Part XV: Around the World in 80 Days – Urban designer’s ultimate destination
May 22, 2014
By Temple Ligon
My train from Hanoi pulled into Beijing’s main station around lunchtime Sunday, April 29, 2012. I was completely lost. I had a current reliable guidebook, so I had no excuse. Besides, my first Beijing destination was my world-famous (I thought) hotel. World-famous hotels are expensive, but part of the tab covers the assurance of the best location in town, a prominent parcel in the heart of the action where a newcomer can’t get lost.
While I sat around my room a week earlier in Saigon, recovering from the spigot-washed salad served in the Dhaka airport terminal, I reserved a Beijing room at the Raffles Hotel, part of the chain in the Far East anchored by its eponymous founding hotel in Singapore, a k a W. Somerset Maugham Headquarters. Beyond the Far East and around the rest of the world Singapore’s Raffles is called the world’s most famous hotel – kind of like London’s Connaught is called the world’s most civilized hotel, while London’s Savoy is the world’s sexiest, and New York’s Carlyle is the world’s most glamorous.
On the whole, though, if you’ve seen one luxury hotel property, you’ve seen them all. What’s required to score the five-star ranking is the same everywhere. And once the five stars are awarded, little else is done. Why add to the furnishings acquisitions and housekeeping budgets? But some hotels do add, and a few add one heluva lot. That’s why it’s so much fun to separate the unique from the routine. Gives you something to write about, what?
Anyway, since I was staying at Raffles, how could I possibly have any trouble finding the place? Just walk out of the train station to the nearest bank lobby, feed the card into the ATM, and walk out with an adequate count in the local currency, enough to work the streets for the afternoon and that night. I hailed a cab, and in a matter of seconds I was in the back seat asking for a ride to Raffles. What or where my cab driver asked in his unsure English. I wrote the name Raffles Hotel on his card, but the driver still had no idea and shook his head in the international horizontal negative.
A big city like Beijing has to be big enough for plenty of well-informed cab drivers competing with the woefully ignorant. I stepped back out onto the curb and hailed a second cab, but I got a second run through the same conversation. Two woefully ignorant cab drivers in a row. What are the odds? This time I settled on the idea the cab driver could take me to the Forbidden City facing Tiananmen Square and Chairman Mao’s tomb, what some would say was the center of the universe.
We got there, all right, and I didn’t get the sense we took the scenic route. Unlike just about every other capital city in the world, this Beijing cab driver took first-time-tourist me directly – no diversions and no deflections – to my destination on the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square. Keep in mind: All this is with travel luggage, the works. I shipped my dinner jacket and tuxedo back to South Carolina from London, thinking the Queen Victoria was my trip’s only need for black tie, but everything else stayed with me for the duration. Fortunately I am not much of a souvenir collector, probably because I know if I buy it, I carry it.
The hotel was not identified on my guidebook’s map, but where I got out of the cab certainly was. I was in the Beijing equivalent of Red Square, the Place de la Concorde, Hyde Park, corner of 59th and Fifth, Nob Hill – you get the idea. How could I not know where I was and thereby Raffles? I walked south along the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square, expecting a tank facing a protest march or a rally of some sort. I walked for more than a block, and still no Raffles. Then I turned 90 degrees to the east and walked another two blocks. At this point I walked into what appeared to be a medium-grade hotel. I asked for walking directions to Raffles, knowing I couldn’t be more than two blocks away, and the concierge didn’t know what I was talking about. He showed me on the map the nearby main drag where fine hotels could be found, and maybe mine was somewhere along there.
Not explicit directions but directions all the same, my guidance got me to An Avenue, better known as the Street of Eternal Peace, and lo and behold stood Raffles, all of one block east of Tiananmen Square. The hotel emblazoned a huge sign over its main entrance that not only said Raffles but Beijing, too. And then it hit. This was an iconic property, probably a hundred years old, that until a few years ago was known as the Beijing Hotel and apparently still was. I still say Saigon and never Ho Chi Minh City, and the people of Beijing say the Beijing Hotel and never Raffles.
Inside the marble-everything lobby I met John from New Zealand, the hotel’s concierge who had to hear my story of his hotel’s piss-poor projection of current Raffles brand fame. He understood and explained Beijing had more eccentricities like that than people, and since I was staying just two days and not 10 years, I shouldn’t try to think about any of that mysterious eastern peoples stuff.
John invited me to sit in one of his lobby’s leather sofas where he got me oriented while my luggage was taken to my room.
The hotel literature told me Raffles had been there since 2006, before which it was the Beijing since 1887. The Peoples Republic of China held its 1949 founding banquet in the Beijing Hotel.
Since 1989 Raffles has been part of something bigger called FRHI Hotels and Resorts, which includes the Fairmont and Swissotel brands. The Plaza Hotel in New York, for instance, is a Fairmont.
Since I first stepped onto the deck of the Queen Victoria back on March 16, having spent the night before in the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, I began a theme of sorts. Or I began to ask the question, “What would Phileas do?” Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg was altogether too well-to-do to worry about budget travel. He bet 20,000 pounds he could circumnavigate the globe in 80 days – close to one million dollars today – and he and Passepartout carried a carpet bag stuffed with a similar amount. As for me, this was it. I was doing what I had always wanted to do and I didn’t see an opportunity for a second lap around the world in my lifetime, so why not go first-class?
Point being, as Frank Lloyd Wright put it: Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities. Pretentious both Ligon and Wright may be, at least we show a basic honesty. This is what we want to do, so this is what we’ll do.
Such a heavy dose of hedonism hit home at Raffles just one block east of the Meridian Gate, the entry to the Forbidden City, the world’s height of hedonism. But it is also the world’s height of design sophistication. Like the pre-Renaissance West, for the most part, we don’t know who designed what. But in the modern world, our time, we do know who designed what from the Renaissance forward and we also know who studied what. Most great architects and urban designers started out with great educations.
The man mostly responsible for contemporary Philadelphia, for the late 20C built city, was the same man who authored the bible on urban design, Ed Bacon. He studied architecture at Cornell University and at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. From 1949 until his retirement in 1970, he was executive director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission. Immediately following college, in the depths of the Great Depression when there was no job for an architecture graduate, Bacon talked his father into sponsoring a ‘round-the-world tour for one, for just himself traveling alone. His last stop before crossing the Pacific for California was China, and the Forbidden City became the highlight of the trip. Bacon said his understanding of urban design – the relationships among buildings and their configurations creating interstitial spaces as opposed to the architecture of individual buildings – came across in his experience touring the Forbidden City. His book Design of Cities, the urban designer’s bible first published in 1967, describes Peking (Beijing):
“Possibly the greatest single work of man on the face of the earth is Peking. This Chinese city, designed as the domicile of the Emperor, was intended to mark the center of the universe. The city is deeply enmeshed in ritualistic formulae and religious concepts which do not concern us now. Nevertheless, it is so brilliant in design that it provides a rich storehouse of ideas for the city of today… The power of the experience lies in the utilization of anticipation and fulfillment, in the setting up of a rhythm of experiences in time, a sequence of sensation that keeps mounting in intensity. Space and color are the major modulators, and the climax is indeed an adequate one for the center of the kingdom… Peking emphasizes the dominance of land-form design in great and extensive work. The levels of the land, the cutting of the land by channels of water, and the creation of land mounds at the climax, determine the architecture of the city. While the planes of the walls define space areas, the buildings, minor in mass, create points of repose and accomplishment.”
The Forbidden City illustrates what American architect Philip Johnson called his definition of architecture, a sequence of spaces. Again, as Ed Bacon put it:
“More clearly than elsewhere, the design is the sequence of progression. The buildings are all of a uniform modular system, the proportion and dimension of structures increasing with the number of bays, according to definite rules of progression. With such rules the designer is forced to depend on means other than aggrandizement of architectural mass for effect.”
Almost 9,000 rooms all told in its 183 acres, the Forbidden City was begun in 1405, about the same time architect Brunelleschi in his Renaissance Florence was beginning to experiment with the rediscovery of single-point perspective and the return of the straight street. The ancient Romans had some idea of perspective as illustrated in their murals, but a formula was never passed down. And Rome at its height as the world’s superpower, around 200 CE, say, and its concentrated city population of almost one million people still had no straight street, not one of any consequence. The Forbidden City’s main north/south orientation to its single straight axis and Brunelleschi’s straight-street design conclusions both achieved completion around 1420. In other words, the street designed by Brunelleschi in Florence between the Foundling Hospital and the Duomo, not completely built until the 17C but usually referred to as the first straight street of the Renaisssance, has to be seen in context with the central axis of the Forbidden City.
American urban design students have their punch cards with them as they tour our Eurocentric world, and they punch off the bare minimum in their pursuit of the world’s best examples of great urban design, too long to list here. But maybe the Forbidden City on the other side of the globe can be counted as the one to study, the one that really matters on a world scale, the one not to miss.
