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The China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012
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9-11-2009
Cities of the Future
Anna Greenspan
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Cities of the Future
September 11, 2009 in Shanghai, urban China by The China Beat | 3 comments
By Anna Greenspan
The future is by definition modern – Carol Willis
Modern means Shanghai – then and now – Ben Wood
At the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park, where lower Manhattan meets the water’s edge, Shanghai
is currently on display. Though the museum only occupies a small space, the design by architectural
firm SOM gives the illusion of height, and the show is packed with content (including maps, floor-toceiling photographs, architectural models, video, and a 20-minute floating streetscape by Shanghaibased photographer Jakob Montrasio).
For those who can’t make the trip to New York, much of this material is now available online at
the museum’s superb website. In the coming months, this should be supplemented by recordings of
a fall lecture series on the Shanghai skyline, which features architectural talks from many of the most
notable firms working in the city (Portman, Gensler, SOM, KPF etc).
The exhibit is designed as an introduction to the urban landscape of contemporary Shanghai. Yet,
there is much of interest here even for those deeply familiar with the city.
Near the entrance, where the vastness and intensity of China’s current wave of urbanization is
documented by a series of diagrams and maps, Shanghai’s contemporary transformation is introduced
through ‘3 forms of urban planning and design.’
The first, the ‘patchwork model,’ is found mainly in Puxi, where modern tower blocks are set amongst
more traditional architecture and street life. The second model consists of the supertowers of Lujiazui,
and the third, again mostly in Puxi, is the trend towards architectural preservation, which began with
the now somewhat controversial development of Xintiandi. (The museum’s display on
Xintiandi includes a fascinating sketch by architect Ben Wood, who has scrawled across the bottom of
the page: ‘What is Chinese? A question that demands an answer every day.’)
The focus here, however, is on skyscrapers, and much attention is given to the city’s most well-known
towers, ‘Tomorrow Square’, Jinmao and the SWFC.
However, the show also features some of the city’s still incomplete supertowers. Visitors learn, for
example, of the White Magnolia Plaza, a cluster of high rises designed by SOM that promises to be one
of the defining features of the new construction along the North Bund.
The exhibit also provides one of most detailed glimpses – through models, photographs and video – of
the newly emerging 128-story Shanghai Tower. This astonishing construction consists of a ‘building
within a building,’ in which a double-glass curtain wall spirals round a concrete outer frame, which
creates eight stacked 15-story segments divided by nine sky-garden atriums.
On a curators’ tour, Carol Willis, the founder of the museum, presented Pudong’s trio of towers as the
past, present and future of the city – with Jinmao’s pagoda alluding to the past, the modernity of the
SWFC representing the present and the ‘green construction’ of the Shanghai Center pointing to the
future. (It’s worth noting that the idea that skyscrapers are models of sustainability is hardly new.
Modernists like Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier and Soleri believed from the start that high-density
highrises would lead to a greener city. The skyscraper museum has explored the sustainability of
skyscrapers in a previous exhibition.)
The most fascinating aspect of the current exhibit on Shanghai, however, is the show’s framing
thesis. China Prophecy: Shanghai is the final show in the three-part exhibition entitled ‘Future City:
20/21,’ which began with the show ‘New York Modern,’ and also included an exhibit and symposium
on ‘Vertical Cities: Hong Kong.’
Presented in this way, ‘China Prophecy’ invites viewers to compare the near future of Shanghai with
the past futurism of New York. This collision of time and space is suggested right at the start of the
exhibition through twin blow-ups of Google maps, which illustrate the uncanny mirroring of Lujiazui
and lower Manhattan, with their almost identical waterfronts, clusters of skyscrapers, and intense
urban density.
As a city of skyscrapers, Shanghai has echoed Manhattan from the start. The Park Hotel, the city’s
tallest tower until 1983, was built only after Shanghai’s great architect Laszlo Hudec returned from
America. Hudec’s design for the Park Hotel was based on his sketches of Raymond Hood’s Radiator
Building, which is located on West 40 Street, Manhattan.
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In an in-depth 5 part lecture series that opens Future City 20/21 and serves as the “expansion,
footnotes and embroidery of the ideas in the exhibition,” curator Carol Willis discusses this and other
of Hood’s work alongside American architects and illustrators like Hugh Ferris and Harvey Wiley
Corbett.
Together the talks and exhibit explore the New York of the 1920s and ‘30s as the ‘city of the future,’
in order to present an alternative vision of modernism that is, according to Willis, not the ‘one you
normally find in the textbooks.’
The idea, briefly put, is that in the early 1920s, before the International Style of Le Corbusier and Mies
Van der Rohe were widely accepted as the definition of modernism, there arose a specifically American
form of modern architecture and urban planning that was born out of the problems of the
contemporary city. Taking New York as their inspiration and site of exploration, these architects,
theorists and illustrators designed a metropolis of the future – a city of skyscrapers, bridges and
overpasses that was grounded in the present but was oriented towards that which was yet to come.
If New York was the 20 century’s city of the future, the question posed by ‘China Prophecy’ and
stated explicitly in the show’s opening video is: ‘Is Shanghai the New York of the 21 century?’
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This pairing of futurist visions of New York with contemporary Shanghai is hinted at throughout the
exhibit. Illustrations from Hugh Ferris’ retro-futurist masterpiece ‘Metropolis of Tomorrow’ are placed
alongside the photographs of Shanghai’s towers of today. The KPF-designed complex on Nanjing Lu is
displayed next to a model of Rockefeller Center (arguably Manhattan’s most successful example of
modern architecture).
Most intriguingly, Shanghai’s coming World Expo, which itself can often seem an exuberant celebration
of an outdated futurism, is paired with New York’s 1939 World Expo (which was themed ‘Building the
World of Tomorrow’). On the museum’s website a twinned video screen shows clips from General
Motors’ hugely popular ‘Futurama’ pavilion at the 1939 fair alongside shots of the skyscrapers and
elevated highways of contemporary Shanghai.
Propelled by modernization and urbanization, which Willis identifies as the ‘impulse of the future,’
Shanghai today is facing familiar problems of mass migration, traffic congestion and the inevitable
chaos that accompanies high-speed growth. In seeking solutions to these urban dynamics by
imagining, planning, building and debating the metropolis of the future, Shanghai, the show suggests,
is reanimating the modernist project of 20 century New York, thereby reviving yesterday’s dreams of
tomorrow.
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