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Trellis Maximus: The Hippodrome of Istanbul
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Radical Adaptive Re-use Strategies in Asian Mega-Cities
This blog covers research and speculation from the 2005 Rotch Scholarship year abroad. The focus was on radical forms of heritage and adaptive re-use in Asian mega-cities, specifically Istanbul, Mumbai, Bangkok and Tokyo. In each location distressed built artifacts were sought out and envisioned with interventions that adapted them to new forms of urbanity. The inquiry addresses six instances of history lost and found, from the vanishing Hippodrome of Istanbul to the contemporary ghost-skyscrapers of Bangkok. The result is a fresh look at the concept of architectural heritage in light of the pressures facing Asia's mega-cities. The chapters of the study are on the sidebar to the right.
Courtyard Cricket: The Bollywood Cinemas of Bombay
Next stop: Introduction
-or- skip Intro: go straight to Istanbul.
GHOST-SCRAPERS: SITE
An abandoned ghost-scraper is located along Patchaburi Street, about 5 kilometers from the river in the Ekkamai area. Patchaburi is a busy road that saw a number of new towers erected in the 1990’s. This tower was planned at 22 stories, likely as commercial space. The building got as far as hanging the ductwork before halting. At this point it has been lying fallow for nine years.
In some respects, there is little to say about the site of an abandoned skyscraper: the building and location are fairly standardized. This spot was at one time considered a good risk to locate a building, but now lacks the conditions to continue. It is obviously big, larger than the surrounding context, but also in sheer quantity of material. The 12,000 tons of reinforced concrete cannot really be recycled, and the chances of it being re-used are diminished every day due to economic and liabilty issues. Is there a way to take advantage of this mountain of stuff without taking it down?
ASIDE: IN PRAISE OF RUINS
Ruins are the rarest heritage to be found in Bangkok. To see them you have to go an hour north to Ayutthaya, the seat of the Siam Empire from 1350 until 1867. It is now a quiet UNESCO heritage site of decaying temples that are fastidiously maintained to prevent the tropics from taking over. Actually, what is so remarkable about these ruins is their presence in a nation otherwise cultivating an ethos of renewal. Historic temples elseware in Thailand might be 5 or 250 years old, it is hard to tell; often they have been rebuilt numerous times. In each case, the materials and details have been altered to reflect contemporary techniques, but the overwhelming result is one of familiarity. In some ways there is more continuity with the past, since the styles are clearly living and evolving today, not codified into history or charged with post-modern baggage.
All buildings have a life-cycle and typically buildings built today are in the 50 year range, assuming regular maintenance. After this the building may be considered uninhabitable, but the ruins stand for many more years. At a certain point the building is subject to small structural failures depending on the materials and methods used to put it together; Albert Speer famously attempted to build in techniques that would last a thousand years. In contrast to Speer’s vision, most standardized reinforced concrete floors will begin to crack with the failure of the rebar. The most likely scenario is the acidification of the alkaline concrete over time by carbon in the air. Cracks and fissures caused by the freeze/thaw cycle and plant life accelerate the process by introducing air deeper into the material. The rebar corrodes and no longer resists the failure of the concrete in tension. This will happen unevenly as the structure begins to crumble. It won’t fail catastrophically, but deform in time like an eroding cliff. Like a leisurely wrecking ball, the elements distress the building until it sags into rubble.
On one end of the spectrum of forces that conspire to ruin a building are catastrophic events like implosions and earthquakes, while on the other is the much slower and more insideous neglect of abandonment. In between is a rogue’s gallery of problems from mold to pigeons that must be battled by regular upkeep. The effects of these parasites were sought out by romantic theorists like Ruskin who desired the “additional complexity” to be found in cultivated aging:
This sublimity, belonging in a parasitical manner to the building, renders it, in the usual sense of the word, ‘picturesque.’ (Ruskin)
North of Bangkok, in Chiang Mai, there is a provocative system of accelerating a building’s ruin. At the Wat Chedi Leung a system of pulleys allows visitors to water the Buddha’s relics located on the top of the wat structure. For a small donation, water can be hoisted up and overturned on the ancient crumbling structure. While the water may cleanse the relics, the by-product is that the destructive plants on top of the building are kept well nurtured.
GHOST-SCRAPERS: ACCELERATED RUINS
I propose an accelerated ruins project that introduces an urban wilderness to the city. By repositioning the structure away from traditional building values and toward a vision of natural decaying matter, the project would respond to the loss of primal space that is so evident in an international metropolis, while slowly eroding (and paradoxically preserving) a legacy of late 20th century globalism. It would take several generations before the building became too dangerous to use, and in the meantime it would foster a vertical jungle for urban explorers. Like any hiking trail, it would need a certain amount of maintenance and oversight (i.e. use passes and permits), but mostly it would be left to nature. In order to accelerate the process, the floors would need to be sprayed down with a mixture of the most destructive weeds. It would be the world’s first Chia-building. A system of irrigation tubes would run from a cistern “crown” at the top of the tower. Bundled with these tubes would be LED lighting to give the ghost life at night, and allow nighttime camping and hiking for the after-work crowd.
The leftover site area would be given relief, allowing for additional FAR to be added to the site in trade-off for loss of “highest and best” value of the existing ghost tower floor plates. A visitor and interpretive center would meet the street, offering retail and restaurants the advantage of a memorable location. From here, an explorer could hike up a light superstructure to whichever floor they haven’t yet visited. This snaking circulation addition would be made of steel and recycled construction netting and cantilevered from the existing structure. Assuming a 22 story building, the height is similar to the famous Golden Mount in Bangkok, a popular destination that takes 318 steps to reach the top. It provides one of the only publicly accessible panoramas in the city and is usually filled with people taking advantage of the vista. The viewing platform at the Golden Mount is some 200 feet above grade, while the ghost tower reaches around 230 feet. The circulation structure for the ghost tower would draw out the walk at a 1:2 incline, with one side along the building and the other providing views of the city. It would be about a half mile round trip to the top. A pretty good walk, but manageable as a day hike.
GHOST-SCRAPERS
In 1997 the “Asian Miracle” came to an abrupt end. Up until then, the 1990’s had been synonymous with economic growth, a period of international investment and globalization. In Bangkok, as in other Southeast Asian cities, this was most easily seen in the rapidly changing skyline; at the time of the crisis there were hundreds of buildings under construction in and around the city. However, the money to build was overextended, lent on shaky grounds. When the Thai bhat was devalued, the banking sector shut down almost overnight. Many lending institutions, including the largest in Thailand, collapsed in a short span.
The stepchildren of this crisis were hundreds of empty, partially completed tower buildings littered throughout the city: ghost-scrapers. In 1998 there were 508 total building projects lying fallow. Compounding the lack of funds to build were legal issues; clarifying liability in transferring the ownership of abandoned skyscrapers is a new field for the courts. Over the past two years, however, the story has tentatively shifted back to growth. The Finance Ministry is attempting to speed up the development of the abandoned sites, promising various incentives to recapture the potential revenue. Numerous buildings have found owners and many more are in negotiations. Citizens are investing again, albeit cautiously, and rarely for unbuilt units. Projects near amenities like the Chao Praya River or Skytrain have found the most new life, often as luxury hotels for the rapidly growing tourism economy, or condominiums for business and foreigner demographics. Today there are 281 abandoned buildings of varying heights totaling 68 million square feet, a far cry from the original numbers, but still daunting. Of these, about two dozen are towers.
Construction of towers in Bangkok favors cast-in-place concrete since labor is inexpensive relative to material. Sitting on deep pilings to resist the sinking Bangkok marsh, the column spacing and floor to floor heights are economical rather than extravagant. They are testament to the happy marriage of standardized methods and socially acceptable conformity. The relatively thin floor plates allow views through the structure to the sky on the other side; they appear purer and more sculptural than completed buildings that have taken on the telltale signs of human inhabitation. They stand out against the rest of the white and taupe skyline, unadulterated Maison Dom-Ino’s not yet ready to join their finished siblings. They are grey skeletons, incomplete and idle, waiting for the skin and guts that never came. In many cases they were interrupted mid-construction and sport prickly rebar bundles reaching out for the next layer of concrete. They may be structurally compromised due to years of unprotected exposure to the environment. Up closer, the structures bear the obvious markings of neglect: graffiti, tall weeds, rusting rebar, and miscellaneous construction detritus. Most ghost-scrapers have security, often a person who has set up an impromptu house on site. They live in modest shacks underneath 300,000 square feet of failed real estate.
Most Bangkokers hate the ghost-scrapers. They will tell you they are ugly, and for a population that is so universally well appointed, perhaps this is true. For one, they are covered with blemishes, warts of exposed fittings and weld plates. And considering the robust sale of skin-lightening cosmetics in Thailand, it is hard not to infer a connection to the creamy white skyline. The stained and aging concrete stands in contrast to the generally smooth off-white buildings around it. Without any residents to claim the space, they possess an aloof and sterile quality. The repetition of the bays is more evident without a human touch; the sheer bulk is more powerful. Drying laundry fluttering on balconies, uneven curtains, lights at twilight, and myriad satellite dishes...all soften the effects of scale. The ghost-scrapers are stripped bare of standard inhabitation and empty bigness is all that is left.
Most importantly to anyone who knows Bangkok, they exist as brutal and obvious reminders of a painful era. They are failures that are too tall to ignore, white elephants that remind locals of a too-recent hubris. More than visually ugly, they are mementos of hardship and fragility. As in any global city that prides itself on growth and progress, material signs of failure are like tumors that need excising. Current economic developments are still contextualized against the 1997 crisis, and the ghost towers represent the vanishing physical traces of those events. They are memories that are clearly present in the minds of locals, but are actively sought for physical erasure, or at least whitening.
Since they are ugly and painful they bring up a challenging question about heritage: how is it determined? Loosely defined, heritage is something passed down from one generation to the next, a kinship gift. If gifts are often unasked for and unappreciated, ghost-scrapers are the equivalent of fruitcake. They are monuments to hubris and reminders of folly. Maybe these are even more precious than the victories, a physical heritage to avoid repeating. After all, success has many parents, but who will care for the ghost towers? Stripped of their loaded symbolic meanings, they are strange, rude black holes in the city. While around them the world seeks growth and progress, they deteriorate quietly, readymade ruins in the city of the future.
