Anything can be designed and built today. Not that it will be. The cities closet to me— Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Detroit— will only occasionally be home to projects that elicit awe. They’ll rarely be featured on the familiar circle of webpages consulted daily by designers and architects tracking the boundaries of what’s possible. The vacant lots that interrupt once busy blocks break apart these cities into fragments, some vibrant and some decaying, but each only a stuttering partial description of a place. Downtown, businesses pressed together in groups create densities belied by the emptiness visible only buildings away. Still vital residential neighborhoods sit well outside of these centers, separated by parking lots and vacant land. The life of the downtown seems to depend on how willing to and where people cross these meandering, empty areas.
Only recently back from my first trip to Kalamazoo, this type of vacancy is particularly on my mind. I found the city to be a troubling collection of beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings besieged by vacancy, modern infrastructure, and neglect. Unintentional and unpredictable empty urban spaces are a defining feature of this city, more so than the late Victorian and Art-Deco buildings that remain. At the perimeter of the city’s central business district, one of Kalamazoo’s best coffee shops is in a small former gas station surrounded by railroads, warehouse buildings, and busy streets. With views in all directions, its more like a building amidst the dunes of Lake Michigan than one near the heart of the city. The dunes are an uncomfortable metaphor for the emptiness that infects American cities, calling to mind the desert sands of North Africa that threaten to bury whole towns. Like the walls built by residents to keep the sand at bay, a fundamental principle of urban planning is that vacancy is to be fought— unrelentingly.
Which makes my discovery of the “ghost cities” of China even more startling. These “ghost cities” are real estate speculation at an unheard of scale. Housing and commercial space for millions, constructed and bought by investors expecting to reap the profits brought by an ever expanding Chinese economy. And promoted by a government determined that national growth meet yearly targets impossible without massive spending on infrastructure. The most dramatic case of this may be seen in the new city of Ordos, a city in Inner Mongolia 25 miles outside of an existing city. Housing and commercial building have been constructed for 1.5 million new occupants and have stood for the past five years largely uninhabited while construction has continued unabated.
Here emptiness takes a very different form than in American cities. It isn’t the open space of the vacant lot or of even the Mongolian steppe that surrounds Ordos. It takes the form of an idealized contemporary city, but responds only to itself. People are absent and there is as of yet no viable plan to bring them to it. Real estate prices are too high and there can be little incentive to be the first resident in a city of 1 million. Meanwhile investors hold onto the property waiting for the interested.
And in the center of the city is the recently finished Ordos Museum. Designed by MAD Architects of Beijing it is their first “realized” project of any real size. A giant shimmering aluminum stone set atop a paved stone terrace the color of the steppe, it has the solidity of a massive cliff but the impermanence of something washed ashore soon to be carried off by the next wave. The building was unveiled to the world not by proud dignitaries, the government, or museum trustees. Rather, the architects themselves made a movie cum advertisement showing off their work to the world. The movie opens with a bearded Mongolian nomad leading his horse across a desert when in the distance he sees the Ordos Museum. Shot after shot show man and horse framed against the metal facade and then indoors at the bottom of deep plaster canyons that slice through the building’s interior.
As the man and horse walk around the building there is never a view of the surrounding “ghost city”. Its skyline is hidden— or possibly even removed digitally. The architect’s work is independent of its actual site, tied instead to the imagined site of a lone building set into the Mongolian desert. It makes for good film, and the empty city is a generic and undesigned mess, but the omission when combined with the deep problems of the empty city makes the architect’s act an incredibly cynical one. The building will secure them future commissions and further launch the careers of what is one of the signature young design firms in China, but this will be done regardless of whether the building or the city of Ordos is ever inhabited. And so we marvel at an empty building. We marvel separately at an empty city, disbelieving that a country of billions has such vast inequity, bureaucracy, and moves at such speed as to create and preserve an uninhabited city.
It’s clear why a young firm like MAD Architects would seize the chance to design a museum for that city, even knowing the likelihood that it might remain empty. The neutrality of its design is likely an acknowledgment that the future of this place is in flux. But to design and then publicize their building entirely separated from its context seems uncritical— and criticism is what’s most needed when faced with a “ghost city.” As it stands, the building is no more useful than the developer-style strip housing that fills block after surrounding block. It’s bold, even accomplished. But it’s emptiness is damning. Despite all the work required to take this museum from rendering to reality, it finally feels no more “real” than the images of unbuilt projects that clutter the websites of young architects all over the world.
Meanwhile existing cities still age; attacked by vacant lots and neglect.
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