The Great Landmark Race

Christopher J. Elliott

• Publisher: Place Research Institute
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780648955634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

TRAVEL FORMAT

What landmarks are on your bucket list?

The Great Landmark Race is the international competition to design great architecture, world icons and significant memorials. From the Pyramids of ancient Egypt to the Burj Khalifa today, we travel around the world to discover the most remarkable landmarks in the world to answer the big question of what makes a landmark great.

Covid19 has caused a rethink of travel. We can no longer overcrowd the few great landmarks we have. Architects, urban designers and planners need to change the game and create icons worthy of greatness and inspire us to travel to new locations. We must think in broader terms that reflect our culture, history, urban context and about how we can build monuments that reflect our civilisation today and for all eternity.

Using the new approach of Evidenced Based Design, over 2, 300 landmarks were examined to discover what makes landmarks genuinely incredible, what we can learn to create world-class icons of the future and to create a definitive bucket list for all.

1. Isolation

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” Helen Keller

Landmarks attract people and can be a cure for isolation. Ten thousand years ago, humanity began as small groups of isolated tribes living in caves. Today, we have worked together to build civilisations that reach the sky and house millions of people. Societies have grown, collapsed, and flourished, leaving behind the apex of their existence as a landmark.

A landmark survives through a human selection process. Civilisations destroy architecture they dislike or do not use, and they protect architecture they consider to be great; this is known as heritage protection today. Throughout time, people have come out of their isolation, banded together and built landmarks – all around the globe. Modern Rome has at its centre, the Colosseum, standing for two thousand years. London has the one-thousand-year-old Tower of London, and Kyoto has the 600-year-old Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kinkaku-ji.

The great landmark race is all about us; the human race, and its fight to survive, to grow and to prosper. It is about all the world’s cultures moving forward throughout history, to expand global knowledge, to go further, higher, bigger, with more ingenuity and more creativity than those before them. Landmarks predate books and movies. They tell stories of the past when languages are lost or forgotten. To experience a landmark, you cannot curl up in bed and simply read, or sit in a dark movie theatre and watch. You must buy a ticket, organise a place to stay, then go. You can then climb the landmark’s steps, you can touch its stone walls, or you may sit in a café and view it on the horizon. If a landmark was a book, then tourism is the act of reading that book.

Landmarks act as a beacon to tourists, pulling people from all over the world to see them. They stand as a monument to the achievements of its civilisation. It happens today, with the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, or in previous dynasties with the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Yet this book is written in 2020 during the COVID19 pandemic when tourism has collapsed. We are back in a type of tribal isolation. Some see other countries as enemies rather than tourist destinations. With international borders closed, suspicion and paranoia have replaced cultural exchange and economic cooperation.

For the first time in history, the function of a landmark – to lure visitors, wealth, prestige, power and fame to a city – is obsolete. The tourism industry has gone from 9.25 trillion US dollars globally down to near zero with less wealthy people and countries suffering the most. In many places, it is illegal to travel, compared to 2018 when 1.4 billion people travelled, as tourists, to elsewhere in the world[1]. That is one-fifth of the world’s population. These people packed their bags, got on a train, bus or plane, travelled somewhere else, shopped, relaxed, visited a landmark and then went home. Our world is so connected that a Coronavirus can spread throughout the planet in a month. Before this crisis, an Australian found it cheaper to go to Bali for a week than to visit another state. For the British, airfares to Spain were less expensive than a train ticket to the next city, and for Hong Kongers, travel to Thailand was cheaper than a luxury city hotel.

This connectedness had the added advantage of bringing about global equality by dispersing wealth around the world. A landmark can pull tourists to more impoverished locations, bringing with them their tourist dollars. A supermarket in a town with a landmark can do far better with the addition of tourists than it can by relying only on the local population. Tourists add to the local economy, which means more staff, more jobs, and a more comprehensive range of products. It can stay open later, creating a benefit to everyone in the town. It is easier for places to bring in tourists than it is to mine resources or manufacture products.

Compared to other industries, tourism has the added advantage of being more environmentally sustainable. Tourism brings with it a win for locals, for visitors, the environment, and the economy.

Free Independent Travellers (FIT) are visitors that vacation on their own, preferring not to travel in tour groups. They will explore anywhere of interest and tend to disperse their wealth in lesser-known places in the world. All they need is a rental car, or in some cases only hiking boots, to travel. The more they visit a location, the more friends they tell, Instagram and Facebook posts they make, and the more famous the landmarks become.

A tourism location may begin as a small backpacker retreat near a landmark waterfall or temple in a hidden mountain village. The more tourists are attracted to this location, the more facilities for tourists that get developed. These facilities may include better hotels, shops, and other activities. Eventually, a place will grow into a series of attractions and in some cases, into resorts and theme parks with improved roads and transport. The final stage of development is a new airport creating a tourism hub. It is known as scalability in the tourism industry. Places can quickly scale up to meet the inflow of tourists and their needs. Yet, from a westerner’s perspective, this could be thought of as a negative impact. The feeling that a remote village can transition into a mass tourism hub gives many people a sense of unease. It feels as though the local culture is washed away and a bland global culture is put in its place. It may be saddening to some. It is a form of cultural contamination, and in the era of COVID19, this mirrors viral contamination.

One of the last places in the world to still be isolated is North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea between India and Myanmar. The island is a protectorate of India. A visit in 1967 found around 80 to 150 people, with current estimates guessing the population to be anywhere between 15 to 500. The villagers all live a simple lifestyle in small lean-to huts all facing each other. This would provide little privacy. They have a communal fire pit where the tribe gathers at night. People carve out canoes for fishing between the protective reef and the shoreline. They craft bows, arrows, spears and knives for use in hunting turtles, wild pigs and birds. They also collect bird eggs, fruit, and underground tubers[2]. It is illegal, under India’s laws, to get within 10 kilometres of the island.

In 1880 an expedition lead by Maurice Vidal Portman visited the island and captured an older man, his wife, and their four children. The man and woman had been protected by the island’s isolation from the outsider’s disease. Once they were exposed to other people, they eventually got sick and died. The four orphaned children were now more of a burden, so they were sent back to the island[3]. It is unknown if, or how many people died from any diseases the children brought with them as there was no further contact with the island until 2019.

In that year, a 26-year-old Christian missionary, John Chau, wanted to bring Christianity to the island, so he paid local fishermen to take him there. Minutes after landing, he was killed by arrows, and the fishermen reported seeing his body being dragged around by the inhabitants. The seven fishermen involved in transporting John were arrested for participation in the visit. Again, it is unknown how many people got sick or died from this visit. The tribespeople appear to know that outsiders bring death and the killing was more of an act of self-defence than of murder.

Alternatively, some people do not wish to be isolated.

To assist in developing China every few years, the government launches a Five-Year Plan. In 2009 the plan was to develop rural areas, and the design team and I were hired by the Provincial Government to develop a valley in the eastern part of Yunnan Province. China develops its rural areas in a different way to other countries. Instead of the process used in the west, of creating activities for tourists, then building hotels and accommodation, then improving roads, building train lines and finally an airport, as demand increases, the Chinese Government does the exact opposite.

The airport was constructed first and to facilitate it, the top of a mountain was bulldozed and pushed into the neighbouring valley, creating the only flat area of land. It had one flight a week at the time, and due to its location in the clouds, it was common for it to get cancelled due to storms. The airport’s height caused lightning to strike along eye level. It was frightening seeing horizontal lightning bounce across the tarmac. I was happy to have my flight repeatedly cancelled. The freeway infrastructure was also built, bringing a divided road right up to the boundary of the valley. It reduced from a four-lane freeway to a dirt track with an incredible bump. Their development approach of infrastructure first and attractions last, is quite brilliant. For when travel time is reduced, demand skyrockets. Our role was to create a tourism landmark for this valley and to plan hotels, resorts, and attractions. We spent weeks travelling around the one hundred square kilometre valley to find places of interest and think of activities for people to participate.

There was a reservoir that had some of those giant wheeled, floating tricycles that paddle around. We were told it was the region’s first tourism attraction. I smirked but did not comment. Far more interesting were some semi-flooded caves where you enter by boat and paddle amongst gigantic stalagmites and stalactites as you loop through the cave system and back out to a natural lake that looked like a garden of Eden. The valley was surrounded by stone-cast mountains that appeared like old Chinese watercolour paintings. The views were spectacular. There was a winery with wine that tasted like grape juice, so sweet you can feel your teeth rot. The streetlights were shaped like chillies in celebration of the chillies grown in the valley, and there were two disused quarries devastating the sides of mountains.

As a westerner in China, I felt uneasy at developing a landmark attraction and a tourism destination that would pull people in from around the world to this quiet, forgotten valley. I was aware of the cultural contamination that was soon to change these people’s quiet farming life into a mass tourism hub. Are these people like the North Sentinel Island villages not wanting visitors? Was I being condescending? As an outsider, it was not my choice to make. So, I asked the provincial administrator about engaging with the local people.

In democratic countries, we go through a public consultation process where we conduct surveys, interviews or show designs to the community, to understand their opinions of a project. I found it challenging working in China, with the government pushing on with projects without hearing locals’ thoughts. Do they even want the development? The fact is that China can do things very quickly without consultation, and this is how they have managed to move a billion people out of poverty – one of the most significant achievements in human history in the shortest amount of time. The question I had was if it could be done better using a different process.

To satisfy my doubts, the administrator took me to the closest farmhouse and asked, “Will this house do?”

He went up and spoke to the farmers who instantly invited us in for lunch. Their house was made of mud brick and had a well-worn dirt floor that was hard as stone. The only door to the house had a threshold to step over, similar to old temples, and was painted red with an ornate knocker. There were only two rooms with the main room used for dining with a lounge area and a bedroom at the back, and the other room was the kitchen. Our host pulled up extra seats to a large round table in the centre. A woman ran around putting things away in cupboards and boxes while turning off the television. Another woman called from the kitchen for bits and pieces she needed for the meal. The other end of the room had beds which looked like army cots, and there was an alcove sleeping area with a standard double bed.

I put my head around the corner into the kitchen to notice it was very dark with the only light coming from between the top of the mud-brick walls and the metal roof. The wok was the size of a truck wheel, and sat on a wood fire that was threatening to burn the whole province down. The cooking was causing so much smoke, it made sense the only other room would be a kitchen. We ate a very spicy lunch (it took my tongue a week to heal), and we even tried the local delicacy of fried bees. Very crunchy by the way, tasted like potato crisps without the food additives.

We eventually got to talking about their opini...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. Isolation
• 1. The Great Bucket List
• 2. Landmarks
• 3. The Race
• 4. The Race for Tall
• 5. Big Things
• 6. The Race for Meaning
• 7. The Race to be Memorable
• 8. The Opinion List
• 9. The Score
• 10. The Results
• 11. Winning the Race
• The Ranking
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Author Contact
• Acknowledgments