BANGKOK HYPERBUILDING
Rem Koolhaas, 1996
A Bundle of Towers, Diagonals and Horizontals, Linked by Elevators and Cable Cars
The name may be new but the concept is ancient. A hyperbuilding is simply a very large structure that can house a huge number of people and contain many different functions within its walls. Perhaps the Tower of Babel was the first hyperbuilding, but twenty- and twenty-first-century mixed-use towers such as Chicago’s John Hancock Center or Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, which accommodate apartments, hotels, shops, restaurants, galleries and car parks, also have some claim to the name.
The work of the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has been shaking up the built environment for several decades now. Koolhaas and his practice OMA as well as its spin-off group AMO have had a particular impact on thinking about city architecture and planning, through buildings, publications and unbuilt projects – some of them very large. Dynamic, bold and huge, the hyperbuilding OMA proposed for the city of Bangkok is one of the most dramatic – a structure that looks from some angles as if a number of conventional buildings have been literally ‘shaken up’ and left as a questioning collection of verticals and diagonals. Yet there is thought and logic behind this apparent confusion.
Various principles underlie the Bangkok Hyperbuilding. One is a familiar idea in planning around tall buildings: that urban sprawl – the bane of modern cities – can be avoided if you build tall structures that leave room for greenery. With the hyperbuilding, where you can house 120,000 people and the services and even workplaces that they require, there is a far greater chance of reducing sprawl and increasing the amount of green space. The building needs only 3 per cent of the space required to house the same number in a conventional development. Another key principle is reducing the distance between home and workplace, cutting down on travel time and energy consumption.
Koolhaas has pointed out that in many ways this kind of structure is more fitting for a city in a newly developing area, where the shock of rapid expansion and the arrival of modern facilities can wreak havoc on existing urban spaces. The hyperbuilding would supply the sudden, growing need for a new city, fitted for contemporary needs, without enveloping precious rural land, as conventional ad hoc urban sprawl would do.
Bangkok, a city with a long history and one that has been growing and modernizing rapidly over the last few decades, is a rather different case. Koolhaas has described it as ‘a city on the edge of the tolerable’, in which traffic, disorganized development and volatile politics make it hard to create spaces in which it is easy to live and work. There is still a pressing need for new accommodation and facilities, and to reduce the relentless urban sprawl. A hyperbuilding could, argues Koolhaas, supply such a demand, but involves specific challenges such as siting in relation to the existing city, links to it and balancing of facilities with what is already there.
The designers see the hyperbuilding as a city or city quarter, and its parts are analogous with the parts of a conventional city. As the architects put it: ‘To achieve urban variety and complexity, the building is structured as a metaphor of the city: towers constitute streets, horizontal elements are parks, volumes are districts, and diagonals are boulevards.’
In Bangkok, the idea was to site the hyperbuilding near the edge of an already existing business district, so that its inhabitants could work either there or in the megastructure itself. The proposed location was in a green reserve, near the Chao Phraya river – and in part straddling the river to give access to the rest of the city. This site was an undeveloped area that would leave green space around most of the building. Moving through a hyperbuilding, and making connections with the outside world, are crucial. In the Bangkok Hyperbuilding, there are several ways of moving around: vertical elevators connecting the building’s different levels; horizontal ‘boulevards’ equipped with cable cars and ‘gondolas’ linking it to the ground and the existing city; and a ‘walkable promenade’.
The structure is unusual. A cluster of towers is linked at various levels by broad, planar horizontals and tied to the ground by the four diagonal ‘boulevards’. This cluster-like arrangement means that the building ‘reads’ as several buildings in one, something that sets this hyperbuilding apart from the typical mixed-use towers seen in the world’s major cities. Yet, although this unusual structure looks complex at first glance, it was intended to be relatively simple. The Bangkok Hyperbuilding is not an essay in high technology. Its various elements – towers, planes, diagonals – are similar to the most basic of architectural parts: pillars, beams and struts.
It is designed on an enormous scale. A model set next to a miniature of the Eiffel Tower shows that the tallest part of the structure is about four times as high – and far higher than the much more low-rise buildings of Bangkok in the neighbouring district. However, the way in which the building is fragmented into several towers makes it less monumental than it would be if its whole community of 120,000 could be crammed into a single, monolithic building such as a twentieth-century Tower of Babel. This is in keeping with Koolhaas’s principle that when a building becomes very large it is no longer satisfactory to create it with a single architectural gesture – the structure therefore needs to be fragmented. So while it seems perverse to use the term ‘lightness’ in relation to such a vast structure, the relatively slender elements have a delicacy about them that is unexpected. Their proportions and arrangement would also make them light and airy inside.
Its unusual configuration makes the hyperbuilding a standout project for Koolhaas and OMA, even though it is unbuilt. It is also important because it points towards a less monolithic way of answering the need for more urban buildings, and because it integrates architecture with city planning in a new kind of structure. Hyperbuildings such as this might not begin to sprout on the edges of the world’s big cities in the foreseeable future, but they show that a megastructure does not have to be a monolithic lump, and can have transparency, lightness and grace.
