. Defenders of bamboo say that, if properly installed, it is as strong as steel, and far more supple. That is handy in a seaport where typhoons periodically lash half-finished skyscrapers, peeling off the scaffolding like an old layer of skin. The scaffolds routinely rise 50 or 60 stories

For Raising Skyscrapers, Bamboo Does Nicely

March 27, 2002

HONG KONG JOURNAL

For Raising Skyscrapers, Bamboo Does Nicely

By MARK LANDLER

HONG KONG, March 22 — Perched on a bamboo construction scaffold 18 floors above a swarming expressway, his legs wrapped around a pole, his lips around a cigarette, Ho Siu Leung looks, against all odds, like a man at ease. Mr. Ho has been clambering up and down these creaky contraptions since he was 14. He is now a weather-beaten 54.

But even he concedes there is something nutty about what he does.

"It's hard work, it's low paying, and it's very dangerous," Mr. Ho said during a rushed lunch break. "If I slip, it's all over for me."

Mr. Ho did slip once, years ago, while erecting a bamboo scaffold on a luxury apartment tower on Victoria Peak, which looms above the city. He fell three stories to the pavement, and woke up in the hospital after lying unconscious for two days.

But he went right back to work.

"Obviously, you can't be afraid of heights," Mr. Ho said.

With its swelling population and scarce real estate, Hong Kong has long specialized in vertiginous building projects. As it emerges from an economic downturn, ever-taller skyscrapers are again sprouting throughout the territory.

For all its relentless progress, Hong Kong has clung doggedly to an ancient Chinese construction technique — surrounding its towers in a latticework of bamboo poles no different from those used by builders in China a thousand years ago.

Nowadays, scaffolding is used most commonly to give bricklayers and tile workers a platform on which to do exterior work.

The Chinese mainland has banned the use of such scaffolds on buildings taller than six stories because of fears that the quality of bamboo has deteriorated in recent years. There are rumors that Beijing may soon ban them altogether.

However, in Hong Kong, where bamboo is legal, it is still used in a vast majority of construction projects. The scaffolds routinely rise 50 or 60 stories.

Defenders of bamboo say that, if properly installed, it is as strong as steel, and far more supple. That is handy in a seaport where typhoons periodically lash half-finished skyscrapers, peeling off the scaffolding like an old layer of skin.

"It bends in high winds, while steel scaffolding breaks," said Norman Foster, the British architect who designed the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters, one of the most celebrated towers in this former British colony.

Lord Foster recalls doing a double take when he saw his building under construction: for all its Buck Rogers modernism, it was erected with bamboo. "It's difficult to think of a design concept that has needed less improvement over time," he said.

Bamboo is not only timeless, its champions say, but elegant. The typical scaffold has slender, hollow rods arranged in a graceful cross-hatch pattern. The poles that support soaring edifices are often no thicker than a man's clenched fist.

Francis So's family has built bamboo scaffolds for 80 years. Ask him about the engineering, though, and he waves his hands dismissively. "Forget about the calculations," he said. "Let me tell you about the history."

From its roots in the monsoon-soaked Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guanxi, where dense forests of bamboo grow in valleys and on hillsides, bamboo scaffolding has developed over the centuries into a trade, with its own rhythms and rituals.

Young workers serve as apprentices to bamboo masters for three years, washing their clothes and carrying their lunch pails while learning the art of lashing poles. An experienced bamboo worker, Mr. So said, knows instinctively how thick a bamboo pole must be to support a multistory framework above it.

The workers also learn to scamper up swaying scaffolds with long bamboo poles slung over their shoulders. Most wear Chinese-style cotton slippers, and sometimes go bareheaded. Although they are required by law to wear safety harnesses, these are mostly for show.

"What are we supposed to tie ourselves to?" Mr. Ho asked, pointing at the sky above the scaffold. "We're already at the top of the building."

Mr. Ho oversees a crew of seven men, who work eight hours a day, six days a week. They cannot afford to tarry because the tower is rising beneath them at a rate of one floor per five days. No other city builds this quickly.

Mr. Ho's current project, with seven apartment towers of 46 stories each, guarantees his men months of employment. From their bamboo aerie, they have a jaw-dropping view of the container port in Kowloon.

But to gaze at the marine traffic would violate Rule No. 1 of bamboo scaffolding: Don't look down.

Looking up can be hazardous as well. Another worker, Ho Kit Man, recalls being struck in the face by a rock dropped by a colleague above him. After a dozen stitches, he was back on the job. But he points proudly to a scar over his right eye.

"It all depends on whether you've got the guts to do the job," said Mr. Ho, whose father, brothers and cousins are bamboo workers.

Like most men on his crew, Mr. Ho migrated to Hong Kong as a child from nearby Guangdong Province. Ho Kit Man and Ho Siu Leung are from the same village. Given that they have the same name, they are likely distant relatives.

Mr. So, whose company employs 400 workers, said they often play up the risks of the job to demand higher wages. At a going rate of about $100 a day, he said, they are already among the highest paid laborers in the industry.

But Hong Kong's construction industry does have a high rate of injuries and fatalities. That leads Tsang Kam-shing, a gentle man who has built bamboo scaffolding for 20 of his 40 years, to hope his son will not follow in his footsteps.

"This is cow work," he said, using a Cantonese expression that means grinding menial labor.

Deyan Sudjic goes off on one regarding Scotland and architecture...

The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland has just launched a £25,000 annual prize for the best building of the year - in Scotland - in a wave of complacency and self-congratulation that flies in the face of the concrete and pebbledash reality

There is nobody in Scotland with the stature of Jacques Herzog, for example, who, though based in Basel, a city infinitely more provincial than Edinburgh, has managed to transform the way that architecture is seen around the world.

What Does This City Need? O.K., You Asked

"Mr. Garvin said that the question about downtown was how big it is possible to think. And at least for now, he said, all the forces are supporting the kind of historic vision that New York has not seen since perhaps the creation of Central Park in the mid-1800's. Branches of government and agencies within government that generally don't even talk to each other, Mr. Garvin said, are aligned. People want something to be inspired by."

March 20, 2002
What Does This City Need? O.K., You Asked
By KIRK JOHNSON
Alexander Garvin's temporary office overlooking the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan is all but empty of detail and clutter — a desk, a few chairs, a panoramic view of the city. That's about it, and, given Mr. Garvin's job, it seems about right.

Think: Blank slate.

Mr. Garvin, a 61-year-old adjunct professor of planning at Yale University, has been hired by the city's Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to think the big thoughts about where downtown might go from here. The wounded city is the canvas on which he will be expected to project a new plan that will partly be about physical architecture and buildings, but which will also be a kind of narrative — the new story of New York and how it might fit back together.

"We have a chance to start all over again," he said. "Things are possible at the moment that have not been possible in my lifetime."

Just as important as his academic credentials, Mr. Garvin said, is his origin: he is a city kid from the concrete up. He has never lived farther than a mile from where he was born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He has made his career thinking about cities and writing about them and, for 30 years, teaching about them. He's a walking headline: Ultimate city kid gets ultimate city job.

"I'm a certified provincial," he said.

That Mr. Garvin was hired at all as the development corporation's vice president for planning, design and development is also a testament to the revolution in thinking about New York's recovery that has taken place since the early weeks after the terrorist attacks in September. Back then the trade center's lease-holder, Larry A. Silverstein, proposed simply rebuilding the towers as they had been before, or constructing a new complex that could rise quickly on the site to replace the nearly 13.5 million feet of office space that had been lost.

Hardly anyone talks that way now, and Mr. Garvin is the public face on the new, more ambitious view. He made his name in part with his 1996 book, "The American City," which lays out in 477 weighty pages his critique of how dozens of cities have succeeded, but more often failed, to plan their futures.

A central argument of Mr. Garvin's book is that every urban planning project must start a market reaction — a business response outside of the site itself — or it is doomed to failure. Thinking about ground zero, by that measure, means thinking about everything from the street grid of Lower Manhattan to mass transit's connections out into the suburbs and the restaurants of Broad Street.


AND his cornerstone thought, Mr. Garvin said, is to think big. His inspiration is the early 20th century planner, Daniel Burnham, who laid out much of Chicago and lived by the dictum that small ideas always fail.

"They have no magic to stir men's blood and will not be realized," Mr. Burnham wrote.

Mr. Garvin said that the question about downtown was how big it is possible to think. And at least for now, he said, all the forces are supporting the kind of historic vision that New York has not seen since perhaps the creation of Central Park in the mid-1800's. Branches of government and agencies within government that generally don't even talk to each other, Mr. Garvin said, are aligned. People want something to be inspired by.

"How much further we can go — that's what we're going to be trying to test," he said.

Some of Mr. Garvin's ideas are indeed hugely ambitious. He would like to see new train lines and connections that would make Lower Manhattan a single-seat train ride from Long Island and Westchester. He wants to look at the possibility of extending Fulton Street, which now ends at the boundary of the trade center property, all the way across Manhattan, making it a crosstown artery anchored by Battery Park City on one end and the South Street Seaport on the other.

And many of his ideas, he admits, are also still sketchy, or perhaps best kept close to the vest. He has been around New York politics long enough, he said, serving for years on the city's Planning Commission, and in various other urban development jobs since the early 1970's, to know that with something as politically sensitive and crucial to the city's future as rebuilding downtown, you walk gently, however blood-stirring your plan might be.

"I don't think you produce something full blown from the head of Zeus and say, `Here,' " he said. "What we've got to do is start putting some of the pieces out, and as you put out all these pieces you arrive at a point where there's some general agreement."

But there are perhaps hints from Mr. Garvin's life about the story he will tell downtown. His parents, Jacques and Margarita Garvin, were both born in Riga, Latvia, but were apparently so in love with the idea of New York that even as they made plans in 1939 to escape from Europe, they bought advance tickets to the World's Fair being held in Queens that year.

Mr. Garvin's father started a food business in Flushing, supplying delis with things like macaroni salad. Mr. Garvin himself is single with no children, and he grew up, he said, with the city as his playground and the subway as the means of exploring it. He fell in love with New York, he said, by seeing it as a giant living fabric of places that were surprisingly, wonderfully connected.

"I'd take the subway to places I'd never been to, just to see what was there," he said

Who says the only way is up?

"It manages to make the massive structure that is needed to keep such a high structure standing disappear. It is big, but, in the context of New York, it is just another tree in the forest."

Deyan Sudjic talks about whether London should (or can even avoid) becoming a skyscraper city.

IHT: Sure it's tiny, it has no view, but hey, it's home Less is more" say the Japanese of their minimalist theatrical art called Noh. Completely the opposite applies to capsule hotel accommodation in Osaka and Tokyo: less is really less. A plastic cubicle, no larger than 150 by 200 centimeters, might not be everyone's idea of a blissful sleep, but for hundreds of office workers who have missed their last train home to a cozy bed, a capsule hotel, capuseru hoteru, is a godsend.
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With the World Cup coming at the end of May, and hotel space possibly at a premium, these seemingly peculiar accommodations may turn out to be one solution for the pressed visitor.

Googlewhacked!

APA Private Practice Division Archives 8. Distract with aerial photographs and historical maps. These make great conversation pieces and are excellent distractions for people eager to exclaim, “Hey, there’s my house!”

Notes from Metropolis: Guiding Light | Metropolis Magazine | March 2002

Samuel Mockbee died at the University of Mississippi Medical Center on December 30, 2001, at 2:48 p.m. He was 57, and by his own admission just hitting his stride as an architect. He believed--as earlier generations used to--that architects need the weight of life and experience before they can design with empathy, technical understanding, and political savvy. Though his life was cut short, his influence is likely to endure.

Far Corner: The Other Environmental Crisis | Metropolis Magazine | March 2002

"Here, as the exhibition text had it, were ideas from "the finest professionals in the fields of design, engineering, ecology, art, and planning," and the whole was indistinguishable from an end-of-year student show at a trendy architecture school."

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Mayor backs Ground Zero 'towers of light' memorial Mayor backs Ground Zero 'towers of light' memorial