The Architectural Dimension
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by LSE Research Online Kerwin Datu The architectural dimension Book section (Text as published version) Original citation: Originally published in Acuto, Michele and Steele, Wendy, (eds.) Global City Challenges: Debating a Concept, Improving the Practice. (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ISBN 9781137286864 © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/56051/ Available in LSE Research Online: August 2014 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. The architectural dimension Kerwin Datu BArch (Hons) MSc PhD Department of Geography and Environment London School of Economics and Political Science For chapter 10 of Acuto, M. and Steele, W. (2013) Global City Challenges: debating a concept, improving the practice, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Introduction When we think about the architecture of the global city, often we have in our mind’s eye a certain kind of rather spectacular imagery, which may entail crystalline skyscrapers, luxurious residential complexes, rich cultural buildings, or works of breathtaking avant-garde design. The discourses surrounding these kinds of architecture can be equally spectacular, studded with vocabulary like ‘starchitects’, ‘the Bilbao effect’ and the ‘icon’. But these images and concepts constitute a highly selective and vastly incomplete vision of the architecture of the global city, and can be misleading for those who commission and produce this architecture as much as for the researchers who study it. This raises two particular challenges, which this chapter seeks to address. The first challenge is to overcome the self-selectiveness of what we think the architecture of the global city to be. To address this, this chapter proposes that researchers need to fix their analysis of this architecture within a framework that identifies the operational connections between architecture, cities and globalization, as well as sufficiently identifying the diversity of architectural landscapes subject to these connections. The framework proposed here is an extension of Sassen’s (2001) method of analysing global cities, namely that the production of architecture is bound up within the social production and reproduction of the global city itself which she describes. By tracing this cyclical process—from the production of the global city to the production of architecture and through to the impact of architecture and its production on the production of the global city—the full extent of what we mean by global city architecture can be identified and its social import determined. Other useful frameworks are briefly mentioned here as well. The Schumpeterian concept of creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1942; Harvey, 1981) explains how globalization processes assist in the displacement and replacement of architectural landscapes within cities. The logic of competition between cities, especially the activities of city marketing (Ashworth & Voogd, 1990) and place promotion (Gold & Ward, 1994), explains how city leaders demand specific kinds of 1 architecture in order to promote their city with specific kinds of images. The second challenge is how to treat the spectacular imagery that dominates and even obscures our understanding of global city architecture. This chapter proposes that the prevalence of this imagery must be given its proper place within the frameworks outlined above. There are scholars and critics who attempt to discount the visual, representational, ‘spectacular’ or ‘iconic’ dimensions of architecture, implying that they distract us from the arguably more important social functions and impacts that architecture must attend to (Lees, 2001; Sudjic, 2005). However this stance merely precludes the important scholarly task of understanding why the architecture of the global city should abound with such spectacular imagery in the first place, and of understanding why the neglect of its social impacts happens so often. Rather than see the image of architecture as a distraction, we need to identify its place within the framework of the production of the global city, and thus be able to weigh its impacts against those of other aspects of architectural works and their production. The proposal put forward here is that the image(s) that a work of architecture or indeed an entire architectural landscape projects is something deliberately constructed by those who commission and design that architecture, and is intended to communicate specific messages to a remote target audience by the transmission of those images through various media. When it comes to global cities, the key ingredient in understanding this is the concept of scale. While the image that works of architecture project in the media may have various intentions (secure more work for the architect, attract visitors to the institutions, etc.), in the context of globalization and cities these images and the messages they convey are intended to be communicated at the global scale, to audiences far removed from the geographic, social, economic and political contexts of the physical work itself. As a result, the gulf between the construction of the image of a work of architecture and the construction of the physical building anchored in and responding to the needs, values and expectations of its local setting is at its widest in global cities. It is a great challenge for researchers to analyse the intentions and the impacts operating at both of these scales simultaneously, often because they are seemingly incommensurable, but it is important to find ways to combine these analyses rather than to discount the import of one or the other. Global city architecture: More than the ‘spectacular’ The practice of architecture provides our collective imagination of the global city with its most potent visual image: the city skyline. Some of the most iconic images of cities are the most famous skylines in the world, for example Manhattan in New York or Hong Kong set against its hills. Alternatively the image of a global city that architecture provides may be encapsulated in a single ‘iconic building’ (Jencks, 2005)—an individual work of architecture that captures the 2 world’s imagination and fuses with the identity of the city within the global consciousness. Some of the most effective architectural icons of recent decades are the Sydney Opera House by Jørn Utzon, the Pyramide du Louvre by I. M. Pei and Partners, the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum by Gehry Partners, 30 St Mary Axe (nicknamed ‘the Gherkin’) in London by Foster and Partners, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai by Skidmore Owings and Merrill. Another yet a no less spectacular and selective image of global cities is to see them as homes to the world’s most innovative architects and other designers dictating global fashions and trends from their bases in districts like Clerkenwell in London or Chelsea in Manhattan, or through publications like Wallpaper, Domus, or Architectural Review. When a global city wishes to illustrate its supremacy as an economic capital, these are naturally amongst the images it invokes. Likewise when a city aspires to become a global city, it is these images it turns to for inspiration. There is a tendency for leaders to take a very superficial reading of global cities (especially of very new cities such as Dubai and Singapore), to seek to replicate their image by assembling what they believe to be the necessary parts—skyscrapers, shopping malls, railways, etc.—and to eliminate from view all that seems at odds with such an image—history, temporality, dilapidation, informality, spontaneity. There are two misconceptions involved in these kinds of efforts. The first is the belief that global cities do not also contain these elements of decay within their environments, and the second is that it is necessary to actively eradicate them to become a global city. Neither of these is true of course; it is simply that global cities rarely advertise the fact. But to the people who inhabit global cities, there are always areas large and small known and even cherished for their decay, their decadence, their street life, their chaos, their resistance to planning and control, or just their simple ordinariness. The concept of the ‘ordinary city’ (Robinson, 2005) is a useful reminder that despite whatever classifications are applied to a city, such as ‘global’ or ‘world’ city, there are many more mundane facets to that city than those indicated by such an appellation. Likewise the architecture of any city we might call ‘global’ extends far beyond that which we associate with the city’s ‘global’ face into a landscape of ordinary buildings and spaces that comprise the rest of the city. In this light there is no categorical distinction between a ‘global city’ such as Singapore and a city that aspires to become one such as, say, Surat. Both may desire to have ‘global’ architecture, and both will necessarily contain ordinary buildings, and neither city’s makers may rightfully focus on one to the neglect of the other. When we talk about ‘the architecture of the global city’ then, we are compelled to talk about all of its architectures, whether they fit our image of what a global city should look like or not. However this is not to say that when discussing ‘the architecture of the global city’ we should dilute our focus to any architecture in any urban area. Rather it is to change the way we narrow our focus.