What is the real purpose of a building? Shelter is obvious, but beyond that most architecture either provides a pleasing environment or sends a message. That message can reveal a great deal about the society that creates it.
The view here is the center of Shanghai not far from the Bund, the waterfront area that used to be part of Shanghai’s international settlement in China’s colonial past. The buildings in the foreground date from the 1930s when colonial powers effectively ruled over a fractured empire characterized by extreme poverty and opportunistic wealth in constant peril from competing warlords. The period is referred by China’s rulers today as “The Great Humiliation.” The ornate Western architecture was intended to project impressive wealth, sophistication, and stability that was in marked contrast to the prevailing insecurity and chaos that characterized much of China at the time.
These buildings survived because they are aesthetically pleasing and because China’s new ruling class wants to project a message that is not all that different from previous colonialist occupiers. The building in the distance represents a new China, anxious to create an impression of modernity. The building is Shanghai’s Radisson Blu New World Hotel. The panoramic restaurant and observation deck on top looks like a flying saucer temporarily squatting on concrete stumps. A critic classified the style as “Retro-futurism,” in other words a design based on a vision of the future that was made decades ago and now looks embarrassingly old fashioned if not ridiculous. Shanghai has a number of buildings that look like that. I once mentioned to a Chinese friend that the Bank of China building, designed by I. M. Pei in Hong Kong projects an aura of brilliance while the Bank of China building in Guang Zhou, which is almost as tall resembles a discarded pencil. “We lost an entire generation of architects in the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “We do the best we can do with what we have.” After a while, China’s experiment with Retro-futurism creates a familiarity and nostalgia of its own, but it is a vision of the past, not the future. Eventually, a decision will have to be made about how much of the past to hold on to and why.
This building is the “Treasury” at Petra in Jordan, believed to have been built as a mausoleum during the reign of Aretas IV Philopatris, king of the Nabateans who ruled more than 2,000 years ago from 9 BC to 40 AD. It was named the Treasury as the result of a spurious legend that Egyptians, having escaped the debacle that resulted from the Pharoah’s efforts to prevent Moses’ escape across the Red Sea, had hidden their treasure there. The building also served as a set for the film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. As with any other Hollywood set, there is no building there. Like many of the other structures at Petra, it is nothing more than a façade carved into the limestone face of a mountain. It is the ultimate message only this time with no substance. Why the Nabateans built it is hard to understand. The Nabateans controlled most of the caravan routes through Eastern Judea. Were the buildings intended to impress outsiders, or out of nostalgia for a Hellenic civilization that existed mostly in their imagination?
The Louvre in Paris had been the residence of France’s kings until Louis XIV decided to move the Royal Household to Versailles, consigning the former palace as a series of showrooms for the Royal Collection of art. Today the Louvre displays nearly 35,000 works of art and counts nearly eight million visitors a year. In 1989, the Chinese-born American architect, I.M. Pei was asked to design a new entrance to accommodate the flood of visitors to the museum. Pei designed a 70-foot-tall metal and glass pyramid in the Louvre’s courtyard. The pyramid acted as a skylight to an underground concourse which provided easy access to virtually all the museum’s buildings. Not surprisingly, Pei was criticized for not being French. The pyramid was heavily criticized for its contrast to the French Renaissance architecture of the palace buildings. In fact, the choice was brilliant. Pei had taken an essential ancient form and turned it into an ultra-modern adjunct to a complex of 17th-century buildings, in doing so he had propelled the Louvre into the future while retaining those aspects of the original structure that were most treasured. In contrast to the Radisson Hotel in Shanghai, Pei had demonstrated a genuinely futurist vision—one that harmonized the best of the past with the demands of the present.
What happens when architecture is not planned? Bangladesh, slightly smaller than the state of Iowa, has a population of nearly 170 million people and one of the world’s highest growth rates. Most of its architecture consists of adapting to constant change after the fact. As soon as a solution is found, another is needed. Everything is ad hoc. What you see here is a stairway leading to an overhead platform that is literally the only way to cross a traffic intersection in the capital, Dhaka. Step into the street and you are likely to be flattened to the ground. Dhaka, which has a population of more than 23 million people—three times the size of New York-- rates as one of the world’s fastest growing cities. For all but a few, the future promises an urban dystopia.
