As New High-Rises Tower Over Landmarks, Ire Builds in Asia
For centuries the gilt spire of the Sule Pagoda soared over Yangon’s roofs and palm tops, unchallenged on the skyline of a city rich in colonial architecture and exotic Asian atmosphere.
Then, foreign developers perpetrated what residents say is comparable to planting a high-rise next to Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral.
Twin 20-story towers were illegally erected some 100 yards from the pagoda, located at the geographic heart of the capital. The skyscrapers, one slated to be a French-run hotel, not only shattered the uniform skyline but desecrated, in the eyes of many, a shrine that legend says was built 2,000 years ago to contain a hair of the Lord Buddha.
Yangon is hardly singular. Across Asia, local and foreign entrepreneurs have put up hotels that violate natural and cultural environments. Others have razed unique historic buildings to replace them with the globalized world’s look-alikes.
In Thailand, the beginning of the end of Hua Hin as a charming royal retreat is often dated to 1992, when Thai developers knocked down a teak palace to drop a 17-story hotel smack in the middle of a traditional fishing village.
“Does it fit? It’s questionable. We are a kind of landmark from the skyline point of view,” admits Dirk de Cuyper, general manager of what is now the Hua Hin Hilton.
Cuyper said the hotel was built during Asia’s boom years when the “sky was not the limit” and the heated rush was on for profits rather than preservation.
Regulations limiting building heights to that of palm trees were routinely ignored on pristine beaches in Thailand and elsewhere in the region. Zoning laws, if they existed, were flouted in cities where developers ran roughshod over old Chinatowns, colonial villas and areas of greenery.
“Urban planners have no say in urban planning in Southeast Asia, and business does not care about the living environment in Asia,” says Alexander Koenig, a German town planner. “They only follow economic rules.”
Corruption and cronyism are the prime enemies of those who would save Asia’s heritage, conservationists say.
In Myanmar, it has never been explained how LP Holding Co., a group of Thai investors behind the Sofitel Yangon Hotel near the Sule Pagoda, was able to sign a contract with the military regime’s tourism minister, Gen. Kyaw Ba. Before construction, the minister had told Associated Press that regulations prohibited high-rises near religious structures.
The Sofitel was to have opened in 1997 as a 270-room, five-star property managed by the French hotel chain Accor. But the Asian financial crisis struck that year and the unfinished twin towers loom as hideous, rusting hulks.
“High-rise hotels are frequently parasitic in function,” says William Logan, editor of the forthcoming book “The Disappearing Asian City.” “They tower over the cultural landscape so that the house guests have a nice view but care little for the negative impacts the hotel has on everyone else’s view.”
Conservationists have scored some victories.
In one of the first public protests on an environmental issue in communist Vietnam, citizens stopped the construction of the Golden Hanoi Hotel on the edges of Hoan Kiem Lake in the historic core of the capital.
The hotel, hatched by Hong Kong-based developers and locals, would have risen to 11 stories, despite a five-floor limit for the area that includes the graceful lake and surrounding French colonial and Sino-Vietnamese quarters. Started in the mid-1990s, construction was stopped when the fourth level was reached. It stands incomplete today.
Heritage groups on the Malaysian island of Penang were able to block demolition of the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, lavishly built in 1904 by a Chinese shipping and trading tycoon. Restoration of the mansion, now a stunning 16-room inn, won an award from UNESCO last year.
But the groups were unable to halt a 22-story extension of the Hotel Continental that went up in 1996, just 13 feet from the elegant residence. A legal battle over cracked walls and other damage to the mansion continues. “The monstrosity now stands next to this fabulous jewel of Penang,” says Lin Lee Loh-Lim, one of the restorers.
Besides putting up unsuitable buildings, developers have “renovated” historic hotels beyond recognition. To maximize profits, classic 19th and early 20th century hotels like Bangkok’s Oriental, Singapore’s Raffles and the Peninsula in Hong Kong have added high-rise annexes.
When Japan’s Okura hotel chain took over Shanghai’s French Club in 1989 it ripped up the indoor swimming pool to lay foundations for a 34-story tower that stands atop the onetime center of French life in pre-World War II China. Almost all the old art-deco interior was torn out, replaced by the kind of modern lobby, coffee shop and boutiques that can be found in Manhattan.
Some conservationists say awareness of the value--both aesthetic and economic--of preserving heritage and natural sites is growing.
Koenig, a member of the Penang-based Asia and West Pacific Network for Urban Conservation, disagrees.
Pro-preservation forces are puny, he notes. The Penang Heritage Trust, for example, takes in less than $4,000 from annual membership dues while the local chambers of commerce and other pro-development groups with close ties to decision makers have millions to spend on lobbying for their projects.
“I don’t think that the situation has changed. It is just the economic crisis and slowdown which have stopped such high-rise projects,” he says.
