Peter Nesteruk
CONTENTS:
Introduction:
‘Looking up’.
PART ONE: The Persistence of Tradition.
(Chapter 1) The Lure of Inherited Forms.
Interlude.
Architectural Debates: The Space/Place Problem.
(Chapter 2) Chinese Whispers.
Episode: Architecture and Desire.
PART TWO: The Shock of the New. The 20th
Century.
(Chapter 3) Building the
Interlude.
Architectural Debates: Illusionism & Ideology.
(Chapter 4) City of
PART
THREE: A Unitary Vision? Cityscapes, Old & New.
(Chapter 5) Reading Architecture! Points of Orientation.
i/ Whose stand-point? Horizon v Stand-alones
ii/ Points of view. Pointed Roof v Flat Roof Traditions
Afterword:
Evolution of the Eye.
Appendices : Timelines. i/ Architectural archetypes (skiamorphs).
ii/Beijing:
a very short architectural history.
(0) Introduction
Looking
up.
Because of the impetus provided by the Olympic Games
of 2008,
“Our ‘love of the skyline’ is explained if
we conceive it as our relationship with our world in concentrated form.”
Even recently the
view of the modern city skyline was a matter for some embarrassment. We
expected old cities to have enchanting horizons, to please us so much that we
would seek them out as we would a particularly satisfying pleasure: but the
modern urban horizon - this was something we did not waste time on. Things
change. Sometime in the last ten years the building of attractive structures
began to outnumber the unattractive; our skyline was again something we could
take pride in as attention to feature, materials and colour began to take over
from drabness and uniformity. Things were looking up. We too began to look up
again.
Already in the
1970s we saw a revulsion against what modern developers were doing to our
cities. First we saw the arrival of Postmodernism on the architectural scene, bringing
back decoration to a scene that until then had been dominated by the naked,
concrete and glass cube. Then new technological discoveries opened the door to
new designs – novel forms, sinuous curves, breath-taking overhangs, unusual
colour combinations; hitherto unimagined configurations began to appear in our
cities. Most importantly, we witnessed a change in the expectations of the
urban dweller; a revolution in the way we think about our urban environment
that has changed what is acceptable to us. Such that we now expect something ‘extra’,
something ‘finished’ about the topmost elements of a building, something that
will add to the totality of the skyline, that will make the building both stand
out, and fit in; stand out as good-looking, fit in as harmonious with its
context, its society, the people who must look at and live with it. This
transformation moved forward at ever-greater speed, until the majority of
buildings, not excluding the humble office and apartment dwelling, all showed signs
of this sense of visual responsibility. So much so that we now find that some meaningful
differentiation of the topmost segment of the urban field has become de rigueur - even if this demarcation in
some cases can only be observed in the most minimal of ways (in the colour of
the paint or the type or texture of the material).
The special
recognition awarded to the topmost part of the built environment is accompanied
by a corresponding differentiation of the lowest segment of urban architecture;
our ground floor level, the level of shop-fronts and displays, window-shopping
and entrances. And the ‘middle’ has not been forgotten either; the textures and
patterns on the long middles of tall buildings, cumulatively, the ‘canyon wall’
of the modern city street, have also received increased attention. These three
zones, three horizontal planes that orientate our experience of urban
architecture and urban life, appear to have been universally recognized. This
despite earlier attempts to avoid decoration (largely on economic grounds)
resulting in the dominance of drab cubes (in the East as in the West) in the
1950s and 1960s; yet - as if the basic experience, our basic, even minimal
expectations of architecture, were hard to forget - even the most plain
buildings often still retained some minimal marking-out of the three zones. But
the tops were flat, giving modern cities their ‘unfinished’ feel, leaving our
expectations fallen flat, conveying the sense of an uncared-for horizon -our
urban landscape as not worthy of concern- as something designed by those who probably
lived elsewhere. Now we expect a lively difference of structure, ornament or
some manner of decorative design to occur between top and middle (and middle
and bottom), and, if we are lucky, some roof-top feature that will single out
the building in silhouette, making its mark as part of the horizon, leaving its
mark, contributing, distinct, but cumulative, to the vision we behold of the
city skyline.
The relation of
our architecture to the sky is a special one – symbolizing so much more than
the bricks and mortar we find there. To capture this symbolism, the term
‘Solar’ has been borrowed from medieval usage (denoting a room in the sun, a
topmost room) to give a name to this top-most level of the urban experience.
The Solar is what we perceive as our eyes naturally slide up the walls of our
world up to the light (the ancient Greeks had a name for this: hypsosis). It is what we see in the
space between heaven and earth, the architectural features that fill this
space. As we look out onto our city skylines, at the heritage that previous
generations have left us, we find that, if we are proud of this heritage then
the skyline will be variegated and eye-catching, if not then the impoverished
and unfinished appearance that is the legacy of the middle decades of the 20th
century will no doubt be in evidence.
The Solar skyline is about buildings in context, about
sharing a world. The skyline, our horizon, is also our final visual context, ultimate
background, site of our collective sense of responsibility to the world, the world
of the viewer, as of its dwellers, the inhabitants of cities, ourselves…
Our ‘love of the
skyline’ is explained if we conceive it as our relationship with our world in
concentrated form. What we collectively feel about our urban home, our space in
the world, is symbolized here, represented in the attention and expense we find
here, reflected in the skyline, in the ‘feel’ of the urban horizon. Good
skylines tell of a sacrifice for a good view (the economic sacrifice of
profitable space for the meanings to be found in a given symbolic feature). A
gift to the horizon. A sacrifice made for a collective view that speaks to all
of us, and, indirectly an offering made for all of us, in the pressure exercised
by all upon the architect’s decisions. Result; variety, exuberance and a spur to
the imagination (and even occasionally the twin extremes of banality and
excess)!
The results of
this transformation are perhaps most obvious in
*
|
How this book is structured. The variety of forms
that we see in the uppermost parts of buildings, those regions of our urban
experience we have chosen to call the ‘Solar’, are described according to
their appearance and their origins - but above all by the type of response
they draw from us – intended or otherwise. A line is drawn from earlier forms to
later developments; from their origins to the borrowing and adaptations that
follow. These family resemblances are discussed in terms of a rhetoric that
has as much to do with our expectations of the environment in which we live,
as of architectural tradition. Both being answerable finally to the court of
human experience. Each chapter has an
introductory section explaining the key issues, followed by a list of
typologies, the terms you see here on either side. These terms are then illustrated
and their meanings discussed. |
|
Palazzo Giant Egg Openings Narthex CCTV Flying Saucers Water Cube Historicism Metal Skin Bird’s Nest Facade Lightening Rods |
|
Dragon Head Pagodas Ellipses Cornice Atrium Flying Carpets Surfboards Wheels Spikes Art Deco Sky Beacon |
PART ONE: The Persistence
of Tradition。.
Where
have I seen that before? The first two chapters will introduce a number of
features prominent on the
(Chapter 1) THE LURE OF INHERITED FORMS
(Chapter 2) CHINESE WHISPERS
(CHAPTER ONE) The Lure of Inherited Forms.
In
this chapter we will see how forms common to East and West have contributed to
the language of modern architectural design. This fusion includes the
appropriation by Chinese architectural culture of certain received Western forms
(the Cornice), as well as the fusion and development of forms that are similar
East and West (the Arch, the Window, the Courtyard). The Chinese tradition
proper will be dealt in the next chapter.
Introductory
Section
This category
contains what may well be some of the most subtle forms of architectural
rhetoric we are liable to see. Basic forms, whose histories may be discussed in
terms of millennia, have been transformed by technology, materials, stylistic
formalization, or combination with other features to form a ‘new’ visual
experience (albeit replete with the echoes of all the past forms it can be
found to resemble or of which it may act as a reminder). Many of these buildings
suggest a combination of traditional forms; most especially in the development
of sky-relating or framing features such as the Cornice (taken from the West,
but cross-fertilised by the roof overhang of the Chinese tradition) and the Arch
along with the continued evolution of spatial-volumetric or room-like features
such as the Courtyard (East and West), and the Atrium, and Narthex forms of entry
and semi-open enclosure.
Typologies; the
Experience of the Edge and the Experience of Openings.
The Experience of the Edge: The
Return of the Cornice and the Chinese Roof-rim
Definitions.
Cornice. Originating in the classical
architecture of Greece and Rome where it signified the topmost, projecting
section of the Entablature (the cross beam, load-bearing element in beam and
column design, the decorative aspects of which could be ‘wrapped around’ the triangular
pediment that often topped it, a ‘raking cornice’). In recent architecture this
term is applied to any outwardly curving or other-wise projecting decorative
moulding or casing that runs along the top of the building (but also along a
wall or arch) and regarded as its finishing touch or crown. Also (in the
language of classical architecture) referred to as a ‘cyma’ or ‘cymatium’, the
distinguishing feature or curved part of the modern cornice.
The most popular
pre-twentieth century feature used in recent architecture owes much to the
legacy of the Renaissance Cornice (itself in debt to the classical Greek and
Roman periods). The Cornice is the decorated top edge of a building (when a ban
on the ‘loud’ or ostentatious ornamentation of buildings came into effect in
Renaissance Rome, the competing families of aristocrats began to devise ever
more impressive cornices for the passers-by to look up to). This function, of
looking up, and of making value judgments as to the nature (and quantity of
wealth) of the building’s occupants, is still important today: We may recognize
a building’s function from the amount of detail and manner of signs found on
the cornice, or read messages concerning State and Nation, from the weight and splendour
(or severely simplistic rationality) expressed there.
The return of the
cornice as an important decorative or ‘finishing’ feature in (post)modern
architecture has occurred in two ways. The first takes the form a feature
placed on top of a building, often appearing as if to act as a sun-break, or
masking the less attractive, if necessary, machine housing that can be found
there. Usually it imitates the cornice by providing an (otherwise modern)
building with a top section which fans outwards from the top, giving a finished
effect to what would otherwise be a flat, unfinished top and so establishing a
relationship with the sky. However this type of cornice also resembles the roof-curve
associated with the traditional Chinese system of roofing –most especially its
overhang and support system. As such this effect will be discussed in detail in
the chapter that follows. The forms of the top edge that concern us here are
those based upon a second form; the differentiation of the entire upper portion
of the building itself, an extension that clearly extends the symbolism of the
(Renaissance) Cornice. It is this category that is discussed next.
In what appears to
have become the official ‘house’ style for many of the key institutions of State,
we are presented with large, basically square, partly-open, structures with a
prominent cornice carrying key national symbols. Designed to offset the
uniformity of the modernist cube, which this type of building takes as its fundamental
model, the cornice outlines the building as a sky or horizon-marking feature
(often taking an inward and downward curve which offers a passing homage to the
roof-support system and roof curves of traditional Chinese architecture). This
same feature is part of the upper frame of a glass-walled opening, which may traverse
many floors of the front face of the building. A key part of this structure is
a monster atrium reaching across many floors, usually a large open space within
the confines of the building in question which is open to the sky by means of a
large opening in the ceiling or roof (or, more recently as large skylight).
This term, ‘Atrium’, is now often (if a little inventively) used for any large
open space within a building which runs up to the roof, giving light access to
all floors and by means of its glass fronting, ‘opening-out’ the building to
the public - or anyway, to public view.
Definitions.
Atrium. First an interior court or
space open to the sky (Roman, Classical), later an open courtyard in front of a
church, such as an open space with columns framing its periphery (Late-Classical
and Medieval periods). Now more usually indicating a large and tall interior
space with (at least part of) one side open to the exterior light.
Such a space,
enclosed in glass, so rendering part of the interior visible from the outside,
from the street or public space, is in character transitional between inside
and outside; so creating a kind of ‘in-between’, between the private spaces of
office and work-place, and the exterior public world - a kind of public space that
lies within the building’s enclosing frame. Welcoming… but austere - even at
times, as when the building is of a particularly vast size, a little daunting
(so possibly running counter to the main rhetorical effect of this particular feature
which is to suggest ‘openness’). Indeed the limitation of this rhetoric, and
hence its presence as a form of rhetoric, as an argument in stone, a suggestion
(or illusion) in three dimensions, may be akin to the experience of an image, something
subsisting in the realm of the visual only and not designed to be extended into
everyday use. Like a façade presenting one message (or face) whilst another, potentially
conflicting one, is contained or performed within. A façade with an opening. Portal
to the sites of power. The gate before which Kafka’s supplicant waits.
For a typical example, see the
The Grand Arch in
The
Likewise the columns that
introduce the Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Architect: Cui Tong;
Location: 4th ring) both suggest the columns of the temple or palace
and open up the building to light and air are topped by a projecting cornice that
echoes the support beam curve of traditional provenance.
Monumental
cornices often sit atop a vast vestibule, or porch, open, like a Byzantine
cathedral Narthex, to the exterior; but with an intervening wall of glass. A
vast wall of a window. Like the West-end windows found in western cathedrals:
any large round window therefore also cites the medieval Rose Window. Now found
uniting skiamorphs from the East as
from the West, reuniting underlying forms; gathering together local
geo-cultural meanings. A window onto new architectural developments. The experience
of openings as the new experience of space in modern architecture.
Definitions.
Narthex. Coming in two aspects,
interior and exterior, the influence of the Narthex on modern architectural
forms and our experience of them lies in its exterior form, which functions as
a relatively open, extended entry space (originally to a Byzantine cathedral).
Forms approximating the Narthex also owe much to the Portico, which pre-dates the
function of the medieval Narthex as entry space in classical language – for our
purposes the modern entrance space as a large, discreet and glazed space echoes
the antique Portico perhaps as much as the Narthex and Atrium. All these
constitute the predecessors of the monumental Cornice as also of the ‘Dragon
Window’.
The Phenomenology of Openings: The
Feng Shui of the
The Experience of
Openings. Essentially a combination of three forms of opening up a building to
the outside, the new sense of openings, of the opening up of a modern building,
is made-up of elements taken from the Entrance (the Arch), the Window and the
Courtyard (the space that results within). Such spaces are fronted by tall
openings from the side and often supplemented with openings from above. Our
view through the window or opening as onto a space lit as if from above (even
if that light is that which enters from above ourselves as we make an entrance
or just gaze in from the outside).
In many ways what we experience here is the three
dimensional equivalent of the intervening white space that is such a feature of
Eastern art (the spacing between the grounds of the traditional shuimo 水墨 or ink-wash landscape). These are the absences that signal the
infinite and eternal realms of religious, artistic and cultural tradition (the ‘quietism’
of the Dao, or the enlightening ‘absence’ that is the aim of the Chan/Zen
Openings the
passage of light; the passage of spirits. This somewhat dramatic idea comes
from the idea that energy must be allowed to pass through a building. Historically,
such (usually small) windows are now most frequently seen in the walls of
temples where they function as ventilators called ‘Dragon Windows’ (‘dragons’
are spirits in Chinese mythology, akin to water sprites and other ‘spirits of
the place’ in Western mythology). There is a sense of a debt to place and to
the demands of cultural history. Like the roof curve which has inspired so many
recent Chinese architectural creations (see sections on Sky Beacons, The Return
of the Cornice, and Pagodas), so with the new architecture of the opening; old
becomes new as modern techniques and styles incorporate ancient ideas and their
architectural embodiments. Metaphorically: we are offered the sense of flow, or
the appearance or possibility of flow, through an otherwise closed building; of
the possibility of a passage through, and so the guarantee of the access to
light, of its ability to move through a building. The important thing is that
the building in question does not appear as a blockade, a blocking of the space
around; so not appearing as an obstacle, as an unwelcome bringer of urban
claustrophobia, of the sense of being visually ‘fenced-in’.
Other explanations
for the popularity of large openings: in global terms, such windows are the
alternative to closed space windows, giving us openings as openness, this is the
architectural rhetoric for administrative openness and democratic ideals (as in
the case of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, which features a huge glass
wall running along one side of the building, and a split tower, its wall ‘breached’
to allow access to the inner corridors of power – at least that is the message
as conveyed by the image). In terms of traditional art we are offered the physical
equivalent of the ‘let be’ white space that signals the space behind things;
the emptiness beyond delusion (or Maya). In geo-political aesthetics we have a
particular set of meanings which suggest the lack of a center; hollowed-out
structures are to be read as more accurately representing Eastern
non-(mono)theistic religions with their absent centers, their (philosophical)
lack of a god and general abstract qualities… including the sense that if a god
is not anywhere…(Confucianism), or nowhere (Buddhism) it is everywhere (a
Daoist pantheism). A reference to ‘all’ or ‘everything’; but without a
traditional (Western) concept of a centre, which is what we find reflected in
the glass of modern architecture, and especially in the apparently open - but
glassed-in - spaces of luminous passage, the passage of spirits that is the
secret of the giant opening, architectural cavern or glass window. These are
the general meanings generated by such a structure; then we have the local,
particular meanings of architecture viewed in context; the suggestion of the
presence of a vast cave, from the promise of shelter to the promise of a
treasure house; openings as invitations to entry, the opportunity to peer in;
lure for the passer-by, trap for the eye…
Eyeguides: How Architectural
Symbolism Works: the ‘Opening’.
The upper edge of
a building or the use of openings, the variety of forms that we have referred
to as a Cornice or labeled as an Opening, all call upon a wide range of
symbolism – a symbolism as old as architecture itself. Unlike ‘historicism’,
which tries to rebuild the past in the form of a whole building, the taking of
significant parts of buildings (together with the intellectual tradition
associated with them, as in feng shui
and the role of openings) offer the possibility of building the future whilst
calling upon the past; accessing our collective inheritance, our collective
architectural memory, in order to give significance to new forms, new
combinations and re-combinations of built space.
Gifts of the Past: Ghosts in
the Present: Arch, Window, Courtyard.
‘The place of
entry.’ Is in fact a space, an opening, an emptiness, or break in a manifold
that permits ingress. The fact that we do not refer to it as a space, but as a
place, is a testimony to the weight of meaning it carries (supported as it were
on its lintel, its uppermost part and most symbolic physical portion – echo of
the sky-touching cornice that will fulfill both functions in the range of
features we have nick-named, Dragon Windows). A weight of meaning that in
reality rests upon the immaterial functions of the entryway; the sense we have
of the threshold, of the passing into a different state of space, a different
place, an interior, a room. Like the entry into a place of ritual, a time and
space put aside; replete with positive expectation: a place. The place of
entry.
There are few
features of the built environment so laden with symbolism and suggestion as the
entrance. Entrances come in three sizes; big, medium, small. However, as usual,
differences in quantity rapidly become important differences in quality. All
three sizes offer differing qualities of experience, arouse different expectations,
and are broadly coeval with the terms, Arch, Portal and Door (the latter is
also the point of entry into the realm of the personal, the private, the
domestic; leaving the arch and portal to represent the entry as an aspect of
public space). All three may be laid out on a continuum between symbolic force
and functional utility with the arch occupying the symbolic end of the spectrum
(size matters) and the door the functional end. Although, in reality, all doors
may be symbolic, and all arches, even those blocked-off from entry, or indeed
blocked-up, suggest the possibility of passage (even if only as the ominous
symbolism of a passage denied). Finally all doors contain the symbol of
threshold, whilst the function of an arch is its symbol-bearing property. If
the door is domestic and the portal is the mode of entry to stores and banks,
then the arch represents the size of opening whose meanings we find in our experience
of the Opening.
The Arch (it should always begin with a capital: certainly the capital is where
it is usually found). The ceremonial entrance-way and memorial gate. Site of
the historic pageant, home of the spectacle as sequence, portal of procession,
performance of the gateway as frame. Strange entry from which are conjured
forth: the masque of memorials; the solemn march of mask-bearing two-legged
beasts - so many flightless birds (inviting yet-further flights of the
imagination). The magic of the Arch has a long and glorious history: indeed it
is the history of Glory itself. Its historical manifestations themselves offer
a grand procession: from the Triumphal Arches of Classical
Indeed two hundred years after the dying-out of
Robespierre's religion of Reason, rationalism again overlooks the French
capital, its geometries guiding the French nation, orienting, framing our
vision, our point of view, over-seeing what it is to be l'exception
francaise...). Such is the power of suggestion of a simple framed space.
An entrance made of pure symbol; of near spectral
specularity: the Arch as the ghost of the past it represents. Like a bridge of
pearls made immaterial in its lambent materiality. Pure entry. With no room to
follow: an entrance to nowhere. Nowhere real. The access is only to an
imaginary place (our imagining of the past it calls forth). Or else entry only
to an ideal version of its current place, its current context and situation
(its inner glow returned to it as if returned to the point before the Fall).
This immediate context, or present, now either basking in the reflected glory
of the past as ideal image, or existing in opposition to that other place, to
that ideal; its light framed by the everyday forms that contain it.
See
Windows…The Arch glazed. We look through a window. But not any kind of window
(it is after all the Arch that we are taking as our frame of reference, the
frame of our reference). The effect must be grandiose – cavernous. Cave of the
Dragon.
For the the kind
of opening that we witness in the sides of buildings, the rent or tearing open
of the concrete and steel, skin and sinews of a urban structure, is a feature
of light; material is divided at the behest of the immaterial. For this reason
the fact of its being glassed over or not is irrelevant, for it is the passage
of light that is, for us, the defining experience of such architectural
features. The passing of the dragon of light. The opening that opens up a building
to our vision, the entry point for our eyes; no longer a closed box, with an
inference of claustrophobia, but an play of surfaces and their illumination
that is attractive to the eye. A sense doubled if the passage is genuinely a
passage through, that is, if it consists of two openings, at once allowing in
our vision and then illuminated from another source, another point of ingress.
And just as the sense of a closed-up building causes a mimetic copying in our
emotions, in our inner model of the world, at once a reception and mirroring
the world or object without (aid to memory and navigation), and an act of
judgment, an appraisal of how we feel about it. So our experience (internal
imprint) and visceral, felt, response to a well illuminated, open structure is
one of interior relief and emotional lightness. Relief at the purging of an
uncomfortable sense of incarceration and the possible presence of hidden
threats, of the banishing of darkness and obscurity, and the sense of a
concomitant lightness of being that comes with airy spaces, well-lit and
showing us the way ahead as unimpeded. Part of the secret of the success of this
style of opening is that it shows us a future without impediment. What lies
before us in time as well as space is open and amenable to cognition. We are
always happier when we can see ahead – and this also applies to our sense of
time, our sense of where we are going.
And once we have moved into the world of the window
(even if only in the space of our imagination), once we are inside, then we are
in the room that at once encloses us and at the same time is open to the sun, a
courtyard, the space within…
Courtyards: are we in an Inside or are we still Outside? Human
construction seeks the Middle Term (the overlap of ‘in’ and ‘out’ in the Courtyard,
or of Nature and Culture in the Garden). In the Opening we are both inside and
outside; like the porch we occupy a space in the margin; like a window we see
one type of space but occupy another. And when the opening is in the ceiling or
the one wall of an enclosed space, we are in an Atrium or a Courtyard.
Courtyards: caught
between interior and exterior (not just a linguistic binary but a profound
difference in space on which our fundamental categories of experience have come
to rest). A space forever finding itself somewhere between garden and room;
occupying the same semiotic space as occupied by gardens relative to the
Nature/Culture opposition. As Gardens are to Nature and Culture, so Courtyards
are to the Garden and to the House. Yet this is not a half moon, equally
divided by light and darkness. One point of view offers a near plenitude: the
other a slim crescent. On the waxing side of Culture there is the comfort of
shelter, a sense of interiority, the presence of a room without one actually
being there. Yet like an eclipse, a residue of exposed exteriority remains. On
the waning side of Nature there is the opening onto the sky; the portal through
which comes everything that falls. The side of Nature that falls; of which
foremost, the gift of light; making of the courtyard a vast skylight, open to
the heavens; charting the passing cycles of sun and stars; mysteriously
transformed by the mercurial touch of moonlight. All are permitted entry
through the portal of the sky; all come pouring down, like luminous rain, coin
of the heavens, gold by day, silver by night. Unlike the world of covered
spaces, where light must peer in from the outside, come slanting in from the
side, as in the relation of room to window. With the Courtyard the roof is of
nature's making; the vault of the sky is carried by unimaginable spans beyond
which the heavens are revealed. Constellations circle overhead.
Origins. The desire for light. The open courtyard of the Roman house (as today,
the dream of every dweller on the block - the insula or apartment block arrived early on the urban scene). The
atrium of the Christian basilica; the place of composure before the hushed
entry into the shaded sanctuary. Moorish courtyards; the Alcazar gardens and
the place of the faithful, the court of the mosque; the gifts of Islam. The
courtyards of the East, the cherished space of ‘home’, place of sanctuary and
security; in China, the siheyuan with
its sheltering tree and well, inspiration to designers of the ‘quiet corner on
earth’. Palazzi courtyards (from the Renaissance to the 20th century’s
Light piercing to the core of built space. The arrow
of light dispelling the darkness of the cave. The window that transforms a bolt
hole into a room, a walled space that denies its exterior into a place at one
with it. A gendered geography which reunites the (symbolic) opposites of Ying and
Yang in the opening-up of an otherwise closed building. Be it Atrium or
Courtyard, Lobby or Mall, it is the open interior and the sense of passage that
promise us a place of light, bright, clean and elevating - the rent in its
fabric that renders a solid building porous. Open to the flight of the Dragon
of Light.
Then, of course,
there is the CCTV building.
Of course? Yes. As with the treatment of the Cornice above, found rehabilitated
in the top-most horizontal of the Modernist Cube, the newest clothes often
cover the oldest skeleton. And here the bones beneath the skin are amongst the
very oldest. The CCTV building is touted as a radical break in architectural
design: but is structured like a (wayward) Arch. Indeed in terms of its
symbolic force it is in no way different from its Classical progenitors. An
Arch which is not an entrance, not, at least to any real demarcated space;
rather a symbolic entrance, an entrance then to some symbolic place, or to the
place of symbols, the place of the making of symbols – the place of governing
and producing social signification; the place of the media. Just so; a Victory
Arch celebrating the role of the Chinese media.
The CCTV Building/Central Chinese Television Headquarters (Architect; Rem Koolhaas;
Location: Chaoyang Lu). The leaning towers and the bridge that joins them are
what make this building unusual to look at and difficult to build (the
technique of transferring stress through ‘strapping’, ‘bundling’ or ‘tubes’ is
employed where parts of the wall again become stress-baring). There are traces
of the ambitious (and at the time unbuildable) designs of the Russian
Constructivists of the early 20th century as well as the influence
of 1980s architectural ‘Deconstruction’ (a movement inspired by the French philosopher,
Jacques Derrida, but which has so far resulted in very few actually realized
buildings).The architect regards it as a breakthrough in high-rise
architectural design. The building is purported to have cost 750 million
dollars (perhaps twice as much as the Bird’s Nest or National Stadium –
estimated at around 300 million dollars).
So much has been
written about this particular building, so much engineering detail rightly
lauding its achievement as a piece of illusionism more befitting the two dimensional
world of the painter, than that of the architect and engineer. So much written,
so much said on what it is supposed to mean, on what it is supposed to do (all telling
us, in effect, what it is we are supposed to think). And yet how little has
actually been written on the effect it has on real people, on how we perceive
it, how it makes the meanings we experience as we incorporate it into our
memory of the horizon. How do we experience it as a part of the city skyline;
positioned on the of the cities busiest junctions, leading on to the center of
the city? Various (occasionally irreverent) possibilities as to the building’s
actual appropriation or consumption by its audience have been made but the most
popular so far has been that in silhouette it appears as if a giant’s trousers
have been left standing on the exit of the giant him- (or her)self. Indeed
And at closer range, a gigantic frame, enclosing and setting
apart a view of
,
*
Interlude.
Architectural Debates. The Space/Place Problem.
Once upon a time special buildings were built in special places. A space was
found to offer special feelings, to be more than just space, to convey the
feeling of place. In such places temples and other sacred edifices were built
(like the situating of temples, monasteries and nunneries in
(CHAPTER TWO) Chinese Whispers. Past and Present.
In
this chapter we will look at the Chinese architectural and cultural traditions
as the source of the inspiration for modern solar forms. In effect, this
chapter will deal with Chinese architectural ‘Historicism’ and the evolution of
a received architectural culture into a series of ‘echoes’ that can be found in
the forms and fabric of modern design.
Introductory
Section.
The key distinguishing
feature of Chinese traditional architecture is its roof, beam and column style which,
although it has evolved over the intervening centuries, was codified early on
in Chinese history. An (initially) all-wood roofing system, based upon an
interlocking system of supports, sits on top of rows of parallel wooden pillars
which shelter a hall or, if subdivided, a sequence of rooms – no structure-supporting
walls are required, allowing the sides of the building to be open or closed
according to need or climate. Therefore we find three elements as typical of
this geo-cultural style of architecture; pillars, a distinctive support system
of beams and roofing. Such roofs are distinguished by curving lines and wide
eaves supported by a complex system of carved brackets. Other distinguishing
features include: the possibility of a double roof; and the taking of the long side
view as the front or forwards facing end (opposite to the western choice of the
narrow end as the front or facing end, as in the Greek temple and its copies in
the (Neo) Classical Tradition – see the section on the flat and pointed roof
traditions in Chapter Five for more on this fundamental architectural
difference).
Typologies: Pagodas,
Sky Beacon, Alien Head, Surfboards &Magic Carpets,
A
Very Short Introduction to Traditional Chinese Architecture.
Perhaps the most popular or well know
Chinese architectural term known to Westerners is Feng shui (风水wind and water) the placing of buildings
and their contents in the best position for the well being of their
inhabitants. Before they are built a place to build them must after all have
been found, and found to be suitable. The place once found, what are the
typical features of the traditional Chinese structure that might then be put
there, and how has it evolved?
Typical features. The immediately
recognisable Chinese pitched roof with over hanging eaves, and post and lintel
system has a history of perhaps four thousand years, with the earliest known
examples of buildings using this formula dated to circa. 1766-ca.1122 BCE (the
Shang-Yin necropolis near
Evolution. If the origins of Chinese
building are lost in remote antiquity (it is the fate of a wood-based structure
that it does not survive neither natural time nor the vicissitudes of human
history), then the Han epoch (parallel to the Roman Empire) saw its rapid
development, the Tang dynasty, its maturity, the Song, its refinement and the
Ming (parallel to the Renaissance), its reification into a formula. The
architectural innovations of the modern period, largely being based upon a
load-bearing frame, has parallels with the traditional Chinese solutions (the
columns bear the weight of the roof leaving the wall space free); there remains
but the question of the form of the roof, and of the nature of the walls;
options taken have included the typical pointed roof, a flat roof, glass walls
and prefabricated wall types and windows. The two pathways available, or two
echoes of the past (if we are talking about evolution and not just imitation of
previous styles) are: parallels in the realm of weight-bearing (structure),
which implies the possibility of a degree of outward similarity or continuity;
and outright suggestion (or symbolic quotation) a matter of allusion and imitative
decoration hung upon a basically modern structure. It is a question of whether
the forms associated with traditional architecture can be made to evolve
through the medium of modern materials.
Further reading: Guo, Qinghua, A Visual Dictionary of Chinese Architecture
(Images:
Borrowing Yesterday’s Clothes:
The Ghost of Glories Past.
PAGODAS
Strange sight on top of a modern building. For all the
world as if placed there by a passing giant. Equally true of the style of the top-most
section of a building. Also true of the entrances of certain buildings; here the
traditional forms appear as citations, as the borrowing of parts of a palace or
temple and their subsequent attachment onto the body of a modern building.
The temple has
landed! But then, in direct contrast, there is the more thoughtful incorporation
of tradition into the realm of the new… These are the two opposite poles, the opposite
ends of the use of traditional Chinese architecture in recent building. Yet although
both are taken from same historical source, the wooden, nail-less, roof-bearing
structure of traditional Chinese architecture, their effects on the viewer are
very different. In one (the latter) case the architecture of the past is used
as citation, as referencing the past, and in the other as a simple copy or
transplant. Moreover the context of the copy is often unsuitable, with the pure
tradition of the ‘temple’ clashing with the modernism of the host building (although
even a decontexualised temple top can brighten up an otherwise boring ‘flat
top’ skyline). Yet where the traditional forms have been adapted to modern
materials and building techniques, then we have an appealing fusion of old and
new. The results of the two approaches may be likened to, in the one case, the
spectacle of temples apparently dumped onto the tops of tall modern structures as
opposed to the use of an original inspiration derived from the traditional wooden
form to guide the lines and finish the top edge of the iron frame building. In
sum: a good and bad, thinking and unthinking, use of the past; incorporating
versus borrowing!
The intelligent redrawing of past
design, of traditional form in the language of the modern (what is often called
the ‘modern vernacular’, in the West), with modern materials can be found in
the overall design (appropriating elements of Tang Dynasty design) and in the detail
of the Fang Fei Garden Villa
(Architects; Zeng Qun, Sun Ye, Gan Bin; Location; San Li He Road, Diaoyutai
State Guesthouse Park). Again the internal frame system (which releases the
walls from weight-bearing duty) is made to function in a way that suggest specifically
Chinese solutions to engineering challenges, not least in the appropriation of
the glass curtain wall and the cornice which now appear as completely regional
in character.
A good example of the fusion of an old idea with
modern materials and building techniques (like the abstraction behind the
design of the Shanghai Grand Theatre) can be found in the various office
buildings on the Chang’an Jie (opposite Xidan). These buildings feature a very Chinese
‘cornice’ as their distinctive solar feature, one whose historical debt is to
the East and where the point of cultural reference lies in the curves of the
roof and especially of the collective and cumulative curvature of the beams
(often augmented by a slight upturning of the eaves of the roof itself). These
buildings provide us with our next category.
Evolved forms: distilling the essential.
Arc in the sky. Waxing and waning all the way from
crescent to half moon. As evolved from traditional Chinese architecture. Most
particularly as found in the elaboration of one particular feature: the rising
curve of the roof support beams which yields the ‘supporting beam curve’ type
top. A curve arrived at by looking up at the roof support system, the interlocking
beams that appear as a curve arching up to the sky…with its line of sight
culminating in the roof it holds up, climaxing in the sky: keeping the place
and abstracting the form. Like an arc in the sky, or a semi-circle, a half moon
descended to rest upon a tower (which given the role of the moon in Chinese
culture, in its written system as in its poetry, is also an important point of
reference). An elaboration which is at once a simplification – a stripping down
to an essence (like an ancient poem or a traditional shuimo painting). Or like
a piece of Minimalist sculpture: but now based upon significant Eastern forms. The
moon in the pool.
Another rooftop feature
taken from the canon of traditional (even ancient) Chinese culture, then to be formalized
and transformed for modern use is the ‘Sky Beacon’. This example of
architectural design has been very much copied, appearing in buildings large
and small across the length and breadth of
SKY BEACON.
Segment of a
circle, slender ellipse in steel. Cradle on the roof of the world. Referencing
the tradition of high-built platforms from which to light sacrificial fires
(the temples of which used to ring old
From beneath… like a giant reflector, or sender, a
receiver, or collector, of light, rays, signals, some arcane message from the
gods, or anyway something, somewhere, coming from above… Yet again our rich
relationship with our natural roof, our existential ceiling, uppermost limit,
our experiential horizon, our life’s covering, is part of the effect of the
skyline upon us, part of the way we apportion meaning to an upper feature of
the built environment. To the horizon that encircles us. To which we respond
with a segment of a circle.
DRAGON HEAD
The
Alien-head? Head
in the clouds? A Dragon passing (looking for its window)? Yet (like the Arch) only
viewable from a certain angle - like an anamorphosis
(a feature which is only clearly visible from a certain viewing position). This
limitation on our ability to recognize it is due to its form as a cut-out, a
form favouring the expression of two-dimensional matters. An aspect (and
limitation) which is shared by the huge screen, placed in the building’s
midriff -as it were- a feature also designed to show two-dimensional images
(part of the clutch of unusual buildings found in the vicinity of the Birds
Nest Olympic Stadium). Enigmatic in silhouette, a two dimensional form becomes
three dimensional as we carry on walking, changing our position – then it
disappears. A flat ornamental -but broadly recognizable- form is found where usually
points and cubes are found to dominate; the form… a ’head’ that disappears when
we view it ‘head-on’. Otherwise a conceit, a kind of architectural illusionism
where the form suggests that we see a slice taken out from a larger whole. In
fact this particular Dragon’s Head is a complex construction, hollow, even as
it appears solid… or almost, as it also appears a little like a stylized cloud
taken from traditional Chinese stone-carving and painting, made solid and
anchored to the top of the building, sky-scraping indeed. Or it may suggest a
ribbon, winding down an otherwise normal oblong cube design: or the windowed
side of the building unwinding and being blown away, waving in the wind… As a
design feature many similar forms, streamlined ‘Dragons Heads’ can be found in
any trip to a department store; the electrical goods department will boast many
kettle tops and lids that use this particular national-cultural design feature.
Stream-lined and wind-blown: this particular effect is also to be found, taken
further in its illusionism and its debt to the air and to the horizon, in the
concrete canopies located on top of roofs of otherwise flat-topped buildings. (See
also ‘Magic Carpet Tops’). Looking up, it is as if we witness a giant passing, head
among the clouds, peering over the nearby skyscrapers, watching over the
Olympic Park, and so itself beating witness to China’s success in planning-for,
hosting (and winning) the Olympic Games of 2008.
MAGIC CARPETS &
SURFBOARDS.
On the wings of the
wind. These solar features are taken from a broad range of historical design
all the way from traditional references dating back a thousand years to recent
icons of popular culture. Echoes of objects we know, stylizations, such as the cloud-scrolls
taken from the dragons and clouds form of traditional illustration or the decorative
carving we find on stone slabs alongside the stairs that convey us between the
levels of the
Riding the
sky-wave. Glancing along the horizon our eye is arrested by the sight of the
sea. Frozen. Apparently in mid-swell; the crest of its wave tipping forever
upwards. Arrested motion. Concrete canopy. Such strange undulations, perched
up-top of buildings, suggest a block against the power of the sun, a form of shadow
giver, ersatz roofing, when we look at them in terms of their practical role or
function. But in terms of the role they play in our meaning making, their
symbolic function, in terms of the signs they offer to us, the viewers, they
are a gift to the horizon – to our perception of the urban horizon. Taken from
a simple, even, in some cases, vestigial, form of protection for the exposed
utilities of the rooftop, the resulting structure we look to and puzzle at, provides
perhaps one of the most outlandish forms of décor that we may find deliberately
designed for the transformation of the modern city skyline. Yielding winding
forms, like banners unfurled on the rooftops, scrolls on the skyline, unfurled
in concrete, petrified in the act of being blown by some colossal wind, opening
out into a ribbon of stone. Sky-sculptures at their best. Making the city
horizon, not least in sunset silhouette - a sea of black forms twisting against
the red of the sky - into a rooftop sculpture park.
ARROW WINDOWS:
All traditionally
inflected design is sacrificial in terms of its cost. Its function for us lies
in the manner in which it highlights the building’s (and so our) relation to
sky. This relationship, like that of a building to its urban context, the sum
total of the views that can be found to contain it, is inescapable and when it
is ignored we all notice and the message this absence of relationship sends is
one of the disposability of the building, its function and its inhabitants. So as
well as referencing the previous geo-cultural architectural tradition the
deployment of the past signals to us that the building in question is valued;
takes its place in, is representative of a collective point of view, or
collective cultural frame of reference. In such matters symbolic considerations
come to the fore. A window is never just a window. Even a small one.
A rising
punctuation accompanies our gaze as it rises to the sun. Stepping stones to our
flight of the imagination, punctuating space with a grid, but not one made up
of crossing lines, rather we are presented with a surface texture which asserts
its solidity. For whereas most windows, in reality, structurally, in fact weaken
the overall strength of a wall or avoid the issue of support or strengthening
of a wall: yet, in terms of its symbolic force, this rhythmic puncturing of the
wall’s smooth surface, of its sloping rise to the roof eve, connotes strength.
This (illusionist) effect is achieved by suggesting an assumed thickness of
wall (that is almost entirely rhetorical). And the fact that we have seen this
manner of wall before, witnessed its rise to the heavens on this gradient, ever
so slightly inflected from the vertical before… It has once (before) been
before us: for it is a citation. The city’s surviving gate-towers provide the
frame of reference that plays origin to this copy. It is their defensive arrow
windows, their shooting windows and their distribution over a plane surface, that
are the key to the design feature borrowed here to enrich the meanings of an
otherwise modern building. So giving the effect of it being otherwise than
modern.
*
Episode: Architecture and
Desire.
The three levels to our visual experience of urban
life. Three kinds of desire…
Three levels? When we see architecture (the street or
the square as we see it from within) we see three. The three grounds of the
urban as well as of the rural landscape (as we see also in landscape painting).
Top, bottom and middle (for these are our equivalents in the experience of the street
scene of the fore-, middle- and back-ground we identify in the world of the
image). The ground (floor) or street level, the top edge or sky-line feature
and the bit in-between (usually made up of a facade). Moreover these three levels
extend across buildings; giving us the three actual horizontal units of visual
differentiation with which we experience the street and the square; these two
kinds of ‘rooms’ outside or ‘closed’ visual units of urban life. Meaning that
in practice most of us city dwellers experience city streets as three
continuous (and contiguous, that is, touching) levels; a ground strip of door
and shop-windows, a rising window wall, and a loft region or skyline.
Three desires? As human beings we feel the need to be
recognised, that is, we need to fit in, to feel (rightly or wrongly) that we
are part of various groups - communities of identity with which we identify ourselves.
Then we also need each other as sexual or life partners, a need, not least with
respect to the imagination, that we can never quite switch of - even when we
are content with our lot in life. Finally, we need to believe in something
bigger than ourselves (God, Nation, Flag, Universal Civil Rights, Equality, Justice,
Fate, History,
So: three desires. Three things we need and continuously
look for. All of which are seemingly ever-present in our lives as human beings
and so continuously re-configuring, or ‘re-touching’, the things we look at.
Identity (the desire for recognition from others); sex (the pull of sexual
desire for others); and a link to the eternal (the desire for knowledge of
first and last things, religious desire, the desire for the Other or Absolute
Beyond). In reality all tied up together (as in; what sex are we, what sex are
we allowed to sleep with, and who or what has the last word on this). But all
separable in principle; and not least in the way we experience architecture,
our home from home (our inside, outside as well as our outside, inside).
And what of the distribution of these desires across
the manifold of architecture? What is their actual overlay or attachment to the
parts of the built environment? The reflection of the self in the windows of the
ground floor strip echoes our preoccupation with our self-image and prefigures
the recognition of the self in the confirmative act of purchase (as we exchange
our spent time, our money, on objects that tell ourselves, and others who we
are, and what groups it is we like to think we belong to…). Our reflection on
what goes in behind the windows, the surface, the facade of the middle,
reflects our boundless curiosity as to the play that we imagine (or would like
to imagine) goes on in the spaces behind, in the home or the office – as the
actual reflection on the surface of the glass window limits our view but
unfetters our imaginations. And finally there is the significance of the solar
strip that touches the heavens. The place where flags and statues, religious or
national symbols or styles are exhibited. Our relation to the eternal (as we
would prefer to see it) brought down to earth, but still touching the sky.
PART TWO: The Shock of the New. The Twentieth Century.
The
next two chapters will deal with the combined heritage of the 20th century. The
first of these, the third chapter, will indicate where to look for the
surviving influence of the early skyscraper tradition, whilst the fourth
chapter will note the insistence of Modernism in recent design.
(Chapter 3) Building the
(Chapter 4) City of
(CHAPTER THREE) Building the
In
this chapter we will examine the contribution of the (mainly) 20th
century tradition of the tall building and note the continuing contribution of
its early styles to current architectural design.
Introductory
Section.
Western
Architecture before the end of the 19th century had crystallized
into the ‘Two Traditions’. Both of these were varieties of what we now call ‘Historicism’,
that is, both were versions of decorative styles taken from the past, namely
the Classical (imitating Classical Greek and Roman forms) and the Gothic
(imitating the pointed arch forms of the late-medieval period). These two architectural
styles were further augmented by the imitation of other periods, of other
styles; of Baroque and Rococo as well as mock Romanesque and Renaissance forms
of cladding and decoration. Much of the municipal architecture found in the
centers of Western cities, the city center as it was built in the 19th
century, is built in these styles. (The classic example of this type of
building in
Definitions.
Historicist/Historicism. Initially a
pejorative term for an obsession with the past, where history was seen as the
key to all things, leading to the excessive use of history in philosophy, these
terms eventually came to mean, in the course of the nineteenth century, the
respect for and use (for example in municipal architecture, or in the remodeling
of 19th century capital cities) of the styles of the past
(culminating in the Beaux Art form of architectural ornamentation). Art Nouveau,
appearing at the beginning of the twentieth century, marked the first break
with this tradition.
Yet another
architectural form came to prominence towards the end of the nineteenth century
as buildings became ever taller, the ‘Palazzo Style’, imitating the palace of Renaissance
Italy, however this style is so much a part of the history of the tall building
in the twentieth century (and indeed before) that it has come to stand as a skiamorph, or ‘shadow shape’, a model
that hovers behind the history of the skyscraper. So much so that the
skyscraper decorated in historicist or historicist influenced detail is in
effect modeled as an extension of the Palazzo idea. That the Palazzo ideal
comes in three parts is in no small way responsible for its continuing
influence. In effect it has come to stand for a more fundamental desire for a
building variegated in accordance with its relationship with the sky, the
ground, and its urban context.
Definitions.
Skiamorph. What is a skiamorph? Again, like hypsosis, this is a term taken from the architectural
vocabulary of the Ancient Greeks, a skiamorph
is best described as a shadow shape, a historically reoccurring template that
appears to underlie the forms we build. It is perhaps an indication of the
forms we think with; the shapes that shadow, that lie behind our habits of
repeatedly perceiving and using certain forms. It begins to explain similarity
in the history of, at least certain, architectural forms. As in the ‘Palazzo’ (itself
indebted to earlier late-medieval five or six storey buildings, or even to the Roman
tenements, the insula, the apartment
block of the classical epoch, with shops below, the best dwelling place just above,
and smaller rooms further above) which then re-appears throughout architectural
history as a kind template for tall buildings. Or in the use of Classical and Gothic-type
forms, from their sky reaching, or hypsosis,
to their use of the three parts. And most especially in the case of the later,
the three parts, for their re-appearance in the urban experience of street and
square or their reduction to two parts (entry level and ‘sign’ above) in
special ‘stand alone’ buildings. A skiamorph
appears to be an ever-evolving compromise between the context of human
habitation (the street, the sky) and our ways of thinking these things. An
element of architectural memory. A made of living with matter, a way of thinking
and feeling that has evolved over the millennia of our settled habitation (see
also the ‘Afterword’ below).
The history of the
tall building in the 20th century begins with the Palazzo style of the
last decades of the 19th century. This style is essentially made up
from the modeling of decorative features taken from the Renaissance (including
the spacing of doors and windows) combined with an increasingly extended midriff
as buildings grew rapidly taller (see especially the work of Louis Sullivan in
the
Typologies: All
essentially versions of the PALAZZO style (the stretched, basic form of the early
skyscraper, still popular with the public and much loved by architecture buffs):
Historicist Classicism, City on a Hill, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Lightening Rod
& Sky Wheels, Totem Top.
HISTORICISM
The Return to the Past: ‘Cut and Paste’ Architecture.
Historicism comes
in a number of varieties: Classism (including Neo-classicism), Gothic,
Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo. All tidied up, and reproduced; this was a
house style of the nineteenth century – all one had to do was pick the period.
So, like Chinese Historicism, the continuance of traditional Chinese architectural
forms in the present, the architectural forms that dominated western design for
at least two millennia (in the case of Classicism) and for several hundred
years (in the case of Gothic classicism and other later neo-classical forms,
Renaissance and Baroque foremost among these) had returned in the form we call
Western Historicism. If it heyday was the nineteenth century, nevertheless this
form of cladding or design has returned again in the twentieth century (not
least a part of the return to decoration that motivated Postmodernism). Neo-classical
window frames and moldings remain ever popular, as do the rusticated wall
surfaces of the lower two floors and the larger, often arched windows of the top
floors that normally accompany them (all features initially found on the
Renaissance Palazzo –apart from the larger windows of the upper section, which
was a latter addition, made as the buildings grew in size and the piano nobile migrated from the middle
floors to the top). Also much in evidence are the basic building forms used to
allow in sunlight and the sky, the Courtyard and the Atrium (especially in their
open sided forms), and the visual symbolism of the Arch, together with the Foyer,
Porch or Narthex (an early church front made up of a covered colonnade, but
open to the elements on one side). We may discern two types of borrowing or
citation: traditional citation or copying where the entire building is
decorated in a particular historical style; and postmodern pastiche where
aspects of a previous style are adapted or combined with others to decorate a given
building.
Definitions. The Piano Nobile (that very special place on a building). Or noble
floor, the floor of the nobles (the best floor or ‘best rooms’). If we follow
the evolution of this crucial architectural feature, one which is also an
experiential feature and a participative form designed for use (a place to look
at and be seen from, as in the case of a loggia, or other form of -decorated-
balcony space) then we can see it taking-off from its original position on the
2nd or 3rd floor of a short building, to arrive at the
middle of a medium-sized building, and finally to find its apotheosis as the
top of a tall building (the penthouse suite). The perceptual, ‘to look at’
features of the piano noblile have in
this way become part of the decorated top of a tall building, whilst the ‘room
at the top’, ‘to-live-in’, expensive urban ‘dez-rez’, persists just below in
the top few floors. The ‘rising’ of these features to the top of the tall
building, to what was once the position for servant’s windows or storage,
constitutes a crucial change in our experience of architecture – and a key
difference from the original ‘Palazzo’ form..
See variations on Palazzo Classicism along
the Chang’an Jie
CITY ON A HILL: Something to look up to…
The initial
solution (after the Palazzo top favoured by Sullivan and other architects in
late nineteenth century America) to the problem of how to ‘top-off’ a tall
building was to keep the old roof arrangement of a low building and quote the
floors found immediately beneath it, this combination was then placed on top of
the many floors, the tower, of the middle section.. In effect a pillar (the
tall building’s midriff, or ‘Middle’) was inserted below a building of a few
floors, elevating it to a great height. The appearance of a building thus
topped marshals together a number of possible fields of meaning: from the
Western religious (here Protestant) tradition we have the notion of the ‘city
on a hill’ as ideal place, a place of the good, of the blessed, the sense the
elevation and our propensity to look upwards is taken as a metaphor for moral
raising-up, converting architecture into a putative moral example. Of course it
also suggests that the inhabitants of these structures (those who look down
upon us from a heavenly height) are themselves worthy of veneration (so
becoming our personal or social ideals). This method of creating a solar region
for the cityscape is still employed today in new buildings; but in fact is a
solution that is now one hundred years old. As we shall see at the end of this
chapter, this idea of placing something on a tall shaft is still popular today.
ART NOVEAUX.
Legacy of the Organic. The Language of Nature.
Whilst there are
no simple copies of the Art Nouveau style in Beijing itself (elements can be
found on buildings in Shanghai), nevertheless a brief account of this manner of
decoration is crucial to the understanding of organic, curvy, sinuous or
otherwise ‘nature-imitating’ features found gracing many modern buildings
(branching structures including leaf forms can be found decorating a building in
Wu Dao Kou).
Art
Nouveau: Owing much stylistically to the organic inspiration of the Art and
Crafts movement of William Morris, this style of decoration borrowed its name
from a shop that opened in
Like the
historicist modeling of the sky scraper which is coated in classical details,
this version of the Palazzo-type building imitates the Renaissance in its
cladding of the iron support frame whilst adding motifs taken from Nature.
Lines are flowing, curved, often mock-natural, or imitating the organic;
leaves, vines, branches formalized and made into intricate winding patterns. The
Garden inside. The original architectural rhetoric of the Nouveaux style was
one of a re-union with Nature; Culture in its predominant form of the built environment
was to be reunited with its lost exterior, Nature, in a union that brought the
Garden back into the home, and the tree back into the upper features of the
building. If the interior of the dwelling was to be once again a garden like
space, then the exterior or urban street was to resemble a forest. Our (mythic)
originary Fall from grace with Nature, our loss of enchantment, our presumed
loss of innocence in attaining civilization was to be, in rhetorical terms at
least, extenuated by a reunion on the level of human culture. Another name for
the built, that is man-made, form of the ‘earthly’ paradise is, of course,
Utopia, and the arrival of Art Nouveaux at the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries came at a time when the various manifestations of the
Utopian impulse (itself a variation on the religious impulse) were about to
turn sour with their imminent incorporation into the ideologies produced by the
class and national conflicts that were about to overwhelm the world.
Today’s recapitulations on the theme of organic
decoration more gently remind us that the impulse for a better (looking) world,
one where we live in harmony with Nature and not as its despoiler, is still
live and well, driving our love of parks and gardens, and perhaps most cogently
visible in our attempts to preserve ourselves as a species by halting our destruction
of the environment that supports us.
DECO TOPS. The
Legacy of Art Deco. The Language of the Machine.
A
Jazz Age style. Coeval with the 1920s and 1930s and arising at the same time as
International Modernism. The name comes from the 1925, Parisian exhibition of
post-historicist decorative and industrial art. Deco is distinguished by ‘non-functional
modernism’ or the use of streamlining features in architecture and design. In
Europe such effects can be found on the buildings of Robert Mallet-Stevens, in
America Art Deco is best represented by the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller
Centre.
Perhaps the
Ur-form, original blueprint, or skiamorph
for the modern, twentieth century, skyscraper (augmenting the shorter
structures typical of the Palazzo style of the late nineteenth century) is the
style we have come to call Art Deco. If the Palazzo style gave the first form
to the external appearance of the skyscraper, then the development of Art Deco
has given us a language with which it has been associated ever since. With ‘Deco’
we see the triumphant arrival of an ostentatiously deco-rative type of architectural design, one which, above all, is
best known for the form it gave to the Solar (the Chrysler Building, in New
York‘s Manhattan, has a special place in international cultural memory and is perhaps
known to everybody who has ever been exposed to the global mass media- even if
they do not always know what it is called). Art Deco is still today instantly
recognisable for its distinctive treatment of the upper part of the building, for
the symbolic language it brought to bear on the tops of tall buildings, perhaps
even in the invention of the language best suited to the, literal and symbolic,
ascension to the heavens of the tall building (powered by the motor of steel
frame construction). Art Deco is also perhaps the style best suited to reflect
and celebrate the role of the machine in the ascension of human culture of this
period (its role in the exponential increase in the productivity of labour) and
the concomitant ascension to virtual religion of the market, its products, and
its means of exchange, money. In fact the structures brought forth by Art Deco in
the early twentieth century led to the rapid adoption of the term ‘cathedrals
of commerce’ (see especially the rise and decoration of the early-twentieth
century department store, heir to the covered arcades of the previous century,
themselves heir to the outside market and its physical embodiment, the
agora-style square of shops, a form stable for over two thousand years). All the
features of Art Deco as a decorative style can still be found to be on the
ascent in today’s world; to be, as we shall presently see, one of the most important,
if not the most important influences on the possibilities for ‘topping-of’ a
tall building- just as the onward march of a post-industrial, but now globalised,
capitalism continues, brushing aside previous prophecies and leading us to an
end none can yet foresee…
So Art Deco is
still present, not only as a citation of the past, but also as a continuing
inspiration to designers in the present: as can be seen in the many later versions
of modern decorative streamlining, of the remarkable persistence of the machine
aesthetic, and so of the accompanying references to the sky as a target of
symbolic directionality and as a source of energy, of a power that is both
actual, electric or solar, but also symbolic, referring to the sky as ‘the heavens’,
as home of gods, place of immortals and ideals – spiritual power is called upon
to augment a material power as understood by the laws of physics. Unity of Idea
and Matter. Machine as Spirit.
Lightening Rods. The Electrification of the Skyline.
This distinctive
feature is also part of the heritage of the machine aesthetic, not curvy or
sinuous like much Art Deco, but nevertheless perpetuating the solar deictic
(symbolic pointing) and also pursuing the energy-drawing metaphor. Plug type or
zoned box structures, replete with sky-stabbing horns, filaments or connectors,
are found on the top of buildings and appear to indicate (like all Deco or
machine-type tops) an invisible element on which they seem to draw - or to
point to, so basking in a kind of second-hand fame. The rhetoric here is that of
being ‘plugged-in’, of being ‘in the know’, or ‘up-to-date’. Yet as well as
drawing on the various semantic possibilities of being ‘connected’, this urban
image equally draws upon all and any mythologies of the heavens, not least the
laws of physics and their popular appropriation as but the latest in a long
lineage of myths whose role is to help make a complex reality coherent. In this
way such forms reproduce effects that are finally traceable to the double movement
that traverses and so constitutes our earth-bound sense of space; the sense of
the fall of sunlight and the raising of the eyes to the source of that light. Our
sense of gravity as pulling down (and rooting) and our sense of rising, or
soaring – with all the meanings and symbolism associated with these
contradictory motions. The gift of the sun and the human response to it, as if
to defy gravity, or the gods themselves, as in the legend of Prometheus who
stole fire from the gods, or the attempt to build the Tower of Babel. Ur-text
of architectural hubris.
Physically pointing up, reaching up (guiding our eyes
up), and (symbolically) pulling down, relating itself to, and persuading us of
the crucial nature of this relation. A persuasion that begins the moment our
eyes are caught - and caught, guided upwards - immediately to be ‘plugged-in’
to our inward repositories of myth and symbolism; inner font of our ‘all too
human’ secular (and not so secular) forms of the sacred. The pointer that
points up, in fact, almost always, ultimately, points in…
Sky Wheels & Sky Needles.
Definitions.
Hypsosis. A term encompassing the
ideal of Classical Greek architecture, from whence it derives, and even more so
of Gothic design, whereby the eyes, on locating the building, or one of its
significant parts, are then guided upwards. A visual rhetoric fusing the
eye-raising of a design feature with the raising of the thoughts to higher
matters, and of the soul to heaven. The basis of the rhetorical operation lies
in the symbol force of light and of the sky as repository of ideals and
beliefs.
The secular
replacement of the Gothic spire: the sky needle. Since the advent of the spire
such features have been used to point skywards, to raise the eyes of the
onlooker to the heavens, but also to associate the building in question with
the heavens, underlining its right to make use of the meanings of first and
last thing - underlining its proximity to the stars. Many buildings now make
use of this kind of distinctive feature to associate themselves with the powers
found and represented in the heavens, not least caught in the powerful image of
the electric storm, the lightening strike, which the sky needle seems to
invite; simultaneously suggesting its invulnerability to such forces and its
ability to draw upon them (effectively boasting and laying claim to a
second-hand potency).
Definitions.
Brise-Soleil. In function, a sun
break or shield; in form now an array of fins, either horizontally or
vertically placed to shade window openings in hot climates. The source of much
modern decorative design, from sky-relating features (to be looked at from
below) to window shading, to the inventive covering of entire walls.
A great
recent example of the adaptation of the sun-break idea into a feature governing
the look of an entire building can be found in Wudaokou.
More recently this
particular manifestation of hypsosis
or ‘eye-raising’ has been augmented by the presence of vast metal wheels. In a
key twist of architectural rhetoric functional sun-breakers (brise-solee)
have become symbols (an effect guaranteed by their actual lack of functional
utility): have become sun-storers,
trappers of the sun’s precious energy, as this design-feature references a
dynamo, or a power station, whose suggestive concentric circles cross one
another and are topped by a needle, pointing at the heart of the sun. A further
continuation of the machine aesthetic which originated in Deco, the whole
assembly may suggest the gathering or transmission of electric energy, of solar
or cosmic energy. The meaning so offered is that of a powerhouse, ultra-modern,
dynamic, transforming the opportunities (and status) of those working within.
Suggesting even that the fortunate inhabitants may be in the possession of an arcane
knowledge and hinting at the existence of a special relationship with regard to
the sky and the power associated with the sun. A building that points, points
up (points-up the message…) points-up its own uniqueness and importance (and by
the figure of contiguity, those who work within… the high priests and priestess
of the cult of the sun).
One classic example of the solar needle
type, replete with accompanying wheels, can be found not far from Chaoyangmen
subway station (head East) on Chaoyangmenwai Dajie). A great example of the
continuation of the Art Deco tradition, which is represented not only in the construction
of the solar spire and its attendant wheels, but reflected in the detail and
decoration found on other parts of the building, as for example, in the form
given to the exterior light-fittings.
These combined
ornaments, the needle and the wheel (or complex of wheels) offer the image of a
machine which, as a part of a whole building, appears to be without fear of the
elements, to appear to stand above and beyond the corrosive processes of time. Wheels,
usually found below -the means of movement of earthbound objects- are now found
above, a means of transport for the soul. Wheels of time. Meaning: to stand ‘outside’
of the inexorable return of temporal cycles, out of reach of the forces of an
inclement Nature and of the passage of time, both of which architecture is
pledged to resist. As such the combined wheel and needle solar feature is an
assertion of control over fate. The performance of the promise of endurance and
control. A prediction of what will be (so a claim to architectural shamanism,
the ability to foretell the future). All these architectural suggestions are designed
to make our world feel more stable, more comprehensible, saner, less chaotic
and less entropic (less liable to temporal wear and tear). In suggesting
control over the wheel of time, ‘Mutabilitie’ or her sister Fate, the processes
of change, we are offered the modern solar version of the meaning of the
historicist medieval or renaissance architectural quotation (such as a heavily
rusticated ground floor wall surface or door frame) which -often by the ‘fact’
of their apparent survival- are designed to connote strength and stability, and
so perpetuate the illusion of long lastingness. So offering both the confidence
building (sic) appearance of a building made to last, a construction apparently
destined to survive. Or (in the case of the needle and wheel ensemble) the
illusion of control; a claim to the site of such a control. Of just who
(putatively ‘us’) it is that is in control of the symbolic forces of the sky
and the sun, of cycle of day and of night, of their succession and their final,
eventual, unknown aim or end in the future that lies, unforeseen, up-ahead,
waiting for us all.
eyeguides: How Architectural Symbolism Works: Wheels
and Spikes; the Rhetoric of Power.
Referencing the realms
of the electric, tapping into sources of energy and the frozen gesture of sky
reaching (tapping into the sources of symbolic energy), is of course a not particularly
subtle metaphor for ‘earthly powers’. A hyperbolic extension of ones size and
so putative ability. Ones Earthly Powers (the use of capitals suggesting the
sacred or ‘magic’ flavour that often accompanies such powers). Or at least a
claim to them; a kind of architectural bragging. Like wearing Gucci or a Rolex.
Or carrying a magic wand (the building’s claim to shamanism). This is achieved
by the deployment of a rhetorical language as old as architecture; by an
accretion of symbols above the place of entry or on the roof. Or, in a
combination of both of these two features into a single symbolic zone, the
entire building above the door, above the entry floor becomes a place for
signs, for signaling the claims of the building to the approaching viewer. In
European terms, using the
For what is
perhaps the ultimate version of the dropping of an -often unrelated- but highly
symbolic stylistic feature onto the top of a skyscraper column, there is the towering
Totem Top
Like a head sitting on broad shoulders, golden helmet
over red epaulettes; a soldier at attention, on alert, protecting and defending
the city, on duty…a symbol of stability and order.
The penthouse, differentiated from the rest of the long, tall tower it
sits on; so distinct that it appears to have been lifted up, as if placed
there… Like a UFO which, having hovered for some time above the city, has found
a convenient place to land. Further highlighted by a difference in colour from
the shaft on top of which it rides, its many windows offering unrivalled views
over the city. Yet by its very height and closed form also suggesting a control
room, an observation post… a place for the act of over-seeing, suggesting a nineteenth
century Panopticon, overlooking all; a structure with 360 degree vision. A building
to look up to: with those within looking down. Overseeing the flows of city
life, as if exercising control over the human anthill far below. Surveillance
with style. Pedestal upon which may be posed those who watch over us all.
Conversely, as all that can see… can also be seen, then this elevated position,
like a mountain eyrie, becomes a place we look up to; asking questions of the
nature of the inhabitants, who is it that lives in such a high place, wondering
how they live, what it is they do, and do they return our stare.
Like the head of a totem, symbolizing
community; but which, that of the State, or of Capital, as in the name of the
building on whose shoulders it rests.
FLYING SAUCERS: Space-age Design.
Then finally there
is the futuristic (as it seemed at the time) refining of this feature. A fantasy
that combines the essence of elevation and what is one logical end point or ultimate
product of the machine aesthetic. A materialized fantasy which turns the top of
the building itself into a kind of machine, and not just any machine: a machine
for traveling through the sky, no longer content with just pointing or drawing
on the symbolism of the heavens, this machine will convey us into the very
heavens themselves. After symbolic wheels it is the theme of transport, of
flying, is called upon to witness the self-aggrandising claims of the top-most
levels of a tall building and its decorative rhetoric. An imaginative process
that leaves what appears to be a space vehicle sitting on top of a column, or,
even more logically, standing on some, suitably metallic-looking, spindly robot
legs. A structure which has its foundations in the science-fiction of the
period (that looks precisely like a quotation from one of a vast number of
period films). Hangover from the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘city on a hill’ has become
the ‘house on stilts’ - sci-fi style.
So again returning us to the sign on stilts, to the ‘other’
role of architecture, the role of architecture as message, and so the
forerunner and, in this particular case, parallel of the elevated
advertisement; with the same logic and sharing the same history that stretches
from the sacred objects attached to the top of a stick stuck into the ground
(or hung from a tree) or tribal totem, and their, not-so-distant, cousin, the
advertising hoarding raised well above the street level, placed on the side of
a building, or the neon sign on top of a tall building.
See the old CCTV tower on the West side.
Interlude:
Architectural
Debates: Illusionism and Ideology.
Buildings can be true or false, so the
argument goes. The ‘true’ building is honest, performs its function and does
not pretend to be anything else (for example, a cathedral). Whilst the ‘false’
puts on airs and graces and attempts to fool us that it is something ’other’
than what it is (that suggests meanings that function symbolically or psychologically,
as opposed to delimiting physical function). The ugliest buildings, it would
appear, are the most true; whilst any attempt to compromise with human (or
contextual) visual comfort apparently only leads us into an inauthentic
illusionism, or supposedly leaves us in thrall to an alienating ideology that
blinds us to the ‘real’ truth. Key terms here are: functionalism versus
decoration; or ‘essential’ structure and a ‘non-essential’ supplement. Yet ‘Deco’
skyscrapers are amongst the most beloved by the public and the wing, sail,
awning or overhanging roof structures on airports, hotels and other large
public structures are amongst the most admired and talked about features in the
publics engagement with architecture (so much so that we might call it an ‘actually-existing’
response to architecture, to differentiate it from what it is we are supposed to feel).
To argue that people are naturally affected
strongly by many (very big) ugly buildings and that the negativity expressed in
these feelings is acceptable is to argue from a misplaced sense of the sublime.
A mountain and a concentration camp entrance both elicit strong feelings and
suggest disturbing thoughts on visually absent content, yet the former are
positively awe-inspiring, whilst the latter overwhelms with disgust for the
horrors it entails but we can not see.
‘Authentic’ perhaps, if we must used such a
value-loaded term at all, may be better employed to talk about suiting human
needs (including visual comfort, the sense of a non-threatening environment and
a positive addition to the urban landscape). The same might be said of the term
‘alienating’.
To
build a railway station now in the form of a Gothic castle might be silly, certainly;
but ‘silly’ at least is humourous, which is more acceptable to most people (who
would prefer the sight of a light smile to a serious grimace). Perhaps a better
compromise would be to create a vision suited to modern materials – but a
vision nevertheless.
At its most cogent and most simple this
issue can be illustrated through the question of mass transit.
This very modern problem focuses on the
making of transit building visually palatable as well as functional. In essence
the perceptions and feelings of those having to look at and using the buildings
in questions are to be taken into account. There are two aspects to this
question; the general exterior appearance of the (often very large) building;
and the appearance and sub-division of the interior. As regarding the interiors
of transit structures, it is a question of making them ‘homely’, that is a
little more like a ‘room’ (whose room, ‘our’ room) for the users inside. The
exterior needs to balance the requirements of function with (geographic, urban)
context and the feelings of the viewer (which should come down to the same
thing) by recognizing that it has to deal with the sublime aspects of size
(which may otherwise be frightening and forbidding) and so by imitating aspects
of sacred structures, or by paying attention to those aspects of the building that
may suggest sublime (or awe-inspiring) sensations. Mass transit is not always
the most pleasurable of experiences and the spaces it creates not always the
most attractive (‘place’ with a negative aspect, a ‘bad’ place); the design of
the buildings involves can make a difference to the environment and to the
psychology of the traveler.
In
the case of rail or ‘plane terminals it is a question of giant sheds versus striking
or nuanced design. Between buildings we look at in horror, and those we admire
(and even enjoy using).
*
(CHAPTER FOUR). City of
In
this chapter we will examine the continuation of Modernism ‘by other means’ and
see how new life has been breathed into, what was once thought to be, a defunct
or discredited form.
Definitions.
International Modernism or the International Style. Terms originating
in the 1930s to cover the range of architecture evolving in the early 20th
century which emphasized simple cubic forms and volumes, the downgrading of symmetry,
(relative) lack of ornamentation (no mouldings) and large windows, often in
bands or strips (as typified by such architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf
Loos, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe). A style first broken by more
expressive styles of building (for example concrete ‘Brutalism’), then by Post-modernism
(where the cube is decorated or its form divided or redesigned).
Introductory
Section.
The term
‘modernism’ is usually read as the dominance of the cube as a functional,
economic and aesthetic guide to architectural design. This basic form is
accompanied with a stripping away of detail or decoration in ‘form follows
function’ or ‘functionalism’ (not to be confused with ‘functionalism’ in the
social sciences, where it is the actual social function and the representation
of a function, what people believe it does and what it actually does, that are
contrasted). Its structural basis was the iron and steel frame which enabled
great heights to be reached, and dispensed with an exterior supporting wall
(the ‘walls’ we actually see are fillers of the gaps between floors, glass
walls or brick ‘curtains’). From slight beginnings as the modernisme of the Art Nouvaux
and Liberty styles to the anti-ornament orthodoxies as pronounced by Adolf Loos
and his followers at the beginning of the twentieth century to the full-blown
architectural Modernism that dominated the world’s cities for thirty or forty
years after the Second World War. The anti-ornament orthodoxy, however, was never
strictly followed in the early period of ‘Modernism’, the early 20th
century. In actual architectural practice it was very hard to give up some
sense of the differentiated top, middle and bottom; not even in the work of the
Bauhaus group, who counted amongst their number many champions of this style,
did the anti-decoration orthodoxy take hold. In the years that followed ‘Modernism’
then lent its name to the evolution of the steel, glass and concrete cube,
which climaxed in the International Style of the post World War II West and the
post ‘sixties East (in each case fuelled by the economic boom of these periods).
It is interesting to note that International Style Modernism spawned a
deliberate self-parody, Brutalism, which appears to confirm the insight of the
German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, that in an ugly world, an ugly art may be the
best form of artistic truth (many have retorted that building ugly buildings is
a part of the making of that world and that we should build otherwise…). In
reality the best admired buildings of this style and or period of architectural
design are those that used a differentiation of parts to signal the presence of
a discrete top and bottom - as can be found even in the buildings of the
arch-modernist and father of the International Style, Walter Gropius.
Typologies: Right-Angles,
Prisms & Pyramids, City of
The two major
effects of Modernism on the urban landscape are: first, the presence of the
cube as manifested in featureless buildings from tenements to skyscrapers; and
second the decorating of this basic structure by means of the employment of
borrowed details placed upon the top or surface of the building (as we have
seen in the sections above) or the hi-tech re-modeling of the volume and form
of the building (as in the CCTV building for example).
Losing your Head: the minimal or ’unfinished’ style.
The dominance or
influence of this style of building can conveniently be divided into two. The
first period roughly covers the 1950s through to the 1970s. So such ‘basic’ or ‘unfinished’
structures are a feature of the ‘old’ new Beijing of the 1950s up until after
the end of the period known as ‘the cultural revolution’: that is, the tower
blocks and tenements built fifty and sixty years ago, which are now in the
process of demolition. Similar structures from a similar period also abound in
the West, where they are universally reviled, both as poverty traps and as
eyesores regarding their negative contribution to the skyline – the lack of
care evinced in their lack of finish, their lack of a ‘top’, reflecting the
lack of care shown for the situation of their occupants.
The second period
is that of the basic concrete and glass cube, the tall structure of the
‘International Style’ type of Modernism (and if anything more reviled than the
older structures that preceded them as these monsters came to dominate most
city skylines – in general appearing to have been built with minimal costs as
well as minimal decorative effect in mind). Dominated by simple geometries, and
the rule of the grid, these towers of glass are still a staple of office blocks
world-wide. Increasingly though, their top parts at least are beginning to be more
differentiated than the International Style orthodoxy would allow. Clearly the
added costs of providing the city with a building people might like, that is worth
looking up to… are not a disincentive when matters of (corporate, city, or
national) image become a matter for concern. And the matter of the top is its
image.
From ‘Scalped’ to ‘Sculpted’: the ‘Decorated’ or ‘Finished’
style.
This category of
building pits the ‘decorated’, that is sculpted and finished style, those
buildings completed with a top part which is recognised by the city dwellers as
a contribution to the city’s skyline, against the stripped-down ‘functionalist’
look, that is a style combining minimal design at minimal cost with minimal
regard for either (immediate) context or (general) public consumption. The
decorated form of the concrete, steel and glass tower is often classified as a
type of Post-modernism; a ‘style’ dating from the 1970s onwards; which category
is also good for describing the return of historicist and traditional
decorative forms in culture in general and the philosophical shifts that have accompanied
them. This category therefore also includes the many ‘return of tradition’ type
buildings together with the various appropriations of tradition discussed in
the three sections above. The features listed below are those that continue in
some manner the experimental or creative side of Modernism (as for example in
the sub-division of space and volume, or in the use of the curve or bent line),
as opposed to its conservative side which remains focused upon the cube and its
concomitant symbolic and economic miserliness.
Definitions.
Post-modernism. Two aspects: the
first is as a specific term for a period or style in architecture and all the
arts, in each case presenting a slightly different meaning or realization – but
involving a move away from minimal form and abstraction. The second as an
approach to and moment in philosophy and the history of ideas, such that there
is a disbelief in the idea of automatic, cumulative progress in history, in
unified stories that would give meaning to the world (or a ‘master’
standpoint), so often suggesting a relativising of knowledge, or a
perspectivism in which the negotiations of the different viewpoints are more
important the notion of a unified or final ‘Truth’. So making meaning a
pragmatic, reception or user-based process, to include movements such as
post-foundationalism, post-structuralism, critical anthropology, critical
musicology (and generally anything with ‘post-’ in the title). In architecture
this term is used to designate the rebellion against the modernist cube and the
return of previous historical styles as a form of decoration.
Right-Angles & Diagonals: Prisms
and Pyramids. The ‘city on a slope’.
These types of building often echo modernist concerns
in their basic design, but are designed to provide an answer to the demand for
access to light coming from neighbouring buildings (a form of architectural
regulation called ‘zoning’) as well as to provide more light for the
inhabitants of the upper floors of the same building (through a balcony or roof
garden or terrace). This access is achieved by offering a rectangular slope, a
feature which has already become a popular solar feature around the world,
transfiguring many city solarscapes at around the turn of the last century.
The presence of slanting, or right-angle, tops on skyscrapers
represents a continuation of the fashion for peaks and triangles as a more
acceptable skyline feature than the traditional modernist flat top. We can say that
the latter is cheaper in terms of cost/price (less income from rent), but costs
the building a place of honour on the skyline (the price of this ‘saving’, the
bathetic appearance of ‘a looser’, manifesting poverty when it comes to recognition
and symbolic force). In many cities world-wide, the triangular peak, specially
the slanting-top type (more economic than the decorative pyramid-type top owing
to the former’s adaptability to use), usually coordinated in glass and metal,
pays its respects to the sky. Offering space for roof gardens and added access
to the sun’s light, as well as opening-up the skyline itself; letting in light
whilst pointing, culminating in the open sky. In silhouette, presenting us with
a series of jagged ridges, like a serrated paper-cut, if a number of such angular
forms are found together, so formative of the distinctive texture of the new
urban skyline; a line of visual enchantment which respects our collective need
for a horizon we can ‘look up to’… no longer sold cheap. When coated in glass,
like the angle of a prism, or the facet of a diamond, the glass-plated slant of
the cut-top type diagonal offers a plane of reflection; we perceive a new
source of light as well as an unusual angle on the horizon. No longer only
reflecting the window-wall opposite (the fate of most vertical planes of glass)
the slant window surface offers light from the sky directly; a mirror directly
reflecting the heavens… a refracting glint that calls down the sun, the moon
and the stars.
The City of
Utopia. In windows. Already realised in our
architecture, in the dreams of windows. The future perfect is to be found
reflected there, where the rhythms of rooftops and spires glow golden in the
sun, run silver in the rain. The reflection of the ideal, already realised, the
light of the ideal, reflected, in windows. The golden cities of the future are
already here. It is only the comportment of the human element that does not
measure up to the ideal. An ideal that they have set and we have built. In
windows.
Definitions.
Curtain Wall. A wall which does not
support the building’s weight but protects the inner space against the weather
and intrusive gazes of passers-by. Placed in front of the frame (which is the
true load-bearing element) the curtain wall may perhaps contain windows and may
otherwise be made from aluminium, steel or, of course, glass.
The spectral vista
provided by the reflective wall of buildings all sheathed in glass offers a
number of meanings to the enchanted viewer. Such vistas are an amazing example
of the inherent ambiguity of glass and so of the range of meaning, the visual
versatility of modern glass architecture. A combination of light and dark glass
surfaces offers a combination of contrasting moods: the light offering a
refracted sky; the dark suggesting concealment; the light, a reference to the
heavens; the dark, the presence of a hidden realm. All meanings generated by
reflections in glass, by our reflections upon them. Even as glass masks an
interior, the skin on the concrete frame, the glint in the eye that conceals
the soul, so such combinations of glass architecture offer a mask, or an array
of masks, reflective, metallic. As if before an armoured presence; the vision
of a sightless visor, multiplied in procession and reflection, so it appears
that that a passing cavalcade of ghostly knights has been frozen into a
motionless tableaux, and we find ourselves in the towering presence of giant,
multi-faceted, crystal beings, their suits of reflective material re-echoing
the world around them even as they hide from us their true content.
See Shang Du
The all-glass curtain wall, spectacular though it may
appear, not least when backed up by a variety of such glass-sheathed
structures, does not always bode well for the solar skyline. Indeed its
contribution is often negative. The emphasis on the sheathing, the glass ‘curtain
wall’, usually leaves the top section ‘unfinished’, culminating in a kind of
dead end - finishing abruptly. Otherwise the top zone of human urban experience
is given a cursory nod in some form of demarcation or segregation, which,
however, remains minimal. When the glass wall is primary the façade, then the
Middle zone of the urban experience is pronounced, and so, as with the form of
a shield, the zone above is left undeveloped to take pot-luck with the
vestigial symbolism obtaining to any form of horizon or rim.
The origami glass effect also
appears in similar developments at
eyeguides: How Architectural
Symbolism Works: the Symbolism of Glass. A Rhetoric of Reflection.
Landscapes of
glass are impossible to gaze upon without the thought of utopia arising. Here
we have entered the moral-symbolic realm of the ‘city-on-a-hill’, the realm of
the ideal, the ideal for dwelling accompanying the ideal of a way of life, come
together as a form of dwelling. Together with its opposite: common result of
the utopian experiment- our inheritance of past dystopias as history now
records them and as famously featured in the early twentieth century dystopian
novel, ‘We’ (1920), by Eugene Zamiatin. This famous novel, (which was the
inspiration for George Orwell’s novel, ‘
Lines of Flight: ‘Climbing the
Stairway to Heaven’.
This is the first
of two categories which are basically about the exterior coating, or cladding
of the tall building (the other is the ‘Metal Cage’ below). This cladding may
be functional, as in weight-supporting strapping, or a protecting brise-soleil (or sun-break), or it may
be an ornamental development of either of these functions (like the surfboards
and waves dealt with in the first chapter) fulfilling the role of curtain wall.
Either way, we are in the realm of the façade, the building’s eye-raising middle
zone, the patterns of which lead our eyes up to its solar rim.
Eye-paths.
Eye-leading. Hypsosis - by step. After
the line, the infinite gradation. Rungs of the ladder of permanent ascent. Quantitative
linear measure indicating the place of a zone of positive quality, of positive
energy (a sky-reaching and so solar effect). Patterns of ascension. Tracks and
trails, irrational geometries traversing the sides of buildings, a repartition
of the rationalist’s grid undertaken by the passing of some giant insect, dissolving
and resetting the verticals and horizontals, reordering the logic of the sides in
the course of its climb to the sun. Stairways to heaven. Phototropic passages
presaging the blinding of the eye. Trace of the passing of a colossal solar
insect, record of its upward path to the heavens.
iPaths. As with the repetition of the grid across the
canyon wall of the Middle, so with the traversing stair, for all its reversal
of the dominant design, it still remains impossible to fix ones eyes at one
point, on one level; instead, as in the game of ‘Snakes and Ladders’ they must
slide up and down – eventually always up again. Above to what waits above urban
matter. Jacob’s ladder.
Curvaceous Constructions: The Return of the Ellipse.
Organic; limb-like. So suggestive of the body, of a
living form. Even ‘feminine’ in character (as opposed to the ‘masculinity’ of
the rational grid of the cube, in a logic of traditional, or ‘received’
opposites). Such forms appear to break all the rules of space and so of the efficient
use of space. Their value therefore is even more rooted in their form than in
their economies of line.
Curves, oval
forms, ellipses and a concomitant avoidance of the right-angular straight edge.
Like some swirling object caught in transit on the potter’s wheel. The
architect’s slide-rule apparently replaced by a bendy ruler. The line we can
bend on the computer. Reappearing in the 1980s in Phillip Johnson’s, ironically
named ‘Lipstick Building’, such elliptic and circular forms can now be seen
freshly in evidence around the world, from the giant ‘gerkins’ of London
(Norman Foster) and Barcelona (Jean Nouvel), to Beijing’s Chaoyangmen vortex-like
towers (see inset below) not to mention the Giant Egg, and the Bird’s Nest.
Curves (with apologies to the fashion industry) are back in fashion.
See the
Yet, even in the
angular world of Modernism this is not a novum. If historically the round form
looks back to the round form of the Rotunda and Pantheon (or even further,
anecdotally, to the round tent or hut said to underlie these forms), then it
also has an altogether more recent provenance; early Modernism too experimented
with the curve (see for example the writings of art critic Rosalind Krauss).
Before the orthodoxy established in the visual language of Modernism by the later
Mondrian, Gropius and Mies, that is, the orthodoxy of the line and the cube,
there was the curve in Kandinsky, and in the design, as well as the paintings
of the Futurists and Constructivists. Cubism itself was but a moment is the
opuses of Picasso and Braque. So, from the perspective of an excavation of the
recent past, we have a return to the experiment with all forms that predated the reductivism of modernist orthodoxy, all
potential forms are again grist to the designers mill, and not just a few boxes
and their linear extension (the logic of which was anyway driven by their cheapness, an economic meanness which
quickly extended into a cheapness of
style). Curvature may cost more - but it is worth it!
See also the National Institute of
Accountancy, (Architect, Qi Xin). Ribbed for comfort. This building also features
the large roof lip that is a direct borrowing from the roof overhang of the
traditional Chinese roof. Shelter from the midday sun when the heat is at its
worst. Shadow guaranteed precisely at the time of its greatest need.
See also Xizhimen Subway and Railway
Station/HuocheZhan.
Metal Cage: Wrap-around
Exo-skeletons; Building as Insect
Binding, the clasp, buckle or strap, as if holding
together the parts of a door or a wheel. Strapping, webbing, riveting, all holding
strategies more often seen on clothing and ornament, in the material of wood or
metal (the broach) like the holding together of a wooden box, casket, or even a
parcel - rather than the stuff of buildings; brick, concrete, or glass. Now
writ large across the face of our urban structures, like the corset that holds
in the middle, pushing the top ever further up…
Touted as the next
great building innovation since the metal skeleton that has driven our tall
buildings ever taller, the external wrapping of a building (or the use of the façade
yet again as a weight-bearing structure) is an engineering feat that allows a
structure to stand because its parts are held together by a force other than
that of gravity; the enclosing horizontal, centripetal, force of the embrace of
a system of metal strapping (so resembling the ‘bundling’ of ‘tubes’). Since
the 1970s this system has been used to augment the stability of structures
where gravity in the form of a steel and concrete core is just not enough (see
for example the CCTV building; and then there is the Bird’s Nest, where its job
it to support the massive roof-overhang protecting the seating below). Often
used in very tall buildings (such as the Jin Mao Tower and Shanghai World
Financial Center, both in Shanghai), where the central tower or core is built
around a traditional iron frame and where the outlying zones of the building
are to held on by a tubular or strapping system of mega-supports; metal
sello-tape to bind on structures against the will of gravity or bypassing the
need for sufficient foundations or internal columnar support - so saving considerably
on the use of steel. (But caution, this was the design feature that led to the
quick collapse of the ‘Twin Towers’ in New York in what has, globally, become
known as ‘9/
Then there are the
webs and nets, the wrapping of a building in a mesh of metal. Warp and woof of
steel threads, aluminum bandages apparently holding in the guts of the
building, its offices, its furniture - its inhabitants. However these are not
the kind of wrappings that hold up a building; rather they hang on to the
building, clinging to its concrete frame – metal web spin by a android spider. In
reality what we have is another kind of curtain wall. Another kind of sun-break
(brise-soleil). Facades. A wash of
ornamental repetition. A pattern that clothes the building, giving it its
distinctive fur, its patterned skin, its tattooed skin, its embroidered weave; its
scales, its shell, its texture.
Lanterns, Lighthouses & Sky Offerings.
Full or empty; the illusion that it is full of
something, fed only by artificial light and our imagination, or empty as in the
transparent interior glimpsed between girders, or even the empty sky beyond
framed by the open structure that performs its own brand of union with the sky.
Full of the sky.
As in the
imaginings of our childhood, that lonely light or enigmatic opening in the
upper story... Index of activity; presence of a mystery; enunciation of an
unanswered question. Index of mysterious activity within – but of what kind?
The workshop hidden in the furthermost turret; site of arcane experiments. Like
a machine room; enclosed by vents, or walled, but allowing the escape of light,
allowing light to do the work of decorative features, the work of suggestion.
Borrowing light (or projecting it from within) to mark the distinction of the
upper level, itself a marking-out of the building, its mark, its identification
among so many others; distinct voice, yet at the same time one element of the
chorus of our skyline song. Again the form of the wall surrounding the
technical necessities (if they are actually even there at all) placed on top of
the building -or even the wall itself- is, technically-speaking, itself an
unnecessary addition. A supplement like the name or the style of a person. Part
of a statement about the building’s identity; a result of our own identity
projected outwards; our expectations of our environment, our demand for a
suitable urban home that answers our requirement that it have an adequate,
finished, and worthy relation to the sky (that we will enjoy looking at it,
that it will in some measure enable us to enjoy it, to feel completed by it,
and not disappointed by it, not to have to avert our eyes, not -above all- to have
to look down). This play of light and openings on the upper level of a given
building offers us an act of illusionism, in the best sense of the word, like
representation or dimensionality in art that transforms stone and steel, glass
and girders, into an enigmatic presence on our urban scene. The alchemy of
architecture: turning base metal into the stuff of symbol. So made up of
symbolic, rather than actual, gold.
Corrugated Shed: Shields and
Blinders.
Remaining
resolutely modern is, or was, the ‘Corrugated Shed’ the hotel -made famous for
being burn down by a stray firework- adjacent to the CCTV Building (Architect:
Rem Koolhas; Location: Chaoyang Bei Lu). Unlike it’s would-be radical neighbour,
the CCTV building, which at first sight and on final reflection continues the
symbolic work of the traditional Arch in modern garb, Corrugated Shed in many
ways defies easy classification (or - perhaps too easily - the harbinger of a
new brutalism…).
From the side, we
see a ribbon of metal wrapping an enclosed interior, like a metal cowl hiding a
face in shadow, the interior is further masked by darkened glass. Dark glasses
concealing the expression of the eyes. From another angle appearing as if a
fold, illusionistic neck, narrowing where there is none such, suddenly making
the building appear fragile, gravity defying. Yet another change of angle makes
the window wall turn into a soaring cathedral window. And the towering shed
becomes the end wall of a cathedral nave…
An inventive
development of the metal-clad cube type. Featuring a metal shield, a polished
reflector apparently bent around an interior space (the building hides
beneath). We, the onlookers, are dazzled by sun’s light and the patterns it
makes on the stripped metal surface, a slope of light, with bands of light,
patterns that appear and disappear according to proximity and position. An
attention-seeking building, pointing to itself, which however then denies any
view of the interior, no windows, or only hidden ones… hidden by its reflective
shield, concealing, protecting (metaphorically) those on the inside. Denying
views of the interior, this wall of light acts as a shield, throwing off, casting
outwards, the captured patterns of the sun. Whose light cascades off the
cladding of aluminum. Waves of light pouring across, traversing a metal mirror.
A waterfall made of reflected light. In this aspect also suggesting a solar
furnace.
*
PART THREE:
A Unitary Vision? Cityscapes, Old & New.
From
huddled hutongs to broad boulevards, from ancient palaces to the latest hi-tech
buildings,
(CHAPTER FIVE) Reading Architecture! Points of Orientation.
In
this chapter we will look at two other key co-ordinates which will help us in our
understanding of the modern urban environment; that is, for understanding our predicament
as an animal that has made and remade the world in the image of its own
spiritual and desiring structures and now finds itself lost in a forest of its
own making.
Part 1/ Whose Stand-point?
The Horizon versus ‘Stand-alones’.
Part 2/ Points
of View. The Pointed Roof versus the Flat Roof Tradition.
Part I/ Collective Horizons versus Stand-Alone
buildings
In
this section we will examine the difference between our ways of reading the street
view as a whole, perhaps the basic unit of our urban experience and so replete
with a mass of inherited differentiation and symbolism, an experience opposed
to the ‘singling-out’ or particular view of a single or ‘stand alone’ building.
There will follow an introduction to the meaning and evolution of three part,
two part and one part experiential building types (buildings experienced, or ‘understood’,
as having one, two or three significant parts) as they apply to several of the
key structures that have made Beijing famous as a destination for architectural
tourism.
COLLECTIVE
PERCEPTIONS: The Horizon and the
Horizontal.
This is an experience we are ’in’, or ‘part of’, one that envelopes us, as if in an urban
canyon, or womb. Perhaps the nearest we can get to an incarnation of the ‘Social’
(as opposed to its symbolization in a key religious or governmental building). As
with our sense of being a part of a larger whole, this is an on-going experience
we interact with continuously, even unconsciously, in that this experience of
our immediate environment is normal, default, and yet powerfully influences our
sense of place, calling forth a general set of responses or desires (unlike the
more deliberate, altogether more conscious stare ‘at’ the stand alone feature, ’before’
which we stand and which calls forth an accompanying, distinct, aesthetic judgment).
For the street we find ourselves in is a part of our selves (indeed where we ’find
ourselves’), we are subject to it, we are ‘inside’, it is part of our
subjectivity, our felt sense of space- indeed our felt sense of the self:
whereas the building we stand before is very much ‘outside’ of ourselves, an
object to our perceiving subject – viewed as an image alone, and so leaving our
other senses to respond to the space we stand in. Vision apart.
The experience of the horizon as a collective experience; the experience of a view shared with many
other inhabitants of the same space (albeit experienced differently according
to mood and personal background). It is also the experience of a collective
unit; what we perceive is made up of many elements, not least the agglutination
of many buildings. Such a perception of the urban scene offers buildings that
touch that become subsumed onto a greater whole, which is then, in turn,
subdivided along the opposite co-ordinate from that which we normally associate
with buildings together (as separate entities, experienced vertically); the
street view is perceived horizontally, as a parallel or receding horizontal lines
(like the lines of perspective coming together with distance). Like a horizon,
or sequence of horizons, the top of one zone, meeting the bottom of another
(the top edge of the shop front strip with its signs and mezzanine windows,
meeting the bottom windows of the long middle layer, often made up of office
windows or the top window line of the middle meeting the exaggerated windows or
other decorative feature of the topmost portion). For it is a fundamental
feature of actually-experienced cities, despite our intuition that buildings
are individual entities, segregated and identifiable vertically, that our
intuitive division of the urban landscape, not least the street scene, is into
cities as an accretion of horizontal bands (top. bottom and middle: street
level strip, canyon or window wall, and solar top). Yet how little of what is
written on architecture, whether on architectural design, reception or theory that
reflects this reality - even though individual buildings are clearly zoned in
this way - even those whose designers deny the need for such a ‘decorative’
difference. This sense of the horizontal governs our experience of the city
street, be it alley, high street or boulevard, as of our experience of the city
square, from the relatively small, closed medieval square to the much larger, open
Renaissance and modern squares that are our collective inheritance; an
inheritance that gives us an innate sense of the built environment as a transbuilding experience.
Urban skylines as repositories of religious
geo-cultural heritage, of regional thought and history. The union of spiritual
and material culture. As for example in the case of religious, cultural
traditions and their influence on the built horizon: Christian crosses can be
found on most (pointed and domed) Classical buildings in Rome (they did not
originally possess them); ‘Onion’ domes and the Eastern cross in Eastern
Orthodox cities (many of which once bore the hammer and sickle of the previous
religion); in China there is the triangular temple top insofar as traditional
architecture has survived the country’s tumultuous history.
See landscape
shots of
STAND ALONES: Building Apart (from Tian’anmen Gate to the
National Stadium).
These are buildings we stand ‘before’ and so are ‘apart
from’; even ‘in front of’
in the sense that we stand before their front or public face - as opposed to
being enclosed by them. So facing one another. Discrete entities. Which does
not mean that we are not moved by the sight of what may lie before us. Indeed,
as in the sight of a mountain or a view over water, we may be transported by
what we perceive…the ‘front’ of every cathedral, or otherwise impressive religious
(and State) building attests to the possibility of this.
How do we perceive the parts of buildings that stand
alone? Whilst the three
parts of experienced architecture are still a feature of most stand-alones (which
are often also the ‘must-see’ buildings of the architectural tourist itinerary);
nevertheless many such structures are often better understood as functioning as
two or even one-part buildings when we consider their impact on the viewer and
the types of meanings the different parts of such buildings convey. For
example, most new tower blocks, both residential and office, such as the long
sweep of Chang’an office buildings (opposite Xidan and its subway stop) can be
best understood as three-part buildings, echoing, when all is said and done,
the historical experience of the tall building or Palazzo model and so blending
in with the three-part zoning of the city street perceived as a whole. On the
other hand, the Tiananmen Square, State and governmental, structures (built in
the desert or dry climate, flat roof style) and the Gugong or
The radical unitary, or one part, structure, is the
late 20th century‘s contribution to the basic experiential forms of
architecture (perhaps the
only previous structure to offer such a unity of appearance was the Egyptian
pyramid). Interestingly, a one part experiential structure is what we find when
we look upon the four key architectural icons of the new Beijing: the National
Theatre (the ‘Giant Egg’), the CCTV building (‘Long Johns’), the National Stadium
(the ‘Bird’s Nest’) and its near neighbour the National Swimming Centre (the ‘Water Cube’); an effect also in
evidence in another recent development in the history of architectural design,
the conflicted planes of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, an example of
the revolutionary work of Frank Gehry. The meanings of these buildings lie in
the key effective response they call forth from their viewers; what do we feel
as we stand before them: in general, the single or unitary image that we behold
calls forth an equally unitary response (which is not to say a response which
is, at the same time, not equivocal). The totality viewed (from outside and
from a vantage point that enables, or even prepares for, a clear view of the
whole or of a significant portion) carries or conveys a more or less single
sensation and a single meaning; indeed it part of the remit of the building as
spectacle, as a work of visual rhetoric, that it appear unified in meaning, as
well as appearance. The impression and the meaning (not lest the context of the
meaning as part of a national project and so of national pride) must deliver a
single message.
The experience of the single-part building, despite its status as an apparent novum on the architectural scene, is
nevertheless that of the two-part temple structure translated into modern (and
so in a formal sense minimalist) language. It also echoes uncannily (and
perhaps this is its only true parallel) certain natural features that carry
significant, that is sacred, meaning: the rock-faces, outcrops, megaliths and
mountains worshipped by our Neolithic ancestors which often survived into the
religions that followed as holy places, sites for temples and (mass) pilgrimage.
See the National Swimming Centre or ‘Water
Cube’ (Architects: PTW; Location:
The parallels of the
CCTV building with the Arch we have already looked at in the first chapter. The
National Theater or the ‘Giant Egg’ is structured around the notion of a giant
pleasure dome, replete with water features, indeed it resembles a colossal
pebble sitting in a pool (or an equally gigantic bubble emerging from the
depths, depths that we must pass under in order to enter, like a funerary road
leading to the place of the dead, a Ancient Greek ‘dromos’ or Chinese archaic ‘spirit
road’). The National Stadium is more enigmatic in appearance, the metal
strapping suggesting the containment of something powerful, an invisible event,
or unseen force – which, in terms of the numbers of people to be contained and social
(national) symbolic importance, is indeed the case. The interior symbolism of
both buildings is a matter of participation, of being inside the space in
question and witnessing the events that transpire there, and so a completely
different experience from that of the building as an externally viewed object;
indeed both buildings take as their function some manner of spectacle, or
ritual performance. Unitary forms far more resemble abstract outdoor sculpture
than human habitations or other functional structures.
See the ‘
The National Stadium or ‘Bird’s Nest’ (Architects: Herzog & De Meuron;
Location: Olympic Green). Probably the jewel in Beijing’s architectural crown; certainly
the building by which the Olympics are best known by (possibly rivaling the
Great Wall and Forbidden City in the World’s imagination of China as a country
and so finally giving it a modern face). Much criticized for lacking
traditional features, ‘it doesn’t look Chinese’, has often elicited the
response, ‘it doesn’t look as if it came from anywhere’; and indeed this
building (more than the CCTV building, the practical symbolism of which I have
discussed elsewhere) is a genuine novum
in the world of architectural design – it literally looks like nothing built
before (and given its cost possibly unlike anything yet to be built). Another addition
to our inventory of curved or elliptic structures and one part buildings, the
form of the rim resembles a giant roller coaster (suggesting the excitement of
a sporting event) and its topmost surface, glimpsed from a distance at ground
level due to its rising wings, resembles the swell of water, the rocking of a
giant wave (suggesting an illusory motion and flexibility which counteracts the
metal structure we see so admirably exposed).The irregular spacing of the skein
of metal bands that carry the weight of the covering parts, suggest an attempt
to restrain as well as give form to this motion. To materialise the energy of a
national event, or perhaps even of an entire nation.
Part II/ The Pointed Roof versus the Flat Roof
Traditions
In
this section we will look at the ‘dry’
and ‘wet’ geo-structural bequests to the history of architecture and how they
are used in both in popular architecture and in several key structures in
A useful distinction
to keep in mind when observing the upper part of a building or street is the type
of roof covering we see there - that is, the fundamental difference between the
Pointed Roof tradition and the Flat Roof tradition. These are two key moments in
the geo-cultural evolution of world architecture, which, broadly speaking,
consist of the contrast of wet climate as opposed to dry climate solutions for
types of roofing and their weight-bearing systems. In China this difference can
be seen in the contrast of the local Temple and Palace style, as exemplified by
the various buildings that make up the Gugong (or ‘Forbidden City’) and also
including all and any number of temples (with subtle variations, the traditional
Chinese form for several millennia) on the one hand, and the use of the Central
Asian, or monumental desert or dry climate style for the Tiananmen Square, Museums
and Government buildings, not least the Great Hall of the People, on the other.
Different roof solutions clearly have implications for how the ornamentation or
symbolism appropriate to the building’s top is managed. Pointed roof solutions
can be seen on the roofs of Classical Greek and Roman temples, as on cathedral
and church structures in the, broadly Christian, West as on the roof edges of
Chinese roofs; in both cases figurines and other ornamentation accumulate
indicting the building’s degrees of spiritual (and secular) importance. In the
flat top the cornice becomes the main focal point for accreting badges of symbolism
or in configuring its -equally symbolic- relations with the sky.
A miniaturized, brick
version of the pointed roof style, can be found in the dwellings that line
Beijing’s hutong (an indigenous
northern, normally single-storey building with a low or blunt pointed roof and
gables) often surrounding and opening into courtyards (whilst the hutong themselves were actually the
lanes once organized around fresh water springs, and are still defined as
taking an East-West axis, the term is now generically used for this type of
dwelling). The south of China also has pointed roofs, suited to its much wetter
climate; but this is where the similarities with the northern courtyard, or siheyuar, ceases, as the southern
varieties are multi-storey and have sharp-pointed roofs usually with over
hanging eaves (so more closely resembling the tradition form of the roof which
can usually only be seen in its full glory only on larger State and Sacred,
Palace and Temple, type structures).
The pointed roof building
that displays to us (standing ‘in front’) the long face, or the building’s long
side, is the Eastern form of the pointed or wet climate solution to
architectural design (think Chinese Temple), but the narrow face, or end as ‘front’
is the Western form of this solution (think Greek Temple with triangular
pediment). This distinction then reappears in the East as the difference
between the two part State or Religious buildings with their long faces (the
long roof slope faces us) and the popular or ordinary dwelling as narrow faced
(the front bit we see in the street). In the West this narrow face offers a
flat gable or pediment, its forehead if you like, a triangular wall whose
slopes are covered by the roof; in the temple this gable wall is tailor-made
for religious symbolic material (the thoughts within the forehead). In the West
the slopes are hidden, as we see them from their sides; whilst in the East the roof
slope faces us on the street. More recently, however, part of the effect of the
increasing cultural globalization of the twentieth century and beyond has been
the arrival of the Western gable point in the narrow face of the domestic
building. Such structures are popular in
*
Afterword: The Evolution of the Eye.
The experiential zoning of architecture, in effect the
phenomenological explication of significant difference in architecture, permits
us a glimpse of our own collective interior. It is our key parts, as it were, that are put on
display with the key parts of architecture. Our perception of our environment
is the betrayer of our innermost structure. Moreover, the externality of the world
is no longer just a projection of our interpretation and desire onto a naturally
occurring screen (or its divisions: horizons, grounds, orthagonals, vanishing
points, colour and texture) but, with the total dominion of human culture, is
now the built exteriorisation of the internal. Product of those restless
persistent portions of the self, its very building blocks perhaps, which
agitate their way into the outside world marking it irrevocably (or onto a
world that once was outside, that once was made elsewhere, that is, not by
ourselves, as it is now - even if made in ignorance of what it is that we are
making). In architecture we see the layers of the self incarnate in stone and
the return of these parts to influence the self from which they came. A power
manifested in the return trip, the agitation, of the parts of architecture, now
in turn inciting and provoking the parts of the self they call upon into ever
greater expansion, unfolding into ever greater dimensions, into ever greater
dominance within the constellation of the self.
Symbiosis. The parts of the self: the parts of architecture. The parts of the self: empowered and
empowering, stimulated and stimulating, making and made by the key urban levels
and their attendant symbolism. The
parts of the self. Sacralised by the (vision of the) rim of the world at the
skyline. Sexualised by the incitement of the window (opening in the canyon of
the urban uterus, puncture in the skin of the urban body). Dressed by the shop
manikins and stares of the ground, stares that provide one with the passing
masks of the self. The parts of architecture. Parts which display differing
types of power over the self, the power to incite parts of the self, to render
them awake and to encourage their growth. Power relations which themselves
echo, were perhaps (once long, long ago) a product of human culture, of the
human cultural organs, social-psychological growths on the body of the mind,
pressures that formed and reformed the mind in their own image (performative or
identity-forming exchange relations such as: the sacrifice, the gift and the
set-aside, as opposed to ‘equal’ or equivalence exchange relations like the
commodity or the tautologies of reason and other second order or artificial
languages). The tangled roots of these interrelated fields are to be found
strung out between the Neolithic revolution of the self (the origin of settled
life, habitations and the earliest civilisations; Ur vision of the eye's
encounter with its new home) and the epochal aspects of the self as found in
the history of architecture. The dialectic of self and architecture. The social
bond incarnate in stone.
The architecture
of the self.
*
APPENDICES
(I)
Timeline.
Architectural archetypes (skiamorphs).
Dates and
typologies in chronological order. The early history of the tall building begins
in the
(II) Timeline.
With evidence of
human habitation in the region from 500,000 years ago, some form of settlement
appears to have existed in the site of modern day
If a good place
for trading and in effect frontier capital: a bad idea for stable government,
as the northern tribes, whom it was supposed to protect from, could, and frequently
did pit their semi-nomadic and so militarised societies (a classic example
being the Mongols) against the settled State with its professional standing
army, ruling over a passive (non-fighting) peasant population. The scene was
set for a succession of military elites (based on tribal invaders) to take
turns in providing the impetus for new dynasties (each succumbing to the new
wave of ‘barbarian’ invaders as they themselves became more settled and prone
to luxury). Whence the relatively recent character of the surviving city given
its length of service as a human settlement and post of governance.
The city as we
know it is descended from the layout and structures of the city founded in 1267
by the Kublai Khan and given the name of name Dadu. By 1274 the Mongol capital
of the new Yuan dynasty (1215-1368) had been built, immediately to be seen by
Marco Polo who arrived in 1275 and eulogized in his famous ‘Travels’.
The Ming Dynasty
which followed (most especially under the reign of Emperor Yongle), moved the
city walls and established the first incarnations of the Forbidden City (then
called the Inner City) and the
The city as we
experience it now is the product of expansion in two ‘directions’, outwards and
inwards. The outward direction involved the swallowing up of agricultural (or
ex-industrial) land together with their attendant ‘villages’ (often left behind
as islands of low rise in a sea of high rise – but now almost universally
condemned by a combination of high property values and aging), and provides us
with the successive waves of taller tower block structures; still built
relatively low in the ‘fifties, then increasing in height in the ‘sixties
onwards, until we see the enclosing ring of skyscrapers that forms the basic
Beijing horizon as perceived from the centre of the city (on a clear day along
the straight, North-South and East-West axis of the main arterial roadways, the
mountains that make up the northern and western rim of the city can dimly be
seen, the natural horizon rising up behind the man-made, urban one). This development
outwards then take the form of a gigantic bowl, beginning from the low rise hutong at the centre, and ascending
through the smaller tower blocks of the 2nd Ring Road and then
continuing to rise until we reach the rim of the ‘wall’ in the heights of the
modern office block in, for example, Guo Mao in the Central Business District
(CBD), and other developments beyond the third Ring.
The ‘inward’
development has been more controversial. This ‘modernisation’ has seen perhaps
two thirds of the old traditional old city, most especially its hutong with their courtyard houses (siheyuar) razed for high-rise and
otherwise decontextualised urban development (perhaps aided by the kind of
thinking that destroyed completely the old city walls in the ‘50s). What
remains is charming and often up-market courtyard housing for the city’s
new-rich, and commercial districts for leisure and play (the later at least
involving the indigenous, ‘Old Beijing’, population in a variety of roles). On
the other hand it must be said that by the mid 2000s the hutong districts, once spacious residential districts, had by and
large become overcrowded and insanitary slums much in need of some kind of
modernisation.
The 1990s architectural
take-off in