The
Chinese metropolis strives to reach a mythical point in which—like an
apotheosis of a Bermanean modernity—it
obliterates everything that is “traditional”. In it, the most absurd western
dreams become urban realities in a mater of months. Modernity in China
not only it is unprecedented in speed, size and ambitions; the footnote is that
there is no intention of looking backwards.
The Story of the Tower proposes a
fictional construction of the intellectual urbanistic apparatus, using
narrative architecture—which is a mix of narrative texts and images, as a catalyst
of possibilities, challenging realities, and tentative alternatives. The story goes on to narrate how a colossal
tower of modern aesthetics is raised in the middle of Beijing.
In this plot instead of applying the predictable tabula rasa, the tower
acts as a shelter in which the urban conditions threatened by modernity become
protected.
This
narrative architecture is a stratagem of urban tactics—however artificial and
far from reality—for the maneuvers and survival of the remaining urban Chinesness
of Beijing. The Story of the Tower is
not envisioned as factual architecture, much less as urbanistic
propaganda. It is an intellectual tool
that reveals the latent dialectical coherence that exists between the metropolis—as well as the skyscraper as its definitive typology,
modernism—with its alchemistic plan of abstraction and repetition, and the
traditional substance of the Chinese city.
The
aim of this provisional urban fiction is an end in itself: to rethink the
pertinence of the architectural imaginaries without restricting them to the
boundaries of their inventions; to see the possibilities of alternative
ecological urbanisms and the reach of possible intellectual conservation
projects. Now that the tower has been
raised, would we be finally ready to discuss the fiction?
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