Skyscrapers with Chinese Characteristics
The inhabited mountain is surely the hoariest metaphor for the skyscraper. From Gaudi to Taut to the great Deco towers of predepression New York to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there has, for a multitude, been an irresistible impulse to model towers on mountains and mesas. I’ve long shared this jones and it has been driven to obsession by visits to Cappadocia, to the American West and perhaps most strongly, to Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, where the concatenation of objects and their doubling in reflection simply blew me away. Unseen but often dreamt is the landscape of Guilin in China with its similarly ethereal peaks rising in the river mists.
Of course, the sacrality of mountains is a staple of faiths descending from the foggy past and perhaps nowhere is the mountainous more exactingly revered and aestheticized than in China, where peaks have been reverenced for yonks in Taoist, Buddhist, and imperial traditions and figure in systems of geomancy, pilgrimage, and – of course – representation. I’ve long been a (modest) collector of scholar’s rocks, those domesticated, miniature, mountains, geologic bonsai. My initial fascination had to do precisely with their incipience as architecture, their weirdly habitable looking tectonic and their irresistible character as almost-skyscrapers.
When we were commissioned some years ago to work on planning for a stretch of the waterfront along the Suzhou Creek in Shanghai, our primary missions were to reclaim the river edge, to extend the pedestrian realm, and to work to insinuate more intimate vectors of scale into an area that was rapidly succumbing to an epidemic of super- blocking and mega-building. Our planning defined locations for new towers that we hoped would aggregate in a suitably urban mountain range. An early study shows the deployment of mountains calculated to precise FAR’s on available sites, an image which apparently horrified the client. But delighted us.
Our mountain building has continued with a series of collages in which scholar’s rocks serve as sketches for towers that might ultimately find the means of their practicality in the development of their design. But, there’s an intention here that exceeds whimsy or coincidence. The search for qualities of locality in architecture, particularly for modern forms of building and organization that have no obvious “indigenous” cultural precedents grows more and more important as cultural differences are flattened by globalization and the all-pervasive influence of mass media. In China, the locomotive of development produces thousands of points of design inflection every day, sites at which someone must decide the degree of symbolic – often purely ornamental – localism to incorporate, whether the electric-eyed dragon wrapping the column at the shopping mall restaurant or the pagoda peak atop the tower downtown.
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Text: MICHAEL SORKIN,
Images provided by Michael Sorkin Studio