Category: Architecture and Infrastructure

Empires have existed for millenniums. Squabbles over land and resources by various groups or tribes continue until eventually a dominant player emerges, subordinating its rivals and bringing order to a larger populace. To strengthen its resolve and maintain order it improves its armies. Once order exists, its armies are usually then employed on further conquest on land and resource acquisitions. Acquisitions are taken by force. Throughout time this has been the principle means of empire building, where the strong extort the weak. Subordination followed by resource drain of mineral, fiscal and human capital eventually consume all benefits of the acquired land mass and populace. The growing empire has to look further afield for new resources to acquire and exploit. This process continues until the acquired resources can no longer support the growing empire and the empire implodes and collapses returning again to smaller self-governed states. Empires acquired by force are short lived. The British Empire colonised in much the same way, with the stronger more technologically advanced nation controlling the weaker nations. British Colonial rule differed in that it partnered rather than dominated its colonies. The British Empire formed business partnerships with the indigenous elite using a countries existing controlling elite and structures to incite its order. The role was exploitive, but the countries also benefited from provisions of governance and infrastructures. An increased longevity was gained from this relationship.

The American Empire has been more subtle. Although American military power dominates every other nation by numerous factors, America was built primarily through the propaganda of media, its film industry and its adverts. The chief weapons were jeans, t-shirts and Coca-Cola, symbols of the good life obtainable within a commoditised world. Post World Wars, America not only controlled global debt, it also provided the majority of the goods that that borrowed capital could purchase. On this America grew very rich and the globalised world became Americanised adopting America’s clothes, its music, its eating habits, its skyscrapers, its finance and its governance. This was a new type of empire led by TV and media but without land acquisition. American military bases are strategically located around the globe within other nation states. America maintains peace and conformity through dominant presence rather than action, although when required they act swiftly and conclusively. American military presence lubricates global trade allowing resources to be allocated uninterrupted, a policed order. Markets are left to find their own natural equilibrium and are only policed when all else breaks down. An empire built by creating the desire for the American way of life and providing the commodities to fulfil such desires.

Empires grow slowly, the ancient dynasties of China, The Greek, The Roman, The Ottoman, The Habsburgs. These empires took hundreds of years to grow, to mature and eventually fade. Businesses took multiple generations to become fully established, The Rothschild’s, The Morgan’s, The Rockefeller’s, The Ford’s, for these industrialists and bankers it took a considerable amount of time to grow their businesses. The grandfathers of modern business, as of 2019, Apple and Microsoft are respectively 43 and 44 years old. Amazon (25) Google (21) and Facebook (15) are in their teens or early twenties. These businesses have incomes beyond many smaller countries. Empires today like businesses grow quickly. The American country can be dated from the Declaration of Independence 1776, but the American Empire is really a post war phenomenon putting it in its mid-seventies. Perhaps this stretches one’s interpretation of empire, as traditionally we consider empires within contained perimeters. We think of the world map painted pink under the British Empire, strict locations with enforced borders. The American Empire is an empire of influence. Its borders are not fenced, they are not straight lines, thresholds between inside and outside. They are not best represented by Trump’s Mexican wall. Its boundaries are permeable, they overlap and bleed into other sovereign states and cultures. It grows as its influence grows by its rate of adoption. The modern businesses listed above are also without borders permeating all aspects of societies and cultures. What empires and businesses have in common are the infrastructures that facilitate their adoption.

Networks, the control of the infrastructures and gateways are key to building any business or any Empire. Whether they were the Minoans or Phoenicians controlling the Mediterranean shipping routes in the second millennium BC, the Venetians controlling the silk and spice gateway connecting The East to The West in the fourteenth Century or the British controlling the shipping routes in the eighteenth century. All these conduits of communication facilitate trade and allow their owner to generate a rentier income from their use. America grew its commodity focussed empire through the use of magazines, radio and TV encouraging free global trade whilst all protected by numerous discreetly located strategic defence ports spread across the globe. These trade networks, when they function smoothly are often an invisible occurrence on our everyday lives. Today these infrastructures are best exemplified by the networked logistics of companies such as Apple and Amazon that make commodity culture so effortless with click to door retailing. To enable the ease of search engines, like the abilities of autonomous driving, require huge amounts of input for them to function and considerable hardware to enable procurement and delivery.

China, once the greatest empire on earth, lost out to The West through inward looking and protectionist policies. At the dawn of the Enlightenment and as the following Scientific and Industrial Revolutions took off in the West, China was left behind, losing its lead through two hundred years of stagnation. China as we all know has been catching up. Slowly at first from the 1970’s but everything changed from 09.11.1989 onwards with the fall of The Berlin Wall. China’s change of speed has caught the West off guard. Immense capital allocation delivered with direction and focus has grown China’s GDP an average 15.8% every year for the past 32 years. China was the fifth largest economy in the 1950’s sitting just above India but now sits second only to the US. China is building its new empire. Its ambition started in the 1970’s but its growth began from 1989 making the upcoming Chinese Empire barely thirty years old, younger that Microsoft or Apple and yet it is growing at such a phenomenal speed and its ambitions are truly global. The upcoming Chinese Empire is growing not by conquest but by controlling integrated networks. China’s hardware, the huge infrastructure and gateway projects and its software, the purchase of existing businesses and patents whether in part of in full, a controlling and influencing proportion of global businesses. The rights and wrongs of empires are for history to judge, it is their actual strategy and procurement, their engineering and governmental achievements on route that are of interest here.

The Belt and Road Initiative, BRI – “Purpose – to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets, through cultural exchange and integration, to enhance mutual understanding and trust of member nations, ending up in an innovative pattern with capital inflows, talent pool, and technology database” (Wiki) 

BRI – To create a market and build trust. This over simplification fully exaggerates the difference between an idea and the delivery of that idea. ‘To create a market and build trust’ translates to the largest global infrastructure project in world history. The delivery of which requires strategic, financial and engineering expertise at scale previously unprecedented.

China is looking to establish a new Middle Kingdom and become the dominant state in the Asia-Pacific region. To achieve this China needs to develop an educated middle class, it needs resource security and it needs to export innovation as noted in the points below. 

1 The transition from a rural to a consumer-based society

2 To increase high quality imports

3 To invest abroad

4 To innovate and develop 

In 1990 China was still largely a rural country with 75% of the population living in the countryside. Today half of China’s population are urban city dwellers. As China has opened up from a communist country of the 1970’s to a capitalist-communist country in the 1990’s the economic development has increased inequality. Educated early starters have been able to increase their economic lead over the adapting rural class. China has set up a strong educational policy with emphasis on maths and sciences and is now a world leader for the standards achieved at maths at secondary level. Asia are world leaders in academic achievement with China, Korea and Singapore leading the way. Education is key to growing both a middle class and a consumer-based society, lifting living standards across the country whilst creating liquidity for the internal markets through increased disposable income.

China has long been the factory of the world, where labour, prices and margins were all low. It grew its reputation by making other people’s goods at a fraction of the price. As China’s standard of living improves its labour prices also have increased and China now needs to move on to produce higher margin products. Increasing quality imports educates the consumer, it sets new consumer product standards and increases government revenues through churn and taxation. To improve liquidity China needs to make the transition from a country of savers to a country of spenders. Imports are also a means of international negotiation and trade. Buying from other countries wins friends and partners which are required to grow a network. Although imports will inevitably be replicated via the internal markets.

Since 1980 the industrialised world has been underinvesting in transport related infrastructure, instead seeking an export (commodities and services) orientated development model. China has pursued an infrastructure development strategy, at first at home and then by creating physical links with future trading partners. In so doing China has developed expertise in both infrastructure investment finance and in engineering and project procurement. The BRI may well be a means by which China intends to extend its influence at the expense of the US, as the two superpowers, old and new, go head to head. However, the ancient Silk Roads just like the BRI were never just Chinese, roads never travel in just one direction. The US has been the world’s largest national economy since 1871. Its 2019 GDP is forecast to exceed 21Trillion USD. In 1978 China was the ninth largest economy with a GDP of 214 Billion USD, in 2019 it was ranked second with a GDP of 9.2 Trillion USD.

China has been heavily investing abroad especially to secure resource commodities and raw materials. It has often done this in Third World countries by offering infrastructure expertise, finance and development in exchange for long mining leases. The Third World countries get ports, roads and railways for allowing China to dig in their back yards. China gets the resources it needs and much of the infrastructure it builds as payment for the leases it would have had to build anyway to shift the resources, yet for both sides this is still a win-win deal. Securing copper, iron-ore, lithium, coal and oil means that China’s development remains uninterrupted. China’s currency is pegged to the dollar and commodities trade in dollars, so investing in resource security also cushions dollar price swings.

Made in China was once a euphemism for a low-cost poor-quality copy. China is now spending money on R&D and innovation. Developing high quality products and patenting its innovations and IP. This will be a huge transition from poor quality copy-cat products to a world innovator. China is already a world leader for solar panel and wind turbine design. It also now manufactures more cars p.a. than the US and is now second only to the US in its annual output of scientific papers and its supercomputing capability. A less regulated Chinese market also allows for increased research into genetics and bio-engineering. China is a secretive country and there is much going on in the background away from the western press. This is conjecture but one should expect China to throw some surprises into the space race within the very near future.

For China, there will of course be internal friction, any empire that grows this fast will leave many behind. Access to the net combined with the leverage of globalisation means that the difference between the haves and have-nots will at first be extreme and this could create internal social and political conflict. China has strong governance and the people of China have a strong autonomous national identity, so lengthy internal conflict, even with the recent Hong Kong riots, is unlikely. China will also be aware that they were once world leaders and were reduced to an opium den in colonial servitude, a world third class citizen, from which it has taken 200 years to recover. Collectively their sights are firmly set and set very high.

As an upcoming nation state China has little competition. Its huge territory and population are considerable assets. Imports are a short-term fix as they will soon be replicated by the internal markets. It would seem unfortunate that the Chinese have rushed to emulate Western Imperialism grown on energy hungry, finite resource exploitation. In 2009 China consumed 46% of global coal production and similar percentages of aluminium, copper, nickel and zinc. A consequence of this rapid development has been China’s high level of ground, water and air pollution. A slower strategically better planned development route may have avoided all of these issues, prevention is always better than cure. There are also many aspects of Western culture that would be best edited out. Post war global values have become Americanised. In a commodity culture, possession is valued over ability, ownership over education, emphasis on the winner takes all. Excessive consumption and disposable consumerism have given us a materialist Bling culture, huge wealth discrepancy, obesity and environmental degradation. Western Scientific Enlightenment gave us a homocentric concept of our world and this we have practiced for 400 years. Today the planet desperately needs a Gaia-centric model. It would have been a far more progressive goal to have seen China lead the way to achieving this as the planet does not need a ‘more of the same, business as usual’ approach. It is time to change and the next Empire needs to lead the way. 

Fundamental to China’s ambition is the Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI was set up in 2013 although its steering committee was not announced until 2015. The Belts are overland corridors and the Roads are maritime shipping lanes. The BRI has been compared historically to The Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road that connected The East to The West throughout the late middle ages. The BRI is far more ambitious and is nearer to the protected shipping lanes, ports and infrastructure that was set up to build the British Colonial Empire. The BRI is truly global in ambition and influence, it eventually will have developments and investments in 152 countries and a target completion date of 2049. The BRI will be the largest infrastructure project in world history. The project consumed 40% of China’s GDP in 2017. The project tries to address the infrastructure gap between the developed and the developing worlds and in so doing improve trade links and create markets.

The North Belt moves through Central Asia and Russia to Europe. The Central Belt passes through West Asia to the Persian Gulf. The South Belt runs from China to South East Asia to the Indian Ocean and Pakistan. At the same time the 21^st Century Maritime Silk Road, a sea route corridor, crosses the South China Sea, the South Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and via the Suez Canal on to Europe. There is further an Ice Silk Road, a Northern Sea Route in the Artic and a Super Grid that will develop high voltage electricity across the whole of the Asian Continent.

Since the 1980’s Asia and Eastern Europe have pursued export orientated strategies, this has created an infrastructure-based development expertise in bridges, roads, tunnels dams, airports, ports and high-speed rail. These are Chinese Mega-Infrastructure projects. In comparison, during the same period, the industrialised world has underinvested in transportation infrastructure.

The BRI achievements to date are impressive, from its concept in 2013, through steering committee 2015, to procurement as of 2019, this is only six years. It is already the largest infrastructure and investment project in history, it covers 68 countries, 65% of the world’s population and 40% of the world’s GDP. It has been difficult to write a text about the BRI without simply writing an endless list of projects, this would be both tedious and beyond the remit of this essay, an abbreviated list however is required to give an idea of the scale and scope of these projects. In Africa – Djibouti the BRI has provided a new port and an international airport. In Ethiopia, completed in 2015, 750 km of standard gauge railway line, connecting Ethiopia to Djibouti. In Kenya, completed 2014, 470 km of standard gauge railway. In Nigeria further railways and the facilities to access satellite TV across 10,000 African villages. In Europe The China-Britain route launched in 2017 and as of 2018 connects 48 Chinese cities with 42 European cities. This line was extended towards Vietnam in 2018. In Russia the China-Belarus Industrial Park covers 91.5 sq. km. There is a 140 km high speed rail route in Indonesia commenced in 2016. In Laos a 414 km of railway project began in 2016. In Malaysia new rail and pipeline projects have begun. There are further projects and ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In Thailand, solar parks, industrial Parks and a high-speed railway have all begun. There are two Hydropower projects on site in Argentina and numerous economic and infrastructure agreements have been signed with other countries with projects waiting to come on line. For example, instant port cities Bagamoyo, Mlingotini, Sihanoukville, Colombo, Kyaukpyu and Gwadar, Inland instant cities, Khorgos, and further railways planned for Thailand. The huge scale and scope of these projects is difficult to comprehend. Many of the above countries didn’t even have standard gauge railways let alone high-speed rail links. All of these projects move freight and people to and from China and the projects are financed by long-term Chinese loans, a very similar strategy to Post War American Imperialism. The difference is that these have all happened within the last six years.

The Karot Hydropower Project in Pakistan is typical of the agreements. The $2B project is funded by China’s Silk Road Fund and developed by The Karot Power Company which indirectly is a subsidiary to China’s Three Gorges Corporation. Upon completion The Karot Power Company will run and maintain the project for thirty years at a pre-agreed tariff rate. At the end of the thirty years the hydropower project will be transferred to the Punjab government. The project is a lease with a guaranteed return minimizing the risk for both parties but the primary beneficiary are the Chinese. There will also be collateral business opportunities during the thirty-year management period where both the Chinese and Pakistan businesses may benefit. The Chinese have been accused of Neo Colonialism and Debt trap diplomacy for many aspects of its BRI projects but this is not so dissimilar to America’s silent Empire building in post war Europe and Japan. The BRI has been called the Chinese Marshall Plan. In both the above cases at the time of the agreements, this was the best win-win solution. Could Pakistan afford a $2B hydropower plant without outside finance and expertise? Pakistan is better off for the next thirty years with a reliable energy supply upon which it could establish economic growth than it would be without this aid. Pakistan has a growing middle class. Two thirds of its population are under thirty and it is the fastest growing retail market in the world. China invests in links that can help access these markets and into which it can sell its goods.

Additionally, China benefits through these schemes from its excess capacity in the mainland, creating new markets for its goods. In Sri Lanka when the government struggled to make the repayments on the Hambantota port as payment the Sri Lankan government leased the port and 15,000 acres of the surrounding land back to the Chinese company for 99 years. This is a kind of land grab and territorial expansion that worries many of the neighbouring countries and is cause for political concern. Any port that can house and trade goods can equally be used for military purposes. There is now a Chinese military base at the port of Djibouti and one would expect others to follow to protect Chinese investments and assets. The BRI is not only about road and rail, hard infrastructure projects it is also about striking legal agreements on conditions relating to loans. There is then a soft infrastructure being put into place where China can exert its influence. 

At home China’s energy infrastructure is undergoing a profound transformation. Early growth was fuelled by oil and coal power stations, too quickly set up and poorly executed, causing well publicised pollution within its cities. To counter this China’s new energy mix will include 110 new nuclear power stations due for completion in 2030. Off the coast of Jiangsu province, the Three Gorges Sea project, due for completion in 2027, will be the largest off shore wind farm in the world. On a Tibetan plateau, in the Qinghai province is the world’s largest solar park. New hydroelectric projects include the 16,000 MW Baihetan Dam in Sichuan province due to open in 2022 and the Suwalong project on the Upper Yangtze River, its dam is 112m high and it is due for completion in 2021. To ensure that all of these renewable energy generators work continuously and at their most efficient five new pumped storage power plants are currently under construction and all of this is integrated into a new national grid. Some of China’s scheduled infrastructure will not be seen by satellite, several highspeed rail tunnels are due for completion. The Zhoushan and the Taihu tunnels are subsea tunnels that will allow trains to travel at 250 kmph. The Bonhai high speed rail link, under the Bonhai Straight connecting the cities of Dalian and Yantai will be 123 km long and in places over 70m deep. It will be over twice the length of the Channel Tunnel connecting the UK to France. Not all tunnels are for trains, a 1000km tunnel will carry 15 billion tonnes of water p.a. from the high wet plains of Tibet to the dry densely populated Xinjiang province.

China has 20% of the world’s population but only 6% of the worlds fresh water, further, most of its water is in the South and not in the North. China has built the South – North Water Transfer Project, three canals that together move 45 billion cubic meters of water from the Yangtze river in the south to the less fertile regions of the North. These canals are also used for shipping as part of the BRI. Along its rivers China has 22,000 large hydro-dams half of the global total, each dam has an upstream and downstream consequence. Large rivers often flow through several countries. New China Hydroelectric dams on the Mekong have caused issues with five poorer countries that rely on its water and fish further down-stream. There will be continuing issues with the scale and speed of these infrastructure developments. China is set for further growth and territorial/market expansion. The Chinese government provides the infrastructure to allow development and then floods the markets with billions of dollars of cheap loans encouraging entrepreneurs and business. This push for market capture that has continued for the past three decades will not slow any time soon.

China, is a member of the Paris Climate Agreement. China is both a world leader in the take up of renewables but it is also the world’s leading polluter, its fossil fuel emissions exceed all of Europe’s combined. Most of China’s carbon dioxide emissions come from burning coal in new power stations to generate electricity. Many new coal-burning power stations have yet to be finished just as the rest of the world is closing them down. As part of the BRI infrastructure projects China has set aside $30bn to build coal-fired power stations in other third-world countries, including Pakistan. The world can ill afford more CO2 emissions being released into the atmosphere especially from countries where lower levels of regulation allow very inefficient and highly pollutive burning of coal. 

The environmental consequences have been made worse since 2017. Under president Donald Trump, America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, America’s trade war with China, the recent Hong Kong riots have all diverted China’s attention away from green initiatives. In 2018 all subsidies to solar and wind generation were dropped without warning and investment in these industries have shrunk 39% so far in 2019. In the mean-time the use of coal as a cheap and convenient option has increased. The short-termism, the rush to build empires sacrifices the long-term prospects both of China and the planet. The British Empire consumed, wasted and polluted through ignorance and primitive technologies. The American Empire consumed, wasted and polluted, through greed, self-obsession, power, control and wealth accumulation. The Chinese have the chance to take a new strategic approach and not to follow the errors of others and previous empires. The world no longer lives in ignorance, we watch by satellite and monitor daily the continued destruction of our planet. We are fully aware of the consequences of what we are doing and yet still ‘business as normal’ proceeds. When this approach is taken by an individual it is shameful. When it is taken by a great nation in the process of building a truly global empire it is unforgivable and the damage caused will be irreversible. The ambition, engineering and funding achievements for the BRI are extraordinary but the scale and speed of these projects, that focus solely on economics, have huge international environmental impact. Each infrastructure project, carried out in whatever country has an immediate environmental consequence. Infrastructure by its very nature generates further development along its lines of communication and this sets up huge areas as future development zones each with a further environmental consequence. The planet is a finite resource that we all share and is already over populated, projects of this scale will encourage further population growth and should be of international concern. For the rest of us mere mortals all we will be able to do is watch and monitor our forever changing planet by satellite.

Many of the BRI projects are utility projects that have little architectural or cultural quality, elementary roads, bridges and railways. I have selected images of projects that can be viewed via satellite to show their scale and that also offer quality design. All images are from Google maps, which in itself is an incredible resource for watching and supervising our planet.

1. Columbo Port City, Sri Lanka

2. Beijing Daxing International Airport by Zaha Hadid Architects

3. Beijing Capital International Airport by Foster and Partners

4. Shouhang Dunhuang CSP and Solar Park

5. Three Gorges Dam

6. Haiwan Bridge, Jiaozhou Bay China

7. The Danjiangkou Reservoir and Canal, South to North water Diversion, China

The 60’s rode the wave of post war euphoria filled with youthful optimism and confidence. The Wars were over and out of the rubble a new world would be built. Music culture had made many young working-class extremely rich, they found themselves in the position to be able to buy up the large country estates of the now cash-poor landed gentry. Times they were most certainly ‘a changin’. Architecture and design quickly followed suit, with large urban commissions such as the Pompidou Centre going to young inexperienced and unheard-of architects. New fashion designers sprung up to capture the ready-made markets selling groovy clothes in loud colours and man-made materials. Everything seemed to be going fine but there were many hidden problems that were soon all about to unravel in the 70’s.

The Vietnam war had continued throughout the sixties, as had the Cold War. By the late 60’s and early 70’s both these wars had lost the popular vote and the Peace and Love movements displayed active resistance. These wars had minimum disruption on the global economies but this was about to change when the Middle Eastern conflicts of the mid-70’s deprived the developing world of the one resource that it could not do without – oil. Markets crashed, industry stagnated, welcome to the world of the three-day week, mass unemployment, garbage stacked six feet high on city streets, power cuts in the developed world and union and political chaos. With no money, contemporary culture made do, making clothes out of rags and songs out of two chords and spit. Punk was on the streets and in the shops. 

The academic world reacted differently to the chaos of the mid-70’s. The big machine of the Modern Movement had failed. The pre-cast concrete towers were now slums, and were soon about to be felled. The machine aesthetic, a bland clean ergonomic production was no longer enough. Corporate culture itself was questioned, perhaps it had led us all astray, it had already left many behind. There was a search to start anew, a naïve poetic, a reaction to the global industrial machine, both to its products, its finance and its philosophy. This was the beginnings of the Postmodern and Postmodern representation, it looked for meaning through semantics and narrative, for the sensorial through colour and form and it looked for the emotive through typology and juxtaposition.

The emotive was an awkward concept in the late twentieth century where rationalism and logistics dominated the manufacture of most goods. It had a Freudian childlike quality. Words such as melancholy, anxiety, profound, romantic, morbid, feverish, voluptuous, prosaic, banal, spectral, oppressive, exuberant, have little currency in the logistics of construction. Yet these emotive states were missing from much of Post War international design. They were part of a language that had been lost, we no longer knew how to read it or see it. To explore and to communicate these emotive states one needed to begin again, to go back to basics, the child’s crayon drawing where all is simplified, flattened and without scale. A dreamscape of how things should be as opposed to how they actually are. 

Dreams are fragmentary, they reference through juxtaposition, they are often without context, they are idealised virtual worlds which we are able to inhabit without conflict or rule. Their conception comes not from the rational but instead from the other worldly. The later drawings of John Hejduk explored these phantom places. Inspired by dreams and memories, dislocated from context and reassembled as metaphor. The architectural work from the early 70’s compares compositionally to that of the paintings of Ferdinand Leger becoming more surreal like the sculptural work of Le Corbusier. They form a dreamy landscape where all is possible, where the rational world no longer exists. Hejduk’s break with the architectural functionalism of the time did not revert back, with a nostalgia for an architecture of the past but instead from within, personalised and esoteric, a collection of incidences, incurred and recalled. The work of Hejduk spans many years and these are framed by time. Recalled experiences from within each time frame are the raw materials for assemblage. Each time Frame is several years. 

In the early work there is also an ongoing conversation between the biomorphic and the biotechnic. These are two terms used by Hejduk to describe man-made and machine-made forms. But these are also metaphors, representing the emotive, hand sculpted forms in search of the sensorial and the rational of the logistical forms of the International Modern. Curvaceous forms are used for the biomorphic and grids are used for the biotechnic. The work can best be described as a tentative, uncertain laboured struggle, a long walk in the dark. The early work up to time Frame 2 manipulates the grid. The grid in terms of architectural language is an abstract. It has no predetermined or proportional scale, it has no up or down, it can be fully rotated in 3D and is an infinite system. By manipulating the grid, the abstract can be pursued as a formal system, a form generator in its own right. By time Frame 3 the biomorphic is inserted into the grid enclosing fluid transitional and activity spaces. There is very little compositional rapport between the biomorphic and biotechnic, a curved line in plan is extruded to enclose a particular volume. There is not the juxtaposition of ritualistic to abstract spaces that can be found in the work of Michael Graves of the same period. The resulting volumes enclose by Hejduk’s biomorphic forms house activities and not rituals and they are very much an insertion. Towards the end of time Frame 3 the curved forms begin to take over from the grid, this Frame also continues from the late 60’s into the early 70’s.

In the work of Hejduk of the 70’s the biotechnic has become subservient to the biomorphic but now a third component has entered the conversation and that is the wall. The wall is considered as neutral, painted grey, a thin membrane through which a discourse exists, it is described as a thin momentary condition. The wall has no functional purpose it is simply the initiator of a conversation. The wall sets up a condition on the site around which the spaces can begin their dialogue. Spaces become grouped, living, bedroom, circulation, and then become separated from each other, elongated journeys, pushed out into the site. Each space develops its own language, they soon become identifiable individual objects, the staircase, the space, the corridor, the wall, and are assembled sculpturally. The houses sit as sculptural objects in the landscape, but architecture is experienced through movement and time, a series of experienced fragments. Here the Hejduk buildings are very much like the compositions of Leger. Each individual component has a recognisable use or point of reference but the assemblage re-phrases conventional understanding.

It is interesting that the work of the New York Five, Eisenman, Meier, Graves, Gwathmey and Hejduk were each exploring architecture’s semantic role post International Style. Eisenman and Meier continued to explore the mathematical abstract as a means of space generation, although Meier’s buildings were always very site specific. Graves began to re-incorporate traditional ritualistic spaces into the abstract grid, typically kitchen and central fireplace rituals. Graves eventually turns to historic referencing with classical Postmodern. Gwathmey and Hedjuk try to reinvent architectural language from scratch using either pure or biomorphic form (Hedjuk) or by re-assembling recognisable typological architectural components (Gwathmey). The work from this group during the late 60s and very early 70s was incredibly potent, stimulating many of the Postmodern architectural dialogues that were pursued through the late 70’s and early 80’s. Meaning, Language and Local, being key to the enrichment of architectural and design dialogue through to the 90’s.

Hejduk’s works stands out from the others for its simplicity, perhaps even its naivety, as a generator of form, the emotive, the recollection of a dream, a feeling, a personal experience by definition. The subject of the conversation, the architectural language post International Style has historical relevance but by personalising the response Hedjuk’s work was a cul-de-sac to mainstream architectural discourse. Hejduk’s work quickly moved on, his later experiments were even further removed from modernism with his use of typological reference. In these, preceding building types were caricatured, e.g. wind tower, water tower, bell tower. When no precedent typology exists, a new type is invented e.g. House for a Musician. The language of this Typological referencing is simplistic and mono syllabic. The whole object is the reference signifier, it does not break down into further semantic components, as time has yet to invent or agree these. The work is more in tune with the that of Aldo Rossi and Bruno Minardi and as such recalls the empty and melancholic landscapes of De Chirico. With this work the Postmodern is an historical invention explored by the generations that had deliberately, and for good reason, forgotten how to think historically.

Hejduk’s works falls into the transition phase between Modernism and Postmodernism. It ignores the established conventions of The International Style and Functionalism and searches for a new means to communicate, through content and metaphor. The simplicity of its language and its use of assemblage make it easily accessible. The work has a poetic charm, it’s escapist, fragmentary and non-site specific. The compositions are idiosyncratic visions, spawned from the consequence of a chance meeting or event from years gone by. These visions inspired perhaps from yesterday’s dream or elements recalled from that scrapbook we call memory, a collection of cinematic intensities that linger forever in the back of one’s mind. Together these fragments help shape who we are, they shape our character, our purpose, and for Hejduk they shape his buildings. 

Hejduk describes the wall in his compositions as neutral and grey, as such perhaps, the wall is supposed to form the background in the same way as the flattened collage of wallpapers fill in the background of many cubist compositions. Perhaps the wall was a necessary framing devise, a back drop or enclosure for composition. Perhaps the wall was a necessary structural means to allow the compositions to ride up the picture plane in denial of perspective and in support of the flattened three dimensionality of the axonometric. However, Hejduk’s work tends towards metaphor and the elements in it are read as such. The wall read metaphorically is a long way from neutral, it cuts the site as clean as any cut of a Samurai’s sword. Figuratively elements form this side of that, neither both and this is ruthless, without exception. However, in space time the wall is almost invisible, a mere moment of the present, a crossing barely 200mm wide, inconsequential. 

In Hejduk’s work, if one were trying to interpret metaphor to read meaning through composition, or to speculate on what drives the mind of the architect, the wall would be a good place to start but I doubt the answer would be either neutral or grey.

Images

1. Wall House 1973

2. Drwg Wall House 1973

3. Plan Wall House 1973

4. Half House 1968

5. Leger Still Life with Beer Mug 1927

6. Cemetery for The Ashes of Thought 1975, Side Elevation

7. Cemetery for The Ashes of Thought 1975, Front Elevation

“The Modern Movement originated as a great pluralistic program attempting to rectify the spirit of the time, the Zeitgeist, catching in its initial stages in the different cultural realities of the European and American horizons. After thirty years of free experimentation, (Art Nouveau, Protorationalism, Expressionism, the modern classicism of Behrens, the creative eclecticism of Sullivan and Wright) the Modern Movement beginning in the twenties, tended to translate into a set of constraining rules, into a real orthodoxy, three fundamental dogmas:  the functionalist analysis  – as a starting point for architectural research;  the annihilation of the traditional grammar of architecture – with all its differences corresponding to places and civilisations;  the identification between architectural progress and the use of new technologies  – understood as potential generators of language.

The above quote from Paolo Portoghesi’s “The Fear of Heresy”, best surmises the convergence of the Modern Movement from the many reactions to the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The three fundamental dogmas outlined above in turn become the basis for Post Modern reactions at the beginning of the Electronic Revolution. These reactions have in themselves been pluralistic, evoking eclectic exercises in classicism, semiotics, structuralism, de-constructivism, formalism and sensorialism, manifesting in a resurgence of the figurative, the fable and the myth. The Post Modern as a generic all encapsulating term used across many disciplines from literature through art, fashion, music, film, dance, design and architecture has been a period of reappraisal. The poetic, the narrative, the tactile, the referential and the metaphysical have all been explored to escape the formulaic and the authoritarian. Many of these reactions have been explored by individuals practicing in artisan studios or have been tested in the Universities around the world. Much of the work is collagist with the Electronic Revolution aiding easy access to other disciplines and cross-pollination of influences where working methods have proved a very progressive experimental environment for all disciplines. Out of this petri dish come exercises in the unimaginable, breaking the shackles of science and production to venture into the minds where fictive possibilities blend seamlessly into the real.

Memory

It is impossible to be Italian without also being nostalgic. The memories of past great civilizations whisper along the streets and cobbles of every major Italian city. Typological icons invented by The Roman Empire, The Powers of the Papacy and The Renaissance adorn many Italian city center’s and are echoed across the world as copies of copies reiterated throughout time. From this the Italian architect sees the city as a great vessel, a carrier of history and memory. Nostalgia is metaphysical, a pathway to romantic interpretations of happier and simpler times, times of clarity and order, of truth and virtue, where the sublime and the theatrical are emphasized over the pragmatic or syntactic. The great typological icons, the temple, the coliseum, the galleria, the arcade, all back drop the piazza with its on-going theatre of life. Memory, the psychic vapor that oozes from every faded fresco, eroded stucco and crumbling frieze fills the streets with an invisible but perceived memory mist. The picturesque is the Italian city, it physically exists, it is no longer the painting, it is a physical living, working, reality. The Italian courtyard, the balcony house, washing lines hanging over narrow streets, the loggia curtain flapping in the wind, the silent figurines, all bear witness. The statues, histories spectators, have watched and recorded all that has walked before them, hundreds of years of monumental events, Iconic moments that shaped the narrative that in turn became the country and its people. The echo never stops, every street whispers to the next – I was this, I did this, I am this – a relentless schizophrenic, multi faceted ghost upon a ghost. 

The Italian city can be seen as a receptacle, an accumulation of collective and individual memory. The city derived from the analysis of political, social and economic systems drawn upon by the ruling class at each relevant time, a perpetual re-concluding product. But the city can also be seen as a spatial construct, with individual responses that are an additive to an on going ‘histoire’. In each interpretation the narrative dominates, leaving its traces, its reveres, layer upon layer. The onward fight against the inevitable conclusion that all invariably returns to dust. The crumbling, the exfoliation, peeled and scrubbed, returned to its former glory only to slowly return back into the ground to be carried as dust in the wind. The empty piazza, this negative volume is a forum for reflection, a time traveller’s portal to previous worlds. This void, walled perhaps with a Fifteenth Century Town Hall, a Sixteenth Century Church, a Nineteenth Century Galleria, all punctuated with statues from every century and from many lands. At the piazza’s center a fountain what better way to represent ongoing life, here water cascades timeless and continuous through every century over dropped lover’s coins carrying their wishes and dreams of better things to come. This is the living tapestry of the Italian city.

As Venice sinks slowly back into the sea where better to explore memory and nostalgia by emphasizing the ephemeral, that even the monumental is ephemeral. The Theatre, an iconic symbol of every city, a typological giant among a cities many monuments, the Theatre that confirms a cities success, its solidity, security and culture. Rossi takes the typologically monumental and to set it adrift on a barge to visit the sinking city. The theatre here is a player that plays its part with its exits, entrances and scenes. During its short life the “Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The passing of an event captured by photography in the same way that every empty coliseum and outdoor amphitheater echo with the silent sounds of gladiatorial battles, chariot races and the great crescendo of historic oratory. 

Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo of 1979, no small title for a small timber clad temporary building, offers the power of typological referencing, a form, the signifier, pregnant with the genetic heritage of its typological brothers and sisters, a reinforced collective, an authority. The Teatro here instead of solid and eternal is delicately floating and vulnerable, its height too tall to have stability, a wooden sail on a barge, timber the colour of sandstone. This is an exercise in how to take the monumental and to make it a shell of timber and paint, the inflammable, floating unstable over a murky sea, an ephemeral reminder of the transience and fragility of everything, including Venice.

Rossi wanted to recall the tradition of the sixteenth century theatrical floats from the period when Venice was the playground of Europe. The dialogue for Rossi’s Teatro would not be prioritized for actor and audience but instead with the City of Venice itself. From the outset the Teatro was to be a tower, a voluminous space and not simply a floating stage. It would speak with the city, the domes and the cupolas, the piazzas and the arcades, an architectural conversation of form and typology, of history and fragility. A tower hunched between two shoulders that would conceal two staircases, the central volume terminated with an octagon and an octagonal roof, as often in Rossi’s work tinted blue that brings the sky into the form. Just below the roof a blue band representing the classical cornice, the beginnings of a grand architecture skinned in paint and wood over a structure of scaffold tubes. Rossi’s architecture is associative, its forms are read via intellect to references of the past. It is not sensorial and it is not to be experienced sequentially as a modernist building may be. It is in itself, meditative, reflective and nostalgic. There is a need in Rossi’s work for human absence, as there is in the work of De Chirico. Human absence leaves us, the viewer, alone with the work, solitude, isolation and silence and only within these conditions can we drift through time back to spaces as yet unoccupied by the seething masses, by the here and now.

To Rossi architectural design was an extension of theoretical analysis. The architecture moves between the real city and the imaginary city, the Teatro Del Mondo sits somewhere in between, it is a gateway, a metaphorical link. With its towers and cupola it references the traditional city in which everything is solid and stationary but in the Teatro de Mondo solidity floats from location to location, event to event, a stage set that creates the stage set. The Teatro draws upon Elizabethan theatres, lighthouse structures and the architecture of Venice. A floating fragment of the city, a place where architecture ends and the world of imagination begins. It creates an architecture through action, the insertion, the intervention, forces reinterpretations of the historical fabric, an interloper that temporarily alters the landscape of a city. It invades on-going centuries old discussions and intrudes upon the comfortable fellowship of existing volumetric connections. It interrupts Venice and its scenic space, politely gate-crashing the old boys club by wearing an old school tie.

Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) 

The Surrogate Twin