Cities Without History
A former nation of farmers, China is halfway becoming an empire of citizens. Dusty roads are turning asphalt, carts turn into cars and concrete apartment blocks are replaced by pink and lavender condominiums. Within a decade the tidal wave of modernizations has spilled far beyond China’s coastal regions across the nation’s grey green landscape. Many thousands of villages have doubled in size and the plans for hundreds of entirely new cities are prepared and ready, awaiting execution.
Today the shapeless sprawl dominating Chinese urbanization is punctuated with a myriad of up-market settlements; densely organised neighbourhoods of repeating building blocks fringed with young trees and new cars. As a cross-over between Celebration (a suburban community developed by the Disney Corporation for the faint at heart) and the Projects (a concept for inner-city vertical slums for non-Caucasian Americans) these neighbourhoods combine the suburban comforts of parking on your doorstep with the density of downtown Manhattan. And they all look the same.
At China’s pace of development a strategy of copy and paste makes perfect sense; copying the urban layout, the engineering, the floor plans or simply the entire building is a tested approach to prevent disaster. When the main structure has been erected it is a matter of applying the right style. In the Chinese housing industry this is a delicate operation. The style of the building, or the outer skin, fulfils a number a practical purposes; it can soothe planning commissions, obscure the colossal scale and distinctly convey the price range of its apartments to a niche market audience.
After weeks of wandering through this great nation, this has led me to believe in China style itself is irrelevant. Style and particularly architecture, that collection of styles that aims to give identity to indiscriminate buildings, has become irrelevant. The blanket of grey building mass of the Chinese metropolis will smother most any attempt at eye-catching mannerisms; and in the towns and villages the need for new homes is just too acute to worry about style at any great length.
At best a necessary burden, architecture in China is applied last minute. It seems to be squirted against the facades like sauce from a squeeze pack. The most prevalent style is neo-classical; an unassuming recipe of Greek, Roman, Gothic and Rococo ornaments. Suitably branded Eurostyle it is the predominant choice of the Chinese developer, even though recently other styles, such as the luxurious Local Style have gained momentum. The successful developer keeps track of the subtle shifts in tastes and trends. At his command a team of Chinese architects will resourcefully drape the columns entablatures and parapets over the basic structures of the apartment block and sprinkle the cast-iron lions around the property. In this fashion hundreds of new settlements and satellite towns are built across China.
One group of the so-called New Towns presents a pinnacle in this nation’s copy and paste practices. Dangling from Shanghai’s outer ring road - forty five miles from the centre – a total of nine satellite cities has been designed in authentic Eurostyle. Part of Shanghai’s suburban expansion plan each of the projects will accommodate half to one and a half million inhabitants (equivalent to the size of Amsterdam). A number of European architects has been approached to capture the spirit of their country’s traditional architecture. A distinctly British, Italian, German and Dutch village will be completed before the end of next year.
The British firm Atkins has won the competition for the design of Songjiang Garden City. The design is a collage of meticulously compiled moments in British township and village architecture arranged amidst the rice paddies of Pudong. Gaoqiao New Town is the name of the satellite city beside Shanghai’s Chemical Industrial Zone (China’s largest new industrial site). Designed by Dutch architects it reads as a psychedelic reinterpretation of traditional Dutch styles. The result is a beautifully post-modern amalgamation of clog shaped windows, stepped gables and sculptures of giant tulips on display before a backdrop of flaming exhaust pipes. The question that comes to mind is what makes the Eurostyle so popular?
This year Europe has obtained the ‘Approved Destination Status’. This simplifies visa procedures and is likely to result in five hundred thousand Chinese tourists annually, travelling to Holland alone. Already one bus crammed with Chinese tourists curves into my street every day. They flock through my neighbourhood in Amsterdam wearing the familiar mauve suites, holding video cameras and jam jars filled with tea. Travelling abroad has come within reach of a growing number of Chinese middle class and Europe’s capitals seem to be the first they are drawn to.
Cities like Amsterdam fulfil a deeply rooted desire for nostalgia. Amsterdam’s drunken merchant homes all neatly aligned along the cute canals embody what the new Chinese urbanites are looking for. Its old centre exudes a promising mixture of historic splendour, affluence obtained by self-made entrepreneurs, total freedom and well guarded order; all in all the values of the burgeoning Chinese nation.
China has effectively erased its past. Its cities are essentially tabula rasa still to be demolished. No wonder Europe’s historic features are now being introduced at a massive scale in China. They become the ingredients of an instantaneous history in tune with the first generation of home owners. Still it’s very tempting for a Dutch architect to become cynical when confronted with a town in ‘Traditional Dutch Style’ to be built as a part of Shanghai. The brand new models of bell-shaped facades and mini merchant homes may appease today’s residents, but can they withstand the times? Much faster still than China’s urban landscape, it is the Chinese state of mind that is transforming. Today’s children, all products of the one-child policy, are educated ambitious and demanding. Most likely they won’t be satisfied to live in China’s future Euroghetto’s. Style may be irrelevant, until it is forced upon you.
In the end it is safer to have skyscrapers dressed with columns by Chinese than to have a European architect construct a utopian nightmare. But China, the world’s toughest adolescent looking for a new identity mixing and matching as he grows, might already know this.
Architect Neville Mars Excerpts from “The Chinese Dream – a society under construction”
Neville Mars
2004-10-15