99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-53- The Xanadu Effect

Episode Date: May 2, 2012

What happens when we build big? Julia Barton remembers going to the top floor of Dallas’s then-new city hall when she was teenager. The building, designed by I.M. Pei, is a huge trapezoid jutting out over a wide plaza. Julia … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Julia Barton has been thinking about what happens when we build Big, maybe because she grew up in Dallas in the Go-Go 80s.

Big football arenas, big freeways, big houses, Texans love big. Dallas built a new city hall in 1978. Designed by IMPAY. It's this huge trapezoid jutting over a wide plaza. It's kind of wedge-shaped but upside down, so the widest and largest floors on the top. When I was a kid, sometimes I'd go up to the top floor

of City Hall with my friends. That's where the vending machines were. They stalked my favorite candy bar, Caramello. I am a male lover, Caramello with my family. Then we'd sit by the windows eating chocolate and looking down over the plaza. And I think, wow, this is so cool. But later in high school, Julia went to a protest down below in the plaza. And those same City hall windows were now

hulking over us. We could see our tiny reflections in the glass. It made me feel like a nobody. And that this whole event was a waste of time. And all of the big things in my environment seemed to be saying the same thing. I'm important, you're nobody. So Julia developed a mistrust of the big building, the big project, and places where

people seem to love the glory of the grandiose. But I'm also fascinated by those kinds of places. I can't stay away from them. Case in point, Russia. Biggest country in the world makes Texans look like amateurs. Totally. The Russians are real pros in the Department of tall, towering, and humongous. And not just from the Soviet past.

Europe's tallest skyscraper, 93 stories, is going up right now in Moscow, though they had to stop for a while on the 67th floor after it caught fire. Russia's southernmost city, Sochi, is the biggest construction site in Europe. That's because Sochi is hosting the Winter Olympics in 2014. So we headed down there to check it out. I went on a two hour bus ride from Sochi's center on the Black Sea up to the foothills of the Caucasus, where they're building the ski resorts.

And maybe on that whole ride, there were a couple of five-minute stretches where I wasn't looking at a crane or a new hotel, or a bridge going up. They are moving to the beach. They are moving here. And they are starting to grow. I also met this man named Alexei Kravietz.

He's lived all his life in a center block house by the Black Sea. The city wants to tear it down for a new rail yard. They've already demolished the rest of his neighborhood, but Kriviets has appealed his eviction in court. He says construction workers come up every day to scrape his walls with backhose, to scare him. We never asked the government for anything is what Kriviets is saying, and now the government

wants to take everything away from us. He's painted slogans and red paint on his windows, things like, people live here and SOS. Sometimes construction workers throw rocks through the windows. They fall in shards of Cyrillic all over the floor. Big crushing small. That story always seems to play itself out wherever there's a massive development. But there's a theory that big buildings don't just hurt little people.

They may in fact hurt the builders of those buildings too. There is the well-known fact in real estate that the great buildings tend to go up at the end of the cycle when everything is about to turn. That's a critic and philosopher Edward Tenor. While I was in Russia this last time, I found an essay online that he wrote in 2001. The Xanado effect. The Xanado effect is what I call the appearance of the big building, the big structure at the time when things are starting to go south. Tanner cites this idea known as the skyscraper curse, that tall buildings correlate with bad

times. So for instance, the Empire State Building was conceived in the 1920s, but not finished until the Great Depression. When it was known as the empty state building. The Sears Tower and the World Trade Center both opened in 1973 on the verge of another economic crisis. The people who run the NASDAQ exchange built the world's largest video display on time square in 1999, just a few months before the dot com bubble burst and the NASDAQ crashed. The Xanadu effect is a symptom of people overreaching, over planning, thinking that everything's going to go on

forever when it's about to turn the other way. I found Tenors theory a little comforting. Plus I think Olivia Newton-John's Zanadue is one of the biggest songs ever written. I see what you're trying to do there Julia and it's not going to work. No Olivia have you newton John, but Coleridge, I will allow. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. Actually, Tenor was thinking of the movie Citizen Kane and Kane's palace Xanadu. Okay then, Rosebud. It was a sledge. So, just as Citizen Kane built his palace while his empire crumbled, the big project can

be a big bad distraction. Tenor goes through several examples of the Zanadio effect in his original essay, but there are plenty of instances of big projects that don't presage any kind of crash. Tenor decides the example of Cass Gilbert's Woolworth building which went up in a boom time of 1913 and certainly didn't hurt the Woolworth Company. And it's hard to say where these gigantic state-driven projects like the Olympics fit into Xanity. Plus, there are plenty of critics who argue

that building height, much less bigness in general, cannot accurately predict a downturn at all. The bigness is a strategy that just about always fails, unless it succeeds. Or you can say it's one that that always succeeds except when it fails. And there's really no one way that you can regard it. You have to see it as a very powerful, easy to misuse, but also tempting way to go about things in life. So this energy effect might not provide the come-up ends that Julia desires, decides in any sort of downturn. The little person is still the one most likely to suffer. I guess the successor failure of Bigness really does depend on where you

stand in relation to it. Are you on top of City Hall or down below? Big places just amplify our reactions. I went to a protest in Moscow where we marched down one of the city's wide Soviet Arab boulevards. Ordinarily I hate these boulevards because you can't actually cross them. You have to find a pedestrian tunnel and like sneak underneath. But for a few hours, Moscow's oppressive business became ours.

The wide road, those stalin'erous skyscrapers and block long institutes, it all made us feel bigger too, though it was freezing. I love that despite the cold, people are smiling. Everybody is. That's my friend Vasili Sunkin. He grew up in Moscow, but he'd never experienced his grandiose city like this, as a grandiose stage for political expression.

The way the crowds transform the national mall in Washington, D.C., or the Shams Ali's A in Paris. And even Edward Tenor says, that's what can be wonderful about thickness. It can elevate people, give them a sense of pride and purpose. I think a lot of the positive side of our cities are the big buildings when they're done well. New York without the Empire State Building, New York without the Chrysler Building, New York without Rockefeller Center would really be a poorer place. But I keep thinking about Alexei Kravjz and his standoff with developers in Sochi. Sometimes he goes out and films his confrontations with construction workers. I posted one of the films up on 99% of visible.org.

Everyone's speaking Russian, but it's not hard to understand what is going on. Kravyaetsa put some of his things in a metal storage unit behind his house. The workers showed up with a huge crane to haul it away. Kravyaetsa asked who they worked for, and the supervisor, this big burly guy, says, we are building the Olympic facilities. Then they hook up the crane while Kravyaets shouts at them. You can see a big building under construction behind them. That's a new train station, which will take in millions of visitors during the Olympic games. You can see the bones of what's going to be a soaring roof.

A stately, pleasure dome. A stately, pleasure dome. Julia Barton traveled most recently to Russia for PRIs the world. You can find more of her stories by Julia Barton with a little help from me Roman Mars. It's a project of KALW 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, in the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. Support for 99% Invisible is provided in part by tiny letters, email for people with something to say.

My boy Carver always says something to say. What do you have to say, Carver? Daddy long ago, it was two or three of eight minutes to fix that up to a tear and not spider. They are a raconids, but they are not spiders. That's a load off my mind. It's free, easy, minimal, powerful, the simplest way to write an email newsletter. Online at tinyletter.com.

This program is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange making public radio more public, more at prx.org. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars. You can always just catch up with us online at 99%invisible.org. Hello, it's Jason Heitz. or low. Thank you. you