Satellit, Schlagzeilen lesen

While I'm anxious to move on geographically from the last few posts about Nairobi, as well as received as they have been (thanks to everyone who read and shared the last few posts). But I did want to post on a particular development near Nairobi that has been on my to-write list of this blog since very early on, and which, before I could get to it,  "has made the rounds" on the internet, as is the contemporary phrasing.

[The Atlantic Cities blog is really something of the Walmart of Architecture Blogs. It's the clearest example in this corner of the internet just how different and more corporate blogging is, in the barely half-decade since the medium of the blog became common. The once-revered Atlantic magazine, in its post-print plans, seems more intent on catching hourly page-views than the slower-paced, higher-intellect journalism that its paper version pioneered in an earlier century.]

"Kenya's Konza Tech City" is one of several new satellite cities planned across the continent of Africa. Inexplicably, it was CNN.com, of all places, that did a run-down of several of the more prominent of these new-built towns in Africa earlier this year, although the lede, "A glimpse of Africa's Urban future or utopian fantasies?" embodies everything brain-dead about that entire news franchise. I have mentioned some of these developments before, in one of my first blog posts, which was a massively verbose run-down on the extra-continental perceptions of African Architecture, c.2010, but I did not focus on these new satellite cities at length.

Inspired by his visit to Silicon Valley in the United States, the home of the U.S. high-tech industry, [Information Minister] Ndemo says the project aims to attract international investors who either cannot find space in overcrowded downtown Nairobi, or who cannot find buildings that meet their standards.  

 "Kenya's $7bn Technopolis," a new development planned 60km southeast of the Kenyan capital as part of the government's "Vision 2030," seeks to pump up GDP growth to 10% per year and create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and, to hear the marketing video, transform Kenya and Africa, namely by inventing an East African Silicon Valley outside of Nairobi, thereby making Kenya a global hub for IT and call centers. Ground-breaking was delayed several times, but is apparently underway. Here is the promotion video:

Konza, and the other satellite instant cities which are springing up across Africa, manifest the vanguard financial forces that have arrived on the continent, viewing Africa as the final outpost for growth-busting capitalism, and replicate the collusional model of state-facilitated, investor-and-debt-sponsored property-development which occurs elsewhere. 

These satellite cities hope to tackle two different aspects: accommodating urbanization and creating modern cities to complement development. They also seek to embrace their respective countries' advantages. For instance, Konza City in Nairobi, Kenya is a multi-billion dollar ICT city park. The Kenyan Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication expects Konza City to be Africa’s home of computerization, the equivalent of Silicon Valley in California, complete with skyscrapers, business centers, international schools and hospitals. It is no secret that Nairobi aspires to be the technology hub of East Africa. 

 The main parameters of Konza and Africa's other satellite districts are the same: a vast zone on the edge of the existing metropolis, transformed in the glossy renderings of business parks and condo towers, and breezy copy, serving as both real-estate boosterism and political spin, boasting the number of jobs, the number of square miles or hectares under transformation, the population in some far-off decade, the square footage of various purposes, above all class-A office space, the number of luxury hotel rooms, the number of condos, and of course the height of the tallest, iconic building.

Satellite cities are driven by business developers and as a result are being promoted by businesses and are consequently labeled as the future of well-organized urban spaces.

It is the banality of these dual replications that is repellently fascinating: the outmoded, debt-lead financial schemes (and the corruption that pervades such machines), realized through outmoded, unsustainable design schemes (as much as they are marketed as "green").

These new cities are openly being sold as flight from the old city center, which, with its dated buildings and poor people, is deemed unsuitable for contemporary lifestyles and business. It is central Nairobi as downtown Detroit. The internet-technology-as-economic-savior trope, while no less realistic, is only slightly less out of date. Under such narratives, it may be therefore less surprising but no less outrageous,  when local Kenyan press reveals that the government has sought to specifically outlaw slums within 10-km of Konza, a sweeping radius that is experiencing rampant property speculation among the elites. The proposed high-speed rail line, non-stop from Konza to Nairobi's international airport, bypassing any actual interaction the people or economy outside of the gated city, is more evidence of the logic that governs this development.

Aesthetically, what is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of Konza City's marketing package is also its most revealing: the random appearance of Dubai's twin Emirates towers at the town center and, even more hilariously, the presence of Montreal's Olympic Stadium as Konza's sports facility. The fiscal catastrophe of the Montreal Olympics is forgotten in favor of the futuristic icon of recreation and revenue-generation via professional sports and sport-event hosting facilities; and there is simply no higher nirvana in dreams developing-world urban growth than Dubai. While the prominent placement of copies of other cities buildings in the renderings of Konza may simply be the result of lazy draughting-by-Google-image-search, but the symbolism is inadvertently perfect.

The Konza e-city will come complete with skyscrapers, hotels, international schools, a world-class hospital, a financial district, a high-speed mass transport system and integrated infrastructure. It will put the capital city’s CBD completely in the shade as it will come with smart fully-computerised buildings, thoroughfares and other infrastructure. Coming on top of other Vision 2030 infrastructure and ICT rollouts, Konza e-city will be the jewel in the crown of a new and completely transformed Kenya.

It has the potential to create 100,000 jobs, the vast majority of them in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector. The comparison with India in the FT headline story on Kenya is indeed a suggestion that Konza e-city could well become a global call centre, placing Kenya in the big leagues of the digital world economy.  --quoted from this website

The startling, dispiriting realization at Konza and elsewhere is, that the final frontiers of human economic and community development are being radically realized as sloppy copies of the dysfunctional, and discredited spatial and financial structures of the most unsustainable cities elsewhere. If Dubai and Phoenix, Atlanta and Abu Dhabi, Dallas and Doha are seen as ecological and social catastrophes, then it is all the more dispiriting to find that dozens, perhaps hundreds of cities are rushing to be made in their image, right down to the shapes of their skylines.

Frankfurt und Anderswo

FRANKFURT AM MAIN.

Journalists have employed the term "Mainhattan"regularly over the last two decades to describe Frankfurt, ostensibly due its thicket of high-rise financial towers that has risen across the west-end of the city. Frankfurt's American-style "downtown" skyline, began rising in the mid-1970s, never 'exploding' so much as growing bit by bit, as it does today. Frankfurt looked remarkably different from any other European city.

Although somewhat renown in the recent past as the most substantial skyline of continental Europe, this hyperbolic moniker's impact has diminished as European skyscrapers became less unusual, and especially as European skyscrapers have become more common, such as post-1990s Rotterdam or Warsaw, much less when considered against the hundreds of formally-flat cityscapes from Doha to Shenzhen which today appear as a shimmering walls of highrises.

Top: southeastern Frankfurt: The Romer, the Main Plaza, the ECB Tower

Bottom: Central-East Frankfurt, the Zeil Hochhaus and Jumeirah Hotel at Left, the ECB at far right.

©2012 Bauzeitgeist.

Not that anyone besides journalists and architectural enthusiasts have ever used the term "Mainhattan," But to at any point call Frankfurt's small cluster of not-particularly-tall buildings a peer to New York's miles-wide skyline was always ridiculously overblown. A more appropriate, if less cosmopolitan, reference would be to a similarly-sized and shaped American city. Frankfurt's skyline was never more substantial or impressive than the elevation of downtown Pittsburgh or Nashville.

 Left: Messeturm, Frankfurt, by Helmut Jahn, 1990.

Right: NationsBank, Atlanta, by Roche Dinkeloo, 1992.

Both images via Wikipedia Commons.

If the comparison should have always been more Mainneapolis than Mainhattan, then at least, in those years, American economic might was still the pinnacle of achievement, worthy of imitation and adoption. Architecturally, this is particularly manifest of that lengthy golden age of post-unification, pre-Euro Germany, when an optimistic Frankfurt embraced corporate American postmodernism as the face of its increasingly intra- and intercontinental financial district.

What had begun as a few German-designed glass boxes pre-1989 was joined by colorful, whimsical bank buildings rising up around the Bahnhofvertiel, of the same generation as the neoclassical office towers that became the tallest buildings in many American cities from Cleveland to Charlotte in the 1990s, as both continents reached the apex of transatlantic corporatism.

 

Left: Westend Tower, by Kohn Penderson Fox, 1993. Photo ©2003 Bauzeitgeist.

Right: US Bancorp, Minneapolis, by Pei Cobb 1992. Image via Wikipedia.

This resulted in such towers as the pyramid-capped Messeturm, which would not look out of place in Atlanta's midtown; KPF's Westend Tower, whose curving-white brise-soliel was, its hard to comprehend now, seen as daring when it was completed, spawned identical hundreds across the North America from Miami to Vancouver, later spreading to other continents. Yet Westend Tower completed a year after Pei Cobb's US Bancorp in Minneapolis opened in 1992, crowned with a similar fan.

Lastly, and while not copying so closely an particular tropes of American post-modernism, the strangely-crowned Trianon Tower has no closer kin than the Centerpoint Energy Plaza in Houston.

Top: Centerpoint Energy Plaza, Houston, with its 1996 crown. ©2003 Bauzeitgeist

 Bottom: Trianon, Frankfurt, built 1999. ©2003-2012 Bauzeitgeist

At least a few in Frankfurt seemed to take the city's gothamist nickname somewhat seriously. In looking at the architectural record, this is best supported by the extremely curious Main Plaza, on the south bank of the Main, a hotel tower which seems to directly copy Raymond Hood's 1924 Art Deco American Radiator Building in midtown Manhattan (and Chicago's Tribune Tower), which itself was inspired by gothic architecture: a transatlantic style boomerang; post-modern irony at its pinnacle.

Top: Main Plaza, Frankfurt, 2001. Photo @2012 Bauzeitgeist.

Bottom: American Radiator Building, 33rd Street, New York, by Raymond Hood, 1924.

Image via Wikipedia Commons.

On a recent visit to Frankfurt, specifically to view the exhibit at the DAM, two prominent additions to Frankfurt skyline show that Frankfurt's skyscraping continues on, but perhaps with new influences and inspirations. In the center of the city, just off the Zeil, the city's wide fußgangerzone, rises the stylish Jumeirah Hotel, the newest outpost of the Dubai-based luxury hotel chain.

Its highly-contemporary exterior, characterized by jagging and wiggling elevations and punched by stochastic slits of windows, employs two popular devices from the contemporary architecture kit of the last few years, which can be found in the United States as much as anywhere (such as the "curving" and "sexy" Roosevelt University Tower which has invaded Chicago's historic Michigan Avenue district. The Jumeriah takes the same jagged shape, while also being reminiscent of the Hilton Hotel in Houston.

 Jumeirah Frankfurt and the Zeil Hochhaus.  ©2012 Bauzeitgeist.

This new developed is adjacent to the historic Thurn und Taxis Palais, but the hotel does not utilize the older building for a substantial street presence or spacious lobby. Instead, a narrow corridor with lectern-sized front desks opens directly onto the ground floor of one the bustling, glittery, mid-market malls which dominate the pedestrian shopping precinct. While linking luxury towers to malls is a standard real estate cocktail around the world, its a formula which is waning in North America at the same time it is worshipped in Arabia, and it seems telling that luxury was conveyed in this particularly non-European fashion.

Hilton Hotel Houston ©2003 Bauzeitgeist.

The Jumeirah, part of the  Zeil Hochhaus I & II phase of the Palais Quartiel development, might therefore be best described as a Gulf hotel in a German city, programmatically, stylistically, and architecturally following the bland luxury development formula that is applied in cities everywhere nowadays.

What is therefore more remarkable both in scale and its peripheral location is the substantial European Center Bank Headquarters at the southeastern limit of the city center, at the Großmarkthalle, a vegetable market which also played an ignominious role in assembling deportees from the city during the Holocaust.

This huge complex rises outside the normally skyscraper-belt, and it is interesting to speculate on the meaning and impact of the ECB's new location, whether this move from the Bahnhofverteil to the Großmarkt marks Frankfurt's shift from its City to its Canary Wharf, especially when viewing central Frankfurt's distant cluster of skyscrapers from the riverfront, docklands-like construction site around the Großmarkthalle. German cities never shielded their centers from development like Paris, but its most skyscraper-strewn city may yet get its La Defense.

Frankfurt's Docklands: The Großmarkthalle site at a bend in the river, 

southeast of the city's center, with the existing financial district several miles distant. 

The Main Plaza is at mid-center left, behind the bridge. 

See Google Earth image at top of post to note how the oxbow bend of the Main echoes the Thames at the Docklands.

Above Image via Wikipedia.

The huge ECB premises, with twin towers pivoting toward each other at an angle connected by multiple, cantilevering sky-bridges between, is dashingly contemporary in its styling. This is the latest iteration of an emerging kinship of such twin-towers, most especially such supersleek developments as the World Trade Centre in Bahrain, which has been mentioned in this blog a few times before.

Bahrain's World Trade Center, c.2008. Image via Inhabitat.

A fable for our times, the ECB has been working on a substantial new building throughout a crisis which now impugns the very concept of a centralized Europe, which has lead no less than George Soros that Germany should either save or leave the Euro. 

While last week's announcement that the ECB development would be overbudget by 41% was met with exasperated derision and humor, that the ECB seems to be emulating new financial capitals much farther to the southeast from its old offices, the sovereign-wealth-fund federation between Doha and Abu Dhabi, with a glittering, Gulf-like financial center. Rather than recall a more rational and socially beneficial heritage of finance, the ECB's architecture reflects out to the flashy new centers of money.

Frankfurt has never been a large city, or at least, never larger by area or population than other German or European cities. Its markets and banks, the vast convention halls of the Messe, and its busy, centrally-positioned airport have made Frankfurt a global city. However, this isn't the same as being cosmopolitan, in the same way that its important book fair is not make Frankfurt a center for literature. As stated in the Guardian earlier this month, even as it has continued to persevere as a global banking center, Frankfurt has never grown into a metropolis.

Despite its under-rated museums and its pleasant quality of life, Frankfurt is only a cross-roads of trade and transport, without the overlay of romance and art that defines London or New York. Its central district holds the late-evening routes of lonely foreign businessmen, not the storied streets of a world capital. Frankfurt may so badly wish to be compared to these sophisticated cities, but it continues to grow by building upward with skyscrapers evoke those duller, more commonplace business districts that are its true peers.

Mein Leiblingsgebäude in Bridgeport

BRIDGEPORT.

As mentioned in the previous posts, I've been taking the Boston to New York train frequently this Spring. Passing through cities every half hour or so, I've come to admire one building in particular. It's located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at the corner of Helen and Arctic Streets, just east of that city's faded, half-occupied downtown.

Top image ©Google, Above images ©2011 Bauzeitgeist

Its the original 1873 Remington Arms Factory, a former munitions plant, which became in 1915 the southern portion of a 73-acre General Electric campus, but has stood vacant and disused for decades in the marginalized, depressed district, the fourth largest city in America's wealthiest state.

Buildings like this tower aren't made any more, although one of the reasons I also like it is that, in form and translucence, it is similar to the Hejduk Towers in the City of Culture Galicia, Spain. Given that passengers from New York to New Haven pass by this complex, inspiration for Hejduk's design, and Eisenman's realization, is not out of the question.

Image of Hejduk Towers in Spain courtesy this website

Aside from being unused, the factory suffered from arson in August of 2010, possibly due to squatters. Under pressure from government, which views the historic complex as a hazard (and is owed back taxes), the assembly halls have already been partially raised, acts which are in evidence from the passing train. It is also said to be occupied by spirits.

Image courtesy this website

I can't find anything specific plans of the tower or its use. Although chimney-like, I imagine it might have been the administrative offices of the plant. There is also no detail at hand about saving or reusing the tower. Maybe it will be pulled down in the last phase of the demolition. I wonder if anything will go in its place.

Four Seasons Federal Reserve Bank Boston Bahrain Bay

BOSTON, and BAHRAIN.

The rendering below shows a design divergent from the recent generation of flowy, melty, rendery, deconstructed designs that have been proposed for Gulf cities. Which is basically to say that its extremely rectilinear, as opposed to a form dictated by the transdimensional gymnastics of computer design programs.

It is also unmistakably similar to one of Boston's more recognizable skyscrapers, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, built in and designed by Hugh Stubbins.

This second set of illustrations, via the website Daily Icon, are even more remarkable. Compare (the Four Seasons renderings are the images with the purple sky and palm trees):

When I was younger I was a big fan of Hugh Stubbins big, shiny, beaming skyscrapers: Citicorp, Cleveland Place, Yokohama, etc. More as elements of the skyline than buildings themselves.

The Federal Reserve is criticized for being suburban at its base, which is I presume a result of Fort Knox requirements, which is probably insufficient today.

©2005-2010 Bauzeitgeist, except renderings.

Nowadays I would be scoffed at for bringing Stubbins up as an example of great architecture. Which in a way makes it that much curiouser, then, that his design is being riffed in 2010 by SOM.

Rembrandtor

AMSTERDAM, and SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS.

This is a story about a building, and its name, and how they are connected. Its also a story about thinking about a question, and its answers, for some time before immediately seeking or discovering the history, evidence or reasons, and how history changes truths. In addition to my observations and photographs, this entry is interspersed with quotes from two volumes: Amsterdam's High Rise, edited by Maarten Kloos and published by ARCAM, and Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City, by Geert Mak.

I had an incredible few months in Amsterdam this year, and I'm in the process of readjusting to life State-side. Getting used to being in a car every day, for instance. From late May til early September, I did lots of train and bike riding, even a handful of evening canal-boat trips.

Its no news that the Netherlands are full of great buildings, the centuries-old canal houses and some of the most incredible contemporary architecture in the world. It also, like all things Dutch, has its fair share of weird, from the intentionally-far out to the unintentionally curious and out of place. This includes some unexpected examples of American-style corporate post-modernism skyscrapers, which seem somehow the least Dutch form of building.

Like most European cities, historic Central Amsterdam is surrounded by successive rings of more recent development. The outer edges, particularly to the south and southwest, are now small thickets of skyscrapers, much like La Défense in Paris and Canary Wharf in London.

The southwestern area, around Amstel Station, historically caleld the Weesperzijde and often referred to as the Omval, where the Amstel river bends before entering the older city, is in particular quite a lot like the Isle of Dogs, with its bland corporate headquarters, bleak plazas (although, in this case the Amstelplein is more diminutive, as everything in the Netherlands always seems to be), nearby rail station, and adjacent waterways.

Having emerged at roughly the same era, the two Eurocorporate clusters are remarkably similar in appearance, atmosphere, function, and even relation to the wider city.

The area is easy identified by three tall skyscrapers, which are the tallest in the city.

The very tallest of these is a grey, neo-American art deco pomo office block. It is named for artist Rembrandt van Rijn, as if the tower is an advertisement for the whole country, a commercial beacon. The Rembrandtor.

At 135m and 35 stories, it is the tallest building in Amsterdam. It consists of a steel skeleton around a concrete core and narrows toward the top. At the base, the tower has a surface area of 48 x 48 m, and at the level of the upper floors this is 22 x 22m. The core, which also tapers toward the top, contains lifts and service space. The building houses 30,000 m2 of office space, a restaurant, and a business-support centre, as well as an underground car-park for 240 vehicles. The façade is executed in a crystal-white, fire natural stone, with glass sections at the corners. --Amsterdam's High-Rise, The Hesistant High-Rise, p92. Maarten Kloos, ed. ©1995 ARCAM Pocket

Not surprisingly for a tall tower in a low, flat city, isolated away from the built-up areas, Rembrandtor is visible from many different parts of the city, as if a panopticon that followed me around on my bike rides and tram trips.

An…aspect of the high-rise debate in the Netherlands is that the Dutch do not have much affinity with the prestige attached to high-rise…nowhere in the Netherlands is there any expression of Sullivan's 'pride of exaltation.' Nowhere does high-rise 'parade its heights, as Cesar Pelli wants it to do. There is no real cultural acceptance of the phenomenon. --Ibid., p.101

[As written by]…Dutch Architectural critic Max van Roy on 27 February 1995: "Rembrandt Tower appears on Amsterdam's horizon as a deus ex machine. Better: it appears on all its horizons, because it can be seen even from the most unexpected angles.--Ibid., p.93

I ended up photographing it a lot as can be seen: on the street, from other vantage points in the center city, even from the car or train when going out of town for the weekend. As it is located at the edge of the city where the main rail and road lines enter, its possible to see the tower clearly from nearly 20km away, near the town of Breukelen (it also helps that Holland is so absolutely flat).

Rembrandt Tower stands prominently…and is majestically present, since it can be seen both along important sight lines over the canals and the Amstel and from the countryside surrounding Amsterdam. --Ibid.

I kept asking myself a totally rhetorical and sort of odd question: What might Rembrandt himself thought of Rembrandtor?

Rembrandt is more than 300 years dead, his remains somewhere beneath the Westerkerk, that other Amsterdam skyscraper. A real answer is completely impossible to have, and I didn't even know why I was asking it, other than to confront the curious and unfortunate way in which I assumed the man's name had been so boldly co-opted for what I supposed to be corporate developer marketing. I didn't exactly research the question on my own, but the thought kept entering my mind, as when I visited Leiden one Sunday and learned that Rembrandt owned property near his birthplace, or read that of his reputation in the Amsterdam society of his time.

[His patron the burgomaster] even tried, without success, to integrate Rembrandt in Amsterdam society. Geert Mak, Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City, p.128

The first problem was Rembrandt's character. He was, to put it mildly, not especially polite. The few anecdotes about him that have come down to us also illustrate his greed…Stories also relate his bad humor, his moodiness, his coarseness and his falseness. --Ibid., p.128

©all images (except top) 2010 Bauzeitgeist

Rembrandt also lacked a solid political base in the city. The Amsterdam sociopolitical system was founded on patronage and protection, with the result that the status of a painter depended only in part on the quality of his work. Far more important was the question of which circles patronized him, something akin to the importance which museum and art critics place upon the "value" of a piece of art today. In this Rembrandt did not exactly prove himself adept. --Ibid., p. 129

Having left Holland, and without my daily encounters with the strange figure on the horizon, I mostly forgot about it. But then, last Tuesday, as I was readjusting to life in Boston, I noticed that the world's pre-eminent Rembrandt scholar, Ernst van der Wetering, would be lecturing at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.

I attended the event. I cornered the fellow afterwards and, served up in some rambling prelude, blurted out my question: what would Rembrandt have made of Rembrandtor. For someone who had just filled a room with wisdom of Rembrandt's mastery of light, he was very receptive to such an oddball interrogation, and was quite helpful to inform me of the existence of a 1640 landscape drawing by Rembrandt, who enjoyed sojourning in the very Weespersizjde where his name-sake tower now stands. It wasn't only a shallow, easy name.

Speaking to Rembrandt's personality, and referencing Rembrandt's troubled, indebted, scandalized demise, ending with his anonymous burial in a pauper's grave, van der Wetering asserted that Rembrandt would have reveled in the appellation with the pride and hubris of the ultimate revenge, so much better known to history than any of the city's burgomasters and merchants, that the dull, post-modern, neo-Art Deco edifice which blocks the views he once sketched, stand as his monument over a city that had once shamed and forgotten him.