Posted on 03/13/2008 11:18:51 AM PDT by Lorianne
A DEVELOPER IN DUBAI, one of seven oil-rich emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, has hired Rem Koolhaas to design a posh new neighborhood, Waterfront City, on a newly created island in the Persian Gulf. The Dutch architect plans to fill the island with a regular grid of intentionally bland highrises punctuated with an eyeball, a pretzel, a drill bit — that is to say, huge buildings that bring such objects to mind.
Of course it is ridiculous. In 2000, Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize. They don’t hand out such an honor willy-nilly. Your work must be totally nuts.
“[M]ixes the bold and the nondescript” reads the cutline for an image that ran with New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff’s March 3 review of Koolhaas’s proposal. He writes that Waterfront City “is a carefully considered critique of . . . the growing use of a high-end architecture as a tool for self-promotion” — not architects but cities promoting themselves — “To Mr. Koolhaas this strategy, which many architects refer to as the Bilbao syndrome [after Frank Gehry’s titanium museum there], reduces cities to theme parks of architectural tchotch- kes that mask an underlying homogeneity.” But Waterfront City will strike many people as not so much criticizing as adopting the strategy.
Dubai seems to have hired Koolhaas with its eyes open. His Central China Television (CCTV) headquarters, in Beijing, nears completion as the Summer Olympics approaches. Koolhaas calls it a “hyperbuilding” — a whole city in a single work of architecture. Like many buildings built during the Era of Terror (or is that Era of Error?), the CCTV seems designed to fall down. Its two towers rise up 54 stories, each leaning by 60 degrees and connected at their upper reaches by a massive 14-story horizontal “V” structure that seems intended to help gravity pull the tilted towers even further off balance.
They “require an innovative steel exoskeleton to keep them upright,” says an article in the newsletter of the ABB Group, whose equipment will power the building. It will house all 16 CCTV channels and the studios, production facilities and administrative offices for China’s central communications. Koolhaas says it has a “barbaric beauty.” If you say so! To me it seems to say to the Chinese: “Someday I will fall, but in the meantime I will stomp on you.”
In a speech to the Congress of the New Urbanism two years ago in Providence, architect Daniel Solomon (a modernist himself) stated that Koolhaas’s CCTV “is not only a dazzling symbol of oppression; it is the very instrument of oppression.”
Imagine the Kremlin hiring Frank Lloyd Wright to design a headquarters for the KGB at the height of the Cold War. Of course Wright would never have agreed. The Politburo would never have asked.
Perhaps there is some sort of power thing, deeply neurotic, going on with these massive buildings that look designed to collapse. Or maybe it is a lack-of-power thing. Anyway, it is old hat in America.
An associate of Koolhaas, Joshua Prince-Ramus, designed a gravity-phobic skyscraper group, Museum Plaza, now under construction in Louisville. Daniel Libeskind’s new Denver Art Museum (which enjoys calling itself DAM) also looks designed to collapse, as does Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT. Even the New York Times’s new headquarters was originally designed to look as if it might lack stability.
Modern architecture has been creeping into every corner of what used to be known as the Third World for decades. But now it is worse. Developing nations that threw off the yoke of Western imperialism are strapping it on again, this time in its most ridiculous form. Dictatorships or democracies, the former colonies seem eager to establish credentials as “hip.”
One can easily understand the motivation behind the emirate’s biggest project, the Burj Dubai, not yet complete but already the world’s tallest building. In July 2007 it surpassed Taipei 101 (named for its location and number of floors). At 159 stories and 1,985 feet and counting as of Feb. 5, at least the Burj Dubai looks like a classical skyscraper, with setbacks reminiscent of Manhattan’s pre-modernist towers.
But Dubai’s head has also been turned by gonzo modernism. Zaha Hadid has designed buildings for Dubai and for Abu Dhabi, the emirates’ capital and its second-largest city (next to Dubai). Dubai was a British protectorate from 1892 to 1971. Hadid is an Iraqi based in London. Her built abstractions are not just modern architecture on steroids but on LSD. She makes Rem Koolhaas look like Christopher Wren. Her presence in Dubai is especially depressing.
This sort of thing is being embraced from one end of the Third World to the other. Why are so many developing nations hiring Western celebrity architects to stomp out what remains of their built culture? Beijing has even hired Koolhaas to oversee a survey on preserving its architectural heritage. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse!
Should Americans care whether the Third World marches into the future by embracing Western imperialism again? I have barely scratched the surface of this dangerous subject. Stay tuned.
David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).
No visual for this?
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