Building booms are becoming common lately. The earth’s surface is being processed, ordered, stacked, shipped, registered and reconfigured into “architecture” elsewhere. Materials, mineral wealth, reserves. Even in unexpected places, global blindspots, like China’s northwest desert province or the small island of Bahrain are all becoming similar to lower Manhattan, with skyscrapers rising almost in front of one’s eyes.
Many cities around the world were only considered as major trading stops are now starting to flourish with economic activity doubling every year. Cities are becoming the commercial trade capital of a wider region; a shopper’s paradise with huge bazaars everywhere. Nothing but multi-storey buildings full of small offices representing every possible manufacturer or distributor of consumer goods.
While the world focuses on Beijing and Shanghai as the new centers of building construction, Russia’s capital, Moscow, is undergoing a transformation unmatched since the massive overhaul of the Stalin era. The building boom has overtaken huge swathes of the where over 50 million square feet of housing were added. Public officials have spoken of building 38 high-rises of up to 45 stories in the next several years, with 22 more expected by 2015 as part of a program known as the New Ring of Moscow. The planned series of towers and modern infrastructure promise an infusion of high-tech energy whose vertical extension will resemble Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai more than a European metropolis. Then there’s the “Moscow-City” district, a sector northwest of the city center that has been designated as the future administrative and financial nucleus.
Bahrain, meanwhile, in forecasting the end of the oil economy, is setting itself up, through yet another building boom, to become a tourist attraction and offshore financial services hub. To do so, though, Bahrain – a very small kingdom – has turned to “innovative offshore developments and land reclamation projects.”
London now looks forward to “31 major new developments… all £100bn worth of them, including the 2012 Lea Valley Olympic Park.” That equates to “400,000 new homes, around 8m square feet of new offices (four Empire State Buildings’ worth),” as well as “so many secret, or simply obscure, developments” that the New London Architecture centre (aka NLA) was at least partially created to help make sense of it all.
Brief questions: where is all this material coming from? In case of Bahrain; you can only build so much architecture before you start to carve quite deeply into the land. So: where are the negative spaces of these building booms? For every skyscraper, is there a corresponding hole, quarry, or mine being dug or deepened somewhere?
The land reclimation projects of Bahrain, the New Ring of Moscow, New London Architecture – all rearrangements, transformations of the void, ever-deepening holes as we strip-mine the face of the planet.
