Towards an Understanding of Architectural Iconicity in Global Perspective
2 Towards an Understanding of Architectural Iconicity in Global Perspective¹
Leslie Sklair
Abstract
Despite the fact that architecture and the built environment confront all of us in our daily lives, they have received relatively little attention in discussions of globalization, capitalism, or postcolonialism. Certain types of architecture can be hegemonic in a class sense, serving specific class interests alongside their recognized aesthetic qualities. Until the middle of the twentieth century, this idea was discussed mainly in terms of monumentality and political power. However, in recent decades, with the spread of the culture-ideology of consumerism around the world, notably in the cities of the postcolonial newly independent countries of East Asia, iconic architecture is becoming increasingly important in understanding how capitalist globalization works.
Introduction
The relationships between the forces of globalization, capitalism, and postcolonialism that are at work in the architecture of the cities of East Asia today have received relatively little scholarly attention. This chapter rests on the general idea that certain types of architecture can be hegemonic in a class sense, just like other art forms (particularly literature and the plastic arts), and that certain buildings and spaces can and do serve certain specific class interests alongside their recognized use or aesthetic qualities.
This paper can be seen as a point on the trajectory of investigations I have been undertaking into the transnational capitalist class and the networks of global capitalism. The argument that certain types of architecture can be hegemonic in the class sense and that certain buildings can serve specific class interests is argued convincingly by Bentmann and Muller (1992) in their book on the villa as an example of hegemonic architecture. Their brilliant study examines how the villa, largely associated with the great Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio,
faithfully reproduced the class structures and divisions of northern Italy in the sixteenth century. It also, of course, went on to become an immensely popular architectural typology and was widely imitated throughout the rest of Europe and then, via the Western European empires, propagated worldwide.
The construction of Hilton hotels in what would come to be known as the Third World after 1945, provides a more recent example of this phenomenon. As Conrad Hilton himself once said, his hotels were literally 'a little America' for upper middle-class travellers, a 'space of modern luxury and technological desire ... [signifying the] new and powerful presence of the United States' or, more accurately, its dominant class, in the post-war world (Wharton 2001: 2). Between 1949 and 1966, Hilton built hotels in San Juan, Istanbul, Mexico City, Havana, Port of Spain, Tehran, Hong Kong, Athens, Tunis, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Barbados, and Bridgetown. The Istanbul Hilton is a typical example: it was built in the International Style (with lavish use of transparent glass revealing a mini-mall in its spacious atrium) and is located on one of the city's best sites. It also illustrates a classic postcolonial theme that will reappear in this narrative in that it was claimed that the process of fitting out the hotel had helped to reinvent the ancient Turkish art of tile-making. Wharton comments: 'Whether these tiles were modified or reinvented, they were deployed as a sign of the Other within a dominant aesthetic of American Modernity' (ibid.: 26).
Coterminous with the public relations industry that disseminates them, city symbols (like the Sydney Opera House) and national symbols (like government buildings in Chandigarh and Brasilia or the Three Gorges Dam in China, and of course the skyscrapers that have emerged on the skylines of so many cities) all reinforce processes of global image-creation that can be mobilized in the interests of the powerful. As we shall see shortly, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature in Jakarta, and the República de los Ninós in Buenos Aires all use architecture to reconstruct history and to create new national identities as well as to boost the all-important tourist industry. All of this is being done in order to consolidate the power of the local and transnational elites. In the era of globalization, some of these processes have evolved in surprising ways.
Globalization, at least as a sociological concept, has always been too frail to sustain the theoretical and substantive burdens loaded onto it. It needs to be deconstructed. In order to do this I will distinguish three different modes of globalization: generic, capitalist, and alternative globalizations. Globalization, at least in its generic sense, is all too often confused with the dominant type that actually exists, namely capitalist globalization. In previous publications (Sklair 2001, 2002), I have argued that capitalist globalization is driven by a transnational capitalist
class, which consists of four main factions: 1) those who own and/or control major transnational corporations and their local affiliates (the corporate faction); 2) globalizing politicians and bureaucrats (the state faction); 3) globalizing professionals (the technical faction); and 4) elites that consist of merchants, the media, and advertising (the consumerist faction). Architecture and urban design provide plenty of examples.
Generic globalization and capitalist globalization
The basic premise of my argument is straightforward: generic globalization offers almost unlimited emancipatory potential for life on earth, whereas capitalist globalization subverts this potential in the selfish interests of the transnational capitalist class. Please note that I define generic globalization in terms of four phenomena, listed in increasing order of significance, that have emerged since the middle of the twentieth century:
- The electronic revolution, notably transformations in the technological base and global scope of the electronic mass media and most of the material infrastructure of the world today;
- New forms of cosmopolitanism;
- Postcolonialisms;
- The creation of transnational social spaces.
These four phenomena are the defining characteristics of globalization in a generic sense. The concept of postcolonialism is used here in its widest possible interpretation. While also acknowledging its complexities (as well as those of the closely related concept of Orientalism),
Iconic architecture I define in terms of the fame of a particular building or space, which can come about through a distinctive aesthetic and symbolic significance. Buildings and the architects who design them can achieve iconic status on a number of levels – locally, nationally, regionally, or globally (see Sklair 2005, 2006). Historically, iconic architecture tended to be driven by state and/or religious elites, while in the
age of capitalist globalization (defined initially in terms of the electronic revolution), those in control of capitalist globalization – the transnational capitalist class – have become increasingly implicated in the production of iconic architecture, particularly with respect to their own narrow and specific class interests. As Vale argues in his study of power and identity embedded in the design of parliament buildings in the Third World in the second half of the twentieth century (often the realm of quixotic and grandiose gestures): ‘grand symbolic state buildings need to be understood in terms of the political and cultural contexts that helped to bring them into being’ (2008: 3). He goes on to demonstrate that, despite the stated aim of postcolonial state architecture to create a national identity, what really happens is a reinforcing of existing hierarchies. These existing hierarchies – led by (in my terms) the emerging state and corporate factions of the transnational capitalist class – become ever more connected with the multifarious world of capitalist globalization. As a result, iconic architecture – old and new – tends to become ever more consumerist. This is apparent in a city like Shanghai, where the city authorities, in an effort to show the city’s global credentials, have been building the hardware of the global city – the skyscrapers, hotels, and office buildings – often at the expense of those who used to call the city home. The people who lived in the low-rise lilong have been shunted aside to make way for this new transnational capitalist class. The picture in Shanghai is further complicated by the existence of a ‘floating population’ of internal Chinese immigrants who have come in search of a better life but who find themselves trapped in what amount to ghettoes and are unable to benefit from the new wealth the city is generating (see Campanella 2008, Ren 2011). This is a topic that is examined by Ana Moya Pellitero in her chapter in this book.
Architecture operates hegemonically in terms of the four defining characteristics of generic globalization in the abstract, and capitalist globalization in the concrete, with significance for the study of postcolonialisms. First, there can be no doubt that the electronic revolution has transformed the practice as well as the reception of architecture in the era of capitalist globalization. A very clear statement of the former can be found in Tombesi’s research (2001), where the overwhelming evidence of the creation of a new international division of labor in architecture is presented. While architects have always worked ‘abroad’, since the 1990s, digital technology has facilitated qualitatively new relationships between design offices in the First World and low-cost, local architectural labor occupying low-cost office space in the Third World, both in terms of the design process and the operation of architectural markets. In the US, the percentage of architecture firms transferring drawings electronically rose from 35 percent in 1996 to 83 percent in 1999 (ibid.: 173). Not only does digital technology make it possible to
build previously unbuildable designs – the move from self-same to self-similar building components that computer-generated drafting has enabled has seen the proliferation of odd or even extravagantly shaped buildings, which is something that would not have been possible without the advances in computer-drafting technology. Designs can also be transmitted across the globe almost instantaneously, vastly speeding up the design and construction processes.
In a case study of how these developments have impacted Indian architecture, Tombesi et al. (2003) shows that this has benefitted the globalizing-commercial segments as opposed to the domestic-traditional segments of the industry. With the rise of consumerism and demand for luxury homes, office blocks, and five-star hotels, in the 1990s ‘fully computerised new firms rose to industry leadership as exclusive purveyors in India of the latest in fashionable architectural imagery worldwide’. Thus, as generic globalization opens up architectural and developmental possibilities, capitalist globalization provides the framework for the transnational capitalist class to exploit these in its own class interests in new markets.
Considering this book’s focus on China, it might be instructive to take a look at the impact these new technologies are having on that country’s cities, where we have seen unprecedented transformations at the city level as well as in the nature of architectural labor. The number of architects in China in the late 1990s was ten percent of that of the number in the US but, according to one estimate, they designed five times the volume of projects (in millions of square meters) while earning only one-tenth of the design fee per job. In Shenzhen’s Special Economic Zone, extraordinary records have been set, such as five designers working for one night using two computers to produce the design for a 300-unit single-family housing development, and one architect working for seven days to produce a 30-storey concrete residential high-rise. Most of these high-rises are built off the shelf and are only distinguishable from one another by the distinctive ‘hats’ that top them or their facade variations, usually based on ‘architectural recipes’ and often lifted directly from foreign publications and domestic competition entries (Chung et al. 2001). This system remains highly dependent on foreign architectural firms, although government regulations require all foreign firms to work with domestic joint-venture partners on Chinese projects.
Where Shenzhen has led, the rest of China has followed, and over the last twenty years this model has transformed the skylines of many of the country’s cities (see Cartier 2002, Campanella 2008, Ren 2011). New forms of cosmopolitanism can also be easily identified in the field of architecture in the person of globally iconic architects (also known, somewhat whimsically, as ‘starchitects’). The majority of contemporary
architectural icons in the Third World have been designed by starchitects, who usually come from the First World. Many of them are in demand to build spectacular buildings, often in an ill-advised attempt to put some city 'on the map'. This is particularly the case in China, but the Gulf States and some former Soviet Republics also seem to have a similar penchant for this type of iconic building, seeing it as some kind of magic wand that will ensure economic growth and cultural development.
Few are the architects from the Third World, even those who have produced iconic work, that have completed projects in the First World. There are many whose work is universally admired, for example Luis Barragan in Mexico, Oscar Niemeyer and Paolo Mendes da Rocha in Brazil, and the Baghdad-born Zaha Hadid – all winners of the Pritzker Prize, the architectural equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Other names include Carlos Villanueva from Venezuela, Charles Correa from India, Hassan Fathy from Egypt, and Ken Yeang from Malaysia, whose recently completed National Library in Singapore has raised his signature bioclimatic style to the level of an icon. It is an immensely popular building, despite having replaced an already popular predecessor (which was knocked down with typical Singaporean pragmatism to make way for a new road). The work of these architects is generally considered to be more 'local' (i.e. regional) than 'global' (modernist) – a contentious distinction to which I now turn.
Postcolonial understandings of architecture and transnational social spaces
My argument assumes that there has been a gradual shift in capitalist hegemony between the pre-global era (in my formulation, approximately up to the 1960s and the advent of the electronic revolution) and the era of capitalist globalization. In the pre-global era, capitalist hegemony legitimated itself using claims to cultural superiority by colonialists/imperialists, which produced a form of racist Orientalism. For architecture, this is expressed in many ways, for example in the idea of the tropical vernacular, the poorly and/or quaintly designed buildings that were built for the threatening tropical climate, as well as the bastardized classicism that sought to emulate the elegant Palladian buildings of colonial power and governance. In the present era of capitalist globalization, ideological hegemony is based more on the claims to cultural superiority of a transnational capitalist class, which has produced a form of consumerist postcolonialism that is expressed in terms of a hybridity that is being used as a marketing tool in architecture. As we shall see below, this hybridity favors particular materials and design
forms, and it is also almost always used in the direction of capitalist consumerism. As Vale (2008: 60) observed in his study of postcolonial parliament buildings: 'part of the national identity of some developing countries has come to be defined according to the dictates and tastes of Western consumers'.
The literature on postcolonialisms and architecture since around the 1920s can be seen as the most important branch in one of the most fundamental debates in the history of architecture: namely the contrast between what can be called international modernism and architectural regionalism, although these are not the only terms in which it can be portrayed. Briefly, international modernism refers to buildings characterized by thin curtain walls as opposed to the massive load-bearing walls which preceded them, regularity as opposed to symmetry, and the use of new materials such as glass, steel, and reinforced concrete (as opposed to stone and earth). There also tended to be very little decoration, if any. Despite the original radical intentions of most of its founders, international modernism resulted in the monotonous tower blocks and glass and steel skyscrapers that dominate the skylines of most cities on earth, usually executed, it has to be said, by less-skilled imitators than the talented generators of this style, notably Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier.
Architectural regionalism, on the other hand, is based on the idea that the vernacular – namely buildings using local methods and materials for small-scale, site-specific projects – should be the guiding principle for architecture. The upper-class El Pedregal gated estate in Mexico City by Luis Barragan would be a good example of architectural regionalism that is 'a major revision of the International Style, an icon of Mexican cultural identity yet still intensely personal, poetic, and mysterious' (Eggener 1999: 179). It is interesting that this project was marketed in Mexico by making references to that other icon of architectural modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.
The history and theory of postcolonial understandings of architecture, before and after the end of formal colonial rule, revolve around these idealized tropes of international modernism and architectural regionalism, the dominant metaphor being the imposition of First World versions of international modernism on Third World communities, whose needs would perhaps be better served by versions of architectural regionalism. The reality is, unsurprisingly, somewhat different.
In the decades before and after the end of formal colonial rule in Africa and Asia, there is ample evidence to suggest that reactions to international modernism and architectural regionalism by indigenous and colonial architects in the actual and nominal colonies and in the imperial powers spanned a wide spectrum (see Crinson 2003). In Latin America, of course, formal colonial rule ended much earlier, in the first
decades of the nineteenth century, but the same also holds true for architects there. In the first half of the twentieth century, many European architects, fleeing persecution in their homelands, took international modernism with them when they fled. The Russian emigré Gregori Warchavchik built the first modernist house in South America, the Casa Modernista (Sao Paulo, 1928), and the German Eric Mendelsohn, who arrived in Palestine in 1934, helped create the image of Tel Aviv as a modernist city. And, of course, two of the greatest architects of the period – Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright – both travelled outside of their home countries. Wright's influence mainly bore fruit in Mexico (as in Barragan's El Pedregal estate) and Japan, while Le Corbusier's work was even more widespread, with projects throughout Europe, North Africa, Latin America, and even, in the 1950s, as part of the team that developed Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab in a newly independent India. (The irony of a Swiss-French architect building in the erstwhile British colony must have played no small factor in the Punjabi government's decision to hire him.) Those they have influenced are to be found all over the world; international modernist buildings with regional vernacular characteristics and/or regional vernacular buildings with international modernist characteristics were built everywhere.
The importance of the postcolonial understanding of architecture is vital in any attempt to understand the background of what is going on in China's cities today, especially for the former treaty ports like Shanghai and Guangzhou. China is, of course, an even more interesting and complicated case in this regard because it was never actually colonized. All the Western powers ever managed to achieve was a series of toeholds along the Chinese coast and some penetration of the country's rivers. Treaty ports such as Shanghai, Fuzhou, and Guangzhou and a scattering of colonies like Hong Kong and Macau were expected to force open the rest of the country to international trade. The strategic importance of these cities can still be seen today in that this is where the massive wave of urbanization is heading – to cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou, the three cities examined in this book.
What is clear is that whether we see international modernist buildings with regional vernacular characteristics or regional vernacular buildings with international modernist characteristics, the identity of the architect still matters and, no less importantly, the identity of the architect (indeed any artist) is a social construct. This raises the key question of representation, an issue constructively problematized but not resolved by the subaltern studies project
Araeen argues that continuing Western cultural domination 'does not necessarily manifest in suppressing other cultures, or artistic forms of other cultures, but denying other cultures, or peoples from other cultures, their subject positions in modernism' (2002: 4). Those postcolonials who are used in an essentially Orientalist manner to represent the Other in architecture – Barragan for Mexicanness, Niemeyer for Brazilianness, Correa for Indianness, Fathy for Arabness, and so on – are denied their subject status in modernism as they are celebrated for their bogus regional exoticism. In a convincing critique of Critical Regionalism and its Western theorists, Eggener points out that 'it is ironic that writers discussing the places where these [regionalist] designs appeared so often emphasized one architect's interpretation of the region over all others: Tadao Ando for Japan, Oscar Niemeyer for Brazil, Charles Correa for India, Luis Barragon for Mexico. In other words, a single correct regional style was implied or imposed, sometimes from inside, more often from outside' (2007: 399). Prakash speaks of 'Identity Production in Postcolonial Indian Architecture: Re-Covering What We Never Had':
When one talks of an Indian architect, or of an architect from the 'non-Western' world, it seems necessary to deal with the question of identity. While discussing Western architects one can get away with dealing with supposedly universal architectural issues like aesthetics and technology, but it seems necessary that in discussing the work of an architect from India the issue of identity be specifically raised in addition to, or in dialogue with, issues more directly aesthetic or architectural. Architects of the West do not specifically make Western buildings. Architects of the non-West are expected to. Even architects of the West working in the non-West in one way or another find themselves obliged to deal with the issue of non-Western identity.
Brazil, which is often considered the first country to create a national style of modernist architecture, appears to be something of a special case – though in Turkey (Bozdogan 2001) and Indonesia (Kusno 2000), there were also strong early state-sponsored modernist movements that came into creative contact with traditional regionalist forces. However, only in Brazil was a whole new national capital city built along modernist lines (though Canberra is a partial exception). The story of Brasilia revolves around President Kubitschek, who provided the political will, and the eminent Brazilian architects Lúcio Costa (actually born in France), who created the master plan, and the communist Oscar Niemeyer, who designed most of the buildings, as well as Le Corbusier and the Soviet Constructivists, who provided the inspiration.
The president promoted Brasilia, located deep in the interior of this vast country, as a motor of regional economic development, as a hub of a new communications revolution for national integration. He wanted the architects to create a material embodiment of the blueprint for the socialist utopia. In the middle of the twentieth century, Brasilia’s planners were calling it ‘the capital of the twenty-first century’, a much sought-after title, and one that Shanghai has set its sights on in recent decades. As Holston convincingly argues, the intentions of each of these parties were not always realized. The architectural context in which all this was taking place was a vibrant modernist movement that began in the 1940s and which took the so-called ‘Brazilian Style’ to international prominence, thanks to a wildly successful exhibition and book under the same title – ‘Brazil Built’ – at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943. Deckker (2001), in her definitive history of the movement, shows that the ‘Brazilian Style’ had as much political as aesthetic significance, being seen by some in Brazil as a symbol of American imperialism but by others as Brazil’s true path to modernization and development. Holton, in his book on Brasilia, expresses this in the following terms: ‘an architectural sign [the appearance of a building, for example] may remain constant while its denoted meanings shift dramatically with changes in use, context, and intention’ (1989: 97; see also Vale 2008: 137-44).
Figure 2.1 Niemeyer’s Congress buildings in Brasilia: a site of multiple meanings
Photo: Leslie Sklair
The main lessons of this case for the postcolonial understandings of architecture and urban planning are firstly, that the end results of such a project (and probably even single buildings) are highly unpredictable over time with respect to aesthetics, politics, use, and reception; and secondly, that the categories of international modernism and architectural regionalism often pose as many questions as they answer.
There is (sometimes literally) a concrete representation of generic globalization to be found in the creation of what has been termed transnational social spaces – notably skyscrapers, globally branded shopping malls, theme parks, waterfront developments, and transportation nodes – spaces that, despite their regional characteristics, could be almost anywhere in the world (see, for example, Abaza 2001, Marshall 2003, King 2004). This is something that is examined in Jonathan D. Solomon’s chapter in this book. These articulations of transnational social spaces are routinely referred to as the ‘icons of modernity’ and, as we have seen, the ways in which dominant classes in postcolonial societies appropriate symbols of modernity (and tradition) is fundamental to understanding the role of architecture in class society. A study of how the Chinese state enters the global market through the heritage industry describes how preservation is presented locally by the example of the clean new Shanghai Museum on Renmin Square which until recently found itself surrounded by dirty streets. As Abbas points out: ‘suddenly you realize that the museum does not think of itself as being part of a local space at all, but as a part of a virtual global cultural network’ (2000: 782) – and as a result excluding, we might add, the subaltern local Other (see also Arkaraprasertkul 2008). Ren (2011: chapter 4) usefully discusses this in terms of the Chinese words Chai (demolition) and Bao (preservation). This exclusion is not uncommon, as Edensor (1998: chapter 5) shows for the Taj Mahal and Wharton (2001: chapter 4) for the ‘forceful Modernity’ of the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv which diverts attention from the Arab slums to the east, as its prime site looks out to the west and the sea.
Abbas argues that it is not in transnational states but in re-imagined cities that we find transnational social spaces (and this is happening all over the world). In the late 1990s, 13 of the 30 largest architect-developer firms working in Asia were based in the US, Australia, or the UK. This leads inevitably to a collection of architectural projects that are remarkably the same in cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore and Jakarta’ (Marshall 2003: 2). However, all of these megaprojects will have partners on the ground – not just architects but also engineers, real estate agents, bankers, lawyers, and support staff – out of which new local affiliates of the transnational capitalist class will emerge as part of transnational urban growth coalitions. Kuala Lumpur, and what has been dubbed Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor, provides a
potent example. The Multimedia Super Corridor (with no less a figure than Bill Gates on its International Advisory Panel) is an extension of Kuala Lumpur, spanning the Petronas Towers, formerly the world's tallest buildings, Cyberjaya, the world's first fully smart city, and Putrajaya, the first multimedia paperless seat of government, all the way to Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the biggest airport in the region. This 'carefully articulated "hybrid" Multimedia Super Corridor landscape ... embraces not only the economic magnetism of modern global-city architecture but also the repackaged symbolisms of tradition and culture that reifies the national integrity of the country', complete with the strategic placement of new mosques (Boey 2002: 207).
While this immense project has stalled somewhat in recent years, the rhetoric and some spectacular architecture remain. Nevertheless, the iconic buildings of the Multimedia Super Corridor obscure the lives and living conditions of the poor (see Bunnell 2004), frequently hidden from the tourist gaze, as in the case of Shanghai and Tel Aviv. Kusno (2000) forcefully makes the same point for Jakarta, and indeed this appears to be true for most if not all globalizing cities, and not just those in the Third World – it is a condition of existence of transnational social spaces from above. On the surface, this appears to turn the earlier critique of capitalism - private affluence and public squalor - on its head. Through the culture-ideology of consumerism, which seems to promise the fruits of capitalist globalization to all (fortified by platitudes like 'the rising tide lifts all boats'), transnational social spaces from above create apparent public affluence through iconic architecture. This is achieved through an appropriation of modernist iconicity with regionalist characteristics that prevailing postcolonial modes of representation translate into a language that sits comfortably with the culture-ideology of consumerism inherent in capitalist globalization.
Three main audiences are targeted by those who run such globalizing cities. First and most directly, these spaces and buildings seek to attract the national and international tourist trade, an important component of which is business tourism (trade shows, conferences, sports events, etc.), which we see highlighted in Jacob Dreyer's chapter as well as Xiangmin Guo and Changtao Liu's chapter. The second audience is the local urban upper-middle class, whose numbers have increased rapidly over the last few decades in most cities. And the third, and only indirectly, is the local working class who are encouraged to participate by looking at and taking occasional outings in their new, gleaming city centers, public buildings, and suburban shopping malls, all of which are promoted as sources of civic and national pride, even in the poorest countries (see Abaza 2001, Ren 2011).
The construction of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur is a case in point. Malaysia is a 'moderate' Islamic state and provides a good, if
convoluted, example of how such issues are typically addressed under conditions of capitalist globalization. The architect, Cesar Pelli, was born in Argentina in 1926 and moved to the United States in 1964. Pelli had attracted international attention with his World Financial Center in Battery Park, New York (1981) and in Canary Wharf in London (1986), so it was no great surprise when he won the international competition for the Petronas Towers in 1991. The project was the centerpiece of then President Mahathir's Wawasan 2020 (which
Figure 2.2 Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur
Photo: Gregory Bracken
translates as 'Vision 2020') and was based on two 88-storey towers that were 451.9 meters high, with a skybridge between them on the
Where, then, does this 'uniquely Malaysian design' come from? At one level, as noted above, it comes from the Islamic geometry of the floor plan, but at another, deeper level it comes from the break with modernist tradition embodied in the symmetrical arrangement of the towers and what this means for the space between them. Pelli explains: 'Through Frank Lloyd Wright, many architects have been influenced by Lao Tzu's teaching that the reality of a hollow object is in the void and not the walls that define it ... This quality of the building is not derived from Malaysian tradition. But because it appears for the first time in Kuala Lumpur, it will be forever identified with its place' (ibid.: 70). Just as the Eiffel Tower, whose structure and form were not French in origin, became synonymous with Paris, Petronas Towers will become synonymous with Kuala Lumpur, as indeed it has. This is clearly a rationale that is open to many types and layers of interpretation. Suffice it to say here that, at one level and for some professionals and ideologues, it painlessly reconciles international modernism and architectural regionalism in a conciliatory postcolonial direction. It is also worth noting that the ground floor of the Petronas Towers complex has become one of the most iconic shopping malls in Asia and that, as Pelli had predicted, it has become a first-class marketing symbol for Kuala Lumpur and for the country of Malaysia as a whole, despite its purported 'break with modernism'.
Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this phenomenon is taking place in Shanghai under the banner of the 'One City, Nine Towns' plan. To provide appropriate accommodation for its newly prosperous upper middle class and expatriates, numbering around half a million,
the Urban Planning Institute in Shanghai has begun to create a series of satellite communities,
each inspired by a country that played a pivotal role in the colonial and commercial history of the city ... China is slowly coming to terms with its semi-colonial past and has been inviting foreign investment back into Shanghai. Now, a scheme is underway to mark the impact of colonialism – not in the city centre but out in the suburbs.
As of the summer of 2009, this vast project envisages a Dutch town in Gaoqiao which has gabled canal houses, windmills, and drawbridges as well as facsimiles of well-known Dutch landmarks such as the Scheepvaartmuseum (which contains a Chinese restaurant) and Drakensteyn (which overlooks the marina). A British-themed Thames Town has been completed in the city of Songjiang (the one city of the 'One City, Nine Towns' plan), this is replete with Tudor, Georgian, and Victorian-style buildings, as well as a gothic church, which acts as the backdrop for photographs taken by newlyweds. There are plans to attract a Scottish whiskey retailer as well as shops selling English Premier League souvenirs, both of which are hugely popular in Asia.
The other towns in this ambitious plan include Anting, which has a German theme and was designed by Albert Speer (the son of Hitler's architect). Anting also has another German connection in that it is home to a Volkswagen plant (while the motoring theme is carried still further by the fact that the town is also home to Shanghai's new Formula 1 race track). The plan also includes two Euro-American towns in Buzhen and Zhoupu, a Spanish town in Fengcheng, and a Canadian one in Fengjing. Luodian is Nordic, while Pujiang is Italian. And lastly, there is Zhujiajiao, the only town to have a style based on a native Chinese model: the water town. However ridiculous all of these may seem, in comparison with the haphazard high-rise development of Pudong in Shanghai, some Chinese architects have tended to take a more benign view of the 'One City, Nine Towns' plan.
Not all transnational social spaces have been created anew in the era of capitalist globalization. Indeed, one of the most prominent types of transnational social space is the postcolonial rebranding of ancient monuments as prime tourist and consumerist sites (Vale 1999). Tourism at ancient monuments has of course existed for centuries, significantly boosted by the invention of photography in 1839, and has accelerated spectacularly since the growth of the Internet. The Taj Mahal is a paradigm example. As Pal (1989: 194) demonstrates: 'The best-known symbol of Indian civilization is essentially a creation of Western enthusiasm', though its contemporary significance for internal
tourism in India is also growing rapidly. This and the consumerist significance of the Taj, as well as the prime importance of agents’ commissions in the local tourist economy, is brought out by Edensor’s ethnographic study showing that tourist paths around the Taj focused on ‘realizing anticipated consumption ... the next stop is invariably a craft emporium’ (1998: 109). It comes as little surprise to learn that the Indian Department of Tourism called in the US National Parks Service for help with its development plans for the site in the 1990s.
Let me bring this necessarily incomplete discussion to a close with reference to one of the most successfully iconic transnational social spaces of the global age in the eyes of the public and urban boosters (events which give a city’s urban ambitions an edge), if not architects: namely the Disneyland phenomenon. Feierstein (in H&W) tells the fascinating story of the Peronist building projects in Argentina (1945-55). Evita’s unique contribution was República de los Ninós, a city scaled to the height of ten-year olds, with copies of the British Houses of Parliament, a gothic Palace of Justice, a Venetian Ducal Palace-style bank, and a Palace of Culture (whose exterior was modelled on the Taj Mahal and interior on the Alhambra). It has had a chequered history. After the Peronist period it gradually decayed, and it was only in 2001 (the 50th anniversary of the death of Evita) that its commercial and ideological potential was realized and renovations began to rebrand it as a tourist attraction in Buenos Aires. Legend has it – and current websites tell us – that it inspired Walt Disney! The first Disneyland opened in California in 1955.
In 1966, a military coup brought General Suharto to power in Indonesia, proclaiming a New Order for the nation. The general’s most famous architectural expression became the Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature Park (known as Mini) which opened outside Jakarta in 1980 (Kusno 2000: 74-79). Apparently, Mrs Suharto was inspired by a visit to Disneyland and took it upon herself to create this more complete and more perfect version of it in Indonesia. The centerpiece of Mini was a large lake with islands to represent the whole country, surrounded by replicas of ancient monuments and religious buildings, a 1,000-room hotel, and, of course, shopping malls. Each of Indonesia’s twenty-six provinces was represented by displays of ‘genuine customary architectural styles’. For example, Borobudur, the most famous ancient monument in Indonesia, is according to the locals best seen at Mini rather than at the actual confusing and inconvenient ruins (Pemberton 1994). ‘What has been crucial in this process are the replica of tradition and not the tradition itself (Kusno 2000: 79). This is true for all three cases – in Buenos Aires, Jakarta, and actual Disneylands – and for many more, for example, the modernization of traditional neighborhoods in Shanghai and Beijing (Ren 2011). In the era of capitalist globalization,
the transnational capitalist class, led either by corporations or by the globalizing state faction (and usually both), appropriates existing iconic monuments or builds new ones in the interests of the culture-ideology of consumerism.
Postcolonial understandings of iconic architecture help to explain why the struggle between modernism and traditional culture is almost always resolved in the interests of capitalist consumerism. Nevertheless, the incisive comment by the Chinese artist Zhang Huan on the hybrid Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, built by the US architects Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in the 1990s, suggests that there are many challenges to the friendly relationships between iconic architecture and postcolonialisms still to come.
I have discussed here only the transnational social spaces as seen from above, and usually imposed with little genuine democratic process.
Figure 2.3 Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai
Photo: Gregory Bracken
Figure 2.4 Zhang Huan, Donkey (2005), Saatchi Gallery London Exhibition 2008
‘Farm animal humping the famous Jin Mao tower ... Zhang’s icon of modernization gets a literal ... shafting from the beast of burden “proletariat”’ (from the exhibition website)
Photo: Leslie Sklair
Transnational social spaces seen from below are also important, such as those that migrant communities create in globalizing cities (for example the Filipino community’s meeting places around Statue Square in Hong Kong – something that is examined in Jonathan D. Solomon’s chapter – and which can be found in some Chinatowns as well), not to mention the virtual communities of migrants all over the world. Alas, they fall outside the scope of this all-too-brief paper.
Notes
- This chapter is a revised version of a chapter due to appear in O.P. Dwivedi and M. Kich, eds. Postcolonial Literature in the 21st Century (Youngstown NY, forthcoming).
- For further discussion of this point see the scholarly, albeit inconclusive, analysis in King (2004, especially chapter 3).
- See, for example, the varied contributions to Nalbantoglu & Wong, eds. (1997).
- Tombesi et al. ‘Routine production or symbolic analysis? India and the globalization of architectural services’, Journal of Architecture 8: 83. And not just in India. See also, among many others, the case of the World Trade Center in Cairo, constructed by the wealthy Sawiras family; ‘a success story, symbolizing the triumph of the new class of tycoons in Egypt’ (Abaza 2001: 111).
- See, for example, two wide-ranging collections: G.B. Nalbantoglu and C.T. Wong, eds. Postcolonial Space(s) (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) and P. Herrie and E. Wegerhoff, eds. Architecture and Identity (Berlin: Lit Velag and Habitat-International, 2008), hereafter cited as N@W and H@W.
- For Mozambique, see Sidaway & Power 1995; for Ghana, see N@W; for Uganda, see Olweny & Wadulo in H@W; for Turkey, see Nalbantoglu in N@W and Bozdogan 2001;
for Israel, see Levin 1991 and Weizman 2007; for Argentina, see Feierstein in H&W; for Brazil, see Holston 1989, Deckker 2001, and Philippou and Lehmann, both in H&W; for Mexico, see Eggener 1999 and Herzog 1999; for Latin America in general, see Fraser 2000; for China, see Chung et al. 2001, Rowe & Kuan 2002, Broudehoux 2002, Lu & Li in H&W, Campanella 2008, and Ren 2011; for India, see Prakash in N&W and Tombesi et al. 2003; and Kalia 2006; for Indonesia, see Cairns in N&W and Kusno 2000; for Australia, see Lovanovska in N&W and Baker in H&W.
7 Citing literature for this is fraught with difficulty. The overview that I have found most useful is Currie (1996), chapter 5).
8 Prakash in N&W, p. 39; see also Kalia 2006 and Ren 2011. The latter has some interesting ideas on this issue in relation to China.
9 Cited in Holston 1989 (p. 85); see also Vale 2008 (chapter 4) and Fraser 2000 (chapter 3).
10 See King (2004; chapter 1).
11 From the website of Gregotti Associati, who won the contract to design Pujiang, the Italian town. However, the chief architect, Augusto Cagnardi, claims to have identified the same model in ancient Chinese cities.
12 See Bracken 2010, Lu & Li in H&W, Arkaraprasertkul 2008, and Campanella 2008.