City Transformed: Urban Architecture At The Beginning Of The 21st Century. - Review - book review

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2001 by Dean Hawkes

By Kenneth Powell. London: Laurence King. 2000. [pound]45

Commentators as different as Peter Hall in his encyclopaedic and scholarly Cities in Civilisation, and Rem Koolhaas in the polemic of S,M,L,XL, agree that the contemporary city defies simple description. The European city is different from the American city and both are different again from the city of south-east Asia. But, even within broadly similar geographical regions, one city may be as different from another as it is from one on the other side of the globe. On the other hand it may be possible to identify striking similarities in the issues which confront cities which are geographically remote from each other.

It is this complexity which provides the context for Kenneth Powell's book, In it he gathers together over twenty projects, proposed or realized in the last ten years or so, to construct a review of the current state of the relationship between architecture and the city. In a brief introductory essay he paraphrases the history of the city itself and of urban theory, from which he derives four ad hoc categories under which he discusses the individual projects.

In the first section, Healing the City, projects as different as Koetter Kim's masterplan for the Victory District of Dallas, Piano's Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Group 91's Temple Bar in Dublin and Siza's reconstruction of the Chiado district of Lisbon allude to the widely differing pathology of the contemporary city and to the varied nature of diagnosis and treatment. The computer-generated images and real estate terminology of Dallas are literally and metaphorically a world away from the delicate specificity of Temple Bar and the Chiado.

In Extending the City the discussion moves from the centre to the periphery and, in Ho Chi Minh City, Canary Wharf, the Almere masterplan, Kop van Zuid at Rotterdam, the Inner Harbour at Duisburg and the redevelopment at and around Kuala Lumpur airport we suddenly recognize more similarities than differences. It is, on this evidence, on the city fringe where the models of globalism are most able to assert themselves. In this company Herzog & de Meuron's elegant project for Link Quay at Santa Cruz, Tenerife is inevitably the odd-one-out.

The third category, Cities in Motion, brings together projects which focus on the redevelopment of major railway stations. These are the Metro and Abando transport interchange at Bilbao, by Foster and Wilford respectively, von Gerkan Marg's station quarter at Stuttgart, and their project at Frankfurt am Main, and the collaboration of UN Studio/van Berkel & Bos in the scheme for Arohem Central. The section also includes a description of Foster's Chek Lap Kok airport at Hong Kong and Farrell's Kowloon Station at the city end of the rail link.

The book ends with a representation of Culture and the City through five European projects. Dixon and Jones' Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, is followed by the Seine Rive-Gauche masterplan for Paris, at the heart of which is Perrault's Bibliotheque Nationale. Atelier Mendini's Groningen Museum -- in collaboration with Coop Himmelblau and Philippe Starek -- precedes Lluis Clotet's strategy for the revival of the Laval district in Barcelona within which is located Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art. The book ends with an account of the redevelopment of the Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam by West 8.

The inevitable problem with a book of this kind is that the projects might overwhelm the development of the argument. This is not entirely avoided here and the emphasis is tilted towards description at the expense of critical analysis, but the selection of projects, and the careful discussion of each in turn, serves to demonstrate the complexity of the city at the millennium. It also shows how, within the dominance of globalism, it is possible for architecture to identify and represent the other agendas which bring specificity and value to urban life.