The Linked Hybrid

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

This weekend, I made my way out to take a look at Steven Holl's Linked Hyrbid in Beijing as well as the exhibition "Urbanisms" that was on display there through the end of the month. Holl, who finished second to the pair of Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima (SANAA), for this year's Pritzker Prize, has become extremely active in China with major residential and cultural projects around the country. With an office in Beijing run by Holl's partner, Li Hu, as well as the original office in New York, the firm says it is able to work around the clock due to the 12/13 hour time difference between China and the East Coast.

Located on the North East corner of Beijing's 2nd Ring Road, the Linked Hybrid finds itself as the centerpiece of one of Beijing's major art districts. Situated right in between two stops on the 13 line, the neighborhood is quiet, with little pedestrian or automotive traffic.

On their website, the architects provide this description of the complex: "The 220,000 square meter pedestrian-oriented Linked Hybrid complex, sited adjacent to the site of old city wall of Beijing, aims to counter the current privatized urban developments in China by creating a new twenty-first century porous urban space, inviting and open to the public from every side. Filmic urban public space; around, over and through multifaceted spatial layers, as well as the many passages through the project, make the Linked Hybrid an "open city within a city". The project promotes interactive relations and encourages encounters in the public spaces that vary from commercial, residential, and educational to recreational. The entire complex is a three-dimensional urban space in which buildings on the ground, under the ground and over the ground are fused together."

Throughout the rest of the description, the architects emphasize the social qualities of the space, and while programmatic elements (bookstore, cinema, coffee shop) are in place to to provide places for people to interact, I felt that there was something stifling the social condensation that the architecture was trying to promote. When I first entered the complex and began looking around, I was stopped by a guard. Dressed in a more contemporary version of traditional Chinese male garb (a far cry from the faux PLA uniforms of the guards who man the doors at most residential complexes in the city), he politely asked me asked me where I wanted to go. When told that I wanted to look around and see the exhibition, he informed me that I am not allowed to look around and that there was no exhibition, but there was a book store. Not wanting to cause any trouble and knowing that he was simply doing his job, I told him that I would just go there. Dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, with a backpack on and a camera around my neck, I figured I wasn't the sort of person they wanted peeking around their Montessori school or art-house theater. And yet, I don't really see a good reason why. If the architecture is to serve as an attraction, and relies on social interaction, then you should welcome individuals, and not just direct them to the closest place to spend money. I highly doubt that this is the fault of the architects, and more a result of a poorly implemented version of what I like to call "human software" by the developers or management.

While China has been able to shoot ahead in terms of their hardware, it is the software that still leaves me slightly disappointed whenever I visit the country. While I can accept it in certain contexts, when I have an experience like I did at the Linked Hybrid - self-harming software paired with extraordinary hardware with highly ambitious social goals - the pretense for the building's existence is revealed to me and again, leaves me slightly disappointed. Furthermore, when I did find the exhibition, it was much of the same. I was the only one there, in a room with two projectors and several models of Holl projects that have been done in China. The models were pretty, but the exhibition lacked substance, a reflection of the same empty feeling that I had in the courtyard outside.

While may experiences may have left me sounding critical, I am quite a fan of the architecture. It is unlike nearly any apartment complex in China, a typology that has been beaten relentlessly with the copy-stick all over the country. And yet, you still have kids on bikes and grandmothers and grandfathers walking around. For me, this is one of the charming parts of the country' apartment complexes, and while coffee shops and bookstores may be appealing to a certain clientele, I don't think that they should be put in place at the cost of what has always made these communities work. While I didn't go up into the towers, the connections which create the links in the sky are also a very compelling architectural move and a relief from the individually designed and unconnected towers that make up the rest of the city.

While I found the Linked Hybrid to be an outstanding urban proposition and a fresh take on the Chinese residential condition, I left feeling that there was still something that was preventing the design from effectively reaching its goals for quality social condensation.