Two Sides of Sinan Lu

The contrast on both sides of the street is only as jarring as you make it out to be, if you notice it at all.

You can see it while standing in the middle of Sinan Lu (思南路), facing Fuxing West Lu (复兴西路) in Shanghai’s French Concession. A noted commercial development of ostentatious luxury sits face to face with the ghosts of past riches. Both Shanghai past and Shanghai present are embodied in the traditional, old, European-style villas. But those on one side of the street have had their layouts redesigned, their foundations tilted sideways, their innards replaced with modern amenities (lifts!), and their courtyards beautified with plenty of commercial landscaping. On the other side of the street stand facsimiles of the original, unmodified versions of these structures: tired, broken down and devoid of occupants.

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Inner Mongolia’s Empty City

In August, I came across an intriguing photo in Tokyo’s Mori Museum — a group of what appeared to be a group of urban sophisticates wandering, seemingly lost, in a desert landscape. The image was part of an exhibit on the work of Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, but it wasn’t the photo itself that was on display: Ai was the “curator”, working along with hip Swiss architects Herzog & deMeuron, of a project called “Ordos 100,” and the wanderers were among one hundred architects, each selected to develop a villa in a development near a booming city called Ordos in China’s resource-rich Inner Mongolia, which is apparently gaining a reputation as “the Chinese Texas”.

Since the onset of the global recession, Ordos has come to resemble its Texas counterparts in more ways than one: a vast, hypermodern extension of the city sits almost completely empty. Ordos cannot fill the hundreds of rank-and-file apartments that were conceived and constructed while Ordos 100′s vanity villas have remained in the design stage.

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Vertically Challenged

The Midtown West intersection was windswept and deserted, save for two fighting children. To their right, a weed-strewn lot, some freshly-painted tags, a shopping cart filled with someone’s belongings from some far-off store called “Buy Buy Baby”, a long-unnecessary construction cone. To their left: an empty, suburban-style Mercedes dealership, out-of-place, surreal — just a little beyond was the Empire State Building. In the near background, a panorama of half-finished new condo towers, half-gleaming in once-trendy sheaths of glass.

New York has not reverted to the destitution claimed by some of the shriller portraits painted by the European press, which cover the economic downturn’s grip on the U.S. with the same sensationalism they once reported on the country’s urban crime. The recession is marked by subtler symbols — the increasing emptiness of storefronts, on the one hand, and the skeletal remains of stunted skyscrapers, on the other. New York’s condo tower boom is over, leaving behind a forest of halted cranes, a frozen Dubai.

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Location, Location, Location

Building the new Shanghai.

Better Lives Come Tomorrow

New developments and recycling at Yonge and Eglinton

Construction Site

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that downtown Calgary is in the midst of a construction boom. Construction explosion, more like it. Nearly two dozen new condominium and office towers are under construction in the city’s compact centre; some are destined for obscurity but others, like Norman Foster’s The Bow, which will become the city’s new tallest building, are daring and ambitious in their design.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the Le Germain, a hotel, office and condominium complex currently under construction at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Centre Street, right across from the Calgary Tower. I like that it subverts the plain-box archetype that has dominated Calgary since the 1970s; by taking two different boxes and bridging them with an bunch of glass condos, it creates an unusual building in a city that strays far too often towards the banal.

At the same time, though, it’s pretty ugly — but I guess it’s better to be interestingly ugly than pleasantly average.

Under Construction

Admit it: at least once, while walking past a big construction site, you’ve stopped to gaze down at the workers below, scurrying like safety-vested ants as they pour concrete and install girders. You probably weren’t alone. Chances are, others joined you, equally transfixed.

Julie Favreau and Caroline Dubois hope to capture that kind of attention with their new artistic intervention, Plan d’aménagement, which runs every day this month until Monday, Nov. 26. Favreau and Dubois have occupied a vacant storefront on Beaubien, where they, with the help of a small cast of dancers and artists and a whole pile of junk, will create a performance of perpetual construction and destruction.

The goal, explains Favreau, is to explore the public’s curiosity with “space in the making.” Passers-by watch their activities through the store’s large picture window or enter to ask questions and talk with the artists.

“Some people just watch outside, others have come in,” she says. “Earlier, there was a man who wanted us to buy the building and stay here permanently. He said, ‘You can’t go, there’s nothing like this in the neighbourhood, it’s so nice to see you here.’”

(Indeed, even during an afternoon interview last week, another man stopped in to ask what was going on. “I’m in the salon across the street and I’m so curious to know what you’re doing,” he asked, before Dubois and Favreau explained their “projet d’occupation.”)

“There’s a sort of desire attached to the location,” says Dubois. “It’s been vacant for two years, so you take for granted that there’s a fascination attached to this space. We have to go beyond that and have people come back and see the shows we’re going to put on in the evenings.”

Each week of the performance is guided by a different theme—last week was “comfort,” this week “risk” and next week “filth”—culminating in a show that ties together all of the weeks’ experiences.

“It’s a bit as if we’re taking the context of people going home from work and coming in here to see this, and creating something else, a piece of art,” says Dubois.

More than that, though, what the duo hopes to achieve is to engage people not only in the finished product of their art—the performances—but in the process as well.

“When we’re really into what we’re doing, people stand on the sides like they’re watching a construction site,” says Dubois. “You know, sometimes you’re watching the big machines and it’s like…”

“You understand that it’s not finished,” interrupts Favreau. “We’re building something but we get the sense that it’s not done. It’s not a show.”

“So we’re interested in why people stop to watch those big construction sites. I know I do it a lot. We thought about why, in art, we don’t have access to the whole process of research, only the finished idea, project and object. We don’t see the whole period of reflection, of doubt, of construction. We wanted to make sure that these steps of creation were accessible, so that people see not just the end but everything that came before.”

This article originally appeared in today’s Montreal Mirror.

Rebuilding Woodwards

For as long as I have been visiting Vancouver, the abandoned Woodwards department store has loomed over the Downtown Eastside, a hulking reminder of the neighbourhood’s long decline into commercial and social oblivion. For more than a decade, developers and government squabbled over what to do with the site. In 2002, an organized squat took control of the building, demanding that it be converted into social housing.

The next year, the City of Vancouver purchased the building and started a public consultation project that eventually led to a unique $300 million redevelopment plan. Most of the building was demolished, except for a chunk at the corner of Hastings and Abbott, and it is in the process of being replaced by a large mixed-use complex that will incorporate 536 units of market-rate housing, 125 units of social housing for singles, 75 units of social housing for families, a supermarket, a drug store, retail space, government offices, a daycare, space for non-profit organizations, Simon Fraser University’s new art school, and green space.

For the most part, Woodwards has been hailed by many as an example of what can be achieved when the community comes together with public and private sectors to shape urban development. I’m inclined to agree: it serves as a model for future development on the Downtown Eastside, one that will reconcile market interests with those of a community riven by deep social problems.

The challenge now is how to deal with spinoff development, to ensure that enough social housing and social services are provided to counterbalance the effects of new market-rate condo construction.

How Would You Like Your Pine and Park?

By Montreal standards, it was a remarkably quick construction project. Perhaps that is because it mostly involved deconstruction: an entire interchange dismantled and replaced with a straightforward, easy-to-negotiate and pedestrian-friendly surface intersection. It has already been several months since the revamped Pine/Park interchange was opened. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate its wide sidewalks and broad vista of Mount Royal, uncluttered by highway signage and crumbling concrete bretelles. I don’t think I’m alone, either, considering how much pedestrian traffic there seems to be at the new intersection.

Of course, the roads, sidewalks and light fixtures might be installed, but the intersection is far from complete. Four parcels of land on each corner of the intersection remain vacant. Now, the Plateau Mont-Royal borough wants to know what you think should be done with this space. Three stages of public consultation will take place this fall, culminating in what will hopefully become Montreal’s greatest new public space. The first stage, which will last until October 9th, is an open call for ideas. The borough has set up a form for you to share your vision of the interchange, so make yourself heard! The best ideas will be compiled and presented on November 9th, followed by a “grand échange” on the 24th.

Personally, I hope that the space at Pine and Park will be used for something dynamic and unconventional. I would love to see some sort of water feature — this city doesn’t have enough fountains — and a mix of uses that will ensure a constant level of activity year-round, perhaps including a bit of outdoor retail space for cafés and street vendors. Over the summer, community activists in the McGill Ghetto made it clear that residential development would not be tolerated, and I agree that condos would be a rather poor use for what is, after all, a bridge between downtown and the mountain. But simple park space, like some have proposed, would be just as bland and unimaginative.

But enough about me: what do you think? This is your space, Montreal. Tell us what you want!

Crossposted from Spacing Montreal.