Architecture as Social Critique: Holl in Beijing

Architecture as a form of social critique: we’ve moved past that, right? As practitioners, as historians, as a society that learned the lessons of modernism and reveled in the erudition of postmodernism?

Here’s what sparked this post: Holl’s new building in Beijing, the so-called Linked Hybrid. Now some would argue that architecture cannot be critiqued in the same way as, say, a sculpture or painting, but art criticism is where I started - those be my roots- so forgive me if I want to talk about the cultural production that we call the built environment in ways that reflect the social, political, and aesthetic context of its making. So perhaps you understand how, when that glossy AR cover (Architectural Record, January 2010) came to occupy my breakfast table this morning, I saw a building that spoke to a social condition in a way that the buildings on that cover have not in some time. 

Full disclaimer, I was one of those who spat venom at the starchitects and little guys alike who went running to the money pouring out of China and the Middle East in the past decade. Many defended their work under the guise of buzzwords like “global community” or argued that they were bringing inspiration to the oppressed masses in the form of a free, democratic building style (Architectural Record, July 2008). Let’s just say that I found those excuses unacceptable, simply means by which they could avert their gaze from the reality of those situations – slave labor where expenditures could sometimes mean the occasional life or money being pulled from the starving underclass to feed a newly developing upper class and an ambitious government’s deadline for presence on the world stage.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the dollar. I like money and wish I had more, but I also have ethics which lead me to despise those who would gain a dollar at someone else’s expense, especially a disenfranchised cog in the authoritarian machine.

Take that for what it is. Let’s talk about what I saw on that cover.

At first glance, Holl’s building elevations are oppressive, concrete grids, stiff exoskeletons that provide the primary structural support. The effect is heavy and there’s no tripartite scheme here to lighten the mood – just the grinding monotony, the equidistant spacing, the squares multiplying up and down, left and right. No cornice to end the march; the building just stops. And there are eight of these buildings, clustered in this new development just outside Beijing’s Second Ring Road. Honestly, the scheme immediately brings to mind Soviet architecture in East Berlin, which did a good job of this sort of building-for-the-people that lacks any sense of life’s color or vitality.

Maybe it was the fresh coffee and morning light, but something sparked. Before I read the feature article (and Holl’s statement that he would never do a project that “relocates” people – Good for you, guy, I guess) I suddenly saw the building grid as representative of the people in the Chinese communist system, each counting equally, square by square, separated from each other by the heavy hand of government supervision. The containment of each individual is palpable.

But then Holl and his Beijing-based partner Li Hu begin to offer opportunities for subversion, slight changes in the grid that suggest an unstoppable human spirit. Diagonals run across small sectors of the building, not breaking the grid or even severing the barriers between squares, but connecting two, sometimes four individuals at a time. This is a slight subversion of the order but enough to hint at the human will to connect and engage, even while operating within the grid’s structure. (Yeah, yeah, after reading the article, I understand that these diagonals are actually the lines of structural support, but why should that deflect interpretation?)

Then come those large swaths of color – the bridges that penetrate and connect these blocky volumes, reordering the grid at its moments of intersection. Like a beam of colored light bouncing off of surfaces, these bridges seem to represent those streams or digital flows of information that are cutting through the society. Try as you might, you cannot block out those outside influences and dialogs. People will connect to the world. They will be exposed to the outside. Being found out is inevitable.

All of a sudden what looked like oppressive blocks with novelty bridges become a subversion of power. Revolution in construction.

Is this what Holl and Hu intended with their building? Probably not, but I will persist. Irony in design is too rare in architecture. To find it in Beijing is the only positive sign I’ve seen in the field recently. I’ll take it.