Light traffic on Shenzhen’s six-lane Shennan Avenue (Photo: 121214.004 by Adam Nowek)
Whether you consider his architectural legacy to be a boon to urbanity or you see him as an architect that sucks the soul out of the cities he builds in, there is no denying that Rem Koolhaas, with his Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), is one of a select few globally recognisable architects that leaves a lasting impression, for better or for worse, on the city as a whole. One city, Shenzhen, is rapidly becoming the canvas of the Pritzker-winning architectural rock star, with two major projects in Shenzhen’s financial heart.
Exhibit A: The Shenzhen Stock Exchange
OMA’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange (Photo: 121214.005 by Adam Nowek)
Completed in 2013, the new headquarters of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange towers over Futian, the home of the megacity’s rapidly growing central business district. Located within a new civic district that houses a sprawling-yet-underused public square and a library with a volume shaped like an open book, the Stock Exchange’s imposing raised podium and sleek exterior are a testament not only to Koolhaas’s unique theoretical stance but also the prominence of financial speculation in contemporary society. The roof of the floating podium is indeed beautiful, but one cannot help but feel that the purported contributions to public space have a somewhat distorted view of who the public is.
Despite this, OMA’s design offers real merit. The People’s Republic of China has been long associated with questionable practices in architecture and planning, including sub-standard building material use, wholesale copies of foreign villages, poor planning resulting in former villages being surrounded by intense urbanity, and cities filled with architecture that averages somewhere between bizarre and horrible. The Shenzhen Stock Exchange is not a carbon-copy of a foreign architectural form, but a major rethink of what a Chinese city ought to look like.
Exhibit B: Essence Financial Building
This is where it gets interesting. During the construction process of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, OMA submitted a proposal to design the Essence Financial Building, also located in Futian. To say that this building shares stylistic similarities to the Stock Exchange is a mild understatement.
Essence Financial Building (Render: OMA)
Rather than raising the building’s podium 36 metres above the ground, the Essence Financial Building lowers it to the ground and slims the volume in the central part of the tower before the inclusion of a viewing platform. Similar to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the Essence Financial Building is promoted as “breaking away from conventions” in a city that is not commonly known for doing so. When the completed structure sits prominently on a major traffic artery of the Futian district, all residents and visitors will know the shiny new façade of the city.
The design, though, is equally confusing: the extensive private amenities and a slick grayscale exterior appear to actively remove the building from its surrounding context. Rather than proposing something that integrates into Futian’s architectural style or subtly pushes it into a new direction, Essence appears as a rejection of local taste and an affront to street-level activity.
Exhibit C?
It remains to be seen whether Rem Koolhaas’s latest commission in Shenzhen is a triumphant exclamation point on the southern Chinese city’s financial district or the beginning of a transformation of Shenzhen’s skyline into a gallery of the Dutch starchitects more bombastic late-career works. While the aesthetics of both structures are strong, attractive, and reminiscent of Blade Runner, it is difficult not to question the purpose of such designs. Importing the work of A-list architects such as Rem Koolhaas is part of a simplistic crusade for improving the brand image of Chinese cities. To that end, Shenzhen has partly succeeded, as the overwhelming international press attention paid towards the two projects is promoting Shenzhen across the globe as an attractive place to conduct business, both from a business perspective as well as from the perspective of the corner office.
Despite this, would it not be more appropriate to entrust projects of monumental scale to a local architecture practice that grew up in the context of one of the fastest growing cities in the world? Chinese architectural styles have a rich tradition of strict design rules rooted in cosmology that placed high value on elements such as garden landscaping, Buddhist shrines, and the iconic detailing of structures as seen on the prototypical pagoda design. As skyscraper architecture continues to become more and more similar across the globe, Shenzhen is left to wonder why urban planners absorb international styles while sacrificing local traditions.
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