Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
awe-inspiring. h e practical purpose of this theory is to avoid modern materi-
als in favor of natural materials. In practice, this meant for Speer Sr. that for
grand Nazi buildings and sites he designed (such as the Zeppelin Field or party
rally grounds, or the New Berlin, which was never built) “we planned to avoid,
as far as possible, all such elements of modern construction as steel girders and
reinforced concrete, which are subject to weathering. Despite their height, the
walls were intended to withstand the impact of the wind even if the roofs and
ceilings were so neglected that they no longer braced the walls. h
e static fac-
tors were calculated with this in mind.”
35
In other words, Speer's ruins were a symbol of the Nazi regime's gran-
deur. h e theory was also, some argue, a product (or justifi cation) of the
reality of the lack of iron in wartime Germany.
36
h e ruins of h ames Town
and the sideways skyscraper are also a symbol of the brutal e' ciency of cap-
italism and its search for cost-cutting at the expense of quality, a symbol, in
other words, of a con. h at confi dence game is also a refl ection of the super-
hot, irrationally exuberant Shanghai building boom, where prices have gone
up beyond all economists' expectations: a bubble waiting to burst, which
keeps stubbornly defying expectations that it will do so.
37
h ames Town's decay and the sideways skyscraper are contemporary
examples of
Shanghaiing,
a term that originally referred to the nineteenth-
century practice of kidnapping men to work as sailors on American mer-
chant ships for the China trade. Sailors were pressed into unfree labor by
“crimps” with colorful names like Jim “Shanghai” Kelly, and Johnny
“Shanghai Chicken” Devine, both of San Francisco. h e term's meaning
gradually expanded to generally denote kidnapping or engaging in fraud.
h e geographer and performance studies scholar Shiloh Krupar uses the
phrase
Shanghaiing the future
in her satiric reading/photo-essay of the Shang-
hai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall (SUPEH), a huge six-story monument to
city planning in Shanghai—its history and future development. Although all
cities engage in real estate and urban development boosterism, SUPEH is
