Chinese Architecture Xenophilia
Olek Borelli
The world?s most renowned architects are flocking to China, where they are building the world?s biggest skyscrapers, hotels, and futuristic model towns. Following the 1990s building boom, Chinese cities are again in a state of architectural foment. Government officials and developers are tearing down plodding Communist bunkers and rethinking the cookie-cutter chrome and glass towers that heralded the country?s embrace of capitalism.
Across Beijing, the once-stodgy urban landscape is sprouting a number of avant-garde structures, all designed to prove the capital is innovative and artistic. From Chongqing to Xiamen, Chinese cities are falling over themselves in the race for flash architecture. In every direction, enormous cranes flank forests of fast-rising skyscrapers. With admittance to the WTO and Beijing?s hosting of the 2008 Olympics ahead, the government is eager to demonstrate they are on par with industrialized nations in architectural terms. Not just on par with?ahead of.
But the job of designing 21st Century China has been given to foreigners. Chinese architects may build more than anyone else in the world, according to AMO, Rem Koolhaas?s architectural research unit. But they don?t seem to have the appeal of foreign architects?like Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who have been commissioned to build a skeletal steel Olympic Stadium in Beijing that resembles a bird?s nest. French architect Paul Andreu has designed three halls that comprise the new National Theatre, which are tucked inside an egg of titanium and glass floating upon an artificial lake. Visitors will enter by escalator and appear to plunge into the water, with Mao?s portrait at the Forbidden City behind them. Lord Norman Foster was given the nod for a $1.9 billion airport extension, which features a futuristic runway flanked by an ice-block-like terminal. Zaha Hadid?s hi-tech but sensuous curves will gird Guangzhou?s new theatre complex. And Rem Koolhaas?s Office for Metropolitan Architecture is building a new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) that aims to find a new typology for the skyscraper: a loop. All this star-studded development comes along with a program to build 300 new towers in Beijing?s Central Business District.
According to the Beijing-based Architecture Journal, there are now more than 120 foreign and joint Chinese-foreign architecture firms in China. Over 40 of the top 200 world engineering companies and design consortiums have set up branches in the country.
The country has been laid out for them like a blank canvas, a muse for their most ambitious architectural visions. Plans including space age cyber-cities, cloud-topping sky-rises and suburbs based on Venice, Amsterdam and Athens are unveiled on a daily base. But does China really need foreign architects to design Chinese buildings?
Local architects complain that many developers have too much blind faith in foreign designs and much criticism centres in the one problem most new projects have: their failure to achieve a harmony with Chinese culture. When approached by officials for a basic outline of a new community for the new town of Lang Fang, located 70 Km from Beijing, German architect Meihard von Gerkan, founder of Hamburg?s GMP, produced sketches for a lakeside metropolis that on paper looks like un updated Aztec capital, a science city filled with observatories, museums and a pyramid-shaped civic plaza.
Shanghai?s high-tech district of Pudong, described in Wired magazine as "the site of the wildest and most ambitious construction boom of the 1990s," is to some a proto-city parody, whose most visible landmark is the Oriental Pearl Tower, a 300?meter-high spire that resembles a giant sci-fi movie prop-jet.
Some Chinese specialists have criticized overseas production for being "flashy and without substance" and "impractical." Wang Bing, architect at the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design Research (BIAD), says of the new CCTV Building?in the business district of Beijing, not the flashy boulevard–that it gives nothing to those viewing it but a visual shock, and a costly one at that.
Alfred Peng, professor of architecture at Beijing?s renowned Tsinghua University, is totally unimpressed by the new development. He says a city?s outlook should reflect the soul of the nation, and since so little remains of Beijing?s original layout, adding an ultramodern building to its already updated centre is rather over-icing the cake. As the city has gone to great efforts to restore its historical architecture, new buildings should coordinate to recreate, rather than negate, Beijing?s original features.
The astronomical cost of these new national status symbols is another cause of controversy. Professor Peng points out that China?s GNP is just 8 percent of the world?s total, and only a quarter of the U.S.?s. Building a national theatre at a cost quadruple that of the Lincoln Centre (the cost of Andreu?s "Eggshell" reportedly increased from 2 billion yuan ($241million) to 5 billion yuan ($603million)) amounts to asking Chinese citizens to bear a burden 16 times that of their American counterpart. Yet foreign architects aren?t necessarily making a lot of money in their forays into China. Corruption, construction snafus and bureaucratic meddling make property development a dicey game in China, and many say they are here mainly because they are being offered the opportunity to create signature masterpieces. "There are things you can do here that in America, people would throw up their hands and say, ?No Way!?" says Skidmore Owens & Merril architect Brian Lee, who designed the Beijing Headquarters for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the country?s largest bank. It is a huge opportunity. The current political system can still command huge resources; for those with government backing, there are few planning restrictions, and given the scale of internal migration (one third of all Chinese will move into a house over the next decade), China will be building whole new cities in the coming years.
The failure of local architects? bids for some major projects has not only revealed the inferiority of architectural education in China, but also the dilemma Chinese architects face: architectural education in the modern sense started late in China, in the early 20th century, When the world was experiencing dramatic development in ideas, design, and technology from the 1950s to the 1970s, China was closed for business. Even after constraints had loosened in the 1990s, architects were required to top every new skyscraper with a traditional tiled rooftop.
The new development can be equally clumsy. A case in point of is the procession of gaudy modern structures along Beijing?s showcase boulevard. It?s called Chang An, but many admit it might be dubbed the Architectural Hall of Shame. Some interesting concepts are attempted, but too many buildings try to do too much, cut outs and curves, pagoda roofs that clash with modern glass. Rows and rows of kitschy flash with little or no sense of subtlety.
Nonetheless, as new has come to stand for good, and foreign for even better, while it holds the risk of obliterating traditional Chinese architecture, the foreign invasion will eventually help locals to learn new techniques, leading to cross-fertilization and, ultimately, to the emergence of a distinct contemporary Chinese architectural style. What is certain is that however these buildings are regarded, they will serve as a powerful record of the explosive, deliriously ambitious, brazenly inventive climate in which China?s cities are now being reshaped.
