I do not know what is meant by “horizontal skyscraper.” Nevertheless, Steven Holl’s Horizontal Skyscraper Vanke Center in Shenzhen, China is stunning and stands is the architectural work that most impressed me in 2011.

It’s really what the buildings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation should have been.

What Bloomberg has to say about the new Seattle buildings:

Artifacts from many countries hang on the wall and strategically placed screens play videos of work being done, but they are background ambience, not front and center. The place is almost aggressively impersonal, as if any meaningful architectural gesture might offend someone or be read as colonialist bullying…

The default to blandness is a lost opportunity.

What NYT said about the new Shenzhen buildings:

Steven Holl, the center’s architect, is a major talent, with significant projects in Europe and America, but his most potent urban ideas have sat on shelves for decades.

In China he was given the chance to dust them off, and the results are extraordinary. Nicknamed the “Horizontal Skyscraper,” the Vanke Center is a surreal hybrid — part building, part landscape, part infrastructure. Its jagged form, propped up above a tropical park on piers up to 50 feet high, gives identity to a characterless landscape. It demonstrates what can happen when talented architects are allowed to practice their craft uninhibited by creative restrictions (or, to be fair, by the high labor costs of most developed societies).

Each work might be seen as a reflection of the state of their cities.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

7 replies on “The Horizontal Skyscraper”

  1. Let’s not worry about taking care of our homeless and people in need. Let’s build a giant retarded sideways building. Yeah.

  4. If corporations have conquered our country, the least they could do is leave us with some decent architecture. Instead we get aggressively banal, instantly forgettable structures like the Gates Foundation or Amazon HQ. Ugh.

  5. No, you know what gives identity to characterless landscapes? Streets. Busy streets full of people and shops. Not new Brasilias everywhere. Holl is a merchant of dead zones, just like all the rest of his compadres.

  6. Marin County Civic Center, north of San Francisco. (Frank Lloyd Wright)

    More here: http://www.studiolo.org/pix/gallery68.ht…

    This building stunned me when I first saw it at about age 8. I still appreciate the technological virtuosity of high-profile architecture, but these days (like Fnarf) I’m more interested in the elusive alchemy that creates vibrant public spaces. In cities that are new to me I tend to visit those places before checking off any nearby architectural icons. Along with the local gayborhoods, of course, which often coincide with the happenin’ hot spots.

  7. holl is still working corbu’s radiant city. the landscape will be pretty to look at and uninhabited.

    probably exactly as the client desired, just like the gates foundation.

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