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Jin
Mao Tower
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Completion
Year: 1999
Site Area: 23,257
m2
Project Area: 3,093,190
ft2
Building Height:
1,381
ft
Number of Stories: 88
Architect:
SOM |
At one point in the mid- 1990s, it was estimated that between a quarter
and a half of the world's high-rise cranes were in Shanghai's Pudong New
City district, lifting piles of I-beams high into the sky one after the
other like giant insects, hanging floor on floor from thin steel spines
jabbed into the earth. Science-fiction office towers climb 50, 60, 70
stories into the air, all of them dwarfed by the 88-storey vertical pagoda
of the Jin Mao Tower, China's tallest building and fourth tallest in the
world.
I had checked into the Grand Hyatt, whose lobby is on the tower's 54th
floor and rooftop bar on the 87th, making it the highest above-ground hotel
in the world. Between the two floors is an open columnar space around which
the rooms are scattered along small corridors, so you don't exit your room
and come immediately face to face with the yawning expanse of space, like a
huge air vent in hell.
Although the doughy concrete and tainted steel of the pro-Soviet era is
long gone in these newest buildings, there are numerous incidental dangers
in the land of instant architectural fantasy.
Stories circulate of plate-glass curtains popping out of their frames and
plummeting 60 storeys to the ground, and Jin Mao has become notorious for an
alleged design flaw that creates air currents so powerful, because of the
length of the shaft, that hapless maids and guests are routinely sucked in
and maimed.
I could find no evidence of this phenomenon, which likely lies in the
realm of urban myth, but there are certainly plenty of dangerous spots in
the tower. The very luxury of the place, so wonderful but finally so
prosaic, is one of them; one can imagine a desperate Japanese salaryman
prompted into sudden existential flight by the emptiness of all this wealth.
Xing Tonghe, who also designed the Shanghai Museum and is guiding the
Expo project, was behind the inspiration for the small corridors and glass
railings, neat design tweaks that kept both architects and developers happy.
It saved the open column but minimized the danger.
I had met him the day before, and he acknowledged that his solution,
while imperfect, was practical.
"Drunks will fall over anyway," he told me, not smiling.
"You can't design the whole thing for drunks."
Like all of Shanghai's dozen or so five-star hotels, the Grand Hyatt is
an exercise in bizarre economics, the complicated mix of import taxes,
controlled currency and ridiculously cheap labour. The hotel delivers the
complete James Bond postmodern global luxury experience, with
hand-wave-triggered light switches, a "sky pool" that floats above
the old city like a bath in heaven, and a glass-box shower sporting controls
worthy of a nuclear submarine. Phalanxes of beautiful smiling girls greet
you at every corner, exit or elevator, and a gang of strapping six-footers,
clearly chosen for their chiselled profiles as well as English proficiency,
fold you into waiting cabs and deliver rapid-fire directions to the drivers.
Waiters in the jazz bar actually run to get your order in, and a cigar
request prompts an elaborate geisha performance over the humidor, complete
with low-cut dress, miniature jet-engine lighter and ritualized waving to
test draw. All this with rooms for less than it would cost to spend the
night in a mid-range Manhattan hotel.
At the same time, the drinks and sandwiches and coffee run more than in
London or Paris, which is saying something. A martini costs as much as a
locally purchased winter coat, a cigar the equivalent of a four-hour taxi
ride or enough pork dumplings to feed a block. You can walk out the front
door of Jin Mao and, beating down the stares of lunching businessmen and
ignoring the giggles of the tag-team waitresses, for less than the price of
a coffee, order a feast of Shanghainese food in one of the nearby
restaurants.
Jin Mao Tower was designed by a team from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,
the Microsoft - or maybe McDonald's - of architecture firms. It cost
$540-million U.S. SOM are masters of the skyscraper, probably most famous
for Chicago's Sears Tower, and they are everywhere, a firm so huge and
powerful they have managed to get a finger in many a pie both East and West.
'THEY SHOULD BE SUED'
Urban theorist Rem Koolhaas, speaking in New York a few years ago, called
the firm "architectural colonialists" and complained that its
design for Jin Mao was "so infantile and regressive that they should be
sued."
In fact, it is a clever update of traditional skyscraper vocabulary, and
not bad at all. Ridiculously tall, yes - 1,380 feet - but retaining a sense
of proportion. Clad in a complicated steel-cage curtain, like chain mail
over glass, it has a distinctive latticed-metal appearance reminiscent of
bamboo and pagoda details on top and sides, even as every room has a
spectacular glass-curtain window. Jin Mao's 88 floors and 13 horizontal
bands, meanwhile, are references to Buddhist numerology. The name means
prosperity, finance, gold - the usual Chinese wish list. If this is global
architecture, it could be a lot worse.
On a bright, cold morning I walked, a lone pedestrian, through a
crumbling concrete plaza of abandoned Western-style restaurants. I dodged
crash-happy taxis across the broad avenues.
I was on my way to the Shanghai International Convention Center, the
space-age site of the World Top Architects Forum, an event whose English
publicity material oozed the funny, semi-literate grandiosity of all such
documents that have been ground though an imperfect translation, like
speeches from the opening sequence of the television program Iron Chef.
'BLANK PIECE OF PAPER'
"Historically, every nation's renaissance will give birth to a
glorious city," it read.
"Every glorious era of a nation is always represented by its big
city. For instance, Rome, New York, Tokyo, Paris, they are all alike. The
essence of global economic competitiveness is always about the vibrancy of a
city's brand. Now, the intelligence of the world top architects will gather
in Shanghai basked in the time of China's Renaissance. In this glorious era,
opportune location, and grand venue, the World Top Architects Forum shall
convene."
Zheng Shiling, then president of the Architectural Society of Shanghai,
spoke after lunch. "We must make sure that the foreign architects
respect the traditions and values of China," he said, after praising
the raze-the-ground buildings of Pudong. "Many foreign architects treat
Shanghai as a blank piece of paper." Not only them.
Back at Jin Mao, I rode two elevators to the hotel's 56th-floor jazz bar,
being greeted repeatedly along the way. I sat at the bar, ordered a drink,
and looked over the split-level, couch-filled acreage of the place.
A few Chinese couples canoodled under dim light. A middle-aged Western
man with an outgrown white mullet sat side by side with an absurdly young
Chinese girl, on whose knee his big, bejewelled paw rested. A table was set
up with a bottle of Chivas Regal, an ice bucket, and cut-glass tumblers -
luxury mise en place. No one ever came to sit there.
Groups of wealthy Shanghainese began to arrive. They shoved tables
together and shouted orders for cosmopolitans and layered liqueur
confections, sending the waiters hustling across the carpet at the trot.
They spoke to the hovering bartender in a manner that suggested he had
offended them in some deep, unspecified way. A few of China's
quarter-million millionaires.
A torch singer in a long white dress, backed by the obligatory lazy trio,
began to sing Cole Porter in Chinese from a low stage in the back, ignored
by everyone at the tables. When she took a break, strains of the Chipmunks'
Christmas album leaked from the sound system.
I waved off the cigar girl and lit my own smoke. I looked out the window
at the view nobody was paying attention to. It felt like we were on a
spaceship, a low-ceilinged, cozy cruise liner to the future, cocooned by
money and the biggest lucky break of them all, the lottery of birth.
Brought there by the brute reality of the six-and-a-half-billion-human
globe, the indifferent energy of material injustice.
Shanghai, wonders and all, still seems a version of Empire of the Sun
author J.G. Ballard's "terrible city," gorgeous and awful at once.
As a material rendering of hyper-capitalist desire, it makes a
forever-deferred promise of novelty and wealth that also says, just as
loudly, that nobody's that special. The Chinese know what we don't, that
Western individualism is a myth of significance in a world where you're
really nobody and nothing. Even the millionaires aren't one in a million,
just one of a million. You can build the buildings, but they stand as empty
as the ideas of freedom behind them. The whiff of truth remains.
Unlike New York, whose own eight million souls, buoyed along by
trillion-dollar debt and confused protectionist imperialism, keep crazy
faith with a narrative of success, the false consciousness of social
mobility, Shanghai is forever taking away with one hand what it gives with
the other. Not a new New York; more like the anti-New York.NO GOING HOME
"How long is the future?" Xing Tonghe had replied when I asked
him what Shanghai's future held.
His point was prosaic, but the question itself is not. Shanghai's lesson
is the lesson of all futurism, modern architecture's dominant trope, the
chancre at the heart of utopia. Much as you might like to, you can't go home
again. Not again, not ever.
All future-desire is revealed as degrees of nostalgia. Because - look,
look up - home has already been bulldozed to make way for another half-empty
skyscraper, another simulacrum of wonder.
Customers optional
People are pushing into the Super Brand Mall, 10 stories of sweeping
marble vistas and designer-clothing stores, most of them deserted, with a
bright fast-food court and vast Western-style supermarket in the basement,
both jammed.
The reasons for the bifurcation are simple: Prices for luxury goods in
Shanghai are so high that nobody shops in the branded stores - not even
Western tourists, who prefer to hunt for knock-off bargains in the street
markets, thermonuclear versions of Manhattan's insane Canal Street.
One boutique shopping mall, Plaza 66, is perpetually deserted; its shops
don't even carry much stock. As one observer noted, there is a structural
irony here: "Just as Stalin erected Potemkin villages to display the
glories of communism to outsiders, Shanghai is creating its own illusion of
prosperity out of the world's most luxurious brands."
In an effort to compete, at least in appearance, with Milan and New York,
the city offers cut-rate rents to top-tier fashion houses. Burberry, Hermès
and Chanel happily take advantage of the legerdemain, since advertising is
almost as important as sales.
"Most leading luxury brands will need to have a flagship store in
Shanghai if only to put Shanghai along with London, Paris, Milan on their
bags," said Paul French, founder and China chief of Access Asia, a
marketing research firm in Shanghai.
The resulting shops, even more spectral than most branded enterprises,
which already sell identification and position more than merchandise, either
have little in the way of stock - or carry only sizes too large for the
average Shanghainese. - 2008 March
21 GLOBE & MAIL Excerpt From Concrete
Reveries by Mark Kingwell,which is being published today by Penguin Group
(Canada)
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