ASIAN CAIRNS
Vincent Callebaut, 2013
Vertical ‘Farmscrapers’ Designed to Transform a Chinese City
As long as there have been architects, we have looked to them to offer a better future. From the ideal cities of the Renaissance to the new start promised by the Enlightenment, from the urban expansion of the nineteenth century to the technological dreams of the twentieth, architects have offered solutions to urban problems and suggested new ways to live. We have not always followed their lead – ideals can be impractical. But their work has offered a fund of ideas, and has sometimes provided hints about the future.
Today, the fastest-changing place on the planet – the place with the greatest need for an urban rethink – is probably China. This country is facing a seismic population movement to its cities. In 1980, about one-fifth of Chinese people lived in towns; now it is more than half, and still rising. There will soon be more than 220 cities with over 1 million inhabitants in China, and more than twenty with over 5 million. As a result, Chinese cities have been transformed architecturally: Shanghai is now a forest of skyscrapers. Shenzhen, once a market town of about 30,000 people, is now a megalopolis with an estimated population of 18 million. With increases such as these come all the familiar problems – high energy consumption, carbon emissions, food shortages and overcrowding. Cities consume 75 per cent of the Earth’s energy and are responsible for 80 per cent of its carbon emissions. The need for architects to rise to these challenges is greater than ever.
There are many ways for architects to try to address these issues. Terms such as ‘green architecture’, ‘eco-architecture’ and ‘sustainable architecture’ have been used to describe a range of approaches that have tried to build such important features as waste recycling, low energy consumption, integration of building and green space, and reduction of carbon emissions, into everything from small houses to office blocks. Many of these designs are resolutely low-tech, using traditional materials (often local ones to bring down the carbon footprint) along with modern renewable energy technologies. What is happening in emerging and rapidly developing parts of the world such as China, however, seems to many people to demand a more radical approach.
Asian Cairns (2013) is the response of the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut to these problems as experienced in the vast city of Shenzhen. This project brings the rural and the urban together in a tall structure: the garden tower or farmscraper. Visually, it is based on a cairn – the pile of pebbles left by a traveller by the wayside. Callebaut’s project for Shenzhen brings together six of these farmscrapers on a circular site. Each structure is based on a tall, rectilinear tower. To this are attached a multitude of large, pebble-shaped structures that can accommodate a wide range of functions: housing, offices, manufacturing, leisure and, most importantly, food production. These pebble-shaped modules spiral around the central towers, which form both the structural support and the vertical boulevard or highway for the whole building. The pebbles can be clad in glass or solar panels, have wind turbines attached to them or have open tops to accommodate green spaces with trees.
High-tech as they look, the Asian Cairns take their cue from nature. Nature relies mainly on solar energy. It keeps waste down, using only the energy it needs. It recycles constantly. It fosters biodiversity. Callebaut uses all these principles in his design. He also draws formally on shapes seen in the natural world: curvaceous pebbles, spiralling nautilus shells, structures that combine toughness with plasticity (he refers both to the flexibility of lily pads and the resilience of bees’ nests in writing about the project). So both the appearance and the process involved draw heavily on the natural world.
Many of the effects of bringing so many functions together in the farmscrapers are similar to the goals of the other megastructures proposed by architects over the decades: for example, the reduction of commuting and the consequent cut in energy consumption and pollution; the creation of a whole community in one densely packed location; and the economies of scale. But the Asian Cairns add to the mix. The structures are designed to incorporate the recycling of waste, to produce as much of their own energy as possible and to contribute to the oxygenation of the city through planting. By including organic agriculture, they cut down on our use of artificial chemicals in food production, promote food autonomy and contribute to the biodiversity of the city. Moving more food production to the city would also help the rural environment by reducing the need to resort to deforestation.
Asian Cairns is structurally exciting, visually spectacular and holistic in approach. It is not unique in these qualities – Callebaut is not the only architect to suggest incorporating farming into a tall, urban building – but it is remarkably integrated and engagingly biomorphic. Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about the project is that it attempts to turn the old view of architecture upside down. Historically, architecture has been seen as protecting humans from the forces of nature, as shutting out wind, rain and snow, as keeping out the cold of winter or shading us from the heat of the summer sun. Asian Cairns is trying to work with nature, to reconcile humanity and the environment, in the hope that this will lead to a more sustainable way of living.
Vernacular architecture, the catch-all term for the traditional ways of building using local materials (and managing without architects) all over the world, has always worked with nature, responding to specific local climate conditions, social conventions and agriculture. Vernacular architecture is generally low-tech, homespun, low-rise and simple. Structures such as Asian Cairns, on the other hand, throw at the building everything technology can offer, from steel beams to photovoltaic panels, in the hope that harmony between the human race and the rest of the natural world will result. China’s expanding cities present a challenge of an unprecedented size, and may need solutions on this kind of scale. So long as architects keep rising to this challenge, there is some hope for the future.
