The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (46 page)

Q
IAN QICHEN IS
well schooled in Marxist philosophy, and he calls to mind a few snatches of Guy Debord. The citizens of the Venetian, he thinks, live lives “presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles,” where “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” Their world has become “a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”

It’s not so bad, thinks Qian, that separate pseudo-world, that autonomous movement of the nonliving. He is considering the millions of his subjects who have never traveled anywhere except to migrate to the great cities in search of work. They have never been on a vacation. They have never had the luxury of wandering about, bored, wondering what to look at next. They have never been able to be the quiescent consumers of spectacles. Perhaps it would be good for them.

Sheldon G. Adelson senses that the brass ring is nearly within his grasp. He went to a soiree once with a load of intellectual scientists,
but he didn’t think much of their endless discussions about the meaning of life. He later told an interviewer: “If I make other people feel good, I feel good! I literally, mentally, went like—it’s over with! I don’t have to think about that issue ever again in my life.”

The Eastern potentate and the Western purveyor of invisible cities both think of something Steve Wynn once said of his creations: “We start with one question. ‘Who are these people and what do they want?’ The answer controls everything we do. We respond to the emotional and psychological desires of our visitors. If this place has any other redeeming feature, I don’t know what it is.”

If you already know everything that people want, and if the sole purpose of everything you do is to deliver it, then you have created a world in which every desire is anticipated, satisfied, and ultimately dictated. God gave mankind free will in the Garden of Eden. The creators of Vegas didn’t. Wynn once said, “Las Vegas is sort of like how God would do it if he had money.” He wasn’t joking.

Sheldon G. Adelson conjures up one last invisible city. He hands Qian Qichen the mock-up of a glossy brochure that bears the image of the Venetian and the subtitle “Macao.”

Even as this city moves forward, it has preserved its rich, European legacy for future generations to relive the past as they walk along cobble-stoned paths and gaze up at centuries-old temples and churches . . .

The fully integrated resort-hotel features 3,000 allsuite guest rooms, one million square feet of Grand Canal Shoppes, a 15,000-seat Cotaistrip® CotaiArena™, 1.2 million square feet of convention and meeting facilities and a purpose-built theatre for ZAIA™, the new resident show from the world-renowned Cirque du Soleil® . . .

The Venetian Macao is a fully integrated resort where you can wine, dine, shop, stay, play and still do some serious business.

Qian Qichen’s face brightens. “Now you’re speaking my language!” he says.

O
NCE ADELSON IS
safely installed in the car back to the airport, Qian Qichen stares at the empty Hall of Purple Lights with its tawdry porcelain and its cracked tiles. The lights have gone up and they expose centuries of the termites’ gnawing. The oriental potentate reflects upon a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

“Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.”

“There is still one of which you never speak.”

Marco Polo bowed his head.

“Venice,” the Khan said.

Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”

The emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”

And Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice . . . To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice.”

“You should then begin each tale of your travels from the departure, describing Venice as it is, all of it, not omitting anything you remember of it.”

The lake’s surface was barely wrinkled; the copper reflection of the ancient palace of the Sung was shattered into sparkling glints like floating leaves.

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

I
T’S
A
UGUST 2007
, and the CEO of the Sands Corporation is talking to the press. “The Venetian represents that first massive step in changing Macao . . . to a full-fledged international, multi-day, multifaceted destination resort,” he says. “It’s like truncating the 76 years of development of Las Vegas into one place under one roof.”

Or a millennium and a half of Venetian history, perhaps. A week later, Adelson hands a beautiful woman down into a gondola. She smiles at him, and he chuckles a little, because it is Diana Ross who reclines on the cushion by his aging side. Their gondolier sings to them as he steers through the canals, and on the hour the deep bell of San Marco resounds in the night air. They scarcely notice the waves of the South China Sea lapping on the sands of the Cotai Strip outside.

In Which Nothing, and Everything, Has Changed

T
HE
A
RCHITECTURE OF
F
AILED
D
IPLOMACY
Scheme for Palestinian access to the Haram e-Sharif, prepared
by Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal (detail)
.

The last place whose secret life is recounted in this book is older by far than the Parthenon, and in some quarters much better known; but it makes an odd sort of tourist attraction. It is surrounded by a security cordon tighter than most airports. Closed-circuit cameras focus on its ancient walls, and every visitor must pass through a metal detector manned by soldiers. The T-shirts sold by local hawkers are not just the usual cheery souvenirs. “Guns ’n’ Moses,” some of them say; “Uzi Does It, Israel.” Many guided tours around the excavations at this site culminate in communal prayers and group photographs under the Israeli flag. Nearby, exhibits are inscribed with the names of soldiers who died to make it possible for Jews to visit this place at all.

The Parthenon is a ruin in two senses. Its stones are crumbling, and the original reason for its existence has receded far into the past; it has become heritage. This place is, on the other hand, for better or for worse, a living inheritance. It is so controversial that no one even knows what to call it, for every name is loaded with sectarian significance. To the Jews the site is Har Habayit, the Temple Mount; to the Muslims it is Haram e-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. The British administrators of the Palestine Mandate referred to its western boundary as the Wailing Wall. The name used by BBC newscasters today is the Western Wall. On Al Jazeera the broadcasters call it the Al-Buraq Wall, after Muhammad’s winged steed. To Jews, it’s simply the Kotel—the wall.

Jews are forbidden by rabbinical edict to visit the interior of the Temple Mount; anyone who does so, dissident Jew or curious Gentile, is subjected to the most stringent security checks. The bridge that
leads into the enclosure is scattered with confiscated Bibles and Torahs, for it is forbidden to take them onto the Muslim Haram. Riot shields are stacked by the door, ready for the next bout of sectarian violence. Once you’re in, there is no museum, no guidebook, no souvenir shop. The Noble Sanctuary is a rare thing in the contemporary world: a historic site that has resisted the siren call of tourism.

At the Western Wall just outside the sanctuary, meanwhile, are people who have traveled thousands of miles to touch its stones. If they can’t come themselves, they e-mail messages, which are posted between the cracks on their behalf. Dumpster loads of them are burned every day. In Colorado Springs, an evangelical Christian organization is building a fifty-ton scale model of the wall at their headquarters. It expresses their solidarity with Israel, they say.

The cities of western Europe have turned into a realization of the architect’s dream: the buildings of their past have become static exhibits in a monumental museum. Elsewhere, however, ancient buildings are still stolen, appropriated, copied, translated, simulated, restored, and prophesied. They still change as they have always done, and they do so because they still excite passions beyond the merely aesthetic. In a reversal of the story of the Parthenon, Hindu extremists tear down a mosque in Ayodhya and build a temple in its ruins. In Japan, Shinto devotees rebuild the holy house of the Ise shrine every twenty years to exactly the same design—they have been doing so for nearly two millennia. In Indonesia, whole villages are dismantled, transported, and rebuilt as dining pavilions in luxury resorts, where the waiters are dressed like peasants in some eighteenth-century capriccio. Outside the confines of the West, historic buildings are not imprisoned in the timeless rapture of the architect’s dream but overflow its fixed frame and impose themselves on the present. History has not come to an end.

I
N THE AFTERNOON
of 14 February 2004, the sky turned dark over Jerusalem and it started to snow. In the middle of the city there was an open plaza, with an ancient wall on one side of it; and high up in this wall, at the summit of a cobbled ramp leading up to it from the plaza, there was a door. As the snow turned to rain, the walls supporting the ramp started to bulge and seep. Two days later they crumbled, exposing a huge scar of raw earth and scattering a heap of rubble on the shiny pavement of the plaza.

The authorities closed the door and cordoned off the area at the base of the ramp. It was too dangerous for tourists to use it, they said. The problem was, the ramp had been the only way that tourists could get to the door that led to the other side of the wall. The authorities couldn’t just leave the ramp the way it was; but they couldn’t make up their minds as to what to do about it, either. Nothing happened until December, when they announced that they’d be building a timber walkway between the plaza and the door in the next few months.