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.

Steep, narrow and winding roads become major thoroughfares with a predictable outcome- a performance of narrow misses, precarious turns, grinding brakes and puzzle-like gridlock. While attending an event with a rooftop terrace overlooking just such a street, I was treated to hours of vehicular contorsion.

5:35pm

When there is open road in Istanbul, only one option is available: go fast. Forget that there is most likely someone right around the corner.

5:55pm

Traffic starts to build up in both directions thanks to cars parked in a rather unfortunate place.

7:28pm

Things get dicey as cars coming in opposite directions start to block each other from turning. Cue blocked lanes up and down the road in both directions.

7:46pm

Lots of close calls and gear grinding gets the traffic flowing.

11:08pm

A big van gets involved and really starts causing trouble. At this point several people got out of their cars to direct traffic and walk further down the road to tell people to back up and make space.

11:14pm

The big van continues its attempts to escape this nefarious corner. Some people get out of their taxi for a breather while they wait.

Anamur

Istanbul

Is North America’s love affair with large, gas-guzzling vehicles finally fizzling out? GM suddenly seems to think so, much to the detriment of workers at one of its truck-producing Canadian plants. The story has dominated Canadian airwaves over the past week, rich in the intrigue of corporate betrayal and linked as it is to the media darling of the moment: high oil prices. Old vs. New Economy, Jobs vs. the Environment, Labour vs. Capital- no familiar framing of the issue has been left dormant. 

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of this whole affair is the perception that the North American collapse in truck sales came out of nowhere. You would figure that a major global corporation such as GM would have at least a few strategists looking beyond the next quarter. Sure, trucks are much more profitable to sell than small cars, but even your average layman would be hard pressed not to notice the economic and geo-political storms gathering over the industry. GM should have been all over this years ago, not days ago.

But then again, blaming GM is the easy way out. In recent years, the national governments of North America have been notoriously unwilling to put any real pressure on the automobile industry to clean up its act or reduce the size and fuel consumption of its vehicles. Freedom has meant twenty miles per gallon, and forward-looking energy policy reduced to developing the oil sands in Alberta, and developing them quickly at all cost. It’s not hard to see how car manufacturers could get so complacent in such a permissive and supportive environment. Gaz-guzzling had protection from the very top.

With governments and manufacturers mired in their do-nothing myopia, it’s refreshing to see change come from those so often labelled as least willing to alter their behaviour: the consumer (or as known outside of government and academic circles, ‘normal people’). The consumer, in fact, has been a convenient straw man for interests opposed to any real progress on environmental and energy issues: environmentalism is too expensive, the average consumer isn’t willing to pay for it, the reasoning went. Well, this ‘consumer’ in North America has apparently turned the tables: wasting energy is now expensive, and people are no longer willing (or even able) to pay for it.  

North America is built around the automobile, its societies and economies dependent on the gas pump to get anything done. Perhaps this, alongside government complicity, gave GM comfort that its trucks and the like could rule the roads for a while yet. But the error in this logic is that while North Americans can’t go ten minutes without driving, they can easily do so in a vehicle other than a souped-up pickup truck or a Cadillac Escalade. How many SUVs and pickup trucks in your average urban area are necessities to the driver? Probably not many. How many of those drivers could get the exact same utility out of a smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicle? Probably quite a few. It’s strange that ‘utility’ is one of components of the SUV acronym, since to a large proportion of their current owners they are effectively useless. Unlike oil, demand for large vehicles is rather more elastic. The era of the Soccer Mom Monster Truck is likely in its welcome twilight.

At least in North America, that is. 

Parliament Hill
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

An ancient civilization. A huge population. A powerhouse. A communist state. A rising superpower. A faltering basketcase. A construction boom. An insatiable market. A military threat. A vision of the future. A major polluter. An opportunity. A development model. A theory. An idea. Sometimes, deep in the scrum of geopolitical debate, economic analysis and media generalizations, it is all too easy to forget that China is also, to so many, quite simply a home.

And in Sichuan, millions of people have seen their homes and livelihoods collapse into rubble, many loved ones lost beneath it. At the outset, Western media channels tried to funnel the story through the usual China coverage paradigms: will this cause social instability? Will people’s anger turn towards their (un)elected officials? How was the cherished economy affected? Was a certain infamous dam to blame? But as the scale of the disaster emerged, it became apparent that no repressive government or global economic forces could really be held responsible, as shoddy as building standards might have been (perhaps the worst kept secret in modern China). The people of Sichuan had been betrayed by the very ground beneath their feet.

With this realization all the posturing, back-and-forth propaganda and righteousness that have been such staples of discourse on China seemingly dissolved. Bickering over Olympic torch movements went from being ‘a defining moment of our time’ to nonsense of the most intense triviality, a category in which it should have landed to begin with. The rigid, media-shy mandarins in Beijing let the mask fall enough to reveal a genuine concern for the devastation wreaked on its people. Chinese people mobilized in a truly endearing way. Those who had not too long ago supported a punitive Olympics boycott were now thinking of ways to donate or help. Tragedies have a way of shocking people out of their usual preconceptions, of reminding many of us that underneath all the squabbling and petty games lies a common humanity.

This is a humanity which, despite all our hubris and infrastructure and habitat management, still exists at the mercy of an environment we don’t really understand. The indifferent shifting of tectonic plates, a mundane blip in the geological grand scheme of things, is enough to wipe out swathes of our built environment and ruin many thousands, if not millions, of hard-earned lives. This is as humbling as it is horrifying, and perhaps unites us all in the fear that sometimes these things happen for no particular reason to people who don’t deserve them.

It is tempting to try and blame someone, to pretend that human agency one way or another has control over planetary destiny. But the truth is that the human condition is still hostage to the weather and the mountains, no matter how much our industrialized selves try to pretend otherwise. But it is heartening to see, as in the response to the Sichuan earthquake, that the human condition also contains compassion deeper than the imaginary lines we draw between ourselves on maps. It is unfortunate that it invariably takes the brute force of nature to highlight this aspect of ourselves.

With springtime this year returns a particular type of seasonal frenzy: the Montreal Canadiens, darlings of the city and local media obsession, are in the NHL playoffs. In a place where the terms ‘hockey’ and ‘civic pride’ are often interchangeable, Montrealers have responded in a flurry of excitement and anticipation. Even the police, traditionally wary of such times thanks to infamous hockey-fueled riots (see 1955, 1986 and 1993), have made their peace with the fans by sporting Canadiens flags on their cruisers. Just like many taxis, and a decent percentage of vehicles in the city.

The Canadiens in the playoffs aren’t just the talk of the town: they are the town. Social calendars revolve around game nights, and the landscape is noticeably more bleu, blanc et rouge. The acoustics inside the Bell Centre, the team’s arena, are rarely below a deafening roar. Beer is still unbelievably overpriced, the in-game light-and-sound show designed for suffers of attention deficit disorder is as ingratiating as ever- but no one cares. Attention is focused on the drama playing out on the ice. The goalie of the Boston Bruins, who have the current misfortune of being on the wrong end of Montreal fans’ energy, equated his appearance at Montreal’s temple of hockey with being like a gladiator. Thankfully, these days you only get killed by the media and jeers as opposed to your opponent’s blade.

Worship of the Canadiens is perhaps so strong because of hockey’s power of unification. In a city so traditionally divided by linguistics and political allegiances, here is something that everyone can get behind with no questions asked. The storied history of the team has provided common legends for all Montrealers to consider their own- English, French or otherwise. This year’s crop of players have a particularly Russian flavour. Much more so than the vapid corporate nonsense of the Olympics, here’s an example of the power of sport and spectacle to transcend societal divisions. Rich? Poor? Federalist? Separatist? Doctor? Truck Driver? All are glued to a screen or their seats, ready to burst forth in celebration or, alternatively, in brutal cursing of the referee. It takes quite the stodgy curmudgeon not to get caught up in this hockey fever.

It has been oft argued that nationalism has replaced Catholicism as Quebec’s dominant religion, but to this I would add that hockey is equally carrying the weight of spirituality in this post-Christian society. And if the Canadiens are the deity of choice in these parts, then this is the holy season. And what is fueling this faith? The belief that, in a league hijacked by marketing and American sunbelt cities with indifferent fans, hockey’s ultimate prize might just return to its true home.

There is no getting around it: Montreal in early spring is a messy place. The thick blanket of white that smothers the city during the dark winter months pulls back to reveal a wide variety of discarded trash, soaking on wet sidewalks and covered in the residual rock salt of de-icing efforts. The roadways are battered and cracked, the mud of construction sites and vacant lots leaking out onto them and into cavernous potholes. Many street corners remain lakes over which pedestrians must jump, and snowbanks decay into an attractive shade of brown or exhaust black. The temperature rises, to be sure, but people remain weary and slightly on edge, not yet convinced that blinding snowfalls are a things of the past. In this part of the world, winter often says goodbye with a massive spring blizzard. How considerate.

Needless to say, at this time of year the city does not look its best. A massive proportion of Montreal’s built environment now dates from the mid-20th century, when concrete was king and grey and brown were de rigueur. Soggy weather brings out the worst aspects of this discarded architectural style, sucking the colour out of the landscape and leaving a residue of marred roads and brutal buildings. Thankfully, the passage of time brings forth a blast of sunlight and a return to the world of colour.

Passing by the street corner pictured above, I couldn’t help but read a scene full of meaning. On a superficial level, the billboard is typical in that it reflects the impossible fantasies of salvation through real estate, in which gorgeous conceptual renditions never quite match the resulting physical structure. Reality has that annoying habit of being slightly messier.

On a more symbolic level, this image spoke to me as a declaration of springtime and renewal, not only in terms of weather but for this particular corner of the city. It has long been populated by concrete, decay and idles spaces devoid of activity outside of the summer Jazz Festival onslaught. As neighbourhoods go, this one around Place-des-Arts (a major performing arts complex) has excelled as a void, a complete hole between busier and more lively parts of the city’s core. Urban change at its scarring worst, one could say.

Montreal is trying to change all this. Having re-baptized the area as the Quartier des Spectacles, the city has revved up some ambitious renewal plans of the usual kind, in which North American cities have nowhere else to turn but permanent spectacle, tourism and nebulous ‘cultural’ industries. A long neglected urban splace has thus sprouted colourful fencing and construction sites, including the condominium tower above. With a minimal amount of fanfare, chunks of the city are changing drastically. Like winter begrudgingly giving way to spring, this bleak landscape of empty lots and bunker bank towers could regain both colour and, more importantly, some vitality.

But as with spring, there is always the possibility of that massive blizzard rolling in to spoil the fun. A prolonged economic mess in North America, a political flare-up at the provincial level of the kind that ravages Montreal’s optimism, a development approach that transforms all space into playgrounds for the wealthy- the sources of weariness are many. But as it is with the arrival of every spring, hope springs forth; amidst the dirty snow and mangled infrastructure, people sense the sun is truly and finally coming. Hopefully, the same can be said for the fortunes of this fair city.