Letters

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2002

TIBETAN TRAGEDY

SIR: I was pleased to see Delight covering a Buddhist monastery in Ladakh (AR November, p98). However, if you raise your eyes to the neighbouring hills, the situation is far from peaceful. The destruction of monasteries is still spreading in Eastern Tibet.

According to http://www.savetibet.org the scale of this continuing demolition of monastic structures is unprecedented since the Cultural Revolution. It seems at Yachen Monastery, now part of Pelyul county of Sichuan Province, Chinese officials forced the monks and nuns to destroy their homes or be fined 200 Yuan ($25) and have belongings confiscated.

But Beijing has always wanted to make Tibet Chinese. A central aim was to diminish Lhasa's role in the religious and cultural life of Buddhist Tibet. Moving people to Lhasa seemed an efficient way, and so the city of 30 000 inhabitants in 1950 grew to 382 000 in 1998. Of course urban growth neccessitates demolition.

Knud Larsen and Amund Sinding-Larsen, University of Trondheim, Norway, documented landmark buildings and the townscape of Lhasa for seven years. They found that the Tibetan architecture kept disappearing before their camera lenses. In 1995 they identified 330 of Lhasa's old religious and secular buildings. By 1999 the total had fallen to about 200. The results are published in a sumptuous and learned volume The Lhasa Atlas: Traditional Tibetan Architecture and Townscape (October 2001, Serindia Publications, [pounds sterling]40). It is well illustrated with maps, sketches and photographs from the present and the lost past.

Fortunately Unesco's World Heritage Committee lists the 1000-room, golden-roofed Potala and the Jokhang Temple Monastery since 1994/2000. Today this architectural masterpiece is a major tourist attraction and the authorities now realize protection of the Potola and other landmarks are key to commerce. For the Larsens their protection means 'turning them over to an aggressive form of tourism management seems to be the only solution, however unappetizing and unrealistic that may seem'

The beauty and peacefulness of the Buddhist monastery in Ladakh contrasts with the situation in Tibet. What a shame Shangri-la is only an imaginary place.

Yours etc

GERALD BLOMEYER

Berlin, Germany

VERTICAL GULAGS

SIR: Referring to View in AR October issue (pp28, 29), I want to make the following comments. Several years before terrorist attacks in New York, at an AIA meeting in Washington, DC, I had expressed my deep reservations on the virtues of tall buildings. I pinned a name for them as Vertical Gulags.

Gerald Blomeyer writes: 'Today tall buildings are the product of need'. Not in my mind. They are the product of financial speculation. Who benefits from them? Not the workers who commute long distances to these anonymous high-rise structures.

Did anybody, specially the architects, ask the clerks if they are happy to work in hermetically shot glass enclosures. What can they see from their interior for relaxation? Other skyscrapers in a tall urban disorder. They do not breathe fresh air, they rarely view the mountains or the plains.

Why many in the States do like Washington, DC, is precisely because the capital of US does not have tall buildings, keeping in harmony L'Enfant urban grand plan. All other American cities with skyscrapers are the same; they do not have any particular distinction.

It is very sad that Frankfurt, or Paris at La Defense is imitating America.

That is not 'a major contribution to the city image' as G. Blomeyer thinks. The towers do not enhance both the skyline and the quality of city life. Tourists do not go to Copenhagen, London, Madrid, Paris or Rome to see the skyscrapers. New York is an exception for being the original creator of the skyscraper in the twentieth century. Today such repetition in the computer world of global communication has no justification.

As to the sustainability: the concentration of energy in a such tall solid density, produced by lifts, heating and air conditioning, as well as lighting, does not contribute to energy conservation, as the Los Angeles and New York crises have already demonstrated in the past.

Water availability might work for New York (Atlantic Ocean) and for Chicago (Great Lakes), but you still will need a lot of energy for pumping machinery and for waste treatment and all other sequences, derived from material and food supplies.

Another important issue as a result of recent events will be their control and maintenance. The vulnerability of tall buildings for sudden collapse will require much greater structural considerations. The CBS, a 40-storey building designed by Eero Saarinen in 1960, was the first skyscraper of reinforced concrete with a tremendous load in comparison to post and beam steel high-rise buildings. The geological soil of Manhattan made it possible to build it, but in other places the cost of tall buildings will be commensurably greater and uneconomical in relation to the renting offices spaces and their prices.

But what is more important: in many lands where the difference between the dwellers in very poor settlements is in abysmal contrast to the glossy high-tech super tall towers, sooner or later we can expect more tragic events of urban unrest and destruction.