China's Building Blitz

[Kris]

[Pilaro]

So, are the rumors true? Is Shanghai construction going to stop or slow due to alleged sinking?

[Kris]

Beijing's building revolution

By Louisa Lim
BBC correspondent in Beijing

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, Beijing is changing its public face, with the world's most expensive and innovative architects designing a new crop of projects which are sweeping away swathes of the old city.

"Nobody knows where Chinese culture is heading," Yung-he Chang said.

"What is a Chinese house today?"

It is a dilemma that, as a Chinese architect, he has tried to address in his own work.

His vision of the future stands in the shadow of one of the country's earliest architectural structures, the Great Wall.

In his attempt to reinterpret the traditional courtyard house, he has designed a split building divided by a triangular courtyard.

Set in the countryside outside Beijing, Yung-he Chang set out to make a biodegradable house, with a wooden frame and ramped earth walls.

"The house can deteriorate, can disintegrate and can to some extent disappear back into nature," he said.

It is a world away from Beijing's futuristic new look, showy projects designed by foreign architects and built to last.

The new Olympic stadium has variously been described as a "vision of some post-Blade Runner city" and a bird's nest.

The arena enclosed in its twisting concrete hoops is the work of a Swiss team, Pierre de Meuron and Jacques Herzog, who were responsible for the transformation of London's Tate Modern.

Extreme

Even more extraordinary is the new state television station by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. It seems to defy gravity with its intersecting Z-shaped towers which frame a huge empty hole. It has been christened the twisted doughnut.

"They want to have more extreme buildings, or buildings which will put them on the map," Zaha Hadid said of the Chinese leadership.

An Iraqi-born architect who is based in Britain, she is a superstar of the architecture world.

She is also designing a project for Beijing, a one-million square metre residential and office complex, and she says working in the Chinese capital is unlike anywhere else.

"There's the will and the desire to make something quite unique and different. I think this is aided by the Olympics. It's a brave new world where it's possible to maybe test ideas and develop ideas which in some other places may not be possible."

"The scale is different here," she said.

And the quest for modernity has already begun - work on the state opera house is underway.

Designed by French architect Paul Andreu, locals call this dome-like structure the Egg.

In the shadow of the building, 80 year-old Mrs Kang does her washing.

She lives in a courtyard house surrounded by narrow alleys. It's a leftover of old Beijing, which will be bulldozed to make way for a highway circling the opera house.

For her, the new architecture is another instance of China's rulers imposing their will on the masses.

"What's it got to do with us?" Mrs Kang says. "After they've finished building it, they're going to kick us out. I'd never go to the opera anyway."

Regret

The Chinese Communist Party has always used architecture to present its public image.

Its familiar, forbidding face is Tiananmen Square with its huge open expanse flanked on both sides by massive monolithic porticoed buildings.

Zhang Kaiji designed one of those buildings, the National Museum of Revolutionary History. As one of the chief architects for the Chinese Communist party, he drew up the plans and supervised the building's construction in just 10 months from start to finish in time for the 10th anniversary of Communist rule in 1959.

But at the age of 92, Zhang Kaiji now wishes he'd done things differently.

"There are a lot of things I regret," he told the BBC.

"Tiananmen Square is too big. We wanted to show how great our country was. At that time there was a feeling that bigger was better, but I think that is wrong. It was just to show off. It wasn't really to serve the people," he said.

Luxury

Zhang Kaiji's son is the architect Yung-he Chang. And as he wanders around his split house, he also wonders about the motivation behind it.

Originally it was envisaged by a local private developer as part of an upscale gated community made up of 12 houses, each the work of a different Asian architect.

But it's become a luxury hotel with each house for hire at US$1000 a night. Now Yung-he Chang worries that he - like his father - is simply serving the elite.

"My father did work for the state in the name of the people. I don't think it's that accessible. In my case, I'm working for the new middle class. And my problem is am I really able to reach more people than my father? That's always questionable."

As it readies itself as an Olympic stage, Beijing is redefining its image: it wants to be ultra-modern, the essence of cool, designed by the best the world has to offer with money as no object.

But in this headlong rush to modernise, China's people and its traditions risk being left behind.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ic/3543419.stm

Published: 2004/03/09 01:36:37 GMT

© BBC MMIV


Beijing Olympic Stadium

[Kris]

http://www.atimes.com

China

Mar 11, 2004

New rich trade gray flats for trendy homes

By Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING - As China's parliament meets to amend the communist country's constitution and protect private property rights, China's new rich are abandoning proletarian apartments in communal blocks and moving into trendy duplex apartments and suburban villas. They are pursuing the very capitalist antitheses of the drab, uniform and crowded quarters once extolled by the ideologes of egalitarianism - beautiful and distinctive single-family homes.

With banks ready to offer 70 percent low-interest credit on new housing developments across big Chinese cities, the unprecedented housing boom is propelling the country's record-breaking economic growth and making China an El Dorado for architects. Soon, Beijing - the showcase of this construction boom in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games - will display architectural works by some of the world's best-known architects, including Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Riken Yamamoto and others.

Meanwhile, since anything foreign has cachet, Chinese architects are filling the cities with residential developments with flashy names like Palm Springs, Upper East Side, Chateau Regalia, and Merlin Champagne Town. Many of these projects feature walled compounds with 24-hour guards, offering luxurious club houses, golf courses, swimming pools, tennis courts and mansions with double garages and tiny rooms for the new class of live-in domestic workers.

"People are coming in off the streets to buy apartments at Jianwai Soho complex and just offering us suitcases full of cash. It's crazy," says Antonio Ochao-Piccardo, chief architect of a new high-rise development in downtown Beijing undertaken by one of the country's most successful residential developers, Soho China Limited.

Jianwai Soho is all avant-garde minimalist with floor-to-ceiling luminous glass walls, and the average flat goes for US$300,000. The complex, with its narrow winding lanes and grass-lined walkways, is modelled on Beijing's old hutongs but defies the city's traditional north-south axis of house orientation by positioning all buildings 30 degrees east and flooding them with light.

"More than 90 percent of our buyers are Chinese," says Zhang Xin, chief executive of Soho China. "About half of them come from places outside Beijing. Now that so many can afford it, they all want to secure a home in the capital."

Zhang Xin, who studied economics at Cambridge University in Britain, won a special prize, the Silver Lion, for her role as a "patron of architecture" at the 2002 architectural Biennale in Venice. Soho, China's most daring architectural project, is a collection of holiday homes, all individually designed by 12 leading Asian architects and located just a stone's throw from the Great Wall.

Named the "Commune by the Great Wall," its staff are dressed in Maoist-style uniforms with badges that evoke the fervor of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Architecturally, developers have chosen an impressive combination of ultramodern design and Zen-style blending with surrounding nature - a definite catch for trend-conscious property buyers.

China's new rich are asked to put down a minimum of US$500,000 dollars for a weekend retreat like Ochao-Piccardo's eye-catching brick red Cantilever House, which looks out over a valley. Inside are spacious light-filled interiors and the roof contains a garden, Jacuzzi and barbecue area.

While the Commune by the Great Wall, and the whole concept of a holiday home, is still testing the appeal of rustic retreats for China's new rich, Soho China's developments downtown are already being cited as a story of ultimate commercial success.

Indeed, Soho China's arrival on the mainland's property market seven years ago was nothing less than revolutionary. For the first time in China, where socialist-era dwellings once were handed over to residents as concrete shells, savvy property developers offered ready-to-move-in flats with equipped kitchens, painted walls and bathroom fixtures.

Now, a score of developers across Beijing are trying to replicate the recipe of success pioneered by Soho China. Merlin Champagne Town, a suburban development by the Merlin China Development Group, tries to blend sleek minimalist designs with suburban comforts by offering smart duplex apartments with private gardens and rooftop balconies.

"Not everybody can afford to buy a suburban villa," says Liu Li, a property consultant at Merlin Town, "but many want to have the space and scenery of the suburbs. We try to cater to exactly this type of customers."

The housing boom is helped by a revolution in modern design and ironically, by nostalgia for the serenity of lost nature. True, the opening of the Swedish home furnishings giant Ikea store in Beijing seven years ago attracted vast crowds, and Ikea still ranks as one of the biggest influences on popular taste.

Yet according to Rebecca Xsu, owner of the Cottage, an interior design shop, the latest trend in Beijing is a desire to get back to nature and one's roots.

"There are too many concrete blocks around, too much steel and concrete, so people are looking for an escape. In the past, they all lived very close to nature and the earth - look at our courtyard houses," she explains. "Courtyards had earthen floors and were open to the sky, so both designers and developers want to reflect that."

(Inter Press Service)


China's designer revolution is based on thoughts of mortgages, not Mao

The new urban rich are cashing in on the economic boom by spending their money on exclusive homes and furniture, reports Jasper Becker

17 March 2004

China's new class of Communist rich are letting their imaginations go as they throw out the antimacassars and the padded armchairs and hire trendy designers for their million-pound mansions.

With banks ready to offer 80 per cent low-interest credit, the rich are abandoning their proletarian apartments in communal blocks for residential developments with names such as Palm Springs, Fifth Avenue, Aristocrat Towers, Chateau Regency or Merlin Champagne.

China's record 9 per cent growth is being powered by a housing boom caused by many of the 200 million urban Chinese taking out mortgages.

The recent National People's Congress meeting formally adopted laws protecting private property rights, while the gap between rich and poor grows ever larger.

The top developments feature walled compounds with 24-hour guards and offer double garages, luxurious club houses, golf courses, swimming pools and tennis courts, and tiny rooms for the live-in servants.

"Architects here are drunk with freedom - this is the time for experimentation," said Daniel Nazdin, an American architect who designs everything from office blocks to luxury housing estates. "A project I would have six months to do in the States, I have three weeks to do here," he said, "but it is very exciting. You never know what will happen next."

The opening of an Ikea shop in the capital six years ago attracted vast crowds, and the company still ranks as one of the biggest influences on popular taste. Anything foreign still has top cachet but a few are trying to reach out for a new, eclectic Chinese style.

Adam Robarts, a British architect who has taught and worked in Beijing since 1993, said: "All of a sudden everyone is talking about art and design."

Antonio Ochao-Piccardo, the chief architect of a high-rise development by a company called Soho China, said: "People are coming in off the streets to buy apartments in the Jianwai Soho complex and just offering us suitcases full of cash. It's crazy."

His building is all avant-garde minimalist with floor to ceiling glass walls. The average flat costs £164,000. The complex, with its narrow, winding lanes and grass-lined walkways, is modelled on Beijing's old hutongs, or courtyards, but defies the city's traditional north-south axis of house orientation by positioning all buildings 30 degrees eastwards and making them flooded with light.

The residential area is complemented by hundreds of small, street-level shops, similar to another big hit in Shanghai, the Xintiandi development, which has attracted the city's trendiest restaurants and boutiques.

Soho China's most daring architectural project is a collection of holiday homes, all individually designed by 12 leading Asian architects and located near the Great Wall.

It is a curious mélange of ultra-modern and individualist Zen-style design called the Commune, where the staff wear Maoist-style uniforms with badges that evoke the fervour of the Cultural Revolution.

China's new rich are asked to put down a minimum of £275,000 on weekend homes such as Ochao-Piccardo's eye-catching Cantilever House, which hangs over the valley. Inside are spacious, light-filled interiors, and on the roof is a garden, jacuzzi and barbeque. The developer Zhang Xin, who studied economics at Cambridge, won the Silver Lion special prize at the 2002 Venice Architecture Biennale for her role as a "patron of architecture".

In central Beijing, some designers are going for a style which is not just post-Mao but post-industrial, where a knowing irony almost comes as a side order. Lin Tianfang's Pink Loft, for instance, is a Thai restaurant in a remnant of Mao's industrialised Beijing. "It used to be one of those secret military research plants, something to do with electronics," she said. "The whole area around here was a sort of Silicon Valley."

Now the chains, girders, glass floors and concrete walls have been painted pink. The old, heavy, dark hardwood furniture of the Manchu period is set off by embroidered pink silk cushions and a profusion of fresh orchids.

Lin's first restaurant, the Loft, was also created in a discarded part of China's military-industrial complex. She started it with her brother and elder sister in 1999 as a place to hold art exhibits, performances and electronic music festivals.

The food is European, the furniture is Chinese, and the art is charmingly Warholian - on one wall dozens of television screens show footage of a model Cultural Revolution-era opera.

Others are going for an ornate retro style harping back to China's past. Handel Lee, an American lawyer who owns the Courtyard Restaurant, has done that with his own home. He rebuilt a courtyard house that once belonged to a nephew of Wei Gongxian, a notorious Ming dynasty eunuch who in the 16th century became the highest power in the land.

A descendant of the original Manchu troops who conquered Beijing in the 17th century, Mr Lee redesigned the house to exploit the feel of the history.

Outside the city he has built himself several weekend retreats in a startling Modernist style. "It is amazing what you can do here now - things you could never get away with abroad," Mr Lee said.

His restaurant combines avant-garde painting exhibits in a house once owned by the doctor of General Yuan Shikai, the man who set himself up as emperor after the overthrow of the Manchus in 1911. "The modern art scene just keeps getting bigger," Mr Lee said.

According to Rebecca Xsu, the owner of the Cottage, an interior design shop, the latest trend in Beijing is a desire to get back to nature and one's roots. "There are too many concrete blocks around, too much steel and concrete, so people are looking for an escape. In the past they all lived very close to nature and the earth - look at our hutongs. Courtyards were packed with dirt and open to the sky. Designers want to reflect that."

Soho China's biggest project is an attempt to fuse all these trends into a giant commercial real-estate venture. The British architect Zaha Hadid is designing Soho City, a residential and office complex the size of a small town next to the Beijing Logistics Centre in the city's south-eastern suburbs.

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

[BigMac]

Newsday
April 17, 2004

New York, China: The city so nice, they're building it twice

By TED ANTHONY

BEIJING -- Directions from Times Square to the Upper East Side: Go east on Chang'an Avenue past Tiananmen Square, then drive north on Fourth Ring Road until you see the Chaoyang Gongyuan exit. And watch out for the gridlock just before SoHo.

Looking for luxury? Buy an apartment in _ not on _ Central Park. Stop in at MOMA, where you'll find nary a Picasso or Pollock. Dine at the Four Seasons, or order some of Little Italy's fresh-made pasta. Head out to suburban Forest Hills, where you won't be seeing pro tennis matches any time soon.

As China's ancient capital gallops through a dizzying building boom and invents a modern identity, developers are borrowing the globally glamorous landmarks of Manhattan _ in Chinese, "mahn-ha-dun" _ as namesakes for gleaming new apartment complexes and businesses.

In the develop-it-now exuberance of today's Beijing, the attitude toward New York is a pragmatic one: If you can make it there, you can remake it anywhere _ especially here.

"When people see Park Avenue, they see New York prestige. It's fashionable, and the pinnacle of civilization, and the name conveys that," says Tian Yutao, a senior salesman for Park Avenue, an apartment complex rising in central Beijing.

"In Chinese culture, we don't have all these iconic names that symbolize prosperity. So we borrow," says Tian, an energetic 25-year-old born five years after Mao's death cleared the way for the economic reform that unleashed the current rush toward cosmopolitanism.

Modern China's paradox is this: It is an ancient culture, yet it is emerging from a recent infancy. Mao's communist vision, imposed with the 1949 revolution, branded prestige as unforgivable and shunned much of the outside world for three decades. His road to utopia didn't cross Fifth Avenue.

The capitalism steamrolling across China in his wake draws upon foreign influence to plug gaps in its recent popular culture _ and, in the process, is infusing Chinese with hunger for the West. A popular 1993 TV show called "Beijingers in New York" didn't hurt, either.

It means a taste for knockoffs of American products, from DKNY blouses to New York Knicks jerseys to DVDs of Manhattan-saturated TV shows like "Friends" and "Sex and the City." It means old men doing tai'chi at dawn wearing Yankees caps. It means young Chinese adopting English first names like "Harlem" to convey their savvy.

And it means an unofficial _ though hardly inadvertent _ effort to invoke New York as a PR device to leave old Peking behind.

"Beijing Chaoyang area positions to become new Manhattan," the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily said in 2000, outlining plans for the most internationally oriented sector of the city.

It is in Chaoyang where most of these glossy, glassy high-rise complexes are rising in a skyline eons away from the drab communist cinderblock villas of yore.

One ambitious complex, the Upper East Side, offers beautifully printed but incomprehensible promotional materials ("Short sense of history turn into regret of all the Chinese cities") that hammer home one theme: New York equals luxury.

The 116-acre tract will open its first apartments next year, targeted at China's nouveau riche _ foreigners and Chinese about 40 years old and working for global corporations. The average purchase price will be $185 per square foot.

"In New York, the Upper East Side has a good standard of living and tall buildings, and wealthy people live there. Our target is to reflect that," says Tian Tao, chief of sales. He predicts a "little city" with high-end boutiques on the first and second floors of buildings _ just like the real Upper East side.

But cheaper. In Manhattan's Upper East Side, apartments sell for $750 to $1,000 a square foot, rising to $2,000 and even $3,000 in the most desirable areas.

Says Tian: "This isn't just a name. The whole New York feeling will be here," including "a coveted view out the western windows" to Chaoyang Park, Beijing's verdant substitute for Central Park.

Up the road, the apartment complex actually named Central Park is already taking residents _ Westerners, Hong Kongers and Taiwanese with money to spend.

"I've never been to New York. I just hear about it from other people," says sales manager Wang Lin. "They say, `I run in Central Park every morning."'

Most of Beijing's people, of course, aren't living in such top-level quarters.

The city's building boom has eradicated thousands of dilapidated courtyard homes, some hundreds of years old and without indoor plumbing. Today, many residents live in mid-rise apartment blocks that, while clean and safe, could hardly be considered luxurious.

The New York names go on: Manhattan Gardens. Forest Hills. SoHo, whose Chinese name means "Modern City." MOMA, where real estate agents immediately tell visitors: "We're not a museum." There's Times Square, a department store where, on the second floor, you'll find the Times Square Subway _ with six-inch meatball hoagies for 19 yuan, or about $2.40.

Across town, restaurants called Little Italy and the Four Seasons do brisk business. There's even a well-heeled China World Trade Center, complete with much shorter twin towers _ something not emphasized much in the post-Sept. 11 world. The only thing Beijing is missing, it seems, is Chinatown.

New Yorkers, though, can be difficult to impress.

"It's kind of sad. They have a chance to make China be China, but they think those names mean money," says Ray Pagnucco, a television actor and New York native who returned to Brooklyn in March after living in Beijing for three years.

"It's like the whole bootleg DVD thing," Pagnucco says. "In China today, copying gets you ahead."

If imitation means flattery, though, it's also the manifestation of something Chinese have been doing for centuries _ deftly adapting outside influences. Even the country's free-market experiment is known as "socialism with Chinese characteristics," acknowledging the fusion of the borrowed and the original.

As Beijing hurtles toward the 2008 Olympics, the touchstone of its current development frenzy, it is trying desperately to forge its own, unique brand. It has centuries of history to draw upon _ the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall at its edge.

But in a town where a Taiwanese woman named Chen has opened a bagel bakery, a Nashville theme bar is regularly packed and one of the newest residential developments is called Yosemite, there's more room for imitation _ and lots of temptation to recruit what's already proven attractive elsewhere.

"This is an unusual cultural moment for China," says Park Avenue's Tian. "China opens up, and these things are coveted. Eventually, the allure will fade and things that are uniquely Chinese will be what's coveted. But not yet."

On the Net:

Central Park: http://www.hkland.com/residential_pr...fer_prime.html

Beijing Times Square: http://www.building.com.hk/feature/03_01bjtimessq.htm

Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.

[Ninjahedge]

Originally Posted by Pilaro

So, are the rumors true? Is Shanghai construction going to stop or slow due to alleged sinking?

I don't think so. I believe we are doing the engineering on that one (I will have to check with the PM).

[Kris]

Soaring Ambitions

The world's most visionary architects are rebuilding China. Inside the aesthetic revolution

By Susan Jakes Beijing

Posted Monday, April 26, 2004; 21:00 HKT

Nothing less than the most novel building in Beijing would do. Zhang Yongduo, an entrepreneur from the coastal Chinese province of Shandong, had made a fortune in a business that improbably paired spas with seafood restaurants. Now he was extending his chain to the capital, and he wanted a landmark to announce his arrival. Zhang didn't know much about design, so he hired a young U.S.-trained Chinese architect to serve as headhunter, instructing him to find a big name with a big vision. That's how in the spring of 2003 Zhang came to meet Raimund Abraham—one of architecture's great iconoclasts and a man whose designs are so radical that most exist only in the pages of a book titled {un}-Built.

Zhang gave the ponytailed 70-year-old New Yorker few instructions. The building would need to accommodate several restaurants, two bathhouses, an art gallery, offices and a massage salon. Zhang said the design should evoke the sea and that it should be "the most radical building in Beijing." A couple of days after their first meeting, Abraham produced a sketch—a meditation on the ocean's violent power in the form of a 12-story block gouged like a cliff at the edge of a raging sea. Zhang was dumbfounded. But after Abraham explained the idea behind the forbidding façade, the client grinned. Construction is set to begin in central Beijing later this year. "There's no way I could get a design like this built in America," Abraham says. "But in China, one starts to feel that anything is possible."

When it is completed next year, Abraham's ode to the oceanic will certainly turn heads. But for the title of "most radical," it will have plenty of competition. China's construction boom has attracted many of the world's finest architects, and amid the hurly-burly of the country's breakneck development they have found a place to realize their most daring visions. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss team responsible for London's Tate Modern, have broken ground on an ingeniously intricate stadium for Beijing's 2008 Olympics. Frenchman Paul Andreu's new Beijing opera house—a titanium-and-glass dome that will repose in a square reflecting pool like a phosphorescent jellyfish—is already starting to bulge alongside Tiananmen Square. Zaha Hadid's signature sensuous curves will gird Guangzhou's new theater complex. Michael Graves has given a makeover to a bank on Shanghai's Bund. Norman Foster is at work revamping Beijing's airport. And Rem Koolhaas' Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture has designed a new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) that promises to be one of the world's largest and most technically complex buildings.

Architecture thrives in societies on the make, and there is no place on earth right now with ambitions the size of China's. Decades of enforced architectural monotony under communism have left the country with few contemporary landmarks, a shortage of visionary designers and an explosive, pent-up demand for buildings grand enough to embody the nation's aspirations. Its cities are expanding fast: 6.09 billion sq m of new buildings were constructed between 1999 and 2002 alone, nearly doubling the country's total built floor space. Add to this a lack of modern urban-design conventions and a vast pool of cheap construction labor, and it's not difficult to understand why so many architects consider China, as Iraqi-born Hadid puts it, "an incredible empty canvas for innovation." Or why Christopher Choa, who came to Shanghai two years ago to head the local office of New York City-based firm HLW, says building in China is "like growing weeds. In my short time here, I've built four skyscrapers and designed millions of square feet of urban landscape. In New York, I'd have been happy to do as much in my entire career."

The concept of the architect as inventor arrived relatively late in China. Until the 1920s when Chinese trained overseas began to return home, the Chinese language didn't even have a word for architecture. Traditionally, the country's builders hewed closely to precepts laid out in a philosophical treatise on construction that dated back to the 12th century. With the ascension of the Communist Party in 1949, building became an outlet for ideology, and individual artistry came to be seen as a dangerous form of bourgeois decadence. Even after constraints had loosened, in the 1990s, architects in Beijing were required to top every new skyscraper with a traditional tiled rooftop. But now, as China gropes for a new national identity, the one common trope that runs through its multitude of recent buildings is an obsession with the idea of newness itself. "Clients here don't know what they want," says Zhang Gong, a Chinese architect who recently returned to the mainland after 10 years working in New York City and Paris. "They're looking for something really odd, something to express newness. So they ask the architect to give them the idea."

The results range from the truly novel to the merely (or disastrously) newfangled. In China, "you're seeing things that no one in their right mind would build elsewhere," says Anthony Fieldman, an American architect recently posted to the Hong Kong office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It's hard to imagine a city outside the mainland that would have commissioned the $543 million Wukesong Cultural Center—an overreaching behemoth of a basketball stadium that is also a hotel, a shopping mall and a 10-story TV screen. It's part of Beijing's Olympic buildup, but no one is quite sure how it will be used after the Games are over. Likewise, Shanghai's much-vaunted Pudong skyline, with its gaggle of futuristic skyscrapers, might look good on a postcard, but it functions better as a symbol than as part of a real city—its arid streets are almost devoid of human activity. "Architecture in China has become like a kung fu film, with all of these giants trying to vanquish each other," says Wang Lu, editor of Beijing-based World Architecture magazine.

The lively urban street life of China's cities might become a casualty of the melee. The mainland's cities are growing faster and on a larger scale than any in human history. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that by 2015 they will have to absorb some 200 million rural migrants. In the relatively small city of Suzhou near Shanghai, investment in residential construction increased by a factor of 65 between 1990 and 2002. In Shanghai itself, residential housing space has doubled since 1996. Most of the world's great cities have developed over decades or centuries, their neighborhoods evolving to accommodate the shifting needs of the people who inhabit them. China's cities, by contrast, are razed and rebuilt almost overnight. Urban planning in the mainland is at best haphazard and dominated by real estate companies that rent land from the government neighborhood by neighborhood rather than plot by plot. As a result, huge swaths of terrain are often drastically reordered in a matter of months at the whim of a single developer. "The problem with building at such a frenzied pace is that it takes time to think," says Thomas Fridstein, CEO of Hillier Architecture in Princeton, New Jersey, which is working on projects with both the Shanghai and Suzhou governments. And thoughtful urban design is seldom an option. Says Guan Yetong, a planning official for Shanghai's Xujiahui district: "We're so busy managing projects that we just don't have time to think about the big picture."

"You can have the best architecture in the world, but if you have bad planning rules, you've wasted your time," says Richard Burdett, dean of the school of urban planning at the London School of Economics, on a recent visit to Beijing. "When you're building a new neighborhood, you have to work within the existing grain. You have to make an effort to identify the DNA of the city." But much of what passes for urban planning in the mainland looks like genetic engineering gone haywire. The ongoing removal of Beijing's dilapidated old alleyways, or hutong, may be ridding the city of outmoded housing. But the bulldozers are also eradicating the complex social networks and bustling street life these close quarters nurtured. Zoning ordinances (based on design dogmas long since rejected in the countries where they originated but still used in China) dictate that new residential buildings face south and that most must be spaced as far apart as they are high. The result is often a sprawl of sterile apartment blocks, walled compounds and broad motorways that are as environmentally inefficient as they are psychologically isolating. The congenial adjacencies of schools and sidewalks, storefronts and stoops that form the foundation of urban community life are an increasingly rare sight. China's cities have begun to look more like suburbs. "There have been a lot of economists involved in the planning of Beijing," laments Yin Zhi, director of Tsinghua University's Institute of Urban Planning and Design, "but not a lot of people with cultural expertise."

If there's one man whose work in China most embodies the contradictions, challenges and enormous promise of the country's architectural-boom times, it is Rem Koolhaas, the Pritzker Prize-winning designer and theorist whose career runs the gamut from teaching at Harvard to enshrining shoes for Prada. In the spring of 2002, the cerebral Dutch hipster was invited to take part in two prominent design competitions: one for ground zero in New York City, the other for the CCTV headquarters in Beijing. Koolhaas skipped New York and chose Beijing, where the 500,000-sq-m gravity-defying trapezoidal loop he would conceive with design partner Ole Scheeren has since become a lightning rod for controversy. Detractors cite the $730 million CCTV project as the ultimate example of the Chinese regime's tendency to plunder state coffers to glorify its own iron authority and say Koolhaas is an opportunist taking advantage of the country's unique combination of state power and state capital to realize his own artistic ambitions. Ian Buruma, a writer who is a friend of Koolhaas, wondered aloud in the Guardian, a British newspaper, how the world would have reacted if an architect of Koolhaas' stature had in the 1970s designed a TV station for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

But Koolhaas, 59, who was one of the first Western architects to study and write about China's urban explosion, revels in such intellectual tussles. CCTV, he insists, like the mainland itself, "is in mutation" and the building represents an effort to complement the state-owned company's desire to keep pace with the times. CCTV's current headquarters is completely closed to the public. Koolhaas' design, in contrast, includes a public "media park" in and around the base of the building intended to foster more interaction between commissars and the masses. "We are engaged," he says, "with an effort to support within [China's] current situation the forces that we think are progressive and well-intentioned... We've given them a building that will allow them to mutate." Says Scheeren: "In all fairness, without CCTV's change we never would have got to do this project."

Koolhaas is also interested in mutating the way Beijing thinks about public space. Last year he submitted a proposal to the Beijing government urging it to consider more low-rise, courtyard-style buildings for the capital's new financial district rather than the standard norm of office towers. That proposal was rejected, but Koolhaas remains convinced that China represents a crucial front in what he calls his "campaign to kill the skyscraper." Koolhaas has a reputation for theatrics, but in this case his choice of words reflects the depth of his conviction. The skyscraper, he argues, is an important invention that has outlived its purpose. Devised a century ago to fit more people onto the small island of Manhattan, the form fostered extreme urban density. But spaced so widely apart—as in most mainland cities—skyscrapers inhibit human interaction.

"In Beijing, you have these needles and they collect their own little pathetic communities while breaking down the larger community around them," Koolhaas says with a wince. "It's an incredible squandering of the potential for exchange. It creates isolation right in the center of the city." His scheme for the CCTV headquarters represents one possible solution to this problem. Instead of distributing CCTV's many units across a series of towers, his megabuilding will put more than 10,000 of the station's employees—electricians and executives alike—under the same angular roof, entering through the same doors and riding the same elevators. Koolhaas hopes the monumental loop will encourage more companies to consider similarly daring experiments, even if they seem a little, well, loopy.

It's unlikely anyone will try to replicate the CCTV edifice, though. The structure of the building (scheduled to be completed in time for the Olympics) is dizzyingly complex. The skyscraping anti-skyscraper consists of two towers braced against each other at a height of 160 m. No two of the 55 stories have the same floor plan. The entire structure is sheathed in a supporting mesh that must be adequately rigid against Beijing's windstorms but flexible enough to withstand earthquakes. According to Scheeren, the project has engaged 75 engineers for more than a year to compute the stress on every I beam—calculations that, he says, must be three times more precise than those required for an ordinary skyscraper. After an initial nod from the jury—which consisted of foreign and Chinese architects and CCTV employees—Koolhaas and his team spent the summer of 2002 in a tiny workshop in a Beijing hutong preparing a model for China's political leaders, in part to convince them that the building would actually stand up.

It was partly that hutong sojourn that inspired another of Koolhaas' mainland projects: a study for Beijing's urban planners on the preservation of the city's dwindling stock of old buildings and neighborhoods. On a stroll through the capital he points out a surprising list of structures he would like to see kept in place: courtyard homes, 1960s apartment blocks, and a pair of stainless steel sculptures that resemble lollipops covered in spikes and already look painfully anachronistic, even though they were erected only five years ago. Ensuring that Beijing's residents have visible evidence of how their city has evolved, Koolhaas asserts, is a necessary counterpoint to his forward-looking building designs. "I find it very important that we don't do hit-and-run projects," he says. "I don't want to be a carpetbagger. Westerners have really been, in a certain way, exploitative. They use the opportunities but they don't really think about the impact. We're trying to engage in a kind of systematic investigation of what—in the current circumstances and with the current economy—would be a plausible repertoire of urban forms. I think you can invent new forms that are about street life. That's what interests me: to maintain the specificity of this city."

Property developers rarely share these preoccupations, but there are exceptions. Zhang Xin and her husband, architect Pan Shiyi, co-founders of the private real estate developer SOHO China, are among the country's most outspoken defenders of the urban habitat. After phenomenal success selling space in her husband's SOHO New Town, a colorful housing complex on the east side of Beijing, Zhang is now trying to create opportunities for prominent architects to make Beijing a more intimate city.

Last December she announced the results of a competition for part of a vast redevelopment scheme in the southwest corner of the city that will transform a trucking depot into a residential and commercial complex with a daily traffic of 200,000 people. Zaha Hadid, who last month became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Prize (architecture's highest honor), won the contest with a design that calls for winding alleyways, boomerang-shape towers and a variegated array of high- and low-rise structures—a conscious departure from Beijing's monotonous mess of concrete towers. "The goal of the project," says Hadid, "is to create instant complexity as if the place developed over 20 years."

It's a controversial notion, but one that China must test if it hopes to give birth to cities that rise to the challenges of its rapid urban growth. Closer to the center of Beijing at another of Zhang's projects, Jianwai SOHO, the idea of the instant neighborhood is catching on. A dazzling asymmetrical arrangement of transparent white apartments, offices and shops designed by Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto, connected by a suspended web of sidewalks, it is Zhang's attempt, as she puts it, "to advocate urbanism to the market, to create a neighborhood rather than just a compound." So far, the market seems convinced. The project's first three phases of construction—about 300,000 sq m—have completely sold out.

No one can tell yet whether SOHO's developments will resuscitate community life any more than Abraham's imposing façade will sell seafood or Koolhaas' megabuilding effect megachange. What is certain is that however the buildings of this new era are regarded by future generations, they will serve as a powerful record of the explosive, deliriously ambitious, brazenly inventive climate in which China's cities are now being reshaped. It will be a landscape hewn in the thrashings of a sea of change.

With reporting by Huang Yong and Jodi Xu/Beijing

Copyright © 2004 Time Inc.

[Pottebaum]

I almost hope China starts slowing down. There is increasing worry that their economy is overheating.

[fioco]

BBC News -- 12 May 2004

The second industrial revolution
Shanghai has been the template for many of the developments. The biggest mass migration in the history of the world is under way in China, and it is creating what some are calling the second industrial revolution.


A massive building boom unparalleled anywhere is taking place - last year, half of the concrete used in construction around the world was poured into China's cities. And the demand for these new apartments, office blocks and skyscrapers is coming from China's rural masses - people intent on heading to the cities along the eastern coastline of the country.

"In the next 25 years, 345 million people are going to move from the rural areas into the city areas, which is the biggest mass migration of people ever, anywhere," Guy Hollis, of international real estate agents Jones Lang LaSalle, told BBC World Service's Global Business programme. "That's really what's driving the building boom. So when we focus on shopping centres and office buildings, it's actually residential that's the big driver, because they're urbanising.

"This happened during the industrial revolution in the last century in Europe, but we tended to do it over a 150 year period. Here we're trying to do it in 15-20 years."

'Release of repression'

One example of the extreme speed of this change is the new port at Qingdao, on China's north-east coast. Four years ago it did not even exist. Now it is one of the biggest container ports in the world. Every day ships unload vast quantities of raw materials such as iron ore and oil - materials that are going directly into the building boom - and fill up with exports from the country's ever-expanding manufacturing industry.

Meanwhile the capital city, Beijing, is changing before people's eyes, with each new building battling the next for attention. The city, awaiting the 2008 Olympic Games, is undergoing an orgy of construction. On just one building site, Jianwei Soho, no less than 18 towers are being built.

"Under the 50 years of Communist ruling, there had been very little construction - so you had this incredibly repressed energy. When you open the lid, it comes out," said Zhang Xin, the co-director of the Soho City project - a town that will eventually house 50,000 people. "That's why we're seeing cranes everywhere. It's quite different to when you see cities, even new cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, where there has been a consistent pace of development.

"Here it really is the release of a repression."

Mr Hollis emphasised that the pace of construction work in China has little precedent. But he stressed that it was not just in China's famous cities that work was under way.
"There's more development going on in China than anyone's ever seen anywhere else in the world," he said.

"When we come to China, we look at Beijing and we look at Shanghai - lots of people from the outside do that - but what's actually happening in the hinterland is even more interesting. "There's probably more development in Suzhou, which is two hours to the west of Shanghai, than there is in Shanghai at the moment. But we aren't necessarily aware of that, because not everybody visits those places."

Olympic boom

China has 22 "second cities", with populations of over 2 million. They are mostly located in the coastal belt or within 200-300 miles of it. In each of these cities are major developments, funded by both the government and foreign direct investment.

In Beijing, meanwhile, the Olympic Games - awarded to the city in 2008 amidst controversy over China's human rights record - has become the main focal point of redevelopment, although the decision to regenerate was taken before the Games were confirmed.

"All the development is targeted to modernise the city and basically have it ready for 2008," Mr Hollis added. "The massive construction there is not just about the Olympics - which is of course a big part of it - but it's also about modernising the city and bringing it up to be a proper capital city."

The huge rise in demand for new buildings, fuelling the construction work, has been in part due to some changes in policy from the country's government. Although China remains a Communist country, the pragmatic approach of its new leadership has led to, for example, a recently-declared policy allowing people to purchase a 70-year lease on their land.

Bank warnings

This has meant that people no longer have to worry about ownership of their property in their own lifetime. "I would interpret that as transition - from the planned socialist economy to a market economy," Professor Wen Hai, of Peking University, told Global Business. "I believe soon we will touch the issue, becoming permanent ownership instead of a limited time."

But there are warnings that the boom may not last as long as some are hoping. Indeed, the pace of development is so fast that the country's government has now warned that it should be slowed.

China's Premier Wen Jiabao has warned that Beijing is readying "forceful" steps to cool the huge surge in investment. In particular, there are fears that local banks are lending out too much money, and may be plunged into crisis if the apartments they are funding are not filled straight away.

As a result, China's Central reserve ratio - the country does not use interest rates - has been increased from 7 to 7.5%. "I think there's concern in the banking sector - and certain in the central banking authorities - with regard to the amount of money being leant to the property sector," said Barry Livett, an EU adviser on China's banking system.

"There is concern that there is a speculative boom in property going on, with too much property coming online that cannot be let."

BBC NEWS http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3701581.stm

[Kris]

What the future holds for Beijing's architecture

www.chinaview.cn 2004-05-08 15:02:16

BEIJING, May 8, (Xinhuanet) -- You are in a city like no other on earth. Beijing is not the New York of China, nor the London of northeast Asia, nor the Mexico City of the Orient. Within a few years it may resemble the set of Blade Runner or Fritz Lang's Metropolis more than any of those places.

Consider that by 2008, the following are some of the ambitious projects that will be completed in the capital: More than ten million square metres of construction in the CBD (the area around the China World complex); 148.5 kilometres of new light rail and subway tracks, giving the city a total of 202 kilometres; the Fifth Ring Road, the Sixth Ring Road and the Beijing-Miyun Expressway, giving Beijing 718 kilometres of expressways and thousands of kilometres of motorways; the construction and expansion of 318 kilometres of downtown urban streets.

Those figures are compiled from Xinhua reports and statistics released by the Beijing Organising Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (or BOCOG). Different sets of numbers are reported in newspapers in China and abroad on an almost daily basis, and that is one of the problems when trying to figure out what this city will look like in a few year's time: everything is in a state of flux.

The motivations behind the construction of new infrastructure projects and new buildings are different: some of them are designed to alleviate problems that have been building for years, others have been planned especially for the Olympics, but built in the hope that they will contribute to the city's environment long after the athletes and spectators have departed. No matter what the results may be, Beijing in 2008 will be dramatically different from the city we know today. Let's take a closer look:

A Good First Impression

The Beijing International Airport received its last facelift in 1999 based on designs by the Beijing Institute of Architecture and Design (BIAD). There is currently a new plan for the construction of a third terminal that will do more than just increase capacity, it will provide the first impression of Beijing, and China as a whole, for arriving passengers.

The design is by Norman Foster whose credits include the HSBC building, Hong Kong's airport at Chek Lap and the notoriously phallic Swiss Re building in London (otherwise known as the Gherkin). The airport itself is not the only facility getting changed. Whereas now the only way to get from Beijing's airport to the city is on shuttle buses or in not-always-fragrant cabs, by 2008 there will be a light railway going all the way to Dongzhimen, where a new public transport interchange is already in the early stages of construction.

Beijing's transportation plans are vital to the sustainability of its ferocious urbanisation. The Dongzhimen interchange will link the airport to the city's subway system, long distance bus stations, and of course to the Olympic village. The rest of Beijing's plans for transport infrastructure include expanding the subway system, with two new lines to be operational by the Olympics and many more post-Games, as well as increasing road capacity along several major routes currently intersecting the city.

Skeptics, however, are already raising questions about the efficiency of such massive transport interchanges, pointing out that existing transportation hubs at Dongzhimen and Xizhimen are already over-congested. A source close to the project noted that adding to the capacity of these hubs would not ease traffic congestion but increase pressure on them. In the case of Dongzhimen especially, its proximity to the airport may make it less efficient because it will be the only link to the airport. Compounded with the congestion of roads and the crowded subway that take people from other places in the city to Dongzhimen, it is unlikely that people will be attracted to making a special journey to Dongzhimen just to get on a train: Car owners are more likely to continue driving the extra 20 minutes to the airport.

Another interesting feature of the area will be the future contrast between international travellers arriving from the airport, people from the countryside arriving on long-distance buses, and the upmarket residents of new apartment buildings surrounding the Dongzhimen interchange. The would-be upscale mall and apartment complex Oriental Kenzo, just south of Dongzhimen, is already open for business. Renowned film director Zhang Yimou recently bought the entire top floor of MOMA, a new development still in construction just north of Dongzhimen that is being sold as environmentally friendly, because of water recycling equipment and green heating technologies.

From Dongzhimen it will be possible to take the subway, light railway or bus to the Olympic Village. The two most notable Olympic projects are the Olympic Stadium, nicknamed 'Bird's Nest' and the National Swimming Centre, also known as the 'Water Cube.' The Bird's Nest was designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron. This firm's previous projects include the renovation of an old power station on the banks of the Thames in London, which was turned into the Tate Modern Art Museum. Herzog & De Meuron also won last year's Sterling Prize for Architecture for their design of the Laban Dance Centre in a rundown area of London.

The Water Cube was designed by PTW, an Australian firm that designed the International Athletics Centre and the Aquatic Centre of the 2000 Sydney Games, together with Ove Arup Engineering. PTW has completed many projects in China and maintains offices in Shanghai and Beijing. Ove Arup is the renowned architectural engineering firm that is single-handedly responsible for the engineering work of the majority of new showcase projects in Beijing, including the airport's new terminal, the Dongzhimen interchange, and the new CCTV headquarters.

Tower of Power

This building will probably become a must-see tourist site for Olympic visitors. The CCTV building is like nothing China, and indeed the world, has ever seen. It will challenge people's perceptions of the roles that such grand architectural projects, all designed by foreign architects, have in China. The CCTV project was designed by OMA, the studio led by Rem Koolhaas. In the 1980s and '90s, Koolhaas was the enfant terrible of international architecture who made his name by writing books such as Delirious New York before any of his major designs were actually constructed. Koolhaas' credits include the Prada flagship store in New York and the Dutch embassy in Berlin. He is now on the commission charged with designing new headquarters for the European Parliament.

Interestingly enough, while the CCTV headquarters may become the most avant-garde building in Beijing, Koolhaas has also been selected to write a report on the demolition and preservation of Beijing's hutongs, and how best to preserve them while keeping pace with the city's need to modernise.

In the case of the CCTV building, some of the problems and criticisms it has faced are representative of the difficulties facing international architectural firms coming to China: that their designs are not Chinese enough, and that these ambitious projects are allowing foreign architects to use China as an experimental playground for designs that they will never have to inhabit.

Walking on the Eggshell

One of the most controversial new buildings is the new National Theatre, designed by French architect Paul Andreu and nicknamed the 'Eggshell,' on the west side of the Great Hall of the People at Tian'anmen Square. Paul Andreu's previous works include the Osaka Maritime Museum and the Dubai airport.

The oval dome of the theatre is already nearing completion and is a striking contrast to its surroundings. Complaints about the building have included objections that it ruins the feng shui of central Beijing, and that it matches neither the Great Hall of the People nor the traditional housing surrounding the nearby Forbidden City. Yet China's modern city planning has always looked to the West, starting from the grid plan of urban housing in cities like Tianjin, Shanghai and Harbin, to the more recent highways reminiscent of America's spaghetti junctions. Beijing's choice of cutting-edge international architects is a predictable manifestation of its desire to enter the modern world stage, and of what China perceives 'modern' to mean at the beginning of the 21st Century. With the Olympics as its greatest chance to showcase itself to the world, one cannot but expect notable, grand, and eye-catching projects.

In the Red Zone

Although these projects are truly Olympian in scale, and no matter how much it may appear that Beijing's skyline will be fantastic and futuristic, they may just end up being isolated reminders of the 2008 Games. The establishment of the Olympic Village has indeed helped push up property prices in the area to those matching the CBD, but it is still a long way from being a social or community centre of Beijing's northern districts. With the project needing to recoup its initial investment and remain financially viable post-Olympics, facilities such as the Water Cube will be hired out or used as ultra-high-class gyms. All indications from the financial directors of Beijing's Olympic Games to the media are that their primary focus is on making them commercially viable.

The organisers have looked to the Barcelona Games as a model and hope the 2008 Games will raise the profile of the Chinese capital as the Games did for Barcelona in 1992. The Olympics did more for Barcelona than for any other Olympic city, mostly because its mayor saw the Games as an opportunity to develop and address underlying problems of the city as a whole. Barcelonans now occupy the villas where athletes lived, and the Olympic Village is a fully integrated, thriving part of the city, and a magnet for business and the arts. It is hard at this stage to imagine that Beijing will come to the same end, though the momentum and impetus to change the city is plainly there.

One of the other problems facing the Olympic projects is a discrepancy between these world-name architects, and problems with workmanship and getting high quality materials. The architects have in mind a full vision of how their buildings will look, right down to the last detail and the texture of the materials, which doesn't always work out in the finished product.

The Silver Lining

Nonetheless, the current phase of Olympic-driven development certainly presents the city with many opportunities. There is a regulation in place that specifies all foreign architectural firms must work with a Chinese partner. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for interaction between Chinese and foreign architects and potentially bodes well for a new, cosmopolitan generation of Chinese architects.

This is already happening. Some private sector property developers are pushing the architectural envelope with bold designs that are a radical departure from the poured concrete blocks and ersatz Chinese roofs that characterized late twentieth century urban Chinese design. One noticeable success in this respect is CLASS, an apartment complex near Wangjing in northeast Beijing. Trading on its unique designs alone, CLASS has managed to sell all its flats at prices comparable to those in the CBD despite its relatively disadvantageous location. The previously mentioned MOMA, Central Park in the CBD (a Hong Kong Land project), and Park Avenue (built by American construction firm Hines) are all examples of the private sector showing an awareness of high quality construction and design.

The developer that pioneered this approach is SOHO China, headed by the media-savvy husband and wife team Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin. SOHO first made its name with the Commune by the Great Wall project, which won Pan and Zhang awards at the Venice Biennale last year for their support of modern architecture, the first time Chinese nationals have received such international acclaim.

SOHO has gone on to create SOHO New Town (Xiandaicheng) and the just-completed Jianwai SOHO, both of which appear at this stage to have been financially successful, as well as unique in their vision of building new modern complexes. Both projects have explicitly marketed themselves on the basis of their designs, using renowned architects in their bid to introduce high-quality international standard housing to Beijing. They are also projects that directly affect the living standards of Beijing residents, though of course only available to certain high-income earners.

SOHO has now embarked on one of the largest and most ambitious private- sector architectural projects in the world: SOHO City. Situated to the southeast of Beijing next to the highway to Tianjin, SOHO City will be a million square metre community of apartments, offices, shops and parks. The project is being designed by Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi born British architect who has just been awarded the Pritzker Prize, the architectural equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Hadid's previous work includes designs for the just-opened Rosenthal Centre For Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and the Central Building of the BMW Plant in Leipzig.

SOHO City comprises a variety of different buildings, all of them asymmetrical, which are supposed to flow together and facilitate the flow of people and activities. It is hoped that SOHO City will become a thriving micro-city, with its own socio-cultural life, that will grow organically without contributing to congestion and other problems associated with Beijing's development. As always with projects before they are fully realised, one will have to wait until SOHO City is built and inhabited before judging its marketing claims.

But more importantly, the private property sector players show that investment in good quality housing is both sought-after and financially successful. This bodes well for the future of urban design in what is still the world's most populous nation.

So when the first visitors arrive for the Olympics in 2008, will they find themselves in a city that resembles an anime Neo-Tokyo? Will the city work as a place to live or will it be a mere showcase for international architecture? Will there be anything distinctively Chinese left of Beijing?

These questions are impossible to answer. What is certain is that in the next few years, Beijing will continue to be a world hot spot for avant-garde architecture, and a living experiment in the construction of a twenty first century city.

[TLOZ Link5]

'China is a sickly, sleeping giant. But when she awakes the world will tremble.' ~ attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte by Lord Amherst

[Ninjahedge]

http://www.wai.com/Structures/Fabric/shanghai.html

[TomAuch]

China is definately becoming the skyscraper capital, though Shanghai and Beijing can never top NYC and Chicago.

[Kris]

The role of culture in shaping cities

2004-05-19 06:21

The country's thriving urbanization, which began in the 1990s, has brought delight to Chinese-American architect and businessman James Jao in his quest to fulfill what he sees as his mission in China.

Day in and day out, Jao is busy shuffling between cities, seeking to realize his dream of creating a unique architectural style that combines features of both Western and Eastern design.

"Chinese clients, developers and city officials are too eager to build these days," said Jao. "But the golden rule in design is that good dishes require a longer cooking time."

China gave the world the Great Wall, flying eaves, screens and other architectural innovations. Yet that was centuries ago.

At this time, Chinese developers and clients are more drawn to Western than to traditional Chinese architectural styles, preferring to climb on board current international trends.

Jao says that for some of his clients Chinese style seems to carry the stigma of the past - a past that they seem not very proud of.

"We, as American-trained architects in China, are trying to fuse the two styles as much as possible - with a Western look on the outside but a Chinese feel to the interior decoration," said Jao, whose company has been involved in many garden, office and residential projects in China over the past 10 years.

He boasted his home in Beijing is a perfect example, as it has all the amenities and conveniences of Western architecture design, but incorporates many Chinese antiques and paintings in its interior decoration.

As Jao and many industry insiders point out, China is the only place in the world where talented architects have the opportunity to experiment with their design ideas because of the booming economy and real estate market.

About 40 per cent of the nation's 1.3 billion people live in 660 cities and around 20,000 towns, and the government has decided to increase urbanization at the rate of 1 per cent annually.

In the wake of the 1990s building boom, nearly all the cities of the country are once again in a state of architectural ferment. Many big cities, including Beijing, plan to become major world metropolises in the future. Late last year, Yao Bing, a senior official with the Ministry of Construction said that up to 182 of the country's 660 cities have claimed they are planning to build themselves into "international metropolises," or "cosmopolises."

Even smaller cities have expressed their ambition to join the big leagues, such as Fuyang, in East China's Anhui Province, which has dreams of overtaking the provincial capital of Hefei and catching up with Shanghai.

Regardless of whether it is possible to have so many Parises, Londons or New York cities in China, such ambitions are bringing about opportunities.

Governments and developers are tearing down old-fashioned buildings and going for the concrete blocks and chrome and glass towers that herald cities' embrace of modernization.

So, for some of the world's top architects, the country offers incomparable opportunities. Topping the roster of architectural stars who are drumming up business in China are fabled Western architecture firms like the famous Pei family, which designed the Bank of China's new Beijing headquarters. Renowned French designer Paul Anderu created Beijing's new National Grand Theatre, which is now taking shape on the western side of Tian'anmen Square next to the Great Hall of the People.

Then there are the huge firms. Skidmore Owens & Merrill, which practically invented the skyscraper, branding skylines around the world with its distinctive towers for several decades, has done a repeat in Shanghai's Pudong Area, with China's tallest building, the US$540-million, 88-storey Jin Mao Building.

"China is like a fresh source of vitality," 66-year-old German Meinhard von Gerkan once said. The German architect's concepts for planned communities are under consideration by the officials of several Chinese cities. "Europe is all finished," he says. "Here you have the freedom to build."

Architecture shapes the appearance of a nation's cities and its international image.

During the past two decades of rapid economic growth, many problems have arisen in China's urban expansion and renovation. A large number of high-cost and tasteless buildings have punctuated the skylines of many cities.

Zhang Zugang, president of the Architectural Society of China, mourned the disappearance of some historical buildings in Beijing and expressed concern over some of the new high-rises in the ancient capital.

"But new cities all look the same. Their original ancient feel has been destroyed. Traditional architectural styles are ignored," Zhang said.

He said the authorities should learn from other countries to avoid repeating their mistakes. He urged greater attention to urban planning, protecting the city's cultural traditions, including the colour of the buildings.

"We must not allow the developers to do what they want, filling our cities with gaudy edifices," Zhang said.

Zhang's call has been echoed by other experts and architects, who are concerned about the increasing inflow of Western ideas in architectural design.

"The construction mania has left thousands of nondescript modern buildings all over the country, which detract from or even destroy historical sites and original city layouts," said Zhu Bingren, a traditional brass sculptor from East China's Hangzhou, a city famed for its picturesque West Lake.

Zhu hopes to initiate a nationwide drive to be called the "New Culture Heritage Campaign" to promote traditional architecture.

"Some cities blindly pursue foreign-style buildings while others are obsessed with imitating ancient Chinese architecture only to attract tourists. Both tendencies are fraught with dangers," said Zhu.

Zhu believes that responsible planners should design structures that embody both genuine local features and a modern spirit, and should not rush blindly into the real estate race.

"It's our responsibility to leave something which will be treasured and regarded as a legacy to be proud of by future generations."

James Jao said that good style and good taste will take time to develop, and emphasized that patience and the education of clients are essential.

"I. M. Pei always told me to choose my clients more carefully than my projects, as there will be many changes during the construction process."

Jao says there are more sophisticated clients in China now than before, but he still thinks the architectural design industry in China is short on talent and taste.

Jao agrees with Zhu's push to preserve traditional Chinese architecture but emphasizes that one must first define the essence of traditional design before deciding what should be preserved.

"Unlike American and European culture, Chinese culture has a very long and mixed history and it will be a complicated and demanding task to set architectural priorities that will ensure the preservation of designs elements that embody the best values of the culture," said Jao.

Jao said in the United States anything over 35 years is considered worth preserving. "We must define what is worthy of preservation and what is not. Otherwise, we may blindly block modern development."

As China is evolving rapidly, more excellent design projects such as the new CCTV building design and the Beijing Olympic Stadium should be encouraged. "There are still too many developers who don't understand that time and money must be spent if you are going to develop a good design concept," said Jao.

Ma Guoxin, chief architect with the Beijing Architectural Design Institute, seems more optimistic. He believes there is no cause to fear that Chinese aesthetics will be crowded out in the rush to modernize.

"The foreign 'invasion' will help domestic architects and planners learn new techniques, leading to cross-fertilization and, ultimately, the emergence of a modern Chinese architectural style," Ma said.

"With the help of traditional Chinese disciplines - such as the relationship between man and nature - we can turn Western concepts into something uniquely Chinese."

Jao said Ma's insights help explain the prosperity of his (Jao) business in this country full of opportunities.

© Copyright 2004 Chinadaily.com.cn

[Kris]

Chinese leaders turn their backs on building projects

The Times, London

BEIJING, May 26. For six decades Chinas Communist leaders indulged themselves by building vast hydroelectric dams, hulking skyscrapers and suspension bridges over the sea. Cement monoliths such as the Three Gorges Dam on the River Yangtze were supposed to symbolise the taming of nature in the name of progress by the billion-strong Chinese masses. As P.J. ORourke, the American humourist, once quipped: Commies love concrete.

But no more. After a year in office, the countrys new leaders have come out against their predecessors beloved building projects, which many citizens see as wasteful and riddled with corrupt practices. In the past sixth months the Administration has repeatedly boosted its popularity by siding with critics of high-profile construction schemes.

Now The Times has learnt that Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, has stopped advanced plans by China Central Television (CCTV), the state broadcaster, to build a huge office block that would have
towered over Beijing. The 60-storey trapezoidal loop wrapped in supporting mesh, designed by Rem Koolhaas, the leading Dutch architect, was set to become one of the worlds most technically advanced buildings, but in recent weeks construction work has come to a standstill.

Many residents had complained about extravagant project cost, estimated at 500 million, and the disruptive effect on traffic in the wealthy Chaoyang district.

It will not be built, a senior CCTV news reporter, said. Wen Jiabao made the decision personally. According to CCTV insiders, he asked the state broadcasters president: If you build this, can you still do a good job at the 2008 Olympics (to be held in Beijing). The broadcasting chief apparently answered we can, but understood the hint and decided to stay in the organisations old headquarters on the other side of Beijing. The decision has been cheered by residents in Chaoyang district, although it is less popular with some
CCTV staff.

A talkshow producer said: A lot of employees have already bought apartments in Chaoyang and now they are useless. The scrapping of the CCTV tower, the most ostentatious building project in the capital, is in line with other interventions by government leaders. Mr Wen has also halted a controversial dam project in the southern province of Yunnan. The hydroelectric power station on the River Nu would have dammed one of Chinas last two free-flowing major waterways. The Nu flows through a United Nations World Heritage Site that has been called the Grand Canyon of the Orient. Mr Wen has demanded an environmental impact study, which is expected to bring a permanent halt to preliminary construction.