#linkedhybrid

A sense of community among residents seems to be missing in modern day cities. Contemporary architecture is shaping new cities to be filled with dense, yet unfriendly neighborhoods. The Linked Hybrid complex by Steven Holl Architects set out to redefine the meaning of public space by creating a highly porous environment within a dense city like Beijing, China. However, on visiting this complex, one feels anything but welcome.

The Linked Hybrid complex lies adjacent to the site of the old city wall in Beijing. The complex as a whole aims to counter the current urban developments in China by creating a porous urban space that is open and inviting to the public from all sides. The project was meant to promote interactive relations and encourages encounters between the commercial, residential, recreational and educational sectors and its users. However, on approaching one of the many entrances off the street, one is quickly waved away from the building by a stern looking uniformed guard with a gun. It seems that Holl’s intentions of public space has been overlaid with militarized occupation instead. This is a new development in the lineage of the ‘Myth of Pruitt-Igoe’ or Park Hill, where buildings became rotten through lack of attention—here, too much attention is ruining the building. It makes something of a mockery of the urban porosity diagram associated with the building's design, which now inadvertently can be read as military strategy.

The Linked Hybrid is designed with the clear intent of carving public space out of private housing, yet the social and cultural patterns which overlay, occupy and appropriate the built form deny this idea entirely. Presently, Linked Hybrid fails in its ‘open city’ strategies, both within the building—you simply cannot access it—or in terms of how it can 'extrude' its porosity and begin to positively leak influence into the surrounding area. This is most obvious in the form of gun-toting guards; more subtle again in the expensive furniture shops that dominate the ground-plane. Both outcomes exclude and impede social activity, meaning the complex is more like a forbidden city rather than an open city. However, the interesting question that arises now is how much the architect can do about this?

The Linked Hybrid is a remarkable feat of architecture that has the potential to be open, just the way Holl had planned. However, a good designer has to redesign the context itself sometimes, in order to enable a design’s true potential—whether that means rearranging the program, the narrative-based systems around the project or in this case, the political frameworks that otherwise prevent the building from working at all. It is perhaps unfair to blame the architect for failures to do with social and political situations in a city; and yet architecture is in effect held responsible for 'failures' such as Pruitt-Igoe. Perhaps it would behoove the profession to engage with these more strategic design components. The key question, as it should be for almost all architecture, is will Linked Hybrid make this city better or worse?