Beyond the Starchitects

As a rule, the British are not supposed to like high rises. We have always preferred gardens on the ground to streets in the sky, it is alleged. Tower blocks are said to be a 'failed experiment', dumping grounds for a particularly lumpen proletariat. Things have been changing over the last decade or so: Ernő Goldfinger's Brutalist Trellick Tower has been rehabilitated as a London Landmark and Denys Lasdun's Keeling House sold off as luxury flats. Out with the council house, in with the penthouse. Thus the New Labourthatcher 'urban regeneration' paradise. Though, of course, no one who has read J.G. Ballard's High Rise can be entirely comfortable with the thought of living in a luxury tower block. Ballard's account of middle-class meltdown starts as it means to go on with one of the best first lines in literature: 'Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.'

Tower blocks seem rather different in China. In Wang Meng's story Kite Streamers, first published in 1980 and set in Beijing, high rise living is altogether more human. He describes two young lovers and their difficulties finding somewhere private, since they have no apartment of their own. While out walking together they are caught in a storm and finally find an empty, newly-finished fourteen-storey apartment block where they take shelter. They climb up to the top floor and it is 'as though they had reached paradise'. They have discovered their private place where they can hold hands and whisper to each other. The ordinary high rise is sexy.

Photos of Beijing from the first half of the twentieth century show the Drum and Bell Towers rising above a sea of pingfang (single storey buildings). The 50s and 60s brought 5 and 6 storey apartment blocks, but Beijing before the Reform and Opening remained a largely low-rise city. It was at the end of the 1970s that high-rise apartment buildings began to be constructed. Some of these older ones are oddly charming; bold shapes with none of the bombast of the recent starchitect contributions. I like the way the yangtai (enclosed balconies) typical of Chinese apartments are missing on some of them, and the window frames don't match.

I'm not quite sure what these great greenhouses on top are:

Penthouses for cadres? Or probably, more prosaically, boiler rooms, as in the Trellick Tower:

(photo:pyrsokomos)

Beijing's first generation high rises are a lot more flimsy than the British Brutalist masterpieces, and there would certainly be a Channel 4 programme devoted to their destruction were they in Britain, but I hope they're not all going to be knocked down and replaced by nickname architecture (The Bird's Nest, The Egg, The Gherkin).