediate ownership of a century that is only eight years old, or perhaps even its dominance of the future tout court. It isn’t hard to see why many in architectural and design circles tend towards this viewpoint: Beijing is their dreamscape, a place where architectural fantasies are made flesh. In the huge monuments being erected, they see their own (Euro-American modernist) visions of the future reflected back at them and adulate accordingly. But these futuristic visions of perfect skyscraper forests are just that- ideas, visions, fantasies. And there is barely concealed glee that, in China, the powers that be are so intent on making these a physical reality unlike so many other less cooperative (read: combatative) jurisdictions.
This is related to another mediatic theme which always appears when discussing tall superstructures in China: the perceived decline of the United States. Barely an upstart superpower itself in the grand historical scheme of things, and already the media has declared the age of American dominance to be done. The symbolism of Beijing’s new gargantuan airport terminal? The USA is wiped out, spent, yesterday’s news. This has become such a natural causal link in recent times that very few even notice it anymore. But are strangely-shaped glass buildings in Beijing enough to spell the end of America Inc.? I’d say the jury is still more than out on that one.
Of course, all is not well in the land of Uncle Sam these days. With two wars and an economic meltdown, far from it. But is the rest of the world in such great shape? There is a deep tendency in Western media to overplay the negatives in our own societies, and up the hyperbole on the positives in others (particularly ones with very large populations). Ever stop to think how ridiculous it is to predict the fate of 1.3 billion people- not to mention the outcome of the next hundred years - based upon a handful of architectural and public works projects in one city as it hosts the Olympics? If you want serious problems, China has them supersized- and the new CCTV tower, as structurally impressive as it is, says very little about how or if these will be resolved.
But quite apart from all the Western navel-gazing fueling our media’s obsession with China, there is still a very real and drastic physical transformation taking place in the capital of the Middle Kingdom. So what is it about, really?
Well, let me offer a novel perspective: the ‘new’ Beijing is not the city of the 21st century, but rather the last great city of the 20th century.
In its aesthetic and form, the transformation of Beijing is a culmination of the ideals behind the century that brought us Houston, La Défense and Las Vegas. China’s capital has become what the future looked like from the 20th century vantage point of unlimited resources, fossil fuel primacy and disregard for environmental context or consequence. From this perspective, nothing mattered but growth, style, size and consumption. Bigger was always much, much better. I hesitated somewhat to write this in the past tense, however, since it should be quite obvious that this mentality has persisted quite well into the first years of the 21st century.
But things are changing fast. Sustainability is now less of a fuzzy buzzword and more of a genuine worry- can the Beijings of the world really last? Will they even be inhabitable in 60 years? Forget joining ten towers at the 90th floor- where is the water going to come from? Cavernous new airports are impressive structures, but how to deal with all the emissions from the boom in air traffic?
Instead of heralding the future or a Chinese century, perhaps 2008 Beijing is a global swan song to an era of unbridled faith in the powers of infrastructure, engineering and capitalism to overcome all constraints, obstacles and limitations. Never has 20th century Modernism and its tabula rasa approach to the world had a stronger proponent than the current crop of Chinese leadership. Perhaps we have it all backwards, after all: maybe 2008 is not a coming-out party, but a final celebration of the industrial and modernist excesses of the last century. You could argue that they have never achieved purer form that in present-day Beijing. It just took a little longer to get there than in other places due to some unfortunate interludes such as communism and the cultural revolution.
Urban China is the ode to a time when narrow-minded economics and infrastructural grand-standing were the guiding lights of progress, and so the issue of sustainability really does become the most inconvenient truth, the ultimate spoilsport. Beijing is larger than life, monumental, impressive, even wondrous- but it is blossoming within an increasingly outdated paradigm of progress. And in this way it has little to say about the future at all.
In 2008, Beijing might well look like the harbinger of a dynamic new world to many people. But in a few decades, it could just as easily be remembered as the ultimate expression of a global industrial dream that was never really possible.
Update: Richard Spencer has written an interesting piece in the Telegraph about how the new Beijing is a product of the 20th century Modernist dream. He mentions how China has done to its capital what Le Corbusier dreamed of doing to Paris- but couldn’t get away with. The most memorable quote:
China is the only country in the world to have taken a conscious decision to knock down Paris to build Los Angeles.
Update 2: Howard French weighs in with a similar opinion in the International Herald Tribune. China, he writes,
has taken an utterly conventional approach to nation-building, racing in headlong pursuit of utterly 20th-century goals - retracing old steps like creating a smokestack economy or sending men to the moon, for example - even as the new and very different demands of the 21st century, from a revolution in the use of energy and respect for the environment to a redefinition of human development, make themselves ever more pressing.
