“The ‘Golden Toilet’ Stage of Things”

A brief, topical post, underscoring some of the spatial-architectural aspects of the recent events in Ukraine: not so much the incredible scenes from Kiev, of a European square as a blackened, apocalyptic war zone, but the spectacle outside the capital, as the general public descended on the ousted ruler's latter-day Versailles.

Photos: Jeffrey J. Mitchell/Getty Images and David Rose for the Telegraph

The tone of the reports was gleeful, fueled by the astonishing images of the gaudy, overstuffed furnishings and bizarre fantasy amusements of Yanukovych's estate: the mini-hovercraft, the elaborate galleon moored on the man-made lake, the private zoo with its ostriches. It also undoubtedly compelled an upbeat voice due to the pleasant irony of regular folks filing through the attraction in an orderly fashion, rather than ripping the place apart in a furious orgy of looting, as if the palace had already become an historical monument of a distant era, open for tours during regular hours, where visitors could chuckle at the poor taste of so many tacky, ego-stroking follies. 

Constantin Chernichkin/Reuters

Washington Post Image

This blog has intermittently covered the architectural and landscape dimensions of this decade’s revolutions, recently in Istanbul and the streets of Brazil, and earlier the spatial aspects of the uprising in Bahrain. The primacy of public space in Cairo has been extensively discussed by Orhan Ayyüce in Archinect, but these were largely dealing with public, and outdoor, zones, not the mansions of the elite.

Invading the autocrat’s inner sanctums has a long history, even in the post-modern era, stretching back to early internet days, uploaded photos of Saddam’s palaces. This was replicated with increasing frequency since the Tunisian revolution of 2011, when seaside villas were vandalized live on Al Jazeera. This has become a cultural phenomenon, a regular, repeated, stage in popular overthrows. No less than David Remnick, writing in  a March 1st blogpost, “Putin Goes to War,” in the New Yorker, sums it up brilliantly:

Just a few days ago, this horrendous scenario of invasion and war, no matter how limited, seemed the farthest thing from nearly everyone’s mind in either Ukraine or Russia, much less the West. As it happens so often in these situations—from Tahrir Square to Taksim Square to Maidan Square—people were taken up with the thrill of uprising. After Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, the coverage moved to what one might call the “golden toilet” stage of things, that moment when the freedom-hungry crowds discover the fallen leader’s arrangements and bountiful holdings—the golden bathroom fixtures; the paintings and the tapestries; the secret mistress; the lurid bedrooms and freezers stocked with sweetmeats; the surveillance videos and secret transcripts; the global real-estate holdings; the foreign bank accounts; the fleets of cars, yachts, and airplanes; the bad taste, the unknown cruelties.The English-language Kyiv Post published a classic in the genre when it reported how journalists arriving at the “inner sanctum” of the mansion where Yanukovych had lived in splendor discovered that he had been cohabiting not with his wife of four decades but, rather, with—and try not to faint—a younger woman. It “appears” that Yanukovych had been living there with a spa owner named Lyubov (which means “love”) Polezhay. “The woman evidently loves dogs and owns a white Pomeranian spitz that was seen in the surveillance camera’s footage of Yanukovych leaving” the mansion.But that was trivia.

It is trivia, how true. Rather than the final scene, the self-guided romps around the suburban spread were swept aside in the larger events, and in the hours since Remnick's post was uploaded, new events, and new spatial violations on a larger territorial scale had unfolded, with larger global consequences. The awe-struck tours of the frivolity and kitsch of the Dictator’s log-cabin McMansion seem quaint just days later, as the initial victory, and the opportunity to topple the monuments of an earlier regime, slipped away in the onset of further war. 

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.

Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Here are a series of scans from a booklet, Kazakhstan: Land of Wonders, published by the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 2009 and distributed at a promotional event at the Kazakh Embassy in Washington, D.C. (Apologies for the low quality of the scanning).

"The Republic of Kazakhstan - a unitary state with a Presidential government"

The glossy handbook is an introduction to the achievements and enticements of the state, attempting to interest tourists, and more importantly foreign investors, to the Central Asian country, which in the post-Soviet period has enjoyed enormous dividends due to the mineral and energy deposits within its vast territory.

This windfall has allowed the post-Soviet regime to devise an entirely new capital, Astana, a city masterplanned by Kisho Kurakawa. President Nursultan Nazarbayev decreed that the capital be renamed and removed to this remote hamlet in 1998, and construction has been on-going since.

A remarkable aspect of the booklet is its promotion not only of this fanciful, glittering new Brasilia on the steppes through a series of photographs edifying the neo-islamic, plastic-paneling and cobalt-blue opaque glazing scheme of the country's new mosques, apartment towers, office complexes, and government ministries.

Whereas some of this is evidently an attempt to forge an architectural identity for this young state, a land of an ancient, nomadic civilization, which for some time has had its islamic faith (and continues to have its political freedoms) repressed, much of the construction is strikingly reminiscent of the Soviet monumentality of its former client state than might be expected.

The vast, glistening plaza in central Astana is gated by the immense State Gas Corporation building, KazMunaiGaz, (above), which, with symbolism that maybe only partially intended, is the only construction to transect the monumental axis of the city's new administrative district. Its also unclear how much the architects intended the similarity to the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas (of course without the coral reef and shark tank), or, geographically and politically more related, Palace Square in St. Petersburg.

As if the new city couldn't be more reminiscent of its former Imperial Power, Astana also has a close copy of Moscow's Seven Sisters. The feel of 21st century Moscow is further embodied in that these Stalinist creations are surrounded by the cheap, gaudy shopping malls at their skirts.

"The impressive elegant palace made of white stone is a symbol of prosperity and power of state."

Astana has among its "most stunning" landmarks two works by Norman Foster & Partners. One, a metallic pyramid, has been labelled the Palace of Peace & Reconciliation, and lends itself most naturally to large international conferences. The other, which is also the second tallest building in the city, is a humungous leisuredrome, the Khan Shatyr, the world's largest tent, which includes an indoor beach so that bored bureaucrats can seek shelter from the merciless climate. (link to an excellent article, Foster in Kazakhstan, by Richard Orange, in Blueprint, 2010.)

It would certainly be possible to write a more extensive post about Astana, one of the greatest examples of the contemporary intersection between autocracy and starchitecture, but I really only intend this to be a brief post about the photographs in this booklet, and not only what they show of this developing country and its flashy capital, but also what the images reveal about the marketing of Kazakhstan as a destination for foreign tourism and capital.

What may be more notable than all the spreads of windy, glistening Astana, then, is a two-page panorama showing some sort of belching smelter plant blotting out the horizon. It suggests influence of both an older Socialist-Realist tradition of edifying Industry, but also a more neoliberal, emerging-economy inclination to boast of a country's economic capability--and is wholly ignorant of any aesthetic and ecological considerations. It would hard to imagine a European nation or American state billboarding its farting smokestacks to entice foreigners to visit.

Further in the handbook is another wide-angle shot of the Mangyshlak Peninsula, lapped by waters less neon and opaque than the new ministerial skyscrapers of Astana, is nearly postcard picturesque. Yet upon closer examination the photograph, surely captured by aircraft, implies some more complex economic forces at work. In the middle of the photograph, proletariat housing piles, too low to break the horizon stand back from the cliffs at the center of a planned settlement, while the waterfront property seems newly-occupied by enormous stucco-and-tile Malibu-Mediterranean McMansions sprouting half-complete out of the sandy precipice. At left, a luxurious, glittery-blue Esfahan-meets-Arizona estate centers on a lush tapis vert cascading down to the Caspian.

The Corporate Parks of Kevin Roche

Union Carbide, Danbury, Connecticut, centered around the parking garages

I was fortunate to be passing through New Haven, Connecticut earlier this month and had the time to visit the Architecture Gallery at Yale to see the exhibit on the work of Kevin Roche before the event ended (There is also a book on his work published to coincide with the show).

Lucent Technologies Research, Lisle, Illinois

Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates designed some very lovely buildings in their time (here is a wonderful first person account and homage to the Ford Foundation headquarters by one of the firm's erstwhile employees, Lebbeus Woods). A major focus of the exhibition the firm's well-known urban interventions, in New York,Atlanta, Singapore, Dublin, New Haven, and elsewhere.

Grupo Santander, Madrid, Spain

Less famous, yet quite as substantial, is a collection of massive corporate headquarters, a series of tremendous exurban campuses in Connecticut, Westchester County, New Jersey, Illinois, Spain, France and elsewhere. Most of these were purpose-built for some of the most prominent names of the multinational era: Union Carbide; Merck Pharmaceuticals; Alcatel Lucent Telecom; General Foods; Conoco-Phillips; Spain's Grupo Santander, among others. This specialization in the practice stretches back to the early days of the firm, as it was a continuation of Eero Saarinen's office, with Roche and Dinkeloo closing out the execution of such classics as the John Deere Headquarters in Moline, Illinois.

Richardson-Vicks, in Wilton Connecticut, connected to the original farm house, with the parking on the roof

The relative lack of appreciation for this typology is easy enough to understand. These privately-held, peripherally-located compounds are by their nature and intention not easily accessible to the public--although John Deere loves getting visitors 365 days a year.

This fortessing has served its intended purpose, especially as many of these corporations are not universally adored, Merck being a Big Pharma behemoth; Conoco-Phillips being a petroleum supermajor; and Union Carbide going down in history as one of the most reviled corporations of the 20th century. Such controversial entities do not generally welcome architectural tourists (see earlier post on attempting to visit to Paul Rudolph's Burroughs Wellcome HQ in North Carolina). Thirdly, the very typology of a sprawling, exurban groundscraper, embracing wasteful land use and abandoning the centers of America's cities, has been impugned in decades hence.

Borland International, in Scotts Valley, California

So this exhibit was a rare and unapologetic celebration of this spatial category, and a juxtaposition of some of the most dedicated and substantial efforts of this genus from one of its major practitioners. Together the several examples embody the tremendous gestation of both corporate post-modernism and post-modern corporatism.

Conoco-Philips Headquarters, in Houston, Texas facing Interstate 10 across a series of shallow ponds.

While its easy enough nowadays to find images of these works online, the show, with its large format photo prints on the walls, evinced well these sprawling, outscaled creations, which are difficult to access and can only be fully examined from above. Several original models were carted out of the firm's storage, allowing exhibition visitors to fly over these verdant campuses like an executive in a company helicopter.

From this vantage, the cog-like office pavilion of the Merck Headquarters took up but a tiny portion of the table top presentation model of the whole estate. A cloverleaf exit ramp looped into a flyover over New Jersey County Road 523, becoming Merck Drive as it slips past a placid landscaped pond and hundreds of acres of verdant woodland.

General Foods, Rye Brook, New York,

hailed both as a 20th century version of a classic English manor, and a Mesoamerican-inspired postmodern palace,

faces a highway with a 3-level parking garage at its base.

General Foods was acquired by Philip Morris soon after it moved into the building,

and the building has had difficulty being utilized since.

What might be the most spectacular of the group is the astoundingly massive Bouygues World Headquarters, in Saint-Quentin-Yvelines, France, outside Paris. A humungous, shiny aluminium Versailles: three multi-tiered office sheds arranged in a wide clearing in the suburban forest.

A focal, janus-faced main chateau has four massive semicircular wings curving out from a central atrium to surround open plazas. This palace sits opposite two identical, chevron-shaped blocks with matching octoganal glass entry domes held up by white columns.

This tripartate group is aligned on an axis across a central rectangular reflecting pond. The two sides are connected by a cement causeway, which ends at a circular drive, a winding, divided entryway connecting eventually to the peripheral auto-route, which is really just a short distance away through the trees.

Bouygues World Headquarters, Saint-Quentin Yvelines, France

Images ©Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates