6.07: Features

Archive | 6.07 - Jul 1998 | Features

The Spirit of Mega
By Bruce Sterling

Think the project you're working on is big? Because we're talking huge. Monumental. Triple Xtra Large. Bruce Sterling reports on how hubris and $20 billion can still buy a pretty big chunk of Planet Earth.

I'm doing lunch at Le Jules Verne, the only Michelin-starred restaurant ever named for a science fiction writer. At my linen-decked table, bow-tied, manicured French waiters are deploying a fabulous array of advanced culinary technology. I've got a two-decker tray for my flavored coffee sugars, a chromed pedestal for the wine bucket, a dizzying multitude of silver Christofle forks.

The décor seems more Philippe Starck than Jules Verne - tasteful sheen and matte black - except that just outside the window is a gigantic, rotating wrought-iron elevator wheel liberally stained with axle grease.

It's April in Paris, and I'm dining on the second-stage landing of the Eiffel Tower. This is the 19th century's tallest megaproject, the sine qua non of prestigious erections.

The Eiffel Tower is an essential first stop in a swift Vernesque reconnaissance of the Mega realm. Mind you, I'm not interested in creations that are merely huge: for instance, the Gullfaks offshore oil platform, or a giant open-pit copper mine, or the huge New York City water-supply project. They're very large, sure, but nobody boasts about them - "Look, we've just created the biggest open crater that Arizona has ever seen!"

No, my beat is Jules Verne's idea of Big, the Prestigious Big - megaprojects that exist because they exceed humanity's previous limits and break all the expected scales. Prestige megaprojects are not big simply for functional reasons. They are not about the economic bottom line. Megaprojects are about the top line - the transcendent, the beautiful, and the sublime. They are built for the purpose of inspiring sheer, heart-thumping awe - not unmixed with lip-gnawing envy from the competition. Mega is a very special conceptual world, a territory of fierce engineering ambition, of madly brash technical self-assertion. Mega is a realm that abolishes the squalid everyday limits of lesser beings.

And reporting on Mega is, of course, a big job. It's a global thing. I'm on a round-the-world blitz to check out truly huge, truly top-line megaprojects still under construction. Off-the-chart undertakings like cyclotrons, Chinese dams, and 21st-century airports. Despite the reign of ever-shrinking nanoworlds of silicon, Mega can still electrify the spirit.

I have a long trip ahead, so I'm starting easy, snug, and well catered to - and yet I'm still sitting inside a soaringly ambitious technical megaproject of the very first rank. When I gaze to my left through the rivet-studded girders, I can see an earlier rollout of Parisian Mega - the Arc de Triomphe. But from the Eiffel's giddy height, Napoleon's best effort looks like a Corsican dwarf.

After the smoked-salmon salad, I make the acquaintance of a young French duck that died for a noble cause. My meal concludes with cheeses, chocolates, and tiny fruit tarts that plunge the astonished diner into culinary Zen. The attentive staff - no fewer than five of them have ceremoniously topped off my crystal water glass at one time or another - relieve me of a hefty and thoroughly deserved sum. Then it's out the door and onto the landing for an ascent to the summit of the world's original high tech colossus.

From a distance, the Eiffel Tower seems oddly cobwebby, a tall frame shrouded in lace. Once you're inside it, though, you're caged by stout iron gridwork as thick as a strong man's legs. Even the tower's very thinnest bars are the width of your wrist. The major load-bearing members are genuinely colossal - huge iron arcs soaring upward from solid rock. You could dangle railcars from them like Christmas ornaments.

It's a cold and blustery spring day - in case you're worried that I'm enjoying myself too much - and at this height the wind strips the heat from your fingers and the hat from your head. And I'm only halfway up.

This veteran was the standard-setter for all following megaprojects. You might say that the tower represents the quintessential spirit of Mega. It has two and a half million rivets. It consists of 18,038 prefabricated pieces. It takes 50 metric tons of paint and two dozen brave men a year just to paint this thing.

The mega rhetoric behind the Eiffel Tower was even more soaring and unlikely than the structure itself. Built to commemorate an industrial exposition and the centenary of the French Revolution, the tower was commissioned as a symbol of progress, to deliver "a view from the summit of the steep slope that has been climbed since the Middle Ages." By the time the assorted worthies on the exposition committee had finished grandstanding, there were barely two years left for the contractor to build the tallest thing on Earth. But luckily they'd picked the right man for the megajob. Gustave Eiffel was already the foremost industrial designer in Europe, a seasoned engineer, builder of 40 bridges, of railway stations, observatories, churches, stores, gasworks, playgrounds - all of them in his favorite material, iron.

Eiffel was not afraid to shock the world, and he was so eager for a crack at this unprecedented, ultraprestigious effort that he was even willing to risk his own money. Looking at it another way, he ponied up much of the tower's construction costs in a shrewd exchange for a license on operations and concessions.

Eiffel brought his brainchild in on time (1889) and under budget (US$25 million in 1998 dollars). It created amazement and some outrage. No one had ever seen anything like it. The previous world champion - America's Washington Monument - was left sucking mortar dust at barely half the tower's height. Eiffel had shattered the paradigm so thoroughly that his edifice held the world title for four solid decades. The tower was the tallest construction in the world until 1930, when it was finally surpassed by the Chrysler Building.

Eiffel devoted the rest of his extensive life to trying to find practical applications for his tower. Mere fame was not enough for him; he considered himself a practical man. He wanted the tower to work, to pay its way. He attached barometers and thermometers to it; he dropped things from it and timed their descent; he used it for wind-resistance tests. He published a number of learned aerodynamics and meteorology papers. This wasn't enough for him - or the Parisians. People spoke seriously of tearing the tower down.

Then Eiffel discovered the 20th century's killer app for towers - Marconi's radio. The tower was into radio way ahead of the curve, broadcasting signals as early as 1904. By 1908, the French military had installed a radio espionage nest, where they could eavesdrop on paleolithic German and Austro-Hungarian stations. At last the tower's future was secure.

Today, a trip to the summit finds it richly bewhiskered with modern communications technology: FM, AM, television, radomes, whole racks of specialized antennas - and my fellow summit pilgrims carry binoculars, telephoto cameras, and a host of cell phones. They're walking through a whipping wind with their collars up, yelling into the flip-down jaws of their Nokias and Ericssons: "Hey, Jacques! Hey, Dietrich! Guess where I am right now!" Given their proximity to the tower's relay megawattage, it's a wonder their eyes don't pop from their heads like microwaved eggs. Today, Eiffel's tower could probably earn its keep from broadcast-coverage rental even if it never saw another tourist. But it sees tourists in busloads, in boatloads, in stadium loads. The tower has a central, starring role in the '90s tourism economy. The pilgrims pour in to pay megahomage.

This is a 109-year-old spectacular success story. Today the world has, on four continents, eight non-office-building towers taller than Eiffel's. Even Uzbekistan has a taller tower. But this grand veteran is still the world standard, the exemplar supreme. You would never hear anyone say that some project weighed "twice as much as the Tokyo Tower."

No monument on Earth better defines the spirit of its own city, the spirit of a country, even a whole continent. (The runner-up is the Statue of Liberty, and Eiffel helped build that one.) In excellent condition, the tower is in no danger of obsolescence. If any harm somehow came to it, the tower would be rebuilt immediately. An entire culture is emotionally, technically, and financially dependent on it. It is no longer perceived as the gigantic technical anomaly that it was (and is). In short, the Eiffel Tower is the iron standard by which today's flimsy, Johnny-come-lately megaprojects should all be judged.

The gnomes under Geneva

I arrive in Geneva none the worse for a Paris farewell meal of chili and escargots at a Franco-Tex-Mex joint. Weird, yes, but of such experiences is the postmodern experience made. I have a swift introduction to my new environs when I arrive at the hotel and find a jumpsuited worker vacuuming the parking garage. A few hours later I am eight stories deep in Swiss bedrock, in the bowels of the largest scientific instrument on Earth, a megastructure called CERN.

CERN (the acronym dates back to the group's original title, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) is the world's biggest and most advanced physics research laboratory. When it comes to pursuing transcendent concepts and cosmic ultimates, this scientific monster has no real rivals.

The laboratory is the prestigious possessor of the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, a high-vacuum, superconductive particle accelerator 27 kilometers in circumference. The CERN accelerator tunnel is a subterranean racetrack big enough to girdle whole villages. It ships electrons and positrons at galactic speed and impetus, whipping them around the track 11,200 times a second. And that's not even the cool part.

CERN's forthcoming effort, the Large Hadron Collider, will eclipse all previous efforts. Instead of mere electrons and positrons, the LHC will ship hadron particles, which crack apart in louder and juicier ways. So far, the Large Hadron Collider consists of some big blue tubes. There aren't many of them yet, but they've been fully tested, and they work. The job at hand is to manufacture 27 kilometers of them and link them underground in a huge chain of superconducting blue sausages. By the way, they have to rip out all of the old collider to do this. And there are ancillary matters, such as straightening out certain dips in the tunnel, and excavating two new colossal chambers for a new generation of detectors, ATLAS and CMS. They're figuring 2005 as the completion date.

I'm here to witness Mega in action, but everything I see on this trip is going to be demolished, replaced by something bigger.

The long tunnels of the colliders are just the humble adjunct of CERN's particle detectors, fantastic experiments that study the results of high-velocity relativistic collisions. Nothing can really prepare you for an enormous subterranean device like the L3 or DELPHI. The L3 detector has the biggest magnet on Earth. There's enough vintage Soviet-supplied iron inside it to - yes - build the Eiffel Tower. Basically, the L3 is a whole Eiffel Tower that has been turned into a vast magnetic onion with power from CERN's own hydroelectric dam rushing through it and a massive digital torrent of data rushing out.

The raison d'être (we all speak French here at CERN, thank you) of the devices is to detect, track, and characterize subatomic particles. They do this by slamming electrons and positrons together to study the collisions deep in the center of their mighty bulk. The titanic detectors go about their business in perfect indifference to their tiny human masters, who call the supervaults housing the detectors "the Pit." They're not very dramatic - no Van de Graaff generators, no big zappy mad-scientist knife switches, no bluish cosmic glow. Just the busy hiss of ventilators and an odd troglodytic hum.

So I find myself, after descending the cell-like mine-shaft elevator, standing in the particle pit with DELPHI, which is not in fact pushing any particle beams at the moment. DELPHI is incredibly huge. As an adult guy of average human dimensions, I relate to these machines like a good-sized weevil to a bread loaf. DELPHI is a single coherent unit - the whole shebang can even be rolled out on rails, rather like a tracked space shuttle launchpad - but this moveable beast is multistoried and riddled with metal catwalks. DELPHI has entire offices built around it. DELPHI boasts fantastic Niagaras of cascading wire that look fit to hook up every stereo in Europe.

A 747 is very big. A battleship is enormous. A railway station is impressively cavernous. But CERN's particle detectors are definitely the ugliest, hairiest, most snarled and complicated big machines that I've ever encountered. Decked out in a garish paint scheme, with myriad blinking lights and monster industrial ductwork, they are unique, one-shot, single-issue scientific instruments, created with a profoundly alien design aesthetic. They look like nothing else on Earth.

It's form following function. A 747 has to fly, so it's streamlined and graceful. A battleship is pugnacious and scary, as it should be. But a CERN detector has nothing to do with such squalid, limiting mundanities. These devices directly grope with cosmic forces. They are built by hands-on techie zealots who do not know what an end user is and would despise one if they saw one.

Oil refineries - which CERN superficially resembles - are built by industrial engineers who are trying to generate revenue and rein in operating costs. This process inevitably creates a certain technological look. CERN simply doesn't have that look. CERN machines look like hallucinogenic distilleries built by a race of extradimensional Titans who despise creature comforts and have never heard of the consumer society.

So, while the Eiffel Tower is a popular idol, CERN has a very cold, exclusionary vibe. There's the 3-meter-high industrial security fencing and the ubiquitous guards in strange European white hats, and especially the CERN warning signs - always in French, and of impressive scope and variety. Don't smoke here, don't park here, don't go in there without a radiation badge, put on your hard hat, you can't come through here without a ticket and a sticker, Authorized Personnel Only, Radiation Dosimeters Required, Fire Alarm, Emergency Stop Button - Look, Pal, Let's Face It, You Don't Understand This and You Never Will. So Just Get the Hell Away from That Thing. And Stay Away.

Every schoolchild within a hundred kilometers has gone field-tripping through the pits of CERN. You could wander the ring all day and be in far less danger than you'd be in an automobile assembly line. As far as I can figure it, the fences and warning signs have little or nothing to do with public safety. But they have everything to do with keeping physicists safely ensconced in the spirit of Mega.

That tunnel's got power. It's got light. They could paint it nicely if they wanted to. They could put in a few beanbag chairs and a coffee shop; they could grow tomatoes. This would make absolutely no difference to the validity of CERN's scientific results. But if some local rebel were to try this, he would be perceived by his community peers as, you know, somehow unserious. Physicists prefer their hardware stark and hideous for profound emotional reasons.

The work of physics gratifies deep and irrational passions. CERN is inhabited, created, and built by a tribe of workaholic obsessives who call themselves "CERNois." (They used to call themselves "LEPers" but had to knock that off because the higher-ups figured it was bad for public relations.) Rational people pursue balanced, commonsensical, pragmatic existences. They don't spend years down in stark stone dungeons, fiercely pursuing the elementary constituents of matter.

The physicists' megaproject has been a signal success. It splendidly performs the job at hand - it blasts packets of particles. They zoom under the bronze statue feet of Voltaire, who spent his declining years in a nearby village chateau. They zap under local Swiss vineyards, which produce a very passable white vin du cyclotron. They zip under the flock of sheep owned by the official CERN shepherd (sheep are cheaper than lawn mowers). They zing like cosmic lightning under a forest, and some golf courses, and furrowed fields, and the romantic shadows of the Jura Mountains. Then the packets whack head-on into their antiparticle opposites and, with luck, the CERNois get to harvest more Z and W particles.

The bill for all this is picked up by the united taxpayers of (in order of financial largesse) Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Portugal, Norway, Poland, Greece, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. This is an odd and unique coalition of nations that have never united to do anything else but CERN. CERN, you see, has a certain compelling charisma. The major donor nations loudly moan about CERN, and they whine, and they jostle and accuse each other of all kinds of gyps and cheats, but they find the money somehow, and they do it. They've been doing it for 43 years. They can't resist doing it - their prestige is at stake - and now this thing they've built is the biggest and the best in the world, and it doesn't bother to make any economic sense, and they're about to tear it all out and build something even bigger! It's an enterprise entirely in the spirit of Mega.

Physicists have geek chic. They are the stud ducks of geekdom, Byronic geeks, geeks possessing deep poetic charisma. And the rest of us have come to sympathize with their deep need for the hardware.

These physicists may be Nobel Prize winners, but they're still the kind of guy who buys you an electric can opener for Christmas. So what the heck, let's all pitch in and do the decent thing - raise taxes half a percentage point and get them a nice new cyclotron.

The hub of the East

Airports, the new cultural center of modern life, are the latest in a long line of historical transportation hubs to be taken over by the spirit of Mega. Once, airports were relegated to the edges of a city; now cities are built around airports, and the bigger the airport the better.

It's pretty clear what people want and need from an airport - a cheap and decent cup of coffee. Also, a rubber room where jet-lagged kids can bounce off the walls without harming themselves and others. And, maybe, a place to pray.

But passengers don't build airports - governments do. Given the strange political needs and the unique government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the former British Crown colony's gigantic new airport is a classic specimen of prestige Mega.

Though it's been officially declared "complete," Hong Kong International Airport is not yet open. It's still awaiting its rail links - and the official wave of the political magic wand from the new premier of China, Zhu Rongji. The opening ceremonies, slated for early July, will celebrate the biggest single infrastructural project that Hong Kong has ever mounted. And one of the largest-scale endeavors by humans anywhere, at least since the Pyramids.

This new airport will do all the things that governments expect their airports to do: control population flows, ship mail and cargo, buffalo wannabe terrorists and passenger passers-by with intimidating security measures, vacuum people's pocket money at the duty-free, and ritually humiliate foreigners at Customs.

But HKIA is built on a gargantuan scale. Hong Kong is, of course, an island - the proverbial "barren rock." Founded by the 19th-century dope trade, Hong Kong has been run for generations by a cabal of ultrarich racetrack touts. A world capital for refugees and fortune hunters, it's also an offshore money laundry of the very first order. Double or nothing is a bet that comes easily to Hong Kong.

Kai Tak, the previous local airport, is one of the busiest, worst designed, and most dangerous in the world. The runway approach is so bad that local tenement dwellers can practically dry their laundry in the jet exhaust. There was simply no room in Hong Kong for a major new airport - but to stick with an inferior one would play right into the hands of Hong Kong's many new, upwardly mobile rival sister cities in mainland China.

So, the inoffensive little island of Chek Lap Kok, a lump of semitropical granite previously best known for its pod of rare pink dolphins, became ground zero for a $20 billion megaproject. One of the biggest land-reclamation projects ever envisioned, it was awarded to a mighty multinational consortium of Nishimatsu (Japan), Costain (the UK), Morrison Knudsen (USA), Ballast Nedam (the Netherlands), Jan De Nul (Belgium), and China Harbour Engineering (the People's Republic).

The largest dredging fleet ever assembled set to work. The island was knocked flat to a height of 6 meters (except for one small section said to harbor a rare frog). A smaller adjunct island, Lam Chau, was also scalped. Three hundred and forty-seven million cubic meters of rock, sand, and mud were blasted up, scraped up, heaved aside, replanted, and finally transformed into a giant runway complex six kilometers long and three and a half across. This was done at crazy speed, at the rate of 400,000 cubic meters a day - 10 tons a second for 31 solid months. The stumps of the original islands are only a quarter of the airport's land area - the rest of it is crushed rock topped with a tough geotextile fabric and thick layers of sand and tarmac.

The associated buildings are many and vast in scope. There are huge cargo shipping facilities (half the world's population lives within five air hours of Hong Kong). There are runways, terminals, a flight-control complex, cop and security fortresses, multiple fire stations, posh hotels and corporate high-rise headquarters, restaurants and shops. An entire new suburb has been built nearby. There's a new railway and two enormous bridges, including the award-winning Tsing Ma suspension bridge, a truly fantastic construction.

But the centerpiece, the focus of prestige here, is British architect Sir Norman Foster's passenger terminal. Strangely, the place is already haunted by that universal smell of airports: chewing gum, sweat, and exhaustion. Foster's terminal sprawls across the arid, artificial landscape like a giant scorpion, with two mighty arms outstretched and a double stinger tail. It is one and a quarter kilometers long and boasts 54 moving walkways, 102 elevators, 63 escalators. It has dozens of gates, separate floors for arrival and departure, an entire shopping mall, a railway depot, and its own automated people mover.

But none of this litany conveys the staggering, visceral scale of the structure. Lofty and brilliantly lit by skylights and vast sheets of glass, it has a monstrous organic quality, with thousands of airy skeletal roof struts and a long flexing spine down its center. A full-size replica of an early biplane (the first aircraft ever to fly in Hong Kong) dangles in the midst of the terminal's vast ribbed thorax. With a bit of petrol and a spin of its prop, this aircraft could easily fly around within the terminal.

The terminal has nine arching vaults in its roof, each the size and shape of a blimp hangar. They simply roll on and on, side by side, each the length of a city block, until the distant construction crew seems the size of puppets. Long sinuous racks of metal luggage carts sprawl out for absurd distances, so that you need a cart just to travel the length of the carts. This terminal contains 516,000 square meters of floor space; it's been designed to handle 35 million people a year. It has three times as much air-conditioning as the biggest skyscraper in Hong Kong. (That would be Central Plaza, the eighth-tallest skyscraper on Earth.) The facility is overwhelming - and they plan to expand it, later.

Empty, the thing inspires vertigo. But if you hold your breath and squint, you can imagine it sheltering a churning tide of free-spending 21st-century Asian yuppies - and that sight would be truly magnificent. This terminal is built to the scale and requirements of a rich, ambitious, no-holds-barred, densely populated, continental superpower. Built not just for tomorrow, it was designed with room to grow through the future. Though it's huge, this is no clumsy Stalinesque pile - it's a work of great suppleness, lightness, fluidity, and sophistication.

Needless to say, like any airport, it has shakedown problems. Skirt-wearing women may find the mirrorlike gray granite floors alarming. Given the dire experience of Denver, we'll cross our fingers about the automatic baggage-handling system that is supposed to spew 19,200 pieces of Samsonite an hour. But design or technical glitches can't ruin HKIA. Its only real perils are the ones that menace its hometown - political and economic dangers.

There was real risk that this airport would never see completion. It became a proxy battleground of Sino-British handover politics. Now that Hong Kong is permanently part of China, the riskiest part of transition would seem past - but China is a country full of dead megaprojects, from the Great Wall to the Grand Canal. Do China's masters trust Hong Kong enough, even now, to want to see it grow? Will this airport see a prosperous sky full of jumbos or has this "special administrative region" outlived its glory days?

The overwhelming urge to be tall

It's no coincidence that the modern devotee of megaprojects finds himself powerfully drawn to China. Sure, Kuala Lumpur is a can-do town that boasts the tallest twin skyscrapers on Earth - but Malaysia has only 22 million people. They're just more sensible in Malaysia - they might run amok every so often, but never on the titanic scale of China. In China, anything that happens has an extra zero in its statistics - maybe two extra zeros.

And Shanghai! What a name to conjure with! Singsong girls kicking the gong, Marlene Dietrich in a tight silk cheongsam, Noel Coward muttering bitchy witticisms into his crème de menthe. The name seems a tad less magical when you learn that it means "Seaside," and Shanghai Pudong means "Seaside East Riverbank," but the east riverbank of Shanghai is the site of the wildest and most ambitious construction boom of the '90s.

Shanghai wants to be a really big city again - big, and especially tall. The Shanghainese as a people are clearly in a volatile mood. For decades they were the pampered darlings of Red China's command economy - the Chinese industrial center, the cultural center, even (in the heyday of the Gang of Four) the political center. But by a few years ago they had become, in the eyes of Taipei and Hong Kong, a bunch of no-neck hicks.

For people who always imagined themselves to be fast-talking, hustling, New York-style urban sophisticates, this was quite the comedown. It was even worse to see ancient rural backwaters like Shenzhen exploding into manic prosperity in a rush of high-rises, stock shares, and cell phones.

The Shanghainese are still behind in the new Chinese economic game. They have a chip on their shoulder and a lot to prove.

Much the same might have been said of Chicago in the 1880s, where the first skyscrapers were built - mostly to annoy and humiliate New York. Skyscrapers, from day one, have been classic prestige constructions and showcase palaces, mostly for strutting financial and managerial empires. No one ever took a freight train up to a skyscraper. Practicality has never been their strong suit - they exist to give you that grand, inimitable, skyscraper feeling. So when the skyscraper mania hits your town, you never see just one. You're bound to get a whole rash of them.

Shanghai is devoured by urban envy and ambition. It fondly imagines itself as the world's next Wall Street, and, in one convulsive effort, it is conjuring an entire Manhattan-style Skyscraper National Park. It is a violent, fantastic, crony-capitalist Great Leap Forward. Since the early '90s, new infrastructure has hit Shanghai like a tsunami. There are three new subway lines, three new freeways, a new elevated highway that soars above the town at absurd and terrifying heights; there are four new bridges, a multilane traffic tunnel, and a fabulous French-designed new airport on the way.

They've even got a new prestigious spire, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower - which, they eagerly assure us, weighs 113,000 tons more than the Eiffel Tower! In the Oriental Pearl's souvenir shops you can even buy lovely glass sculptures of the Eiffel Tower. (Oddly, the Eiffel Tower doesn't sell any copies of the Oriental Pearl.)

New buildings are rising all over town, but the government has declared Pudong to be ground zero. The city's east side was long neglected - the local proverb was "Better a bed in Shanghai than a house in Pudong." But this made it easier to zone the neighborhood for shattering transformation. A sleepy proletarian sprawl of brick, cinder block, and bad stucco mutated at the wave of a bureaucrat's wand. Suddenly, a maze of modest shops and cramped apartments became the Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, the Huaxia Cultural Tourism Zone, and several other grandiloquent fantasies.

But it didn't stay fantasy for long. The scene physically exploded. There are 69 new skyscrapers in Pudong, either completed or on the way.

While I'm no engineer and far from fit to properly inspect any of these projects, it's hard for even a layperson to miss the gimcrack effects of hasty construction in the Shanghai building boom. Three-inch gaps in overpasses, vast concrete spans wedged up with plywood blocks, live power lines draped around trees and crudely hand cinched at throat height. With the best will in the world, the Shanghainese are simply not used to high-rises, superhighways, high-tension cables, and traffic jams.

The Chinese government finally turned off the faucet in March, refusing to issue any more building permits until the situation somehow stabilizes, according to a local engineer. It'll be very interesting to see what stabilization might look like here. Shanghai now has 22 times more office space than it did in 1990.

Once, Shanghai had the tallest buildings in Asia - on the western bank of the Huangpu River, the world-famous Shanghai Bund, where colonial brick buildings lined the river. The Bund has seen better days - the old banks and hotels are tired, gray, and smog eaten. They probably weren't all that impressive when brand new - they look like they were built by imperial hustlers with their carpetbags fully packed and an eye on the steamship tables.

The Jin Mao building across the river, however, is a stunningly beautiful skyscraper. Almost complete and the fourth-tallest skyscraper on Earth, it contains more floor space than the entire Bund. It's girdled by a set of precisely spaced, bamboolike ridges that rise to a rippling crescendo as the build- ing nears its peak. It has much of the lively quality of the Chrysler Building, while vaulting some 40 meters taller than the Empire State.

However, a Japanese company is building a structure right beside the Jin Mao that will be taller yet, the tallest skyscraper the world has ever seen. At the moment, the forthcoming Shanghai World Financial Center is a flat brown field of bulldozed dirt. A cadre of enormous, foul, towering steam hammers is methodically banging steel pilings into the sod.

There is no bedrock in Pudong. It's a muddy riverbank. The world's largest skyscraper will be supported by 80-meter-deep steel pilings. They're like vast rust-colored 10-penny nails, and when the black steam hammers smite them, they emit a sharp and anguished metallic ring that you can hear five blocks away. If you stand between the Jin Mao and the impressively colossal Shanghai China Merchants Tower, the clifflike echoes break into a literal rhumba beat. It's the sound of the 20th century being methodically hammered to death.

I enjoy an informative chat with Tomoshige Yamada. Polished, well briefed and very much in command of his material, Yamada is exactly the kind of guy you might expect to find in charge of the tallest building on Earth. He works for Forest Overseas, a wholly owned subsidiary of the well-known Mori construction firm.

Yamada makes his approach to the project very clear. Today, it is technically easy to build the tallest office building in the world. The real challenge is economic: finding a way to make the thing pay. To fill it up, to keep the tenants happy, to manage it successfully over the longer term.

The Shanghai World Financial Center was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, a US design firm known for its exuberant sense of fantasy - that special touch for megaprojects. The folks at Kohn Pedersen Fox are the guys who put the giant postmodern diadem on the DG Bank inFrankfurt, Germany, part of the worldwide fad of pomo "funny hat" skyscrapers.

The Shanghai center is sleek, bleak, and reasonable for about 88 stories or so. Then it turns into a tall gleaming chisel with a giant hole in its head. This huge funny-hat hole is mellifluously known as the "Moon Gate," and in any stateside downtown it would be a freakish architectural advent to be talked about for decades.

But in China it's hardly making waves. Postmodern Shanghai basically is a giant steel chisel with a hole in its head. By native Pudong standards, the world's tallest building is stodgy, conventional, and remote.

It's those 68 other high-rises in Pudong - pink, bulging, turquoise - that define the Shanghai Pudong experience. Shanghai's skyscrapers could pass for Christmas ornaments. They may not be up to the niggling health and safety standards of the basic international-style mirrorglass box, but they don't belong to featureless Western-style corporate empires. These are genuine crony-capitalist skyscrapers - flaunting, gaudy things, true and unashamed Shanghai showpieces. The Shanghainese have skyscrapers with saucers, geodomes, cupolas, balconies, and big weird wings. They've got vast fretted acreages of mirrorglass in astonishing shades of peach and aqua. There are buildings crowned with monster Statue of Liberty hats and with Flash Gordon ray-gun emplacements. Shanghai's new art museum is built like a giant bronze pot, including the handles. The new stadium has a U-shaped roof - an upright U, that is.

You gasp in awe, and then you giggle. But the awe is very genuine, and the giggling is a Yankee personality problem. These megabuildings are raised with a genuinely Chinese skyscraper aesthetic. It's not for nothing that Shanghai was called both the Pearl of the Orient and the Whore of Asia. Compared with Shanghai's strutting darlings of the Pudong boulevards, everyone else's skyscrapers are like crabbed old women wearing Muslim hijabs.

And this isn't Stalinist gingerbread, either - not oppressive totalitarian showiness, but real exuberance, the prettiest and most imaginative skyscrapers that anyone has ever built. P.S.: They are taller than anything in New York.

Another great wall

China has a very bad government. Nobody should fool themselves about this. It's a profoundly corrupt one-party dictatorship based on a bankrupt, morally discredited ideology.

However, the current Chinese government is certainly the best government that any living Chinese citizen has ever seen.

Their 20th century: Corruption, Catastrophe, Foreign Repression, Revolution, Repression, Revolution, Military Coup, Chaos, Warlordism, Anarchy, Foreign Invasion, People's War, Civil War, Communism, Starvation, Purges, Anarchist Frenzy, Counterpurges - and then, suddenly, material relief - maybe enough food and a warm place to sleep. The 21st century is almost upon them now: cologne, panty hose, Asian pop videos, and maybe even a car. The Chinese people are definitely with this program. They know how much they have to lose.

Xiaolangdi is China's second-ranking river project. It's far more technically complex than the better-known Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, but it gets less foreign attention because it is less controversial. Three Gorges will displace more than a million people and drown vast areas famous for their natural beauty. Xiaolangdi will drown a relative backwater and displace poverty-stricken peasants whose lives may well improve for that experience. And the dam can't cause much environmental harm to the Yellow River. That's because for much of the year the Yellow River no longer exists.

This isn't merely a very large project. It's a very strange and complex one. China is a very, very old civilization with legacy issues most cultures can only dream of. Chinese civilization was born near Xiaolangdi on the banks of the Yellow River. China has tenaciously exploited the Yellow River for thousands of years. The river has reacted badly to the exploitation.

The Yellow River runs through a huge continental plain with a dense, high-piled soil called loess. Loess is very odd stuff - wind-heaped fine particles. It clumps together fiercely - you can see vertical cliffs of loess 30 feet high - but it also dissolves rather easily in a hard rain. Upstream, around Xiaolangdi, the people can literally live in loess - they carve caves in it, they fire bricks from it; they combine the bricks and the caves, and they sink right into their landscape and dwell inside it. They've plowed it, and planted it, and harvested it, century after century - while downstream from their tireless efforts the Yellow River is choked with yellow loess. It is one of the muddiest rivers on earth.

In flood season, the Yellow River is basically a giant angry mudslide. In the flat plain of heartland China, there is very little standing in its way. It has been known to burst its levees and spontaneously change course over hundreds of miles. During the Second World War, the Kuomintang broke a Yellow River levee, rashly hoping that the flood would slow up the Japanese army. The flood killed nearly a million people and left 12.5 million homeless and starving.

This river is a major killer. And there's more trouble yet, since during the dry season the overtaxed river now routinely disappears.

Then there's the mud. It has a strange property. It settles in the Yellow River. The bottom of the river is layered year by year with loess mud, and it rises. So the river above it has to rise, too. And that means that the levees have to rise as well - more than 1,300 kilometers of levees, which line the Yellow River on its north and south embankments all the way down the plain.

The levees are old. They have broken 1,500 times during the last 3,000 years. And although the river broke convulsively free and changed course in 1194, and in 1854, and in 1887 (among other times), these levees have risen so high that the river they entrain is basically flowing on stilts. You have to climb uphill to reach the Yellow River; it is flowing higher than the surrounding countryside, and its banks are endless Great Walls of China.

If less mud shows up, the vengeful river will climb a little less rapidly. So the Xiaolangdi dam is in reality a labor-saving stopgap for China's perpetual megaproject - the more than 1,300 kilometers of levees, whose care and repair consume the time and resources of millions of people downstream.

Xiaolangdi is a modern technical fix for several thousand years of previous Chinese premodern technical fixes. Its scope is extremely ambitious but very much in the long tradition of Chinese autocratic government, where command of the nation's rivers and avoidance of major disasters automatically bestows political credibility.

The giant dam basically comes in two parts: a fantastically huge, solid concrete hydroelectric complex and a Brobdingnagian earth, rock, loess, concrete, and asphalt wall the size of a mountain. The whole shebang is 1,317 meters long and features nine flood tunnels, six more providing power, and an underground turbine vault.

The engineers of the Xiaolangdi joint venture have already blocked the Yellow River, but they haven't yet established their 12.65 billion-cubic-meter reservoir, because they haven't yet completed the earthen dam. They've done the hard part of it - they've put down its waterproof concrete spine - but to get the spine to stay put they have to pile a Matterhorn of rock and dirt on top of it. This will be accomplished, because it is the kind of work at which China has long excelled - erecting great walls one patient brick at a time.

They have a quarry at Xiaolangdi like a giant set of stone stairs. Every once in a while they set off 40,000 kilos of dynamite, placed in a neat row like a string of Chinese firecrackers, and 40,000 metric tons of solid rock calve off into neat megaheaps of rubble. Then a set of 20-ton backhoes daintily picks up the debris and drops it into a fleet of 66-ton trucks. A bucket chain of these monster trucks motor, with antlike persistence, over to the dam to add to the giant heap. Step two: Repeat, for several years.

It's hard, loud, dusty, grimy, onerous, hazardous, brute labor - but at least it's not complicated. The complicated stuff is all taking place in the mind-boggling hydroelectric complex.

The basic scheme is as follows: Nine giant tunnels of water work their way through the dam. Six of them, the clearest and most sediment free, are cunningly directed through a set of monster turbines that can generate up to 1,800 megawatts of power. Three other tunnels serve to coax the thickest muck away from the turbine feeds. After exiting the turbines, the water is combined into three tailrace tunnels and ventures in and out of various underground conduits, and into covered areas and open channels, and finally downstream. It may sound straightforward, but the design of huge tunnels carrying a swift and very high-pressure tonnage of muddy water is no easy matter.

The interior of the Xiaolangdi dam resembles a prairie-dog burrow - if prairie dogs were the size of diesel submarines. There are tunnels in Xiaolangdi that make the CERN tunnel look like a strand of macaroni. The chamber for the water turbines is a vault of Lovecraftian scale, accentuated by its monster rail-mounted 50-ton crane, which can pluck whole hydroelectric dynamos up and out like Thermos bottles. Elder gods could squat in that space and shoot dice with the kneebones of mastodons. I've never been so far from daylight with so little sense of confinement. It is otherworldly.

During my visit, the Chinese crew is installing monster steel conduits for the water flow. The silt can't chew through steel quite so easily as it can through mere concrete, so they are crane-handling monster steel rings into place, then welding them together and pressure-filling the rimmed cavity with gushing cement. The crew wears tough, bright orange canvas jackets, plastic hard hats, big rubber boots. These young Chinese men are no shrinking violets. They are hard-bitten, wiry, iron-bending, spark-blasting, concrete-spewing, John Henry-style roughnecks. They may not deserve all the Hero of Socialist Labor blather that they get from the state press, but they clearly deserve quite a bit of it.

The tunnels are a netherworld, but the outside of the hydraulic dam is even more impressive. It's a bristling mass of reinforcement rods, the dam rising chunk by chunk as they cast it in pieces. Each segment of concrete is about the size of a railroad car; they can't cast them any larger than that or the heat of the setting cement might crack them apart. (In fact, to keep the heat down, they use ice and cold stones in their cement water, as if mixing a big martini on the rocks.) Set in the smooth and rising face of the monster dam, each of these cement segments seems the size of a domino.

A crowd of welders spit brightness in a roiling mix of river fog and thick construction dust. They're at it all the time, all gritted teeth and grim persistence. Though it has its own uncompromising majesty, there isn't a lot of Shanghai glamour or exuberance to Xiaolangdi. Though it's a political prestige project, no one who understands it has any romantic illusions about Xiaolangdi.

It will help with water and irrigation problems - a lot, in the local area - but it can't hold enough water to supply the dwindling and overtaxed Yellow River downstream. And the power generators will be useful, but no one knows how useful or for how long - nobody has ever run generators in water that filthy. The computer design of turbine blades has made interesting strides recently, so that turbine efficiency is up to 80 percent - but these turbine blades are going to be spinning 107 times a minute in what is basically high-pressure liquid sandpaper.

The Xiaolangdi Reservoir will have a capacity of 12.65 billion cubic meters. But the Yellow River knows no rest. That means the river will soon fill up the reservoir with mud. No one knows how soon - it depends on weather, field erosion, a bunch of factors - but the best guess is about 30 years. Thirty years, and the giant reservoir will be a giant marsh. The Yellow River will climb up over the rising basin of loess mud, it will climb the full 154 meters of the dam, and the dam will become a simple waterfall.

They're not quite sure about what to think about that marsh. It's another generation's problem, really. They could open the floodgates and then the mud would ooze down and settle some - not enough to safely build on, but they might be able to farm it.

What they do know is that, having gained 30 years of relative grace for the folks downstream, Xiaolangdi will be dead. That's why they already have several other spots marked out for future dams.

The Desertron

No epoch has a copyright on overweening hubris. You can't conjure the largest thing on Earth by hitting the F1 key. It still requires daring, and persistence, and forethought, and the kind of brow-knitting real-world competence that only good engineering can provide.

And risk. There is truly no glory without risk. And there is no risk without the chance of failure. Deep, abject, technological failure. Desertron is a tale of the spirit of Mega meeting failure. Megafailure.

Credit for the idea of putting a cyclotron in the desert goes to the physicists - American scientists had grown tired of following Europe's lead. Hugely ambitious plans were drawn up for a brand-new US federal physics facility, officially called the Superconducting Super Collider. The breakthrough instrument would carry particle physics into a whole new realm of energy. The accelerator ring for the Desertron would make CERN's loop look like a quarter beside a coffee saucer; it would be 54 miles around, roughly big enough to circle Washington's Beltway. It would make full use of one of America's great competitive resources - plenty of elbow room. Big, sure, but they'd build it out in the desert somewhere. Like with the Manhattan Project.

But they didn't build the Desertron out in the desert. They tried to build it in Waxahachie, Texas.

It was quark-barrel politics. Texas had a lot of pull in the Senate and the House, and though you don't think "physics" when you hear "Waxahachie," at least the Desertron enthusiasts had their grant money. They got the project under way in a fine flurry of flag-waving and transcendental pop-science rants.

Things looked rosy at first. Everyone in Congress loved the Superconducting Super Collider when it looked like they themselves might have a chance at the gravy train. But when the monster project finally found a home in a sleepy farming town south of Dallas, lining some specific set of contractors' pockets, the boondoggle aspects became more obvious to all.

It would take me a couple of days to explain the complex tangle of technical difficulties and managerial incompetence that caused the Reagan/Bush-era Department of Energy to spend billions of dollars for nothing. Suffice it to say that big projects have big problems, that pride still goeth before a fall, and that it's a really bad idea to rashly claim that you can build some gizmo for $4 billion when it will actually take 11 big ones. By pressing the prestige pedal to the metal, the US physics establishment managed to ratchet their budget up pretty high before Congress revolted. Then the physicists all went home.

The Super Collider is well and truly deserted now. You never see it mentioned in the press. It won't sell any snow globes, key rings, or T-shirts. But it hasn't entirely vanished. It's left us a few Faulknerian, Southern Gothic relics. It's well worth the trip - since anyone who swills fine wine in the Eiffel Tower should consider it a matter of principle to also taste the bitter lees.

The visible remnants of the dead Super Collider are three virtually empty buildings. The most forlorn has thorn trees growing through cracks in the pavement beside their doors. Racks of power switches are bent and overrun by dewberry vines and poison ivy. Dead telephone installations burst with shriveled wiring, awaiting high-speed infoconnections that will never come. CERN-style warning signs have cracked in the fierce Texas sun.

But the truly haunting part is the tunnels. You see, there were nearly 15 miles of supercollider tunnel completed at the Desertron - not in one long concourse, but in a series of separate arcs. They were reached through giant open access shafts as much as 200 feet deep.

All the access shafts have been plugged with rubble just in case someone might want to sneak down to the tubes. There is no visible trace of those miles of tunnels now, except for large shallow pits where the bulldozed plugs of rock have settled with time and the elements. But there are still many secret miles down there in the earth, sunk in eldritch blackness and total, obscurantist darkness.

How long before Waxahachie's lost tunnels are rediscovered? Imagine you are studying the remains of Waxahachie many centuries from now. Cannily, you notice the archaeological spoil heaps of what was obviously very extensive excavation. Ambitious work, commanding large resources by the long-forgotten civilization of that period. Apparently, this huge dig was entirely obliterated from the historical records (the few that remain, that is). So it has to mean buried treasure, right? The hidden tomb of the American Tut! What else could it be? else could it be?

And the moral is ...

The Super Collider megaproject died in its crib. It won't be the only modern megaproject to die; it was just one of the first. The prestige of being Mega doesn't grant immortality.

What else will be left when the world tour is over and today's hype dies down? Will there be a CERN in a hundred years? Doubtful. Science goes through vogues, and even the biggest and best-designed instrument becomes obsolete. Interestingly, dead scientific instruments tend to turn, by subtle cultural alchemy, into admirable and collectible art objects - but CERN won't fit in a curiosity cabinet. And while physics is many centuries old, its equipment isn't. It seems unlikely that particle physics in 2098 will require big subterranean rings. Accelerators, if they exist at all, will either be so refined and subtle that they're pocket sized or so large and insanely powerful that they can only be built in orbit. Mark CERN down as a future Maginot Line.

The Hong Kong airport may well be around in a hundred years. Large-scale flight, now 70 years old or so, seems likely to persist for quite a while. Hong Kong has a good chance to thrive. I would worry quite a bit, though, about the long-term stability of that rockfill. And especially the acreage of geotextile fabric webbing that supports the airport's so-called topsoil. It's a seismically active area as well. Mark the airport down as still there in 2098, but reformed and rebuilt so much as to be scarcely recognizable.

Shanghai Pudong? Skyscrapers are hard to tear down. They can live quite a while - if built soundly. The Shanghai World Financial Center will be built to modern standards. Its funny hat with the moon-gazing bridge is basically a large hollow framework, though - might there be maintenance problems there? As for the rest of Pudong, well, Shanghai is a city known for revolutionary convulsions. China can breed a peck of trouble in a hundred years. Pudong is a prodigy. A monster. A fad, a phase. Don't count it out entirely, but don't count on it.

The Xiaolangdi dam is physically indestructible, a mythic worker-bee triumph, but it will choke to death in a monster tub of mud during our lifetime.

That leaves us where we began, with the Eiffel Tower.

The tower, that unlikely child of technohype and glamour, is no longer the biggest, certainly not the newest. But it has an excellent chance of surviving and thriving in 2098. It may have new ads down its sides, it may be festooned with unheard-of technologies, but if Western civilization is alive, there will be a tower where the Eiffel Tower stands today. It will be older then, old enough to be truly archaic and not just historical, but it will still be cherished, it will be well kept up. It will mean something different to the people of 2098, just as it meant something different to people in 1898, but it will still mean something important.

The Spirit of Mega can strike almost any culture, anywhere. The world has already seen cathedrals, giant Buddhas, the Pyramids, the Great Wall, oil refineries, Mount Rushmore, the Nazca Lines, the Colossus of Rhodes, space stations, moon-rocket launchpads.

New-and-improved construction materials will encourage a new giantism. Biomaterials can be natural, recyclable, sustainable, and insanely huge, all at the same time. Something that looks like redwood, smells like redwood, but is 10 times taller than a redwood - that has a certain over-the-top appeal. Today's American society is rather blasé about somber, nonprofit, spiritualized big gestures, but entertainment pays for Mega like never before. Venice is now appearing in Las Vegas (see "History Lite, No Chaser," page 136). Any culture that spends $200 million on digitally replicating the Titanic tragedy has an obvious weak spot for extravagant size. So, coming up: more giant casinos, giant theme parks, giant all-year snow slopes, captive tropical seashores.

But it may be that none of them ever surpasses the mega status of the Eiffel Tower. Because, you see, while big is indeed a thrill, it's not enough just to be big. If anything is to last for the long term, it has to be loved.

Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com) recently wrote Holy Fire, a novel.