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Snobbish obsession with weird high-rises betrays lack of confidence in native culture
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THIS Sunday, when I passed by the gate of the former Shanghai Maritime University on Minsheng Road in Pudong, I came upon a scene of utter desolation.
A year ago I still took long walks on the campus, under the spreading canopy of decades-old camphor trees. It provided a welcome escape from the hustle and bustle of the noisy city, right next to where I live.
Alas, the former campus has now been reduced to heaps of rubble. Rumbling trucks are hurrying to and from the site conjuring up new landmarks more worthy of an international metropolis. When the trucks roar brutally past, they leave behind a storm of dust.
Normally I would hasten my steps as I pass through, so as to avoid being choked on the dust. But on Sunday I stopped and snapped a few pictures.
In the background, towering high and supercilious, are the three totem-like high-rises in Lujiazui, one of which is nicknamed the big bottle opener.
We are ruthlessly sanitizing from our view anything that might remind us of our cultural roots.
In the past, architectural style used to be conceived with a view of the context. The most important buildings were often nothing short of a moral and ethical statement, meant to glorify the natural forces that today we are more apt to show disdain of.
Today we pay little heed to such nonsense about harmony with the environment, or the elements.
We show our defiance for forces of gravity by erecting ever higher highrises. When this erection becomes too easy, sheer height no longer flatters our vanity and arrogance.
As Xu Qin observed in her article “China’s erection of odd buildings under fire” (November 1, Shanghai Daily), there has been in recent years a tendency among our purse-pride officials and business people to erect the weirdest buildings, with some shaped like an ancient coin, the fortune god trio, underpants, a bra, or even genitalia — male or female.
We should probably feel relieved for the new campus of Shanghai Maritime University in Lingang, much of it built on a maritime theme, with some buildings modeled on ships.
The thematic constraints spare the students the worst.
Of course there are acres and acres of lawn, boulevard, and open space, with the monotony occasionally relieved by the presence of a few lonely trees. As has been observed, China has become a testing plot for bold Western architects, as each aspiring city vies to erect the most novel and eccentric buildings.
In this race, there is probably an extenuating circumstance for a city like Shanghai, for by Chinese standards it has never been an ancient city. The city rose relatively recently, in part as a result of Western influences.
Plenty of eyesores
But we have cause to feel disturbed about the daring experiments being conducted now in cities where Chinese culture and traditions are supposed to be stronger.
For local officials, unless this otherwise burdensome legacy of culture could translate directly into tourist dollars, they always suffer from a sort of inferiority complex for not being as modern as others. Thus they tend to embrace modernity with a vengeance.
A few years ago, when I first visited the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, I was appalled to find the campus dominated by modern, sometimes surrealistic Western buildings. Fortunately, its close proximity to the West Lake probably discouraged the architects from experimenting vertically.
The city has its share of more egregious cases, though.
For instance, as Xu observed in her article, the stadium and swimming pool of the Olympic Sports Exhibition City suggests a bra.
Suzhou, an earthly paradise known for its Chinese gardens, kunqu opera, and guqin (seven-stringed Chinese zither), is now home to a pair of high-rises known as qiuku — a pair of long johns.
It is more difficult to speculate about the real motives behind some buildings that need not draw attention by being odd. The highly symbolic (according to its Dutch designer) CCTV tower in Beijing is today always mentioned in decidedly good humor.
There might be mercenary considerations, for an erratically shaped building must by necessity entail a bigger budget, thus allowing for more room for kickbacks.
Ultimately all this stems from a deep-seated cultural nihilism, which allows scenes otherwise steeped in culture and history to be seen as tabula rasa for adventurous Western architectural dabblers. The only way to save us from these eyesores is cultural confidence, which can inculcate in us a reverence for our indigenous culture.
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