Is Bigger Really Better

Three men at a cocktail reception admire the view from a downtown high-rise, drinks in hand. An American architect, a Chinese developer and a Malaysian contractor, are in town for a business meeting to discuss the newest addition to the city skyline. The developer slides his hand into his pocket. "Mine's bigger than yours," he says to the architect, whose face begins to redden. "Excuse me, gentlemen," interrupts the contractor, "but mine is even bigger." He whips out a rolled up set of drawings, revealing the soon-to-be tallest building in the world in Kuala Lumpur, a staggering 1,476 feet high, just 24 feet shy of the length of five football fields.

Yessiree, folks, it's the battle of the high-rises in the Pacific Rim. The competitive nature of building high-rises, like the flashy American buildings of the 1980s boom, has caught on, and the Pacific Rim is eager to show the world that its cities are top-notch and as good as any city the United States, Germany and Britain can dish out. They're tired of being considered Third World and want to catch up with the West. "Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, they want business and they'll make it happen," says Jay Hoenig, Asia-Pacific senior project director for ADP Fluor Daniel's Phoenix office. "Their economies are growing 10 percent because of that."

Kuala Lumpur at one time inspired its natives to christen the Malaysian capitol muddy estuary, its literal translation. Now it's the home of the tallest building on earth, Cesar Pelli's Petronas Towers, built on what used to be a racetrack. Its completion will mark the first time in more than 100 years that the world's tallest building won't be in North America. Witness a shift of far-reaching economic and social change, perhaps the biggest you'll see in your lifetime. Architecture is the gateway of transformation, and Western architects hold the key.

The Pacific Rim has become obsessed with Western-style architecture. The horizons of East Asia and Southeast Asia shine suspiciously with the glare of numerous high-rises being built by Western architects. But are they being responsible when they introduce advanced technology to societies with no experience in grand-scale, Western-style development? Some cry the architectural boom has resulted in too much too soon, evident in Malaysia, which has become plagued with the world's first-ever concrete shortage. Others call it an uncontrolled disaster of contradictory building styles and conflicting use of land. Slick contemporary buildings rising out of Asia's rich architectural history are out of context in the midst of pagodas and ancient temples.

"When Asian businesses and developers hire Western architects and engineers, they're more interested in creating Western architecture," says architect Jeff Ellis of Sady Hayashida Architects in Berkeley. "The emphasis is on importing Western architecture into Asian countries as opposed to creating a modern Asian architecture, buildings that are sensitive to the cultures and areas in which they're being built."

San Francisco architect Dan Solomon has been working on a planned community project on the outskirts of Jakarta. The project includes an urban hub, a municipal building, a mosque, and rows of shop houses, traditional urban structures consisting of shops on the ground floor and apartments above. When the project began, Solomon faxed his client some preliminary sketches based upon traditional designs. But that wasn't what the client had in mind. He said traditional Indonesian architecture is no longer in vogue. He wanted the project to be modeled after an American suburb like Orange County.

But this trend raises ethical questions about importing Euro-American glitz into countries with long, sophisticated histories of architecture, and the consequence of steam rolling and importing Western ways into another country, which is seen by some as a modern-day architectural colonialism.

"There is a lack of central planning and coordination between residential, industrial and commercial projects," Ellis says. "Development without taking social implications into consideration creates its own problems, like the strain on transportation." Many of these new cities don't have systems of utilities, roads or public transportation to properly link new projects to previously developed areas. A prime example is Jakarta which is notorious for its traffic because the city wasn't meant to accommodate the number of people who live there.

Money is being raised to build new towns. The Pacific Rim is filling up with towns and cities that weren't on the map a decade ago.

Many new designs are mixed-use projects, a Western specialty which integrates offices, apartments, retail space, etc. The Sogo Pernas Centre in Kuala Lumpur, designed by San Francisco's HOK, combines a 75-story office tower, a 515-room hotel, a department store, an air terminal, a 3,000-car garage and a cultural museum. The Dong An Market in Beijing will include in its retail center department stores, a night club, a bowling alley, and a food court several stories high.

Western architects often link the past to the present by turning to traditional Asian architecture like pagodas, longhouses and Korean castles, adapting their designs to suit modern conditions. Many high-rises borrow their design elements from pagodas; the Petronas Towers' twin tapered towers are reminiscent of Islamic temples.

"I personally think it's ludicrous," Ellis says. "There are two ways modern architects are using indigenous architectural styles as precedent. Cesar Pelli takes a geometric form that was used widely in decorative screens, mosaic tile and Islamic architecture. He took that out of its context. In the way he's used it, there is no meaning. There's no regard as to why those particular geometries evolved. The other way of using precedent, which is more responsible and sensitive to these countries, is like a project taking a traditional design like the longhouse and incorporating that into a modern design. Architects have used the idea of the longhouse and interpreted it into a modern building to actually solve a problem with that region-a hot, humid region-to keep the building cool."

"We may design a project out of any one of our 20 offices around the world, but the project has to be delivered in that specific country," Hoenig says. "If you deliver in Korea, you really have to know Korea, its cultures, demographics, suppliers, vendors and permitting process, codes, standards, those types of things-that's the benefit of duality."

No one knows how long the industry will continue booming, but global seems to be the word. "The opportunities in the Pacific Rim are tremendous across a wide spectrum," Hoenig says. "If you're not a global player now, I think you're limiting your market significantly; if you're a large firm depending on a domestic market, you're really in trouble."

Sources:
Jay Hoenig, Asia-Pacific senior project director, ADP Fluor Daniel, Phoenix, AZ (415) 362-6020
Jeff Ellis, architect, Sady S. Hayashida Architects, Berkeley, CA (510) 644-2491
Byron Thurber, architect, HOK, San Francisco, CA (415) 243-0555, Ext. 162
Langdon, Philip, "Asia Bound," Pacific Architecture, March 1995.
Keune, Russell V. "Lessons from Asia," AIA Architect newsletter, February 1995.
Special section, "Pacific Rim," Architectural Record, March 1993.

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