A city built on impermanence -- and that's OK
SHANGHAI — 'Most of them are so superbly ugly that they're exciting." That's what Qingyun Ma, dean of the architecture school at USC, told me last Tuesday afternoon when I asked him what he thought of this city's remarkable explosion of skyscrapers.
We were in a taxi heading east on the elevated Yan'an Highway, in the heart of the city, continuing a conversation we had started an hour earlier in a conference room at the architecture firm he runs here in the French Concession neighborhood.
A year and a half after coming to L.A. to take over the architecture department at USC, Ma, 42, a Chinese citizen, is just finishing the renovation of his house near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. He's officially in L.A. during the academic year, and he spends his summers in Shanghai running his firm, MADA s.p.a.m. (the lowercase letters stand for strategy, planning, architecture and media). But the peripatetic Ma also seems to be a global nomad, spending much of his time at 35,000 feet above sea level, crisscrossing the globe sharing his views on architecture and obsolescence.
Part salesman, part philosopher, Ma prides himself on being able to articulate what he thinks are the most important principles of contemporary architecture: 1) Architecture is more about ideas than materials; 2) Ideas should not be inscribed in stone forever; 3) The idea has to be beautiful; and 4) Architecture has to be for others.
I'm not entirely sure how all of this fits together, but I get his message about impermanence. It all goes back to the skyscrapers and why ugliness excites him.
"If they're ugly, they'll be torn down sooner," he explained before launching into a critique of historic preservation. Even as Westerners marvel at the enormity of China's urban building boom, they also tend to bemoan the ongoing demolition of the country's architectural patrimony. Even my guidebook complains about China's "perverse delight in destroying its own heritage" and the fact that in Shanghai, an enormous city of 19 million souls, only 600-odd buildings have been designated as protected historical sites, compared with nearly 40,000 in London.
Ma sheds no tears for the quaint buildings that have given way to thousands of new structures -- and they aren't all ugly by any means. In fact, he barely conceals his disdain for architectural nostalgia. "The concept behind historic preservation is foolish," he said. "It assumes that there is infinite space for future generations. We have to allow people in the future to build their environments based on their own needs and intelligence."
