Shanghai and New York: Mid-Century Urban Avant-Gardes
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Shanghai and New York: Mid-Century Urban Avant-Gardes Rosemary Wakeman History Department & Urban Studies Program, Fordham University, New York, United States Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural and architectural exchanges between Shanghai and New York in the mid-20th century and their iconic roles as avant-garde global capitals. It considers the cultural and architectural free-thinkers and the groundbreaking movements they led, as well as their influence on the character and identity of both cities. Art Deco was the emblematic symbol of these modern forces. The article analyses the new technolo- gies and theatrical perspective, the performative and spectacular qualities of Art Deco as the signature styles and cultural heritage of both cities. KEYWORDS Art Deco, New York, avant-garde, Radio City Music Hall, Park Hotel, lighting design, technology, Ca- thay Cinema, cityscape, film Received May 12, 2019; accepted August 15, 2019. In the 1920s and 1930s, New York and Shanghai were Much has already been written about New York and bustling cosmopolitan metropolises, melting pots of Shanghai in the 1930s. The scholarship on ‘Art Deco nationalities and by extension architectural styles from New York’ and ‘Art Deco Shanghai’ is multitudinous. around the world. New York was already a metropolis This article focuses more narrowly on specific facets of some 7 million people and just behind London as the of this heritage. It broadens out the imaginary of built largest city in the world. With 3.2 million inhabitants heritage to include the composite of cosmopolitan in- in 1932, Shanghai was the fifth largest city in the world. fluences that shaped the urban fabric, and that made Its population increased to 5 million by the end of the these cities into global crossroads. While the influence 1930s. Both cities were teaming ports and places of en- of New York and the American architectural idiom on counter with a flux-and-flow of peoples moving across Shanghai is taken fully into account, the article argues borders and frontiers. They were shaped by exchanges that similar avant-garde influences inspired architects and the mingling of publics, ideas, trade. This circulation in both cities and predisposed the way their built en- of peoples and cultures, the collision of all these ideas vironments were produced. It takes a closer look at ar- and ways of seeing was a boiling cauldron of creativity. chitecture as urban theatre and redefines architectural They made New York and Shanghai into global pivots for space to include what are often considered ephemeral the production and consumption of urban modernity. or inconsequential elements, and yet were decisive in The modern temperament, the famous New York and making architecture into avant-garde production. Spe- Shanghai ‘styles’, was defined by skyscrapers, department cifically, new building technologies and theatre design stores, and their glitzy ballrooms and jazz dance clubs. were both at the nexus of perceptions about modernism Their built heritage comprised manifold cultures. Both and urban form. Technology was the guiding leitmotif cities were the sites of competing architectural styles- ne- of the 20th century. Technology along with architecture oclassical and pompous Beaux-Arts buildings sat along- in the service of mass culture and consumption, popu- side Art Deco towers that exemplified the new age. The lar entertainment and urban spectacle opens a rich aesthetic tensions that existed in New York and Shanghai perspective on built heritage. It ties it to the myriad created mesmerising cityscapes that was already legend- transformations that made New York and Shanghai into ary in the 1930s. modern urban icons. R. Wakeman 49 Art Deco as Future City capitalism, while in Shanghai, it was a visible sign of the colonial presence and a mesmerising newness invented in It was the Art Deco skyscrapers that crowned their sky- the West. Alluding to the lesser role that Shanghai often lines in the 1920s and 1930s that made New York and played in relation to the great western capitals, the pub- Shanghai into unabashed icons of the future. Rockefel- lisher of The China Journal argued that Shanghai ‘must ler Center, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State show that it is one of the “Great Three” along with London Building in New York were glorious signatures of urban and New York … Shanghai is the London, New York and modernism as were Shanghai’s Park Hotel, the Sassoon House, and Broadway Mansions. Of course, not everyone Paris of the East, all rolled into one’ (Sowerby 1928, 114). was convinced that the skyscraper was the future. Ven- Shanghai was becoming ‘an apartment city just as are New erable American urban theorist Lewis Mumford called York and London’. At the same time, the cosmopolitan New York’s skyscrapers ‘a blind alley and an insupportable qualities of Art Deco were directly connected to Eurocen- luxury’ (Mumford 1933). But for the majority gazing up at trism. A plea for Chinese expertise in modern architecture the soaring towers, Art Deco was the vision of a futuristic asserted that ‘We want variety in the “brave new world”. city. It formed part of a cosmopolitan imagination ema- We most emphatically do not want an exact reproduction nating from the West. Architects consciously abandoned of Europe or America in Asia.’ (North China Herald 1929, the historical forms that dominated architecture up to the 1934) Yet in this dialogue between east and west, the re- 1920s as stogy and unsuitable to the modern age. Instead, semblances between the cities were as provocative as their they found inspiration from a wild variety of sources in differences. In both cities, Art Deco symbolised money what amounted to a global intermixing of styles. Art Deco and power and took on a hegemonic caste (Lee 2001, 92– exuded optimism and aesthetic exuberance. It was a spec- 95). It is easy to interpret this heritage as a capitalist logic tacular statement of ‘newness’, of a future filled with pos- exulting in the flashy facades. It was the rich and famous sibilities. It was an immediate international sensation, in- who inhabited the luxurious Art Deco skyscrapers rising fusing cities across the globe with a scintillating verve, an on the skylines, and their glamorous lives became the stuff architectural jazz that matched the modern age. Although of Hollywood films shown in the cinemas of Shanghai and profoundly eclectic, it was the technology that pervaded New York. The Bund and Fifth Avenue were the frontiers modern life that most infused the new Art Deco aesthetic. of global capitalism. Architects and designers embraced airships and cruise If architecture exuded wealth and privilege, it was also ships, the whirring cogs and wheels of the factory. They a product of the crossroads positions of both cities, a kind rendered the machine aesthetic in linear and geometric of migratory or melting pot modernism that scaled ter- forms and cubist volumes, in sumptuous metals, zigzag ritorial frontiers and wandered through urban cultures, and streamlined configurations that evoked the energy imbibing local design practices, picking up fragments and and power of technology. They explored the interplay of adapting to local aesthetics. British sociologist Gerard planes, the juxtaposition of patterns, colours and textures. Delanty argues that there are moments of world open- In this regard, the impact of the 1925 Paris Exposition des ness in which the encounter between the local and the Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes on New York as global shaped cultural modes of mediation (Delanty 2006, well as on Shanghai was profound and rapid. The Exposi- 27). The avant-garde production of the 1920s and 1930s tion graced the Seine River in the west of Paris from April was indeed such a moment. In both cities, the genealogi- to October that year with an official attendance of over 15 cal roots that made up this cultural mélange were many, million people. The exposition was itself a place of fantasy and the meaning of this modernist heritage goes beyond and wonder. Under the banner of ‘Art Deco’, the Exposi- the hypnotic decorative spell that Art Deco caste. It was tion challenged participants with an avant-garde credo: a form of global cultural knowledge situated in the local ‘Works admitted to the Exposition must show new inspi- (Windover 2009, 24). The geometric forms and motifs of ration and real originality.’ East Asian decorative art added to the mix as did Futurism It was this experimental aesthetic temperament that and Constructivism. Central European avant-garde design made Art Deco so adaptable across cultures. Rather than was a significant ingredient to this stew of global influ- simply emulate Paris, when it was transplanted inter- ences, as were avant-garde theories of democratic theatre nationally, the design took on different meanings and and mass society, along with the technological wizardry fashioned distinct New York and Shanghai ‘styles’. In of engineering and communication media, and dreams of New York, Art Deco was the signature of a triumphant cities made up of spiny-needle skyscrapers. In the hands 50 BUILT HERITAGE 2019 / 3 Figure 1 Walter Gropius (1883– 1969), 1927. Berlin: Total Thea- tre: Plan deep stage in position 3 (Source: ARTSTOR). 1 of the avant-garde, these appealed to the emotions and the design of the playhouse itself (Figure 1). As part of the imagination. They made up a broad modernist heritage broad social theory shared by these cosmopolitan elites, in which the ‘irrational fantasies’, as Rem Koolhaas called the modern theatre was imagined as a mass democratic them, about the future city came to full light (Koolhaas medium (Gropius and Schlemmer, 1924). The focus was 1997, 173). on dramatic technique and technics. Revolutionary uses of space, form, colour, sound, motion would dissolve into the shifting, illusionary arena of the imagination.