Above the Treetops

In any dense urban center, the reconciliation of street-level with mammoth skyscraper often fascinates me.

In places like Wall Street in New York, the buildings are so tall and the streets so narrow, regardless of what time of day, shadow is cast and the pedestrian is confronted at eye-level with mammoth atrium lobby spaces, big bronze doors, and concrete and stone building bases.

In Paris, Hausmann's boulevards have quite the opposite effect-- despite the height of the surrounding buildings, Paris could easily be called "the city of natural light."



Walking along Huashan Road in Shanghai, there is a curious blend of street level with sky-level. On many of the larger roads, trees have been preserved and/or planted as a means of countering the Wall Street effect (or at least this is my assumption). Thus,with the exception of areas like Pudong or central Puxi, if he/she doesn't not look up, they would seemingly have no real idea that the buildings about 10m away were actually 50 storey apartment and office buildings.



So when I walk or ride, I try to look forward and then look up, constantly making comparisons between what is seemingly in front of me, and what is actually towering above me.

I should mention, however, that street level is much more tantalizing and rewarding. While New York's pre-war top floors almost always boast an interesting resolution in the form of an elaborate penthouse or ornamental detail, Shanghai's mammoth generic skyscrapers seen in daylight leave a lot to be desired.



From pinkish-and-green-glass facades twisted and contorted into every generic, extruded, blase shape imaginable, the reward of looking up in Shanghai is that you get to look down again, taking in the smells and sights of fish, dumplings, construction sites, retail shops, and laundry-clad alley-ways.



With that said, nighttime tells a different story; last night taking a cab home on the giant highway that runs through the city, I was awed as street-level dematerialized and hundreds of gaudy building tops competed in a beauty pageant of luminescence and form.



Thus, while daytime brings the absence of scale, nighttime does quite the opposite: it boasts the power and presence of a major megalopolis awake and humming 24 hours a day...