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[Updated] Xinjiang riot leaves scores dead
The Xinjiang Riots: What's happened so far
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With Rem Koolhaas's eagerly-awaited CCTV headquarters nearing completion in Beijing, many are considering the role of architecture in China's quest for status as a world power. Great buildings have always played a role in a regime's strength and prestige, and for the last decade China's central government has been hellbent on constructing impressive city skylines. Shanghai's own horizon has progressed at a breakneck pace, with its latest undertaking, Xintiandi II, (dubbed Xintiandi's "big sister" by Shanghai Daily), scheduled for completion within the next 7-10 years. Neville Mars, a Dutch architect in Beijing interviewed by the New Yorker, believes that the central government's approach towards architecture is dangerous:
The Chinese appear to be in control, but it is really moving too fast for anyone.
The cities' expansion has caused concern for other architects as well. Architect Daniel Libeskind remarked in February that he refused to work for totalitarian regimes; his comment continues to remind other architects to reconsider their willingness to work for a government whose politics they might not agree with. Ultimately, as New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin explains, the question becomes,
By designing high-profile buildings that bolster the profile of a powerful client, do architects implicitly sanction the client’s actions or collaborate in symbolic mythmaking?
Photo by Noel in the Bahamas.
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'...do architects implicitly sanction the client’s actions or collaborate in symbolic mythmaking?'
Er, yes. But then the 'name' architect is pretty much your typical monomaniacal tyrant himself. For guys like Koolhaas working in China is positively liberating after the developed world, with all its tiresome health and safety standards, open scrutiny of how public money is being spent and all round lack of crazed tyrants wanting to build monuments to themselves.
I think some people put way too much importance on both themeselves and a building. After all, it is still just a building, no matter how unique and grand it may be. The average person, meaning 99.99999% of the people who will see the building, there will not be any "Oh, such a magnificent building, the government's political structure must be beneficent and sanctioned by everyone else in the world!"... they'll just say, "Hey, what a neat building!".
I agree with Fuzi on this one. There are far worse ways of tacitly accepting a totalitarian regime's policies than the construction of buildings. However, there are a few exceptions, the most notable of which is the "Bird's Nest" in Beijing. A building can indeed feed propaganda.
Most will, however, never earn this dubious honour though, and some will earn the opposite. :-P I have read many more critical reviews of the ugly pair of legs that is the new CCTV headquarters than positive ones. You could just as easily say that such a ghastly structure represents the pitfalls of placing more value on modernity than on aesthetics as say that it represents the ascendance of a new China.
But when that building is the state-of-the-art television building in a totalitarian state where CCTV is the muscled arm of the Propaganda Ministry, broadcasting numbingly inane programs to The People, it sort of makes the Bird's Nest pale as a comparative agitprop venue.
"..(T)here will not be any "Oh, such a magnificent building, the government's political structure must be beneficent and sanctioned by everyone else in the world!"... they'll just say, "Hey, what a neat building!""
Fuzi, are you kidding me, or are you just off the boat. Because that is exactly what many people in China think about all these buildings; you have it totally the wrong way round.
Clearly you do not speak or read Chinese, because you would be able to read all the banners hanging around with slogans stating exactly the idea that you are rubbishing. Or you'd have overheard the endless 'our Shanghai has so many wonderful buildings'/'Our China is developing so fast'/'Shanghai is most modern city in whole world', with the clear underlying point being that the government is doing a great job.
Or your folks haven't yet come to visit and babbled on breathlessly about all the amazing buildings, how China's much more developed than they thought, and gee it really is going to be China's century isn't it.
And hey it's not like dictatorships throughout history have not deliberately used architecture to impress their subjects of the power: e.g. the Nazis, the Soviets, the Mao-era Chinese, plus, er, pretty much every ancient empire ever.
What kind of place do you think you are living in? Does anything happen here for non-propaganda reasons and do the populace just not lap it up? Like...the Tibet railway/Olympics/useless Shanghai Maglev/Three Gorges Dam etc etc etc plus a thousand other White Elephant examples. All done with the aim of stating to a populace floundering about in these uncertain, post-ideological times, 'we are on it, out of control economic growth tamped down with rampant nationalism is the way forward, everything is onward and upward from here peeps, trust CCP/Daddy, it's all good, oh and, by the way, tremble and obey!'
Fuzi, COME ON!
rldh: I think you overestimate the sensibilities of the general populace. It is my feeling that the overwhelming majority of people only see a "neato" building. Now whether that subconsciously affects their view of the political structure of the city/country hosting the building remains to be seen. I would wager it has little if any effect. Personally, I appreciate some of the amazing architecture I've seen in some less-than-desirable countries but said architecture does not preclude me from thinking the government of the country is hideous. I believe most people would feel the same.
As I stated previously, "I think some people put way too much importance on both themeselves and a building."