Transnational Architecture and Urbanism

Rethinking How Cities Plan, Transform, and Learn

Davide Ponzini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351847230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Transnational Architecture and Urbanism combines urban planning, design, policy, and geography studies to offer place-based and project-oriented insight into relevant case studies of urban transformation in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East.

Since the 1990s, increasingly multinational modes of design have arisen, especially concerning prominent buildings and places. Traditional planning and design disciplines have proven to have limited comprehension of, and little grip on, such transformations. Public and scholarly discussions argue that these projects and transformations derive from socioeconomic, political, cultural trends or conditions of globalization. The author suggests that general urban theories are relevant as background, but of limited efficacy when dealing with such context-bound projects and policies.

This book critically investigates emerging problematic issues such as the spectacularization of the urban environment, the decontextualization of design practice, and the global circulation of plans and projects. The book portends new conceptualizations, evidence-based explanations, and practical understanding for architects, planners, and policy makers to critically learn from practice, to cope with these transnational issues, and to put better planning in place.

Part I

Transnational architecture and urbanism

1 The transnational transformations of contemporary cities

The question of the transnational influences involved in city-making can be more evident at different times in history than others. I open this work by stating that I am fully aware that the urban transformations I observe here are not radically new nor exceptionally peculiar of our present time and that transnational urbanization problems will inevitably continue to evolve in the future. According to my specific research path, I have limited myself to a selection of geographical contexts and to particular investigations that roughly cover the last 25–30 years. Moreover, my historical and geographical position has oriented my personal point of view and my research experiences and travels have naturally focused attention towards certain angles of the issues I study. I am aware that the matter exists at a much vaster scale and longer duration than a single book can cover; the examples I use here have been selected amongst many possible. Within this broader picture, this first chapter explains the core problems and main questions addressed by the book. First, I use one image and relevant literature to question if transnational architecture and urbanism can be intended as a pervasive and inevitable outcome of globalization. Second, I present past and background examples to help refine the formulation of the problems to be investigated. Third, I consider a few recurring narratives and models influencing cities and their policy and planning discourses. Finally, I discuss the emerging problems and questions that form the core of the following chapters of this book.

1.1 Ubiquitous and homogenizing forces of urban globalization?

1.1.1 World city image

Despite being sometimes perceived as merely abstract and intangible, the images of globalizing cities and projects that circulate give significant information and numerous clues about how world-class cities are perceived and expected to be (Appadurai, 1996).

A perhaps somewhat mundane, but telling image of our time is an advertisement from the Financial Times. The image advertised the newspaper and perhaps also suggested its international influence. Appearing in 2006–2007, the image came at the tail end of a long period of growth and just before the impending global financial crisis. Following a long tradition of imaginary cities (among which 1756–1759 Canaletto’s Capriccio con edifici palladiani, 1816 Joseph Michael Gandy’s A selection of Parts of Buildings, Public and Private, Erected from the Designs of John Soane,¹ 1840 Thomas Cole’s The Dream of the Architect and 1848 Charles Robert Cockrell’s Professor’s Dream are worth noting), the image is a collection of iconic buildings lined up along a waterfront. These buildings are iconic because they are immediately recognizable and perceived as unique by the general public – architecture experts represent a mere fraction of the Financial Times readership. Yet each building can be readily located within its own city and carries a symbolic meaning of that place (Figure 1.1 shows my elaboration of the original image and provides relevant information about the buildings). One can easily recognize the intentional urban geography and ambiance crafted by carefully examining the individual architectural elements selected for this image.

Figure 1.1 Own elaboration of the advertisement “We live in FINANCIAL TIMES” including the name, year of inauguration, and designer of buildings.

At the very center of the picture stands the New York Stock Exchange building on Wall Street. Though a historic building (completed in 1903), it evidently represents an important reference point for contemporary international markets. Directly behind it we find the Hong Kong Two International Financial Center (designed by César Pelli and completed in 2003) which stood as the tallest building in town at the time of the image (until the KPF-designed International Commerce Center was erected in 2010). The building just to the right also refers to financial services: the Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt was designed by Norman Foster and completed in 1997. Another iconic building – and certainly a reference to Londoners (London is the hometown of the Financial Times) – stands just to its right and was also designed by Norman Foster: the 30 St Mary Axe building (originally named after its primary occupant, the reinsurance company Swiss RE). Londoners nicknamed the building the “Gherkin,” which subsequently became its moniker for most of the Western world. It was the first of a series of name-architect high-rise buildings that started populating the City of London, along with other parts of London as well, from the 2000s. Moving further to the right we find a set of significant Asian iconic buildings (with the exception of the TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco). The Taipei 101 building was the tallest building in the world at the time this imaginary skyline was pieced together, being completed in 2004 (and then surpassed in height in 2009 by the SOM-designed Burj Khalifa in Dubai). The Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai (designed by SOM, 1999) sits near the Gate Building of the Dubai International Financial Center (designed by Gensler, 2004), which is overshadowed by the Landmark Tower, in Yokohama, again another record-breaking building as it was the tallest building in Japan at its completion in 1993.

Other buildings on the left side of the image can also be found in Asia, such as the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center (again designed by SOM and completed in 1997) or Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower (1994) along with further notable exemplars from the USA (the Chrysler Building in New York and the Smurfit-Stone Building in Chicago) and Europe (La Grande Arche, the symbol of the Paris business district of La Défense). At the center of the image one clearly recognizes the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur (again designed by César Pelli and, again, the tallest buildings in the world upon their completion in 1997). In a way, the latter towers incorporate an aspect of traditional Malaysian architecture and, in this image, recall New York’s Twin Towers, which at that time had already collapsed in the tragedy on September 11, 2001.

The buildings are almost impossibly close to one another and packed up. With most of these structures being the seat of global financial businesses in their respective cities, they are easily recognizable as “meaning business” to an international readership. Also, they more systematically represent spectacle for their subsequent time and region (e.g., for their iconic forms and superlative heights) and are internationally recognized in part for the quality of their designs as well as for the name of their designers. It is already quite clear that the geography to which this image referred was very selective. Only a handful of countries were included, with some repeated more than once. The cities found here are global cities and financial capitals such as New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Shanghai or crucial nodes in the global financial system like Frankfurt (the seat of European Central Bank) or Dubai. The waterfront refers to an imaginary island, which in fact does not exist but evidently takes the skyline of Manhattan as its inspiration (Taylor, 1992; Lindner, 2015).

In the past, painters reinterpreted the built environments of cities like Venice to enhance the richness of the buildings and the wealth of inhabitants. Centuries ago, cities like Istanbul, Amsterdam, and London emphasized their size and position as the center of trading and colonial empires through their dramatic skylines. I find this advertisement for the Financial Times somewhat in line with such historic examples. Just as paintings did in the past, this image fosters the idea that a spectacular city can, or even should, be comprised of a set of famous and distinctive buildings, each more impressive than the next. In reality, each of these buildings represents one financial center and enjoys a central location in its respective city. These centers cannot be simply conceived of as physical points of centrality, urban transportation gravitational centers or in contrast to a single periphery physically surrounding them. They operate as nodes in a layered network of material and virtual infrastructures, power relationships, and the economic interests at multiple scales that are present in global cities and global-city networks (GaWC, 2016). Contrary to the images of the capitals of past empires (like Venice, Istanbul or London), this one assembles the icons representing business in multiple global cities into one single transnational waterfront, without suggesting one single center.

1.1.2 Not an architectural coincidence

Directly in front of the Petronas Towers there is a solitary tower crowned with a pyramid-shaped cap. Contrary to all the other iconic buildings, it is difficult to determine specifically which building it is and where it sits in reality. The issue is not because it is a generic architecture, not at all; on the contrary, it is quite distinctive. Nonetheless, this building could easily be mistaken for the former Three World Financial Center in New York City or for the One Canada Square building in London’s business district of Canary Warf – both mentioned in the introduction to this book. This possible confusion, interestingly enough, went unnoticed and seemingly continues to (even among architects, critics, urban scholars, and geographers who have studied in depth these individual cases and even compared the developments in the two cities). As mentioned, perhaps at that time, most people expected the financial districts of two global capitals such as London and New York to look alike and did not notice anything awry, simply thinking nothing more of it. But today, such episodes have become ever more recurrent and perhaps scrutinizing such details within an advertisement, as well as in reality, deserves further attention.

The landmark building of Canary Wharf in London – i.e., the high-rise tower of One Canada Square, the tallest building in the UK between 1991 and 2010 – dramatically resembles its antecedent building located on the landfill of lower Manhattan and completed in 1988. Both count 51 floors and are roughly of the same height (225 m for the building in New York and 235 m for the one in London). They share a similar steel structure with part of the façade glazed; the shape of the top is nearly identical. Of course they both share office functions and public activities at their base (retail and civic space or public transportation). More interestingly, both were designed by the same architect, César Pelli, and funded by the same international developer, Olympia & York. This latter piece of information, in addition to an insight into real-estate development and the design firm, can help in understanding the reasons for such architectural similitudes and reveal part of their urban implications.

Olympia & York was a real-estate property development company that, in the 1980s and 1990s, expanded internationally from Canada thanks to strategic low-price acquisitions, large-scale master plans capable of developing whole new business centers, good connections with local planners and designers, a high risk-taking approach and advanced use of available financial instruments (Fainstein, 1994). In addition, the company tended to procure highly reliable architects, not risking going over time or over budget for frivolous aesthetic reasons. In the case of New York, after having won the bid for developing this area of Downtown Manhattan, they selected César Pelli through a design competition.

At the time of writing, César Pelli is an important architect based in the USA. Since starting his practice in 1977, he has completed more than 150 projects, including master plans and signature buildings (in some cases coupling the two), cooperating with relevant international developers and investors such as Hines. At the time of winning the New York competition, the firm was already recognized internationally as being very reliable for designing office and retail spaces. The bulk of its early-period work was built in the United States and Japan (Di Martino, 2015). The firm has also completed unique landmark buildings (both the Petronas Towers and the Hong Kong Two International Financial Center were highlighted in the Financial Times image, Figure 1.1) as well as becoming specialized in business districts and skyscrapers, more recently reaching several other markets in Asia and Europe. Despite Pelli once proclaiming that “Architecture is not a painting. It is about extraordinary creative responses to specific situations” (Pelli, 1999, 9), there are many technical and compositional solutions that his firm seemed to have repeated in significantly differing urban and geographic settings.

Both the New York and London pyramid-topped towers are not merely standalone pieces. They exist within larger real-estate schemes and master plans, both close to a riverfront. In the case of New York, the site is not far from the World Trade Center and was developed as the mixed-use commercial and high-end residential World Financial Center containing four high-rise towers and a civic winter-garden with retail space at the ground level. This project was one important component and the first installment of the broader Battery Park City development scheme (Fainstein, 1994). The London case followed the success of the New York project, though with quite a different ending (namely the bankruptcy of Olympia & York), and contains several similarities in terms of urban design and architectural forms. It was originally part of a large-scale redevelopment of former docklands, following the master plan by SOM and which involved internationally reputed architects including I.M. Pei and, indeed, César Pelli. One Canada Square became London’s modern landmark as the tallest building in the city and, more importantly, for its ability to represent the change the docklands were undergoing during the early 1990s, subsequently increasing the economic competitiveness of the area (for a detailed description of the process, see Sudjic, 2016). Despite the architectural similarities, the New York building was not intended as a reference point nor could it be, because of its role with three other fairly similar buildings by the same architect located near to the well-established icon of the Twin Towers.

Figure 1.2 Three World Financial Center in Manhattan, New York, 2011.

Source: Photograph by Paulm27.

1.1.3 A post-Marxist critique of urban forms and transformation

In his radical critique of the project and what it represented for London and the capitalist world, David Harvey described Canary Wharf area as

A collection of buildings by some of the world’s better known architectural firms – one building by I.M. Pei, two by Skidmore Owings and Merrill [SOM], one by Kohn Pedersen and Fox [KPF] and the 800 foot tower designed by César Pelli – lavishly appointed and equipped to be Europe’s most prestigious, most elegant, most beautifully manicured and above all most internationally efficient office complex.

(Harvey, 1994, 420)

With all the due substitutions of individual buildings, this ironic description could easily depict the imaginary city assembled in the Financial Times advert. In terms of actual urban environment, the radical transformation of the Canary Wharf area and its commercial components brought the same author, in addition, to say that the project “announces the death of public space and the street as a site of heterogeneity and difference, and it commemorates the universal and homogenizing uniformity of money power without even a trace of guilt” and inasmuch as

Figure 1.3 Canary Wharf seen from River Thames, London, 2011.

Source: Photograph by S nova.

it represents the spirit of the age that produc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• PART I: Transnational architecture and urbanism
• PART II: Critical issues
• PART III: Conclusions
• Index