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| The Thrill of Excess |
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The transformation of the city's skyline is a dizzying spectacle |
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By Christopher Choa |
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Posted Monday, September 20, 2004; 20:00 HKT
Great cities are the product of excess. Shanghai, which has an excess of ambition and economic capital coupled with an extraordinary facility to get things done, has produced one of the most profound booms the world has ever seen. As an urban designer working in Shanghai, I'm struck at every turn by how the architecture here reflects the city's characteristic optimism. As a native New Yorker, I'm used to being surrounded by hustle and bustle, but in Shanghai, even with all the chaos around, I'm also struck by the lack of grimness in people's faces. It's as if the huge piping across sidewalks, the concrete dust that cakes onto shoes, the impenetrable traffic, the deafening rumble of construction sites at 2 a.m. are all just positive proof of how everything is getting better—and at warp speed.
There is so much new construction here that even architects have a tough time remembering who exactly did what. It used to be a relatively easy and fun game to guess the geographic origins of the designers who have flooded Shanghai. Now, however, all the shapes are starting to run together; every building seems to be a quotation of another one. Recently, while zooming along yet another of Shanghai's recently opened elevated expressways, I was faintly surprised to see a new high-rise that seemed familiar. Then I realized it was a near copy of a building of mine that had been completed only a few years ago. Protesting is useless, so I have taken it as a compliment.
Shanghai's new buildings sport a riot of wild architectural hats—levitating, spiky, jagged like the jaws of a techno-monster. Most of these are just a fantastic pastiche, but they do serve a useful function; it's easy to get lost in a city of more than 16 million souls, and sometimes you desperately need to get a fix on an unusual shape to remember exactly where you are. Ultimately, though, this frenzy of forms will produce something even more important. The city's strange, hybrid architecture is beginning to coalesce into something uniquely Shanghainese, as distinct from other cities in China as New York is different from the rest of the U.S.
A friend of mine, one of Shanghai's outstanding architects, recently observed that the planning of Shanghai is "contaminated" by Western culture and that this contamination is difficult to root out since it is a part of the city's very history. This astute observation addresses issues beyond urban design and architecture. Traditional concession-era Shanghai, with its monumental riverside buildings and the goulash of the former international settlements, did not evolve gradually. Instead, the cityscape was the consequence of violent growth over a short period of time. Yet Chinese culture—and architecture—is noteworthy not just for its longevity but for its consistency over thousands of years. Shanghai developed therefore, in some ways, as the anti-China, with its love of the new and the foreign.
The mélange of Western classical and Art Deco styles along Shanghai's famous Bund waterfront is but one manifestation of this. On the streets of the former international concessions, you can catch glimpses of the slick new buildings through the leafy green plane trees (a legacy of the French), smartly pruned to make way for double-decker buses. The city's traditional lilong lane neighborhoods may be cherished by residents and tourists alike for their intimate scale and unique brand of semipublic space, but they were originally conceived as high-density tenements, rapacious cash machines typically thrown up by Western developers in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the shadow of the outrageously shaped Pearl Tower and other wacky Pudong-business-district skyscrapers, I'm currently trying to encourage the Shanghai authorities to preserve some 40 old buildings in the heart of the original British Legation area, colonial structures that have been designated as "heritage buildings" by the Shanghai urban-planning authority. Yet less than a century ago, these edifices may have been considered an eyesore, a foreign intrusion in a Chinese city.
So as a foreign architect working in Shanghai, I have been forced to confront the question: To whom does Shanghai really belong? Foreign-influenced or not, I believe the spirit of this place belongs uniquely to Shanghai. After a generation or two, even the most strident new addition will come to be seen as part of Shanghai's patrimony—just as the Bund buildings now form an integral part of the city map. Shanghai is currently besotted by car culture. The Formula One Grand Prix is coming to town, and hotel rooms can't be had for any price. Professionally, I know the inevitable consequences of highways in cities, and I've produced endless counterproposals to them.
Yet I confess that the sinuous monumentality of the blue neon-lit elevated expressways as they snake past the city's French plane trees, traditional lane houses and shimmering skyscrapers has become strangely mesmerizing at night—despite the increasingly frequent traffic jams.
As I watch Shanghai grow skyward, I'm reminded of contemporary accounts of New York from the early 1900s. Europeans were both appalled and fascinated by the development of that great American metropolis. They smirked at the bad taste and the excess. But they were also envious, and maybe even a little fretful about the muscular emergence of a new world center. Perhaps Shanghai's rise is provoking the same sentiment in those of us who watch the city evolve before our very eyes.
Christopher Choa is an American architect based in Shanghai
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