Megalopolis

If all that sounds like I have a problem with the ubiquitous high-rises of Shanghai, then that's not quite it. In a conversation when here, my Chinese-speaking interlocutor interrupted my spiel on the skyscrapers here with the well-placed phrase 'Koolhaas alert!' and one of Koolhaas' smarter statements on matters East Asian was that it's somewhat unseemly how Europe is so panicky and hand-wringing about high-rise when in much of the rest of the world it's just the normal means of accommodation. Yet the high-rises here are as strange, fascinating and worrying as anything else here, a form which has gone mutant, and as Koolhaas is one of the few to have ever seriously analysed this - by which I mean in the absolutely peerless 'Junkspace', not in OMA's sillier or more glib pronouncements and projects - to end up with a certain amount of Koolhaasism is an occupational hazard here. This post is about the Megalopolitan side of Shanghai, its skyscrapers and intriguing lighting systems. The picture above is, in fine tourist style, the view from my hotel window. This is a view of Xujiahui, one of the Shanghai districts which were designated as capitalistic Special Economic Zone in the early 90s expansion of market reforms that followed the 1989 protests and the Tiananmen massacre. It's dominated by two towers called the 'Grand Gateway'. They do something rather typical for Shanghai. Mostly, they're smooth, SOM or late-Foster glass skins, but at ground level they're typical pink-glass shopping malls, the sort of tat you'd expect to find in 80s London or today's Moscow. (the really interesting thing, the lights, I'll get to later in the post. As you can see it looks equally odd, if less glamorous, in daylight:

The fact is, architectural periodisation is completely meaningless here. In my lecture to Jiaotong, I was originally planning to talk about the movement from a Modernist architecture through various versions of Pomo to the Pomo-eats-Modernism style that I've called Psuedomodernism, but looking round Shanghai I realised it just doesn't apply. Here, there wasn't really a socially engaged CIAM Modernism in the interwar years, there was Moderne, Art Deco; after the war, Stalinist Gothick and unpretentious (but hardly modernist) utilitarianism prevailed - and now, in the skyline, you can pick out everything from historicism to pomo to Constructivism to Expressionism to serene Miesian Modernism, with the only logic seeming to be that rather chaotic notion of Harmony and Pluralism. So basically, the only bit of my work left was to argue for the politicisation of architectural form, and that's what I'll at least attempt to do here. There is one unacknowleged influence here, as far as I could see, and it might well be completely accidental, is Stalinist architecture. I'm not using that as a pejorative, but as a description.

Above is a typical example - serried, identical towers, with south-facing aspect, generously proportioned windows and breathing space inbetween, which are dressed with clearly machined-ornament, whether at the top or in the 'brick' coursing you can see at the corners. It's not the crass, appallingly planned, architecturally illiterate, Zhdanov-goes-to-Vegas Yuri Luzhkov style drolly described as Capitalist Realism, but something with rather more conviction and thought behind it; it comes out of a combination of market preferences which the UK market, for instance, is unwilling to service (the south-facing aspect), and state edicts - the pinnacles that you find on every block and which have such an effect on the Shanghai skyline, are the result of state policy, to stop extra floors being built on top, as they were in boomtime Hong Kong; like the New York Zoning Code analysed by Hugh Ferriss, Corb and Koolhaas, is dirigisme leading to delirium, rather than a pure, Babylonian capitalist potlatch. What it really is, is the CIAM goes Classicist, and here we should remember that the architect Andrei Burov, one of the CIAM's 20s Soviet contacts, was later one of the leaders of Socialist Realist architecture, pioneering the use of prefabricated ornament in monumental construction. Much of contemporary Shanghai is the fusion of Burov's two preoccupations into a new architecture.

The block above does this with more demented panache than any other I see here - the sheer length and height of it, slathered in all kinds of prefabricated 'stone', with the particular approach coming very, very close indeed to the style of 1950s Moscow; except rather than the boulevard-and-courtyard approach, it's towers geometrically organised in parkland. This is another unphotographable, because this is one of eight identical towers stretching all the way past a main road in the southern suburbs. The lower, retail block in front is part of the same tabula rasa. The approach makes me think of the notorious photograph of a statue factory in the 70s USSR churning out identical Lenins, and I'd be intrigued to see a picture of the ornamental production line. Elsewhere, you occasionally find a pure example of a neo-Karl Marx Allee approach, although these were almost completely unphotographable....more often, you have small pavilions to the street and towers spiralling off into the distance just behind, of staggering density.

So in short, contemporary Shanghai is in many ways the fusion of the two architectures that contemporary urbanists find most uncomfortable - the repetition and lack of any 'street' in CIAM/Athens Charter high modernism, and the imposingly monumental, obsessively ornamental approach of the Soviet Union in its fully Imperial, pre-Khrushchev pomp.

Appropriately enough, there is one fully fledged example in central Shanghai of the full-blown Stalin style - the former Palace of Sino-Soviet Friendship, one of those peculiar 'gifts from the Soviet people' that were built in satellite states in the early 1950s - see also the Stalinallee, the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science...with the difference that China was never really a satellite, and after the Sino-Soviet split it became the Shanghai Exhibition Centre (and I think 'Top Marques' is another instance of Luxury Time). Aside from all the Corbusier-meets-Lev-Rudnev, which is more prevalent in the residential suburbs, the main influence - and I hesitate to call it that - is the Manhattanism that prevailed before Mies made it across the Atlantic, and similarly it's a serendipitous consequence of planning edicts.

That's not to suggest that it's all a pure matter of importation and adaptation. In one of the extraordinary essays in his 1998 Terminal Architecture, the late lamented Martin Pawley included one on 'Asia Reinvents the Skyscraper', where he pointed out how all of the innovations in skyscraper construction since the Sears Tower and the World Trade Centre were completed in the 1970s took place in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Taipei and (lastly) Shanghai, while Europe and America retreated into the aforementioned handwringing. He'd no doubt have added Dubai and Abu Dhabi if he'd written it a decade later, but as it is, the analysis is about protectionist, developmentalist capitalism rather than neoliberal dreamcities. It discusses overlooked architects like C.Y Lee, and argues that they started to influence international architects like SOM and KPF, not the other way round. However, the difference with Shanghai is that it already had a skyscraper urbanism 60 years beforehand. It's the lowest of the blocks above, crowded by its grandchildren.

The Park Hotel was designed in 1932 by Ladislaus Hudec, a Hungarian architect, and it partakes of the clinker Expressionism of the period - it's like something in Hamburg, only gone up to full skyscraper velocity, but with a very similar approach to the Baltic nautical style. It's rather beautiful, and coexists rather well with its groping-for-attention partners, like the wonderfully absurd UFO-topped Radisson.

Inside, though, it's not quite so Expressionist. It's the international luxury style of the 1930s, an opulent streamline classicism that could be found in the Queen Mary, or indeed in the Overlook Hotel.

There's a similar sense of guilt and horror just offstage from the dinner jackets and bobbed hair. So in amidst the dancehall scene above, there is someone impressing upon you that you have always been the caretaker.

Cognisant with the claim, expressed a little while ago that Liverpool was the British Empire's main attempt at a real 20th century urbanism of steel frames and high-rises, a lot of Shanghai looks like Liverpool. The still-extant firm Palmer & Turner were evidently the colonial W.A Thomas - and note that Palmer & Turner are now wholly an Asian firm. This is the clocktower of the racing club, from whose racetrack the People's Square was created, and from which you get a marvellous view of the Puxi skyline, where the 1930s are hardly visible, though the ten-storey Shanghai Number One Department Store can just about be seen in the bottom right-hand corner.

The towers take the planning requirement for an anti-speculative pinnacle very seriously, setting out to use it as an excuse for proper Hugh Ferriss/Fritz Lang/Raymond Hood spectacle, to varying effect. Some of them have a Babylonian power which marks them out as true successors to 1930s Spectacle-Architecture, the attempt to ennoble and glorify hotels, trading floors and suchlike. The aesthetically worthwhile ones are in the minority, but they're also often the tallest. The largest above is the Shimao International Plaza, the fourth largest in the city, designed (apparently) by Ingenhoven, Overdiek und Partner, East China Architecture and Design Institute. Like lots of these things, it's mostly a hotel - 48 of its 60 storeys. Those prongs at the top and the general thrusting gives the requisite sense of the overpowering, a latent violence and paranoia. As does this:

There's not much in the way of even today's circumscribed avant-garde in the Shanghai skyline; the starchitects are elsewhere. There's Holl and OMA in Beijing, Hadid in Guangzhou, but here the main monuments are by Skidmore Owings and Merril, Kohn Pedersen Fox, and of course John Portman. Below is Tomorrow Square, another of Portman's hotels. Portman is Fredric Jameson and Kazys Varnelis' favourite, the hotel designer and entrepreneur whose LA Westin Buonaventura was the Jameson's defining moment for postmodernist architecture – a new architecture which, in Jameson's case, very presciently had nothing to do with the shortlived Michael Graves/Terry Farrell bells and whistles ornamental style, although that too has many descendants in contemporary Shanghai. The presence of Portman, always an exemplar of the entirely unashamed melding of art and development, is another reminder of how a socially concerned Modernism makes little sense in the Shanghai cityscape. What Portman's firm are very good at, however, is designing sleek and sinister buildings, and Tomorrow Square is a marvellous example of it - mute, inscrutable, and like the Shimao, with a science fiction hint that all that frippery at the top might have some function, as a launch pad, or in some way be convertible into some piece of technological villainy.

In 'Communist' China, some – like Nick Land in his book on the Shanghai Expo, which is worth a whole other essay – seem very pleased that Modernism in Shanghai essentially picks up where New York left off before the 1932 The International Style exhibition, before the central Europeans with their Commie ideas got in the way of Manhattanism's path (in its Shanghainese form), interrupting the play of eclecticism and miscegenation, and of spectacle. Land laments the Style's purism, as most sensible historians would, but given the cheerleading for Chinese neoliberalism, it's also clearly an argument based on expunging much of what is relevant in Modernism to our wildly unequal cities, leaving it also as mere style, just not a style of unadorned surfaces and flat roofs. Eclectic spectacle, purist spectacle, it's all much the same, and neither have much to do with, say, Brutalism or Constructivism – but the aesthetic charge of the Shanghai skyline is furious and undeniable - at times, at least.

The name Tomorrow Square evidently has some reference to the People's Square it stands in front of. So what is the connection between Tomorrow and the People? In 1989, People's Square was a place of assembly and protest but it didn't see any massacres, apparently because of the constant presence of armed forces looming over the plaza. The Shanghai authorities' handling of the situation earned them a prominent place in government – Jiang Zemin, most obviously, whose Three Represents became Chinese neoliberalism's numerical successor to the Four Olds and the Four Modernisations. The square is of course loomed over by these skyscrapers, but also by a far less interesting city governmental building -

Evidently the Party has little interest in emulating the capitalist delirium all around, or even at joining in the extraordinary CIAM Stalinism of the outlying residential areas, instead providing something sober and bland, with perhaps a little hint of the Fascistic stripped skyscraper style favoured by the Kuomintang, more of which later.

The square is filled also with various kinds of advertainment, like these corporate pavilions, which help to keep any more dubious uses at bay.

Around is the pedestrianised strip of Nanjing Road, and more Manhattanism. This angular tower-and-base design with skyway round the back is a superlatively cranky composition, a much earlier example of the interesting things that can occur with ultra-density, when you have to force a tall building rudely into a site. You will also note that the neon lights are about to start coming on.

To fit with the general tourist-itinerary tone of this post, an excursion to The Bund, the command centre of the International Settlement in the semi-colonial era, is in order – because it's a very interesting place indeed – and so is a trip back indoors, to the portals of Palmer and Turner's Peace Hotel. The Hotel is of almost-skyscraper proportions, slightly smaller than the Liver Building; and the opulence of the place is matched only by what is, by contemporary standards, a rather small scale, with no vast atria, although the construction technology would have allowed at least a grander entrance than there is here. It's very much an earlier, more buttoned-up opulence than the dance-before-the-Japanese-come style of the Park Hotel, opalescent and exquisite. There's one section where reliefs show the hotel as it fitted into the cityscape at the time, with rickshaws passing by. This is what it looks like now, the one with the green mock-Chinese peak, anticipating the legally obliged peaks of today:

Next to it is the same firm's Bank of China building, which Chris considers to be an example of 'Kuomintang Fascist architecture', combining the symmetrical, stone-dressed modern classicism of Mussolini's Italy with fairly tacked-on Chinese details. The pronounced vertical emphasis, though, puts it squarely in the almost-skyscraper category – in fact, this one can probably get the 'almost' taken away. It was finished in 1937, the last on the Bund before the very similar neo-deco Peninsula Hotel, which is Shanghai's foremost example of Luxury Time. However, the people in front of it are photographing in the other direction. You will be able to see why presently.

The Bund's curve along the riverside now faces one of the unambiguously Good Things about contemporary Shanghai, a fantastic public space, an Improvement made as part of the Expo year. It's one part riverside promenade and one part square, and it is absolutely full of people, all photographing each other, as it should be. The tower just behind the 1910s-30s skyline was, we were quite sure, a direct transposition of the Ziggurat in Metropolis, and it has one of the most compellingly megalopolitan architectural elements in the Shanghai skyline – a searchlight as part of its illuminated crown.

This is the Custom House, the Liver Building abroad - the most Liverpudlian building ever erected outside of Merseyside. There are currently proposals from Chinese property developers to build around the historic Liverpool skyline a 'Shanghai-inspired' new high-rise district in order to return the favour, but the city seems less than keen, which is a little unsporting. These photos are all taken after the lights went on. They come on roughly all at the same time, between 6 and 7pm. They vibrate, they pulsate, they shimmer different colours, they declare different slogans, and they give the effect of a city of excitement and melodrama, somewhere which, like New York in the 1930s, ought to be inspiring great poetry, films, and music, but strangely doesn't actually seem to be, by all accounts (I'm told by everyone that the art and music scene in 'bureaucratic' Beijing is far superior). If the architecture has antecedents in Sino-Manhattanism, or China's transcendence of Manhattanism as described by Pawley, then the lighting has more in common with the abstract play of light in Weimar Germany, the sort of thing profiled in Janet Ward's Weimar Surfaces, more than it does of the dully literal advertising lightscape of 1930s American, or the simple giant banal adverts of contemporary East European cities. The lights are mostly not really selling anything in particular, their spectacle is more complex. The floodlighting of the Bund is part of that rather than a historicist riposte, establishing a link between the two eras of determined display. The more raffish buildings are especially appropriate – here, the Hugh Ferriss Babel of Broadway Mansions is dressed with yellow neon, the very English-industrial bridge in front in vivid red.

Many of the Bund's buildings have the red flag of the People's Republic flying from them, something which forces me into a minor double-take, realising that it signifies something quite different here, or rather it does now. The Custom House's chimes play 'The East is Red' on the hour – no, really, they do. It was the first time I'd heard it, other than Holger Czukay's version. The smaller, earlier public space here is where the notorious sign that didn't actually say 'No Dogs or Chinese Allowed' but did say something very similar in more polite language used to be, and it now has two monuments to the revolution that ended that.

One of them is typical figurative flag-waving hurrah socialist realism, and aside from a couple of curious snappers, lots of whom must be provincials up for the Expo, the large crowds entirely ignore it. The Monument to the People's Heroes, meanwhile, is completely abstract – it could be a monument to practically anything, and it could be admired by a Speer as much as a Mies - which doesn't stop it being a rather powerful sculptural object, its rectitude a contrast with everything around as much as its high-rise form is a complement to it. Whether it conveys the Chinese people's struggle against imperialism and capitalism is less certain.

So I've held off from this for too long – the architectural money shot, if you please, the thing that everyone in front of the Bund was taking photographs of rather than of the Bund itself (developmentalism winning an aesthetic victory over imperialism, there). A clear view of skyline like this is pretty damn rare in Shanghai, because of the height of everything else and the ubiquitous smog, so when you get it it's all the more breathtaking. This is the skyline not of Puxi, the only built-up side of the Huangpu river until the early 90s, but of Pudong, the area that is really an entire new town which sprang up from marshland after Shanghai was designated a Special Economic Zone – something the Chinese government originally refrained from, in order not to encourage the massively uneven development that made parts of Shanghai into one of the most modern cities in the world in the 1930s while grinding poverty stalked much of the rest of the city, and of China. That the return to fully uneven development should coincide with the notion of the Harmonious Society is one of those ironies of history.

The skyline itself as the lights come on, like the expressways at night, is a joy that only a churl couldn't be in any way moved by, as if the Empire State Building couldn't be enjoyed because of the Dust Bowl (some did argue that, of course). To pick out details – the giant illuminated globes again, Adrian Smith's smooth, tapering, gorgeously elegant World Financial Centre, the improbable declaration 'I Heart Expo' on the part of the Taiwanese Aurora company's offices, the pulsating lights extending even to the Expo-sponsored sightseeing boats (replacing much unsightly freight)...and, in the form of Oriental Pearl TV Tower, the curious feeling, once again, that you've seen the future somewhere before...that the future resembles very closely the past's idea of the future. It's the Space Needle or the Berlin Fernsehturm with an extra spiked bollock. There's no time, evidently, to imagine a new idea of the future.

On my second day here, as we sat in a cab careering northwards, Chris argued that what looks like it's moving at a thousand miles per hour is slowing down – that the famously accelerated growth rates are falling, but are still high enough (and the promise of success, symbolised by that empty Prada in Nanjing, is enough) to prevent any explosive social unrest; yet the country's 600 million poor peasants aren't going to be on Luxury Time any time soon. In short, that China is actually approaching the stationary state, that it will soon enough be the most powerful country in the world and still a poor one. I found this hard to take when careering down a ten lane expressway lined with gargantuan skyscrapers, that made the place I'm coming from seem utterly petty and provincial, but after ten days and several books it started to sink in. Perhaps one concept that could be applied to what's happening here now is one taken from music, Simon Reynolds' notion of Hyperstasis. A whizz-bang brightly coloured gymnastic everything-at-once eclecticism which, while enormously immediate and sometimes completely thrilling, almost seems designed to hide the fact that no new forms are actually being created, that there are no new ideas behind it, and that any alliance between art and politics, any revolution of everyday life, has disappeared from the agenda. The hyperstationary state?

The little red flag in the background is an accident – I would have tried to get it in shot if I'd noticed it. As mentioned, the lights all come on between 6 and 7, but the concomitant of that is that they all go off at around midnight. The apparent reasoning behind this is derived from environmental imperatives – all that wasted electricity – but the effect is 'ok, you've had your fun, now go to bed'. The intended effect of the lights might be to present a vibrant and delirious techno city that never sleeps, but it's hard to be the city that never sleeps when you have to get up at first thing in the morning for a day of hard, hard work.

Earlier Shanghai posts that would otherwise fall down the back of the sofa: One, and Two.