China's Building Blitz

[Kris]

http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/portfolio/archives/images/0403china.jpg (http://archrecord.construction.com/china/)

[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/hi/asia-pacific/3543419.stm

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

© BBC MMIV


Beijing Olympic Stadium (http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1335)

[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_property/central_park_offer_prime.html

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

Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.

[Ninjahedge]

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.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40137000/jpg/_40137297_shanghaiap203.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/04/asia_pac_the_new_industrial_revolution/img/laun.jpg http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40137000/jpg/_40137415_beijingblood203.jpg

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."
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40137000/jpg/_40137281_beijingolympics203.jpg
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.

[TLOZ Link5]

Poor Rem Koolhas.

[Kris]

May 31, 2004

Salvaging Jewish Heritage in China, Block by Block

By SHERIDAN PRASSO

Every morning at 5 Christopher Choa gets up for his daily run, logging 8 to 10 miles on his trip to and from the North Bund, which includes the old Jewish ghetto in Shanghai.

A New York architect who moved to Shanghai three years ago, Mr. Choa became enchanted by the area and its history. So when he learned that the North Bund was facing redevelopment, he decided to try to save as much of the old ghetto as possible.

"The history of the Jews in Shanghai is so compelling," said Mr. Choa, who is Roman Catholic, but whose great-grandmother was a Sephardic Jew. "It's really worth preserving. It's part of the fabric."

The ghetto, in what was once the American and then the International Settlement and is now called the North Bund, harbored more than 20,000 Jews who fled Nazi Europe from 1933 to 1941 and another 5,000 to 10,000 who fled Stalin's Russia before that. Viewers of Steven Spielberg's 1987 film "Empire of the Sun" got a glimpse of the area. Known in Chinese as Hongkou (or Hongkew), the ghetto was a haven for stateless refugees in a city that for years did not require a visa to enter.

Almost all the Jews, except a few descendants of mixed parentage, resettled in New York, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv and elsewhere as the Communists took power in 1949. They left behind a charming neighborhood with row houses, schools, a synagogue, a park and even a Little Vienna Cafe. The district is now inhabited by working-class Chinese, some of whom live in rooms lighted by a single hanging bulb and with three or more families sharing a kitchen and bathroom. When Shanghai officials announced urban renewal plans for the North Bund almost two years ago, they said they envisioned turning the area into a masterpiece of the 21st century, a modern business and residential district with skyscrapers, apartment buildings, cruise ship docks and even an enormous Ferris wheel.

The gleaming metropolis that city planners had in mind did not leave room for a quaint old neighborhood. Officials had earmarked about 400 historic buildings for preservation citywide, but in the old ghetto only the Ohel Moshe Synagogue and a block or so of row houses made the list.

Mr. Choa had a different idea. He and his New York-based architecture firm, HLW International, entered a competition to design a master plan for the new North Bund. HLW, along with two other firms, the Cox Group of Australia and RTKL Associates of Baltimore, won.

Mr. Choa, who had already restored the Art Deco lobbies of the Park Hotel and the Peace Hotel annex, architectural jewels from the era when Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East, has experience in environmentally sensitive design. The centerpiece of his plan is creating a memorial park around the synagogue, where there are now buildings, and bringing in gravestones of Jewish residents from former cemeteries. He says his idea would symbolically link the park to the Huangpu River on one end and an ornate Buddhist temple on the other.

Yet creating the park would mean saving only a few more of the ghetto buildings than the city required, Mr. Choa said. By tearing down some of the row houses, developers, who would be chosen by the government, could build more profitable high-rises.

"The choice was to keep the housing or put in a park," he said. "Park space was so underrepresented. I thought the park was more important."

"I agonized a lot about what to do in this area," he added, calling the decision a "Faustian bargain."

Mr. Choa said that no matter what he proposed, much of the ghetto could be torn down anyway. "There's no guarantee that even a municipal-preserved building will stay," he said.

But momentum is growing to preserve the entire neighborhood. An alternate plan has been drawn up by two Canadians, Ian Leventhal and Thomas M. Rado, who are Jewish. They formed a company called Living Bridge, that is trying to raise $450 million to preserve at least 50 ghetto buildings in a nine-block area.

"Our plan calls for the restoration of all the buildings of significant architectural importance, such as the row houses, the Broadway Theater and of course the Ohel Moshe Synagogue," Mr. Leventhal wrote in an e-mail message, though he declined to say how much money has been raised.

Mr. Leventhal and Mr. Rado, who are working with government-appointed preservation professors from a Shanghai university and a Toronto architect, made a presentation to district officials in Hongkou last Monday. If district officials can be convinced of the financial viability of the Leventhal-Rado restoration plan — which also calls for a boutique hotel, an extensive memorial park and a car-free pedestrian zone — it would then go to the Shanghai city government for consideration when they auction the area to developers.

"In principle the government is supportive, and our next step is to do a more detailed version for presentation early this summer," Mr. Leventhal said, adding that he hoped to set a precedent for heritage conservation and development.

The Ohel Moshe Synagogue is already a tourist attraction. No longer used for worship (Judaism is not officially recognized by the Chinese government), the synagogue operates as a small museum and Jewish cultural center supported by donations. A museum plaque listing visitors during the last few years includes photos of Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and former Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Because Shanghai has not decided which redevelopment path to take, no one knows what, if any, buildings beyond the synagogue and the row-house block will be preserved. All Mr. Choa, Mr. Leventhal and Mr. Rado can do is keep urging government officials to consider the tourism potential of the district so that they in turn might transfer that pressure onto future developers.

"You're just trying to save as much as possible," Mr. Choa said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Tuesday, June 1 2004 Beijing Time

Foreign architects' fruitful days in Beijing

By Xu Xiaoran

Roaring bulldozers, busy cranes, ubiquitous scaffolds, and tall buildings are everywhere: Such is Beijing. For years this city has been a big construction site. So who is the winner? The indisputable answer is foreign architects.

They indeed have had a very fruitful time here. The first three super high-rises in Beijing – Jingguang Center, Capital Building and China World Trade Center – were designed by Japan's KUMAGAI GUMI CO., LTD and SHIMIZU KENSETU CO., LTD as well as Sobel Roth from the U.S. That was just a beginning. In recent years, almost all extra-large projects in Beijing were designed by foreign architects: the new building of CCTV, which involved an investment of nearly US$800 million, was designed by Rem Koolhaas, a great Dutch architect; the English designer N. Foster won the bid for the new terminal of Beijing Capital Airport, which involved an investment of US$2 billion; with an investment of US$600 million, the much-talked-about National Theater eventually was won by Paul Andrew, a French designer.

From super-large national projects to Olympic venues, from five-star hotels to high-grade business buildings in CBD zones, from large enterprises' headquarters to some common residential areas, foreign architects have taken over everywhere. Meanwhile, some foreign architectural design companies have shifted their focus to this country. In merely a few years, China became a main source of their business revenues.

In early March, in a report titled "An Architectural Revolution in Beijing", BBC described the pre-Olympics Beijing as a city that was blindly pursuing works by world top designers, eager to get rid of its image as a follower and show off its modernity to the world.

The decision-makers in China's building sector are highly "accommodating". As a result, this country becomes an "international exposition of architecture". Some "blueprints" come true in China that are of highly bizarre styles and can hardly be realized in the designers' own countries. As a result, although on the whole wonderful works are created, potential troubles are left in some aspects. At the same time, more foreign designers are lured to China to "make experiments". And eminent and poor architects are mixed up. Some second-class and third-grade foreign architects and even those unqualified ones are having their ways in China. Consequently, good and bad designs are intermingled, raising uproars in the society, especially in the building industry. Of course, such sentiments have something to do with the failure of local architects on some major projects.

It is undeniable that because China's architectural education started late and failed to keep abreast with the times due to self-closure, Chinese architects lag behind world-class rivals. However, Chinese designers and scholars are not convinced by the foreign masters, who take away enormous amount of money full of cheer, and their works. From the "eggshell" (the National Theater) to the "bird's nest" (the main stadium for the XXIX Olympiad), to the new terminal of the Capital Airport, China"s architecture circles are engaged in endless debates over the fact that foreign architects are taking over the design of more and more landmark buildings in China.

In July 1999, the scenario for architectural design of the National Theater was finalized. The successful bid turned to be a proposal hammered out jointly by the celebrated French architect Paul Andrew and Chinese designers. The image is a huge "eggshell" situated on a quasi-square pool. The eggshell-shaped roof is like a water drop that lops down gradually. The pool outside looks like a lake. Despite its novel design, heavy cost resulted from the irrational design and the inharmony with the surroundings (the Great Hall of the People and Tian'anmen) sparkled much criticism.

At the end of July 2003, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron won the bid for the master venue of the 2008 Olympics – the National Stadium. The design is like a bird's nest woven with tree branches. The outside is a gray steel mesh covered by transparent materials, and the inside is a red ochre stadium stand shaped like a bowl.

Proponents of the design maintain that the "bird's nest" precisely represents a new architectural language, and contains Chinese philosophical notions. Yet the oppugners argue that such a design is too "avant-garde" and does not accord with the traditional awareness, and that the excessive emphasis on an unusual style makes it impossible to exhibit the appeal unique to Chinese culture. The design overlooks engineering, structure, culture and cost.

The debating will stimulate deeper thinking. And in this sense it is a boon. Wang Mingxian, a renowned architecture critic, noted, "Everyone wishes that these landmark buildings were designed by Chinese architects. But unfortunately, Chinese architects indeed are not in a position to do so. Then what reason we have to reject these great architects who have achieved immense prestige and success in other countries? After all, their previous experiments have been recognized by the international architecture circles. Among those architects who have come to Beijing, Koolhaas is the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 2000, the foremost authoritative prize in the field of architecture; Herzog Schlumberger and de Meuron won the prize in 2001. They are master architects recognized worldwide. And their experiments in China offer more benefits than harm to the evolution of Chinese architecture."

Today, at a time when the Chinese economy experiences robust development, the successful bids of celebrated foreign architects precisely signify enhanced self-confidence of the Chinese nation. While learning from eminent foreign masters modestly, Chinese architects are turning out excellent works endlessly, and the artistic level of their works is improving. Chinese architects' works will also win major bids held abroad in the future.

Source: CE.cn


Images of major Beijing projects:

http://www.thatsmagazines.com/image/articles/200405CovFchinatheather_1.jpg
http://www.thatsmagazines.com/image/articles/200405CovFairport2_1.jpg
http://www.thatsmagazines.com/image/articles/200405CovFolympic2_1.jpg
http://www.thatsmagazines.com/image/articles/200405CovFwatercube_1.jpg
http://www.thatsmagazines.com/image/articles/200405CovFCCTVTower_1.jpg

http://www.thatsmagazines.com/features/index.asp?sectionid=50&location=bj&articleid=695&v iew=detail

[Kris]

June 15, 2004

A Glass Bubble That's Bringing Beijing to a Boil

By JOSEPH KAHN

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/06/15/international/15opera2.xl.jpg
The National Theater of China, under construction in Beijing, is under scrutiny for safety issues, aesthetics and the approval process of its design.

BEIJING, June 14 - Some compare it to a globe severed at the Equator. To others it resembles a phosphorescent egg floating in a crystal sea. One prominent Beijing architect said that when the desert dust kicks up around Beijing, lathering the expansive glass dome in a pall of gray grime, it resembles nothing so much as dried dung.

But the most apt analogy for the $300 million National Theater of China, now nearing completion in the political heart of Beijing, near Tiananmen Square, may be a hot potato.

The building's French architect, Paul Andreu, has come under investigation in France and intense scrutiny in China after a terminal he designed at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris partly collapsed in May, killing four people, two of them Chinese.

His troubles were taken as a green light for China's state-controlled news media and a few leading architects to raise questions about the approval process, the safety standards and the aesthetic sensitivity of Mr. Andreu's Beijing project, which is regarded as a favorite of China's semiretired senior leader, Jiang Zemin.

Beijing's cultural community is also complaining that less than 18 months before the titanium-and-glass complex is scheduled to open, there is no opening act lined up. In fact, no public or private group has agreed to operate the theater at all.

China is treating the 2008 Olympics, to be held in Beijing, as an occasion to remake the capital. The government is razing old neighborhoods, laying hundreds of miles of roads and subway lines, and constructing monuments of modern architecture that the Communist Party hopes will stand as tributes to its leadership.

But as billions of dollars of public money are spent on skyscrapers, stadiums and transportation facilities designed by the world's leading architects, local designers are complaining that many of the projects are overpriced and out of touch with Chinese history. Even in a place where challenges to the leadership's priorities are rarely permitted, voices of dissent are growing louder.

"We are a poor country, not a fancy country, and we should not be wasting our money on monstrosities," said Xiao Mo, an architectural historian at Qinghua University in Beijing who has campaigned against the theater project. "I believe it is an insult to the people of China."

China is not alone in seeking to advertise its rising power through architecture. Societies on the rise, like the United States in the 1920's and Japan in the 1980's, often spend lavishly on new designs that critics consider too grand or iconoclastic.

Yet the building boom here is in some ways unusual. Since 2000, floor space in China has doubled, according to Construction Ministry statistics. Some projects are public works and office complexes of such scale and cost that it seems unlikely they would be undertaken anywhere else.

China also sets itself apart because it is still relatively poor, with an annual per capita income that surpassed $1,000 only last year. Its most ambitious projects are often financed with public money or by state-owned enterprises whose profits come from concessions bestowed by the government. And the architects chosen for the highest-profile projects are usually foreign.

Two Swiss architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, won the competition for Beijing's main Olympic stadium. They designed a bowl of interwoven metal mesh that resembles a bird's nest with a price tag of $543 million. The British architect Norman Foster is renovating Beijing's airport, using a dragon motif, in a project valued at $1.9 billion.

Rem Koolhaas and Ole van Scheeren, Dutch architects, designed an enormous new headquarters for China's dominant state broadcaster, China Central Television, that has drawn almost as much scrutiny as Mr. Andreu's National Theater.

Mr. Koolhaas proposed building two 55-story Z-shaped towers angled toward each other, with the top horizontals linked in a gravity-defying tango. He told the Chinese state news media that his vision is a "hyperbuilding of unimaginable scale and complexity" intended to house all of the television station's functions.

The design won praise among some Chinese architects, but the price offended many others, with some critics arguing that the estimated cost of $730 million may be understated. Beijing is abuzz with speculation that the project may be scrapped as a symbol of the new leadership's determination to cut back on excessive state investment and slow the overheated economy.

Mr. van Scheeren and China Central Television officials say that the approval process is moving ahead and that the new building will be the base of China's Olympic broadcasts.

"I know there's been a lot of high-level political discussion about how China should spend its money and the gap between rich and poor," said Mr. van Scheeren. "But I can assure you it is by no means dead."

Wu Liangyong, a senior architect who has helped the government select designs for state-financed projects, has supported importing foreign talent to remake China's cities. But he argues that the country has also squandered state assets on quirky notions of modern grandeur.

"In my view, some Chinese cities have become experimental sites for novelty for novelty's sake by some foreign masters," he said.

Reflecting the sensitivity, the Construction Ministry announced a new regulation this month requiring foreign architects to enter joint ventures with local architectural firms before taking on Chinese projects.

Even before the Paris airport accident, Mr. Andreu's National Theater had become a flashpoint in the debate. The complex has one large 2,500-seat hall and three smaller auditoriums. They are arranged under a soaring glass dome, which is notable for having no central supporting columns. The dome is set like a floating bubble in a lake. The entrance is an underwater tunnel.

Supporters say the design is stunning and luminescent, offering a welcome contrast to the Stalinist wedding-cake architecture of Tiananmen Square next door. Critics say it fails even to nod to Chinese tradition and violates every rule of feng shui, the traditional art of harmonizing people and their environment.

Critics got a boost when a section of a new terminal Mr. Andreu designed at Charles de Gaulle airport collapsed last month. The accident prompted a flurry of criticism of Mr. Andreu's design principles.The French news media also reported that French authorities were investigating whether the Paris airport, Mr. Andreu's employer, paid bribes to win the Beijing theater contract.

Mr. Andreu, who was not available for comment, has also built the new Shanghai airport, a stadium in Guangzhou and the Shanghai Opera House, making him one of the most prolific foreign architects in China.

"We have confidence in Paul Andreu," said Wang Zhengming, a spokesman for the committee overseeing construction of the theater. "The accident in Paris will have no effect on our building." Mr. Wang also denied any corruption.

But Mr. Xiao of Qinghua University, who compared the theater to dried dung, is one of several dozen critics who have lobbied against the project even after it won final Politburo approval in 2001. He and other opponents have begun a fresh campaign to have it demolished.

Beyond aesthetic issues, opponents say it will prove impossible to run efficiently. The central dome needs to be illuminated and air-conditioned even if only the smallest of its performance centers is in use. They say the underwater entrance poses an unacceptable safety risk in the event of fire, earthquake or terrorist attack.

At least partly for this reason, critics say, the theater has become an orphan, with no agency willing to run it. With potentially enormous maintenance expenses, neither the Culture Ministry nor the Beijing city government, much less smaller theater groups, want to accept the responsibility, according to Wu Zuqiang, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, an advisory body to the central government.

"We've got this amazing piece of hardware in place but no one thought about the software," Mr. Wu said. "You need to book first-rate international acts two or three years in advance."

Unless the government acts quickly, Mr. Wu said, "We are going to raise the curtain on an empty house."

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/06/14/international/15oper.jpg
Workmen completing the roof on the National Theater in Beijing.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Time for Chinese architects to come off the 'Eggshell'

(China Daily)

Updated: 2004-06-29 08:38

http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-06/29/xin_16060129093671423701.jpg
A model of the logistics hub designed by British architect Zaha Hadid for the southeast outskirts of Beijing.

With Paul Andreu's "Eggshell" - the National Grand Theatre, still under construction in downtown Beijing, the National Stadium, dubbed the "Bird's Nest," designed by top Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, broke ground some 15 kilometres north of the "Eggshell" site.

To the east in the Central Business District, Rem Koolhass, a Dutch architect, won the bid for CCTV's new building, "Z-crisscross."

On the southeast outskirts of the capital, Zaha Hadid, a Baghdad born British woman architect, has joined hands with Pan Shiyi, one of the most successful real estate tycoons in China, to develop a logistics hub. The project is expected to be a huge complex of conference facilities, shopping malls, hotels, office buildings, theme parks and top-quality residential areas.

All big names in architecture circles, they are noted for their novel designs, use of new materials and high tech and their sky-scraping costs.

Apart from these top architects, with their landmark projects in Beijing, many other architects from abroad have also been lured by the huge Chinese market. They are involved in either public buildings or residential developments, many of their jobs won through public bidding.

No matter whether famous or not, these foreign architects have also received their share of both praise and criticism. They have brought not only new designs to this country, but also heated debate: Does China really need foreign architects to design Chinese buildings?

A big cake

"China is now the largest construction site in the world. That makes us, as architects, excited," said Neil Leach, a professor of architectural theory at the University of Bath, UK, who attended a recent seminar on avant garde architecture at Tsinghua University.

At the seminar, initiated by the organizing committee of the first Architectural Biennial 2004 Beijing, 12 architects from both home and abroad presented their designs and shared views on avant garde architecture.

Starting from the early 1990s, foreign architects began to swarm into China to take part in the development of the Pudong New Area in Shanghai. Celebrated architecture firms such as AS&P, Atkins, OBERMEYER, RRP and SOM Planning submitted winning bids for some of the big projects in the new area. According to Beijing-based International Herald Leader, foreign architects took 30 per cent of the projects in Shanghai in the late 1990s. Following the 2008 Olympic fever, many of them moved to Beijing and won almost all the big public projects in the city.

According to the Beijing-based Architecture Journal there are now more than 120 foreign and joint architecture firms in China. Over 140 of the 200 top world engineering companies and design consortiums have set up branches in the country. Design contracts for a great number of landmark buildings in major cities have gone to foreign firms.

Like them or not, these buildings are being erected.

Controversial reaction

Much criticism centres on the one problem most new designs have: their failure to achieve a harmony with Chinese culture.

Consider, for example, the "Eggshell" next to Tian'anmen Square. Those who like it say it is unique and avant garde, and those against it call it a "dirty dropping" or "a tomb."

Paul Andreu has been accused of damaging the harmony of the area, which includes the Great Hall of the People and the Tian'anmen Rostrum. Forty-nine academicians of the Chinese Academy of Science appealed to the central government reconsider the design, but their request fell on deaf ears.

The heavy cost is another major point of dispute. According to a report from the International Herald Leader, the "Eggshell" costs are running way over original budget. The cost has reportedly increased from 2 billion yuan (US$241 million) to 5 billion yuan (US$603 million).

The whole construction area, including the theatre and a pool, now covers 260,000 square metres, 143,000 square metres more than in the original design.

The "Bird's Nest" has also exceeded its original budget of 3 billion yuan (US$362 million), escalating to 3.5 billion yuan (US$422 million). For the new CCTV "Z-crisscross," the cost is now expected to far surpass its original 5 billion yuan (US$603 million) estimate.

"I'm not against novel ideas, or unconventional or unorthodox designs, as that is what the art needs," said Wu Liangyong, one of the great contemporary Chinese architects.

"But we cannot put aside engineering and structure, we cannot overlook our culture, or the cost. China is not rich enough not to care about 5 billion yuan," Wu said.

"Some cities in China have become 'experimental sites' for both noted foreign architects and some second and third level ones," he said.

However, some disagree.

Wang Mingxian, an architecture critic, says: "We'd better first have a welcoming attitude towards these new things. City planning and historical protection must allow for a combination of old and new.

"We really wish that our Chinese architects were able to win the bidding for these landmark buildings. Unfortunately, they were not able to do so," Wang said. "Why should we reject these great architects whose previous experiments have been recognized in international architecture circles," he said, adding that their experiments in China offer more benefits than harm to the evolution of Chinese architecture.

Among those architects who have come to Beijing, Koolhaas was the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 2000, the foremost authoritative prize in the field of architecture; Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron won the prize in 2001; and Zaha Hadid was the winner in 2004.

Fei Qing, a New-York based Chinese architect, said: "From the point of view of Chan (the Chan Sect of Buddhism, known in the West by the Japanese name Zen, which emphasizes simplicity, spontaneity and self-expression), putting unrelated things together might produce something new."

"When the East meets the West; traditional concepts give in to modern ones, and vice versa. The two might compromise. This can happen in every art form, including architecture."

But Luo Li, secretary general of the first Architectural Biennial Beijing 2004, pointed out that to improve the ability to judge beauty, or in other words, to judge art and culture as a whole, is crucial for decision-makers, architects, developers and ordinary people alike.

"For quite a long time, we have lagged behind in art education," Luo said, adding that in designing a new building city planners must keep in mind the unique local cultural fabric of their city.

"What is most important is not to let new buildings break the cultural line," she said. "We must encourage foreign architects to deepen their understanding of Chinese culture before they work on projects in China."

Chinese architects

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, and failed to keep abreast of changes because of the country's closure of its doors to the outside world from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the world of architecture was experiencing dramatic development in ideas, design and technology.

Zhang Yonghe, a noted Chinese architects, once said that Chinese architects have been trained in classicism and are more concerned with form and style in design.

"I have to admit that Chinese architects cannot compete with their foreign counterparts when it comes to imagination and design," said Dou Yide, deputy chairman of the China Architecture Society, who has worked as a jury member for many international bidding competitions during the past years. "Most of them know very little about new materials and new technology, which has badly limited their creativity and imagination," he said.

However, Chinese architects complain that many developers have blind faith in foreign designs.

Cui Kai, one of the top young architects in China, in his late 40s, complains about the imbalance in design charges. "Many developers know nothing about domestic architects," said Cui, who has won many awards in design including his "See and Seen" villa for the Commune by the Great Wall. Together with 11 other architects, Cui won a special prize at La Biennale di Venezia in 2002.

Cui said that in a joint project, the developers usually pay two-thirds of the bill to the foreign firms, leaving only one-third, or even less, for the domestic designers who have usually done much more of the work than their foreign counterparts.

Some top Chinese architects have to work for some foreign firms that don't have enough designers to handle all the projects they are involved in. All the foreign designers do is signing their names on the final sketches.

The experience of Cui Hongbing, a Shanghai architect, is a good example. Once when he was on a jury assessing international bids for the renovation of a downtown area in Shanghai, he was confused by four plans. Though coming from four different countries, the proposed plans shared the same space and planning concepts used at Tongji University in Shanghai.

After hearing the presentations of the leading designers, Cui got the answer - all four of them were graduates from Tongji University and one had even been his classmate.

Guan Zhaoye, a noted Chinese architect, also a professor from Tsinghua University, urged giving more opportunities to Chinese architects. Only when they are given more chances, he says, can they demonstrate their abilities.

"Chinese architects should improve their own abilities instead of complaining," said Wu Huanjia, a professor from Tsinghua.

www.chinadaily.com.cn

[Johnnyboy]

I really hope that China does not surpass american archetecture and high number of skyscrapers.It would be imbaresing

[Kris]

Your level of writing and thinking is far more.

[Pottebaum]

I really hope that China does not surpass american archetecture and high number of skyscrapers.It would be imbaresing

How do you figure? I mean, I'd actually HOPE that they would surpass us in number of tall buildings; there are 1.3 billion people in China!

[Johnnyboy]

What does population has to do with tall buildings :?:

[Pottebaum]

What does population has to do with tall buildings :?:

:shock:


Where do you think all those people live and work, John?

[Kris]

China shelves office tower

Reuters

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

BEIJING China has shelved plans to build a $600 million office tower in Beijing as part of the government's efforts to cool the overheating economy.

Construction of the skyscraper by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was scheduled to begin this month, but there may be "a change in plans," according to Oriental Outlook magazine, which is affiliated with the official Xinhua news agency.

The building, dubbed the "Titanic of Chinese architecture," would have been the new headquarters of the official broadcaster China Central Television and, at 230 meters or 750 feet, the tallest building in the Chinese capital.

"Whether that building will be completed is a big question mark," a senior executive of China Central Television said.

Sources said the plan had drawn the angers of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who has tried to curb a proliferation of real estate, cement and iron and steel projects to stop the economy from boiling over.

The magazine cited fears of traffic congestion in the central business district around the 80-story structure, which was to have two inverted L-shaped towers joining high above the ground, as the main reason for the decision.

Some Chinese critics said the price was too high, especially when the government is trying to curb investment.

And the sleek geometric design with a latticework touch was too quirky and would have presented a securities risk, the magazine said.

Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

[TLOZ Link5]

China did a great job destroying much of the tangible elements of its rich heritage during the "Cultural Revolution" of the 60s and 70s. Monasteries, palaces, mausoleums, archaeological sites, even the Great Wall and the Grand Canal: many were destroyed or allowed to fall into disrepair.

Despite all the hype about China's skyscraper boom, I am therefore skeptical and somewhat alarmed at the rate that so many sites that have so much cultural significance are being recklessly replaced with new construction: not just in Beijing and Shanghai, but also the controversy over the Three Gorges Dam and how the Great Wall continues to decay. It's the 1960s all over again, only the destruction is now made in the name of economic progress -- the same mindset that justified the destruction of Penn Station, Les Halles, etc.

[Johnnyboy]

What does population has to do with tall buildings :?:

:shock:


Where do you think all those people live and work, John?

most people don't live in skyscraper size buildings. But in work, i can agree on what you said.

[krulltime]

So maybe this is the start of a new slowdown in china. Finally!

[Kris]

July 28, 2004

New Boomtowns Change Path of China's Growth

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/07/28/international/28china2.jpg
A street cleaner at work near a building under construction in Dongguan, which has grown from a small town to a city of seven million.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/07/28/international/28china.jpg
Dongguan, in southern China, is one of a score of cities whose extraordinary growth reflects China's boom and its challenge. Dongguan's thriving downtown, which features new skyscrapers and a major shopping center.

DONGGUAN, China - The cranes peek out from behind skyscrapers in every direction, wheeling and nodding in a slow-motion ballet as crews work around the clock to fill in an already crowded skyline.

Newly planted palms line the sides of broad, newly traced avenues where the traffic lights have not been turned on yet.

Dongguan has exploded from a mere town to a city of seven million in a little over 20 years. But the city officials are not content with a 23 percent annual economic growth rate. They are putting the finishing touches on a vast, entirely new annex city that they hope will draw 300,000 engineers and researchers, the vanguard of a new China.

"We are the first in China to pursue this kind of vision,'' said Wang Jianya, deputy director of the development, called Songshan Lake Pioneer Park. "We're not trying to be the biggest, only the best.''

Dongguan is one of a score of Chinese megacities whose extraordinary growth reflects China's boom and its challenge. The country's rapid urbanization is helping to lift hundreds of millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. But at the same time, these new second-tier cities are locked in a ferocious competition, spawning ambitious development plans that escape the control of the central government in Beijing.

Economists like Tang Wing-shing, a specialist in urban development at Baptist University in Hong Kong, worry about the consequences: waste of resources, loss of arable land, fiscal crises, corruption and pollution.

"Every city wants to develop into a world city, and every one wants to have an international airport, six-lane highways and export zones, rather than integrated growth,'' Professor Tang said. "This is what we are observing in China today. All of the cities have been turned into vast construction zones, and the government has not contemplated the consequences of this yet.''

China has 166 cities with populations over one million, compared with nine in the United States. China's urban population is growing at 2.5 percent a year, among the fastest rate in the world, according to the United Nations Population Division. That compares with 0.8 percent in India, another large, fast-developing nation.

In fact, Beijing has found its powers to slow runaway growth to be surprisingly limited, in part because provinces and cities resist efforts to rein in their investments.

Although the central government allots money to pet development projects, provinces raise money for their own projects by selling rights to develop real estate. In many cases, local officials are judged in part by economic measures - how many jobs they create, how many big buildings spring up.

That means that many provincial officials are trying the same formula: manufacturing and export zones, research parks and self-styled Silicon Valleys like Pioneer Park in Dongguan.

Dongguan's officials, in fact, have even bigger plans.

"In the future our goal is 10 million people," Dongguan's deputy mayor, Zhang Shenguang, said almost nonchalantly. "Beyond that, we may have problems with electricity and water."

But the model Dongguan is pursuing has not always worked. Yehua Dennis Wei of the University of Wisconsin cited the case of Wenzhou, a southeastern city of 1.4 million. Like many second-tier cities, Wenzhou is straining to beat the competition by creating research and development and manufacturing zones.

Because Wenzhou is not that close to the major concentrations of business in China's booming Yangtze Delta, businesses are leaving for bigger cities like Shanghai. Scrambling to woo more business, local governments like Wenzhou keep giving away more land and building even bigger industrial parks.

The unchecked development means there is little ability to consider China's needs as a whole, or to prevent duplication and waste.

Some cities, though, are trying a different approach to growth. One landlocked city that seems to be thriving, Wuhan, which sits astride the broad Yangtze River 400 miles west of Shanghai, has struck on a formula of its own.

To be sure, Wuhan, a city of 4.5 million official residents and millions of migrants, has its own research and manufacturing parks, one of which is a sprawling place called Laser Valley, which contains fiber-optic, electronics and pharmaceutical companies arrayed one after another on a huge grid.

But the main thrust of Wuhan's strategy has been to rely on an old-line industry, automobile manufacturing, whose history here predates China's economic liberalization. By selling off assets to foreign and domestic investors and encouraging foreign automakers like Nissan, Honda and Citroën to enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies, Wuhan is positioning itself for re-emergence as the Detroit of China.

The city has even managed to sell its central location as a boon for efficient distribution at a time when domestic car sales here are booming.

Wuhan is hardly more of a household name overseas than Dongguan, but its recent growth has outpaced Dongguan's. In an interview, the city's mayor, Li Xiansheng, proudly reeled off the latest statistics: 13.8 percent growth for the first half of the year, along with 26 percent tax revenue growth and 50 percent fixed capital growth during the same period.

"In the past, I regret to say, we were left behind by a lot of eastern cities, but Wuhan is determined to play its role,'' Mr. Li said. "If you draw a circle of 2,000 kilometers in diameter with Wuhan at its center, 80 percent of Chinese cities will be fall inside it. We are blessed to be the economic hub of central China.'' The radius he mentioned is a little more than 1,200 miles.

Wuhan is dotted with technical colleges and trade schools, rather than the proliferation of research parks and new universities seen in so many other cities, winning it praise from manufacturers.

"Wuhan has a long history of auto production, and there are excellent human resources here for that reason,'' said Liu Yuhe, deputy general manager of the Dongfeng Honda Autowork, a Chinese partner with several foreign car makers.

There is another reason for Wuhan's success: its higher education is among the best in China's provinces. The schools have faculties of auto production and auto engineering, resources unmatched anywhere else in the nation.

Which approach to economic growth will prove more successful in the long run - export-dominated technology zones or the more deliberate rise up the ladder of industrial development - is an open question.

For all its cachet, Dongguan has dozens of competitors trying variations of the same thing, and many of those experiments seem destined to end unhappily. Wuhan, on the other hand, has found a niche but could conceivably see its star fade like those of America's steel towns.

"Overplanning a city will kill it, but so will trying to make it a steel town, a car town or an electronics town,'' said Richard Florida, an expert in urban development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "What you have to do is allow people to use their own energies and allow markets to create the new city in their own hurly-burly way, and that's usually a messy, unpredictable process.''

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/07/27/international/0728CHINAch.gif

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[JACKinNYC]

Well, that map of city populations is misleading. In the U.S. many cities like Boston and San Francisco have relatively small populations, but their metro areas are 4-5 million. Dallas-Ft. Worth is much bigger than the map indicated. Seattle, Miami, Portland, Minneapolis and on and on.

[Kris]

True, but perhaps arbitrary and non-representative official numbers are used for China as well.

[Johnnyboy]

do they have suburbs in china or does everyone live in cities

[TLOZ Link5]

do they have suburbs in china or does everyone live in cities

Cities in China often extend over thousands of square kilometers, so there are some parts that are more urbanized than others. A Chinese city can be entirely urban like Hongkong, or it could be a giant metropolitan area like Shanghai. And despite the huge migration to the cities, most of China's population is rural.

[Kris]

Beijing Manifesto by Rem Koolhaas (http://a1112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/07312000/www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/images/FF_120_beijing.pdf)

[Kris]

Despite Rumors, CCTV Project Will Proceed As Scheduled

August 13, 2004

Various news sources (including RECORD) have reported that the Chinese government would likely suspend the CCTV (China Central Television) Headquarters project in Beijing. The building, designed by Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, has been the subject of controversy. Many Chinese critics, including some in CCTV and in the Chinese government, regard the large-scale project as too expensive and unnecessary. Meanwhile it has been widely publicized that Wen Jiabao, the country's Premier, found the facility a waste of public resources. Furthermore China's governing State Council has recently instructed authorities and developers to curtail many of the country's large-scale public works.

Yet according to officials and architects involved with the project, the CCTV project will remain on schedule. When completed, the broadcast center would be OMA's largest built work to date, and will cost an estimated $730 million. OMA conceded that there had been issues that related to the project’s impact on traffic flows within Beijing's Central Business District, but they were resolved in late July. Aside from traffic, "there are absolutely no changes," says Ole Scheeren, the project leader and one of OMA's four partners. "We are now preparing for the start of construction real soon," adds Scheeren. The project is planned to be complete in time for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Daniel Elsea

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/040813cctv.asp


Rendering (http://www.crystalcg.com/english/project/xuni/1+.JPG)

Animation (http://www.crystalcg.com/new/xinshang/002/4cctv-en.html)

[Zoe]

China plans world's tallest tower
By Louisa Lim
BBC correspondent in Beijing

The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has announced plans to build the world's tallest tower. Work on the tower, which will measure 580-600 metres (1,914-1,980 feet) above ground, is expected to begin soon.
It comes as China undergoes something of an architectural revolution, although some plans have been dogged by controversy and financial cutbacks.
If national pride is measured by tall buildings, then China is placing itself firmly in the running.
The Guangzhou TV tower will surpass the current record holder - the CN Tower in Toronto. It will be taller, too, than New York's new World Trade Centre, which will measure up at 541 metres to its spire.
Three foreign firms are competing for the project. It is just one of a number of ambitious designs to stud the skyline, as Chinese cities remodel themselves for the future.
But there has been opposition over the fact that the highest-profile projects have been awarded to foreign architects, and in Beijing, several big venues for the Olympics have been scaled back to save money.
But still, the sheer amount of construction under way in China today means it is becoming something of a playground for the world's top architects.

[Zoe]

I wonder if this will spur NYC officials to go forward with the 2001ft design instead of the 1776' so they will beat this one. Otherwise, it sounds like this building may get started around the same time as FT, which depending on completion date, will never once hold the title of WTB.

[Jasonik]

If only....

[Kris]

November 16, 2006
Embracing Koolhaas’s Friendly Skyscraper
By ROBIN POGREBIN

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/16/arts/16rem_CA0.600.jpg
A computer image showing the China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing. The building is scheduled to be completed in 2008.

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/16/arts/16rem_CA1.650.jpg
A rendering of the Central Chinese Television building.

Set on a site that’s about as large as 37 football fields, Rem Koolhaas’s television authority headquarters in Beijing may initially seem intimidating. This 54-story tower leans and looms like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding central business district.

But if the five-million-square-foot building is one of the largest ever constructed, its architect sees it as a people-friendly reinvention of the skyscraper.

“Awe is not usually a condition our buildings inspire,” Mr. Koolhaas said in an interview at the Museum of Modern Art, where a show devoted to the Central Chinese Television building — known as CCTV — opened yesterday. “Amidst all the skyscrapers there, it’s relatively low. It will feel accessible.”

Tina di Carlo, an assistant curator in MoMA’s architecture and design department, said the goal of the exhibition was not so much to bring the CCTV design to people’s attention; the building is already something of a phenomenon in architectural circles. She said she and Mr. Koolhaas’s firm set out to address the preconceptions that people bring to an enormous tower. “It’s a radical rethinking of the tall building typography,” she said.

The television building is essentially an upside down U with right angles, an office tower bent out of shape. Ole Scheeren, the partner in charge of the CCTV project at Mr. Koolhaas’ firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, said the structure might be frightening “if it was a pure gesture.”

“But since it’s actually a circuit of life inside, it’s a huge social catalyst,” he said.

Since the Chinese government chose Mr. Koolhaas’s design in a competition in 2002, rumors have circulated that the building was too ambitious to ever get built. But construction photos on view at the show, taken as recently as last month, suggest that it may well be completed on schedule in 2008. “It confirms it’s actually going forward,” Ms. di Carlo said. “There were so many rumors that it wasn’t.”

Through models, drawings and extensive wall text, the exhibition — “OMA in Beijing” — explains the various activities that will unfold inside the tower, detailing circulation patterns that encourage staff members and visitors to intersect; amenities like restaurants and health clubs; even a small hospital. “It’s a fiendishly complex building in terms of program and structure,” Mr. Koolhaas said.

The show juxtaposes the Beijing project with images from MoMA’s collection, from Mies van der Rohe’s first glass skyscraper to the mechanical structures of Peter Cook to the organic growth of Kisho Kurokawa.

The exhibition represents a new effort by the Modern to explore architectural projects that have yet to be completed; the first was last year’s show about the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway that is being converted into a landscaped park. The goal is to present architecture in new ways, “to get away from plan, section, elevation,” Ms. di Carlo said.

The architects insist that practical concerns drive their design but note that it is also upending tradition. “Hardly any building really engages space,” Mr. Scheeren said. “Most skyscrapers exhaust space. This building leaves open the space it encapsulates. It activates the ground. It draws activities into the building.”

The architects could have created a campus with each of the company’s various functions in a building of its own. Instead they decided to unite them in a single structure, with everyone connected through the spaces they jointly inhabit. In addition to 10,000 workers, several thousand visitors are expected each day. “It attains the critical mass of a small city,” Mr. Scheeren said. “It becomes a collective in its own right.”

Glass peepholes about 15 feet in diameter, in the floor of the large viewing deck at the underside of the building’s cantilever, will afford vertical views to the ground some 500 feet below. “Staff and visitors move in parallel, can observe each other, can meet and congregate,” Mr. Scheeren said.

The CCTV project also includes a second, more modest building that will house a five-star hotel with 300 rooms, restaurants and spas, recording studios and a 1,500-seat theater. Mr. Koolhaas’s design provides untrammeled circulation from the outdoor plaza to the inside foyer to the backstage area, clearing space so that television cameras can move freely. The floors are equipped with hydraulic platforms.

There are also digital screening rooms, a multi-use ballroom, 20 audiovisual rooms, an exhibition hall and a press room in the second building. The architects describe that structure, the Television Cultural Center or TVCC, as the public component of the project, a kind of “fun palace.” It is to open ahead of the larger headquarters, at the end of 2007.

China’s television network — with more than one billion viewers — will be capable of broadcasting 250 channels when the headquarters is completed. CCTV currently produces and broadcasts just 16 channels.

Mr. Koolhaas won the competition at an important moment for China: recently admitted to the World Trade Organization and selected as the site for the 2008 Olympic games, the country was exploding with soaring new architecture projects. While CCTV is technically not being built for the Olympics, it will be the main broadcaster for the games, Mr. Scheeren said.

The scope of the project forced Mr. Koolhaas’s firm to open a separate office in Rotterdam, where it was already based; it has also established a permanent office in Beijing. By the end nearly 400 architects, engineers and consultants in Europe, Asia and the United States will have worked on the CCTV Tower, producing some 6,000 drawings. “We never did a building of this scale,” Mr. Koolhaas said.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

CCTV Headquarters, Beijing, China under construction at November 21, 2005:

http://www.japan-architect.co.jp/english/5info/announce/au2006special/cecilbalmond/img/cctv.jpg
Photo by Arup.

http://www.japan-architect.co.jp/english/5info/announce/au2006special/cecilbalmond/cecilbalmond.html

[Xemu]

This building is really fascinating. I can't wait to go see this show at MOMA. Does anyone know if the diagonal black lines on the building's exterior in the rendering above are structural? Or are they just ornamental? I like them, but I'll like 'em even more if they serve a purpose.

[Xemu]

I checked out the OMA in Beijing show at MOMA today. I would highly recommend it. I always kinda though Koolhaas was full of 'ish (I should have never read Content) but now I'm a believer. The way the building's design is dictated by the way people circulate through it seems really novel. Also interesting was OMA's way of designing the exterior bracing. They started with a regular digrid and then added or removed members as the structure warranted.

[lofter1]

More on this building and the OMA in Beijing exhibit can be found at the MoMA thread starting HERE (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=128526&postcount=11)

Some shots from my visit to the exhibit at MoMA ...

***

[Xemu]

How'd you take pictures? The gaurds were desending on anyone who pulled out their camera when I was there. You must be pretty slick...

[lofter1]

How'd you take pictures? The gaurds were desending on anyone who pulled out their camera when I was there.

There were three or four of us taking pics ...

All were very upfront and visible.

The only time the guard said anything was when I moved my cell-cam down really close to the display platform -- I guess it looked like I was going to touch it [ :eek: ] ... a loud "SIR!" resounded through the room :o

My one disappointment with the exhibit was that there was no literature to take away -- and nothing in the bookstore, either. The salesperson said that the Design & Arch. Dept. rarely offers that type of info.

I guess that increases rentals of the AV's ;)

[Geer]

Hope to see this exhibition in my hometown and hometown of Rem Koolhaas.

Some pics one construction. They come from skyscrapers.cn again.

http://skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/DSCN4917_4PAch5zdm5zi.jpg

http://www.davidwei.com/BJ-CCTV/cctv-9.jpg

[Geer]

Thought i share some Shanghai pics from skyscrapers.cn

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/Peter%20Jenkel_aAxXgB6XkYF1.jpg

http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/7065/2696491163865474mo4.jpg

In this last pic there's one 260, 250, 198 and one 180 meters under construction. All in the Pudong area of Shanghai.

[ablarc]

^ Most of these buildings relate poorly to the street, the surroundings and each other. Seems the resulting district will be arduous for the pedestrian.

[Geer]

I'm afraid i have to agree with you on that one.
Streets are beautifully paved and landsdcaped but there are no shops on street level. At least not in this district. This is different in the old parts of Shanghai.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/asiaglobe/IMG_2660.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/asiaglobe/IMG_2682.jpg
A small update on the CCTV tower in Beijing

[homeandaway]

chinas coping spains landmarks, well for intance, that construction pic above looks like the madrid building - Punta do Europe Towers.
~AleX~

[Jasonik]

Chongqing Journal
Homeowner Stares Down Wreckers, at Least for a While
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/26/world/26china.600.jpg
China Photos/Getty Images
A building sits on its own island of land in Chongqing Municipality, China.
The homeowner has refused to sell to a developer, who went ahead with
construction around the site.

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: March 27, 2007

CHONGQING, China, March 23 — For weeks the confrontation drew attention from people all across China, as a simple homeowner stared down the forces of large-scale redevelopment that are sweeping this country, blocking the preparation of a gigantic construction site by an act of sheer will.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/27/world/27china_2.190.jpg
Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times
Wu Ping, and her brother Wu Jian last Wednesday
in front of a construction site gate that barred
Ms. Wu from her house.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/27/world/27china_map.190.jpg
The New York Times
At a site in Chongqing, all of the households
but one have left.

Chinese bloggers were the first to spread the news, of a house perched atop a tall, thimble-shaped piece of land like Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France, in the middle of a vast excavation.

Newspapers dived in next, followed by national television. Then, in a way that is common in China whenever an event begins to take on hints of political overtones, the story virtually disappeared from the news media after the government, bloggers here said, decreed that the subject was suddenly out of bounds.

Still, the “nail house,” as many here have called it because of the homeowner’s tenacity, like a nail that cannot be pulled out, remains the most popular current topic among bloggers in China.

It has a universal resonance in a country where rich developers are seen to be in cahoots with politicians and where both enjoy unchallenged sway. Each year, China is roiled by tens of thousands of riots and demonstrations, and few issues pack as much emotional force as the discontent of people who are suddenly uprooted, told that they must make way for a new skyscraper or golf course or industrial zone.

What drove interest in the Chongqing case was the uncanny ability of the homeowner to hold out for so long. Stories are legion in Chinese cities of the arrest or even beating of people who protest too vigorously against their eviction and relocation. In one often-heard twist, holdouts are summoned to the local police station and return home only to find their house already demolished. How did this owner, a woman no less, manage? Millions wondered.

Part of the answer, which on meeting her takes only a moment to discover, is that Wu Ping is anything but an ordinary woman. With her dramatic lock of hair precisely combed and pinned in the back, a form-flattering bright red coat, high cheekbones and wide, excited eyes, the tall, 49-year-old restaurant entrepreneur knows how to attract attention — a potent weapon in China’s new media age, in which people try to use public opinion and appeals to the national image to influence the authorities.

“For over two years they haven’t allowed me access to my property,” said Ms. Wu, her arms flailing as she led a brisk walk through the Yangjiaping neighborhood here. It is an area in the throes of large-scale redevelopment, with broad avenues, big shopping malls and a recently built elevated monorail line, from whose platform nearly everyone stops to gawk at the nail house.

Within moments of her arrival at the locked gate of the excavated construction site, a crowd began to gather. The people, many of them workers with sunken cheeks, dressed in grimy clothes, regarded Ms. Wu with expressions of wonderment. Some of them exchanged stories about how they had been forced to relocate and soothed each other with comments about how it all could not be helped.

From inside the gates a government television crew began filming.

“If it were an ordinary person they would have hired thugs and beat her up,” murmured a woman dressed in a green sweater who was drawn by the throng. “Ordinary people don’t dare fight with the developers. They’re too strong.”

Earlier this month the National People’s Congress passed a historic law guaranteeing private property rights to China’s swelling ranks of urban middle-class homeowners, among others. Some here attributed Ms. Wu’s success to that, as well as her knack for generating publicity.

“In the past they would have just knocked it down,” said an 80-year-old woman who said she used to be a neighbor of Ms. Wu’s. “Now that’s forbidden, because Beijing has put out the word that these things should be done in a reasonable way.”

Between frenzied telephone calls to reporters and city officials, Ms. Wu, who stood at the center of the crowd with her brother, a 6-foot-3 decorative stone dealer who wore his brown hair in jheri curls, stated her case with a slightly different spin.

“I have more faith than others,” she began. “I believe that this is my legal property, and if I cannot protect my own rights, it makes a mockery of the property law just passed. In a democratic and lawful society a person has the legal right to manage one’s own property.”

Tian Yihang, a local college student, spoke glowingly of her in an interview at the monorail station. “This is a peculiar situation,” he said, with a bit of understatement. “I admire the owner for being so persistent in her principles. In China such things shock the common mind.”

Ms. Wu will in all likelihood lose her battle. Indeed, developers recently filed administrative motions to allow them to demolish her lonely building. Certainly the local authorities are eager to see the last of her.

“During the process of demolition, 280 households were all satisfied with their compensation and moved,” said Ren Zhongping, a city housing official. “Wu was the only one we had to dismantle forcibly. She has the value of her house in her heart, but what she has in mind is not practical. It’s far beyond the standards of compensation decided by owners of housing and the professional appraisal organ.”

With the street so choked with onlookers that traffic began to back up, Ms. Wu’s brother, Wu Jian, began waving a newspaper above the crowd, pointing to pictures of Ms. Wu’s husband, a local martial arts champion, who was scheduled to appear in a highly publicized tournament that evening. “He’s going into our building and will plant a flag there,” Mr. Wu announced.

Moments later, as the crowd began to thin, a Chinese flag appeared on the roof with a hand-painted banner that read: “A citizen’s legal property is not to be encroached on.”

Asked how his brother-in-law had managed to get inside the locked site and climb the escarpment on which the house is perched, he said with a wink, “Magic.”

[homeandaway]

right...very erm..interesting, i will look interesting!.
why should they build a landmark there if no-one goes there?
~Alex~

[BenL]

What do you mean?

[MidtownGuy]

I know what you mean about the sloping sides but it won't look like the ones in Madrid for very long- these will connect and form one structure.

[lofter1]

I'm loving this project --

Progress on the CCTV Tower by OMA / Koolhaas ...

YouTube has a very trippy vid: CCTV Rem Koolhaas/OMA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxmfFkLZku8&feature=related)

cctv.com webste (http://www.cctv.com/newSiteProgram/en/project_info.htm)

http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/05/cctv3.jpg

http://oma.eu//images/photocache/stories/CCTV/2007.07.18-tom-van-dillen03_451x329x90.jpg

http://images.google.com/url?q=http://www.nancarrow-webdesk.com/warehouse/storage2/2007-w44/img.57155_t.jpg&usg=AFQjCNHH4JX0CLCeFV5W3lGnWmdF285P8A

Delirious Beijing / CCTV Site (http://china.fujitawork.com/2007/?p=287)

http://china.fujitawork.com/2007/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/cctv1.jpg

http://china.fujitawork.com/2007/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/cctv5.jpg

http://china.fujitawork.com/2007/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/cctv8.jpg

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/icons/icon14.gif http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/icons/icon14.gif http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/icons/icon14.gif

[investordude]

For those of you excited to go check these places out in person, here's why you should fly the Chinese airline :)

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-stew20nov20,0,7746200.story?coll=la-home-center

Can someone explain to me how the CCTV tower is a useful building economically. I'm all for cool stuff but its not a sculpture - a building is suppossed to serve a useful purpose. The design seems like it would be a pain if you were a tenant looking for office space that wasn't a statist boondoggle.

[Jasonik]

Architects "reinvent skycraper" with Beijing tower

By Lindsay Beck
BEIJING, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Building a skyscraper should be challenge enough. Ole Scheeren wants to reinvent the concept.

The chief architect behind the new headquarters for China's state broadcaster has created a project that is a both a feat of engineering set to dominate Beijing's skyline and a radical social statement.

"We wanted to think of a skyscraper that would not fall into the trap of racing for height, of trying to dominate the skyline by being the tallest," Scheeren told Reuters.

"We thought against the verticality of the needle, against this very simple principle of hierarchy," he said from his Beijing offices, overlooking the massive construction site.

What his firm, Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture, created instead is what Scheeren describes as a "loop folded in space" -- two towers sloped together and joined by a gravity-defying canopy equivalent to 80 storeys in height.

The building is among several projects in Beijing as the city reinvents itself for the 2008 Olympics and gains a reputation in the process as a playground for architectural ambition.

Norman Foster is behind the city's new $3.6 billion airport terminal, French architect Paul Andreu has created its National Grand Theatre, a futuristic, dome-shaped bubble, and Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron are building the main Olympic stadium, dubbed the "bird's nest" for its interlaced steel beams.

China's emergence as the world's fourth-largest economy, and the recognition that came with being awarded the Olympics, created a momentum that allowed for the projects, Scheeren said.

The Olympics "was really a catalyst that I think propelled ambition and development in a very particular way".

"I think these are also buildings that might not have been possible anywhere else in the world, starting from their magnitude, but also to their actual architectural formation and expression," said the 36-year-old German.

SOCIAL AMBITION

The project for China Central Television (CCTV) will incorporate 475,000 square metres in a single structure, making it the largest in the world after the Pentagon.

The design is so complex that a decade ago computational tools were not sophisticated enough to support the engineering.

For Scheeren, it's not the architectural tricks that count.

"It's easy to look at the building as an accomplishment of engineering," he said. "But for me, what is more important than that is the social ambition this project pursues in the way it brings people together."

The finished building will incorporate all the elements of television-making in one structure, from production studios and newsrooms to executive offices.

A pathway open to visitors will follow the loop of the building up to the canopy -- where the glass-floored overhang will allow a view over the city from a dizzying 160 m (525 ft) -- before looping back down through the second tower.

The radicalism of a project that aims to do away with traditional hierarchies and open itself to the public seems surprising for a state broadcaster more known for staid programming than innovation.

But Scheeren says the project is being driven in a part by a desire within CCTV to use it as a tool to develop and change the company, which will be broadcasting from the building by the time the Olympics open on Aug. 8.

The firm has assembled a 400-person team for the project that is 50 percent Chinese and 50 percent international, a decision that Scheeren says grounds the building in its cultural context of Beijing.

It also sets the stage, he says, for more to come.

"While there are a series of these large projects being designed by foreign architects, I think we also see simultaneously a new generation of Chinese architects that emerges with an incredible education and an incredible ambition from their side to reformulate their own beginnings."

[Jasonik]

Beijing Is Ready for the Olympics

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,1022336,00.jpg (http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,5538,26426,00.html)
Click for image gallery.

By Ullrich Fichtner in Beijing (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,517577,00.html)

Ten months before the official kickoff of the Summer Olympics, China has already prepared the stage for the world's top sporting event. Twenty new sports facilities have been built and 11 others renovated. The message from Beijing is clear: Nothing about the 2008 Olympics has been left to chance.

It's raining sparks in Beijing. Showers of sparks burst from the steel frame of the Olympic Stadium, from the flat-topped shell of the Central Television Headquarters, from the scaffolding on Tower 3 of the China World Trade Center. It's raining sparks in the Jade Garden, on the Beijing Riviera and in Capital Paradise, where the high-rise apartment blocks of the nouveau riche emerge from thin air by the dozen. Sparks cascade from the façades along the ring roads.

Beijing is being welded, sawn, constructed, repaired, renovated and retouched. Burning shavings fall to the ground in a shower of golden rain, with 265 days still to go before the start of the Olympic Games.

The city is smartening itself up in the gleaming mirrors of the 31 sporting facilities that are scattered, seemingly at random, throughout the city. The stadiums, arenas and sports fields stand in three or four clusters to the north, west and east of the city center. Whoever visits them, or indeed anyone who even wants to find them, needs an expert driver and nerves of steel; the route will take them through a sprawling, congested, swamped city, an immense urban settlement that covers 16,800 square kilometers.

That's the size of a real metropolis. It is 20 times the size of Berlin and it's a city with no defined edges, with an interior accessed by elevated highways and multi-level expressways, divided by five many-lane ring roads that sketch out their wide, crooked circles around the center point of the Forbidden City, the ancient heart of China.

If one starts out at Tiananmen Square, the Square of Heavenly Peace, and heads west, the path soon leads to Wukesong. There, a mighty hall that looks as though it is made of turquoise frosted glass stands in a large, fenced-off building site.

In August 2008, this hall will host the basketball tournament of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad; it will be all about free throws, technical fouls, points scored in the last remaining seconds, as if these were the only things of any importance. But the sporting dramas fade into insignificance, because in fact the whole of the vast country that is China is perpetually in play: as a former empire but also as a new country that wants to demonstrate how brilliantly it has entered the 21st century.

The forecourt of the Wukesong Indoor Stadium, to the left of which three Olympic baseball fields can be made out, is intimidating in its hugeness. Migrant laborers in everyday clothes populate the building site. Not one of them wears a hardhat as they swarm like bees over the square. Behind the sports grounds, cranes stretch up over the shells of the buildings that comprise a new business quarter, where banners flutter, with their message printed in white on red: "Celebrate the 58th Anniversary of the Founding of the People's Republic of China."

In front of the site fence, old men play with Dou Kongzhu, diabolos, making the cones dance on strings like yoyos, elegant acrobats with weathered faces, old enough to have heard Mao on the radio live. Many wear soft-peak caps and buttoned-up overalls. They hold aloft small dragons that they have made out of cut-up shopping bags from the French supermarket chain Carrefour. They stand with their backs to the new Olympic sports hall, but the old and the new are in close proximity here: opposite, the windows of Military Hospital 301 can be seen, where Deng Xiaoping died in February 1997.

Satellites to the Mother Ship

To some extent these are his games, and if Deng, the architect of the new China, were still alive, maybe Swiss construction company Burckhardt + Partner's original plan would have come to fruition.

Their idea was to cover the exterior wall of the basketball hall with LCD panels, making the entire facade a screen for live broadcasts from inside. But the project was stopped when, three years ago, all plans had to be rethought on cost grounds. But it also likely had to do with a general suspicion in China of too much Western influence, too much transparency.


http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,1021602,00.jpg


Many of the new Olympic buildings are reminiscent of space ships, of flying saucers, of UFOs and of science fiction generally. The centers outside of the Olympic Green, often hidden away on rambling university campuses, are clad with various light alloys or are finished as though they were sealed, often windowless, smooth and closed. The buildings, which are often round and often have no angles, are to the new Chinese National Theater in the center of Beijing (the controversial "Egg" designed by French architect Paul Andreu) like satellites to a mother ship. They offer little resistance and they show little face.
This also applies to the two gymnasiums in the Tongzhou district, southeast of the center, on the Peking University of Technology campus. These buildings are reminiscent of melting golf balls, in which badminton and rhythmic gymnastics will be the order of the day. A UFO has also landed northwest of the center, on the Beihang University campus, where a cheerful aluminum building has been provided for the weightlifters.

But the good news, and that's what it's all about, is that Beijing is ready. The games could essentially start the day after tomorrow, because the sports halls and the stadiums are built and the stage is set.

Banners hang over the building sites with mottos like: "Work hard, make sure the building is a success." Beneath them, parquet is already being swept, lines are already being drawn, pitches laid out, nets put up. Water will soon flow into where it is required and ammunition will be laid in where it is needed for shooting range competitions.

On a visit to the table-tennis hall on the Peking University campus, loudspeaker announcements resound through the domed hall and fire sirens are tested several times, with announcements in Chinese and English. Far out to the west, at the Olympic shooting range, a bold line in front of the Western Hills district, access is already strictly forbidden, so that not a single speck of dust will be brought in.

At the old Capital Indoor Stadium, built in 1968, all that is required before the Olympic volleyball tournament is a bit of cosmetic work. As with almost all of the competition sites, only minor work is left -- a little green here and there, some decorative stones.

The message here is loud and clear: We are ready. And moreover: We could have done it even in 2000, when Sydney's bid won at the last minute. But now, in 2008, nothing will get in the way and nothing will be improvised, there will be nothing like the hectic last dash for Athens 2004, everything will go according to the far-sighted plan. In the catacombs of the wrestling stadium 280 days before the huge opening celebration, computer-printed labels are already stuck on the doors, reading "fresh flowers," "referees" and even "medals." Nothing will be left to chance in Beijing in 2008.

Part 2: Bringing in Farmers to Build the Stadiums
(http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,517577-2,00.html)

[futurecity]

The new beijing terminal is stuning - check it out if you haven't--> Maybe we should send our politicians over to the Orient (HK, SIN, etc) - perhaps it would open their eyes to see how far we have fallen behind in customer service and infrastructure.

Instead we have JFK T2, a cattle barn or bus depot from the 1960s.. oh shame on us. The longe we leave it, the worse it will get. Not to mention our outdated bridges, roads, dams, power supplies, transit, etc..

[Bob]

Beijing isn't ready for "us." Beijing is ready for people who keep their mouths shut.

[Zephyr]

That smoky haze of pollution is everywhere apparent. And construction is on a scale that cannot be believed. Yet there are problems at the very heart of all this, that won't go away, and the organisers are fully aware of them.

Who knows what will happen now.

[MidtownGuy]

Not to mention our outdated bridges, roads, dams, power supplies, transit, etc..

We don't really do much for infrastructure, we're better at bombing and destroying it in other countries than building it in our own. Now we are best at building bombs and wars.

[zupermaus]

Bored of the endless construction in China? Didn't want to look?

That was me^

Well here's an update... gawd theyve been busy. Many thanks to Zorg

Please guys, this isnt a chance to bring up Tibet or Olympics or human rights, just the buildings:

anyway this is scary (ignore the conceptual proposals for the time being). There are over 100 supertalls in the works:


http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/apricityl2008.jpg

It takes 8 months to construct a 15 storey building in Shenzhen, 18 months for a 30 storey one, despite strict building codes (they have to withstand the usual floods, bomb attacks and high winds, but also in yearly typhoon and earthquake zones.) A supertall takes 5 years from planning to finish.



A selection of a handful of over 100 supertalls:

368m Dahutong International
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/Hongqiao5.jpg


Tianjin City centre

the tallest tower is the R&F Morgan Building (Proposed): 415m
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/20080411_84432514d203439dc747o4QFKS.jpg


Liuzhou Diwang International Fortune Center 303m, will be complete in 5 years
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/cb048d011e0a339e808315659e85816d_36.jpg


Twin 420m towers for Tianjin off tv - however this proposal has already been changed twice before so this may not be final at all.

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/20080417_2b5bdb73b4fcf137e656DB7nmk.jpg


Guiyang 77storey 7* hotel, part financed by Arab money
Look familiar? This actual organic-loop design now going upp everywhere actually originated in the first major overseas commission for a Chinese firm - a condo complex in Toronto, then got copied in turn for the Docklands, and now adversely, will be copied back into China by a Western architect.

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/18611.jpg


Shanghai Center winning entry, 650m approved

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/sg-36G.jpg

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/1208550188.jpg

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/1208550206.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/1208550254.jpg


New Kerry Center
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/20080327_f23511ceaa0e01acadc2KbAA7B.jpg


Chongqing Sun Valley 450m

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/cq-08G.jpg


Shenzhen International Finance Centter 400m

http://bbs.home.news.cn/upfiles/02EC2360.002C

Century plaza, Chongqing

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c203/macpolo/200781520313476385.jpg

Chongqing Grand Theater

http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd5/z0rggg/go4G.jpg

Beijing Fanhai Twin Towers 505m

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r5/z0rgg/JiangbeiTwins.jpg

Guangzhou Television tower, 610m (over 2000ft):

http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/news_images/958_1_1000%20IBA-bv%20Guangzhou%201.jpg

http://adi.build.cn/project/20060007-01.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Hyperboloid_Shuckhov_Tower_in_Guangzhou_during_con struction.jpg/450px-Hyperboloid_Shuckhov_Tower_in_Guangzhou_during_con struction.jpg











...and the rejected designs :(








http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd5/z0rggg/jyt1G.jpg


http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/sg-21G.jpg

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/sg-23G.jpg

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/sg-33G.jpg

thank f*ck!
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/sg-35G.jpg

nasty
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/sg-42G.gif

nice
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/gz-16G.jpg

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/nj-14G.jpg

[zupermaus]

on a different note, the pedestrianisation of China's city centres...

Shanghai:

Nanjing Road

http://www.chinatour.com/attraction/nanjing-road-shanghai-200751.jpg http://www.nancarrow-webdesk.com/warehouse/storage2/2007-w39/img.06906_t.jpg

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e306/Gabriel6677/Shanghai-NanjingRoad.jpg


http://www.chinaherald.net/uploaded_images/lothringer-788175.jpg

http://www.chinapictures.org/images/subway/1/shanghai-40416141123413.jpg http://www.tellthetruthtravel.com/images/China/Nanjing.jpg

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q49/zupermaus/China_Nanjing_Road1.jpg

http://www.gxtravel.com/ImageDB%2F2005%2F5%2FImgS-9444-%C9%CF%BA%A3%C4%CF%BE%A9%C2%B7.jpg http://cache.virtualtourist.com/446422-NanJinDongLu_Shanghai_CHINA-Shanghai.jpg

http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/places/images/lw/china_nanjing-road.jpg


Shanghai Old Town:

http://woollymammoths.org/Mark/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/shanghai_old_town_street.JPG

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q49/zupermaus/036ShanghaioldtownYuanBazaar1.jpg

http://beijing07.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/old-city-shanghai.jpg http://wuwf.org/china/oldtown.jpg

no car zone

http://julie.nomadlife.org/uploaded_images/CIMG7214-711800.JPG

Xintiandi:

http://www.theodora.com/wfb/photos/china/xintiandi_area_shanghai_china_photo_expo2010.jpg http://www.savagexi.com/photos/xintiandi.jpg

http://afxafx.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/xintiandi_cafes.jpg

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q49/zupermaus/xintiandialley.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c4/Xintiandi_gem.jpg

http://web.mit.edu/x_x/www/uploaded_images/CIMG0515-708076.JPG http://archrecord.construction.com/china/1_projects/images/Xintiandi-1.jpg


^vast areas of Shanghai are slated for the 'Xintiandi treatment', Hongkou's Jewish quarter and large areas of the French Concession is currently going that way, biggest of all is the showpiece Bund:

from this:
http://china.metcn8.com/album/bund-shanghai.jpg http://www.beifan.com/036bund/traffic01h.jpg

to more of this:

http://www.destination360.com/asia/china/images/s/china-the-bund.jpg http://www.khulsey.com/travel/shanghai_the_bund_1.jpeg

http://mjbryan.com/FosbergD/pics/Shanghai%20007.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Taichi_shanghai_bund_2005.jpg

http://www.gulker.com/photos/2005/bund_national_day.jpg

[zupermaus]

the largest airport in the world (as in future capacity) has been completed, Beijing Capital:

Designs of the worlds largest building.
It took 4 years to build
:

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_airport_fostersoct07_nigelyoung01.jpg


http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_airport_fostersoct07_nigelyoung27.jpg

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_airport_fosters_oct07_3.jpg

terminal 3
http://www.fosterandpartners.com/content/projects/1235/53009.jpg

http://www.lightingdirectory.com/news/images/main/thorn011106_2.jpg

[zupermaus]

Beijing Opera House also complete, the worlds largest performing arts centre:

overview
http://www.paul-andreu.com/images_nb/094b.jpg

http://arxxiduc.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/beijing_andreu.jpg


http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/news/gallery/2007/sep/25/internationalnews/GD4776381@A-night-view-shows-th-9596.jpg http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2087/2064888058_d7ab062e58.jpg




http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/gallery/2007/sep/25/internationalnews2?picture=330811383


http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/gallery/2007/sep/25/internationalnews2?picture=330811383

[zupermaus]

Good Design, Good Business in China

Architects and businesspeople often seem to speak different languages. Architects love to talk about space, light, and "transcending morphology." Businesspeople use phrases like "return on investment" and "risk management."

The goal of the BusinessWeek/Architectural Record Awards is to create a dialogue between these two worlds and honor examples of architects and their clients working together to further each other's goals. Two years ago we brought the awards to China on a biannual basis, believing the message "good design is good business" would find fertile ground here.

This year we honor 13 building and planning projects including a small house in Hong Kong, a new railway hub, an architect's studio in Shanghai, and Finance Street, an 860,000-square-meter, mixed-use development in Beijing.

Far and away the most awards were handed out in the Public category, to buildings that serve a community or unite a neighborhood. Many of these awards went to cultural institutions, such as the Dafen Art Museum in Shenzhen, which attracts tourists to a district already thronging with art-school graduates, and to I.M Pei's design for Suzhou Museum, which juxtaposes the ancient collection of precious ceramics, paintings, and jade with a stunningly elegant exterior. AREP Ville's design for the South Station in Shanghai features a huge, dramatic, flying-saucer shaped roof, which shelters the thousands of daily commuters. The roof's design is not merely about being aesthetically pleasing: its perforated panels filter and diffuse the sun's rays, spreading a soft glow around the waiting hall and reducing the need for electric lighting.

An Eye Toward Preservation
Environmentally sensitive principles are being applied in China too, and a few projects were recognized for their attempts to apply green design on a huge scale. Another transit hub, Sunny Bay Station in Hong Kong, takes advantage of sea breezes to cool the building. And architects Arup and Aedas designed the building to allow hot air to rise along a curved ceiling while cool breezes sink down to the boarding platforms and the waiting commuters. Plans for Chongming North Lake District, meanwhile, include the ambitious sustainable "eco-city" of Dongtan, along with a "green" highway linking the island with Shanghai and Jiangsu province.

As China goes through a period of enormous change, with growth and an astonishing surge in new building projects, the judges of the awards, including editors from both BusinessWeek and its sister publication, Architectural Record, were also keen to recognize preservation projects. The Shanghai office of Horizon Design occupies a building that was General Electric's (GE) first factory in Asia. The architects changed as little of the original industrial exterior as possible.

Two structures were created for the interior: a large glass box enclosing workstations and an elliptical conference room made of salvaged bricks. In an area undergoing a huge transformation, where entire neighborhoods are razed to make way for new development, this design was noteworthy for updating an original structure in an elegant and respectful manner.

Each of these projects highlights the kind of quality to which architects now working on the mainland aspire to attain


http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2008/id20080421_404170.htm


http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/2_dafen-art-museum.jpg

Dafen Art Museum
Location: Shenzhen
Architects: Urbanus Architecture & Design (Chinese)
Award: Public Project

The streets of this Shenzhen neighborhood are packed with studios where thousands of art-school graduates produce copies of old masterpieces. To upgrade the area and attract tourists, the government commissioned a museum to display their original works. The result is a stunning mixed-use arts center that responds to the museum's hillside location and the cultural setting of its urban environment. The museum's façade, meanwhile, is a stylized map of the village, which will eventually be painted by local artists, turning the gray concrete exterior into a colorful mural.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/3_liangzhu-culture-museum.jpg
Liangzhu Culture Museum
Location: Liangzhu
Architects: David Chipperfield Architects and the Architectural Design and Research Institute of Zhejiang University of Technology (collaboration between British and Chinese)

Award: Public Project

Set on a formerly contaminated industrial site near the town of Yuhang in Zhejiang province, the stone-clad Liangzhu Culture Museum provides a contemporary home for an ancient civilization. London architect David Chipperfield designed the 9,500-square-meter museum as a series of four rectangles, each 18 meters wide but of varied lengths and heights. Chipperfield placed five courtyards among the boxes to connect indoor galleries with outdoor rooms and to increase daylight. Wooden balustrades frame the courtyards and serve as benches where visitors can relax.




http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/4_suzhou-museum.jpg
Suzhou Museum
Location: Suzhou
Architects: I.M. Pei and Suzhou Institute of Architectural Design (Chinese)
Award: Public Project

Daunting restrictions defined this project. The city of Suzhou wanted a 14,000-square-meter museum, yet it couldn't be taller than 16m, and no higher than 6m in sections adjacent to existing historic buildings. The obvious solution to height limitations, which architect I.M. Pei had employed in his pyramid at Paris' Louvre, would be to sink the building into the earth. But Suzhou's high water table made that difficult. Ultimately, Pei split the difference: two stories above grade and one below, with a large area at ground level left as garden space. Inside, the octagonal great hall at the museum's entrance frames the garden while exhibition spaces sized to highlight the museum's collection of precious ceramics, paintings, jade, and wood carvings lie off passageways.




http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/5_shanghai-south-station.jpg
Shanghai South Station
Location: Shanghai
Architects: AREP Ville and East China Architectural Design & Research Institute/Shanghai Xian Dai Architectural Design (Collaboration French and Chinese)
Award: Public Project

Shanghai is a city that seems to be in constant motion, but until recently it lacked any central focus. That changed with the opening two years ago of South Station. With its shimmering circular roof and dramatic flying-saucer shape, it has created a hub for two metro lines, buses, and taxis, as well as trains. The station's roof is its most distinctive feature. Although it has a diameter of 255m, the roof appears to float, resting on 18 treelike pillars. It has three layers: metal sunshades on the outside, transparent polycarbonate sheeting in the middle, and perforated metal panels inside. The shades are angled to let in light during the winter but block the hot summer sun. The sheeting and perforated panels filter and diffuse the sun's rays, spreading soft light around the building's great waiting hall and reducing the need for electric illumination.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/6_sino-french-center.jpg
Sino-French Center
Location: Shanghai
Architects: Atelier Z+ (Chinese)
Award: Public Project

The new Sino-French Center of Tongji University needed to be woven into a dense fabric of existing buildings. The architects created what appears to be two buildings: one clad in naturally rusting steel, boasting a sharp profile; the other in cement panels with a flat roof. The rusting orange wing holds mostly college classrooms and lecture halls, while the gray-cement wing is mainly office space. The classroom portion, with its angled steel envelope, has a more dramatic personality than the gray-suited office section, as if to say the process of learning is the star here, while administration plays a supporting role.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/7_chongming.jpg
Chongming Channel and North Lake District
Location: Chongqi Channel
Architects: EDAW (British)
Award: Green

As Chongming Island faces increasing development pressure, architects and planners are intent on keeping it from turning into just another urban jungle. Over the past few years, the island—30km north of the city center at the mouth of the Yangtze River—has become a laboratory for new strategies in large-scale environmental planning. Programs include Dongtan, a sustainable "eco-city," and two major projects in the area that push the boundaries of environmental design, such as the "green" highway linking the island with Shanghai and Jiangsu province.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/8_sunny-bay-station.jpg
Location: Hong Kong
Architects: Arup and Aedas Limited (Chinese)
Award: Green

The Sunny Bay MTR (Mass Transit Railway) Station combines sophisticated engineering with nature to show how even infrastructure projects can stand as examples of sustainable design. The spiraling tent-like structure uses only one-third the energy typically needed in a station of its size. The site, nestled between the sea and the hills of Lantau Island, offered the opportunity to tap the cooling power of wind, so the architects designed a structure that is open at either end to capture breezes. Meanwhile, they oriented the structure in the direction of the winds and calculated its curvature to optimize air movement, allowing hot air to rise along the curved ceiling while cool breezes sink to the boarding platforms.







http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/9_horizon_design.jpg
Shanghai Office of Horizon Design
Location: Shanghai
Architects: J.J. Pan & Partners (Chinese)
Award: Preservation

This building, General Electric's first factory in Asia when it opened in 1921, later served as a Japanese arsenal. When U.S.-trained Taiwanese architect Joshua Pan began to convert the building into offices for his design firm, he wanted to retain the building's character. So Pan and his team changed the exterior as little as possible, even maintaining chipped surfaces and old paint. Inside, Pan inserted two structures: a large glass box enclosing the workstations and an elliptical conference room made of salvaged bricks. Throughout the interior, the roughness of the original finishes is offset with glass and steel.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/10_vanke-experience-center.jpg
Vanke Experience Center
Location: Shenzhen
Architects: Urbanus Architecture & Design (Chinese)
Award: Interior

For Vanke, one of China's largest real estate developers, Urbanus designed a curvaceous, three-story exhibition structure. The project's lightweight design serves as a counterpoint to the heavy concrete structure—Vanke's architecture research center—in which it's housed. A floating pavilion doesn't crowd the atrium and lets light and air circulate. A lattice of angled steel columns and rods carries most of the structural load, while aluminum mesh panels allow the spaces inside to breathe. Because there are no partitions inside the bubble, the Experience Center feels like one continuous space spread out over three levels. Its fluid form and see-through skin prevent claustrophobia and inject a sense of playfulness inside the more serious concrete research center.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/11_beijing-finance-street.jpg
Beijing Finance Street
Location: Beijing
Architects: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (US group)
Award: Planning

As Beijing has boomed over the past decade, the city surged rapidly skyward, but little has been done to create inviting outdoor spaces for strolling, shopping, or relaxing at street level. Beijing Finance Street is intended to make up for that and to become a neighborhood that stays active day and night. The mixed-use development features offices, hotels, shops, and apartments, all gathered around a curving central park with a series of smaller gardens and courtyards tucked into the buildings. Three levels of parking sit beneath the 18 buildings and are all linked underground so cars and trucks can move below the street—and out of the way of pedestrians.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/12_dutch-ambassador_s-house.jpg
Dutch Ambassador's Residence
Location: Beijing
Architects: Dirk Jan Postel/Kraaijvanger Urbis, Universal Architecture Studio, Royal Haskoning (Dutch)
Award: Residential

Made of strips of black Mongolian stone, the entry façade to the new Beijing residence of the Dutch ambassador runs the entire length of the single-story house and extends beyond it, presenting a monolithic barrier to passersby. Except for a cantilevered roof hovering above the entry wall, the house and its spacious rear garden disappear behind the stone. But if the home's front elevation only hints at exposure, the opposite side sings its praises. A floor-to-ceiling glass façade beneath the sweeping cantilevered roof offers visitors an immediate and almost unobstructed view of the large rear garden. From the outside, the house becomes a luminous glass box.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/13_southside-house.jpg
Southside House
Location: Hong Kong
Architects: Chang Bene Design (Chinese)
Award: Residential

Here, the architect's client, a Hong Kong businessman, didn't want to increase the size of his 350-square-meter home, but he sought a space where he could hold informal meetings and entertain clients with an outdoor pool and patio. The original two-story building sat above a carport and a small ground floor divided into cramped rooms. The architects enclosed the carport and broke through its ceiling to create a two-story room that looks out over a new lap pool outside. The ground floor works as one large entertaining area, with the living room, an open kitchen, and dining deck all flowing into one another. A library mezzanine overlooks the living room, and on the top level three bedrooms were converted into a single master suite.



http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0418_bwar_awards/image/14_ningbo.jpg
Ningbo Eastern New City Economical Housing
New City Economical Housing
Location: Ningbo
Architects: DC Alliance and the China Ningbo Housing Design Institute (Chinese)
Award: Residential

In the port city of Ningbo, local officials in 2004 commissioned a community for 11,000 displaced farmers. The 20-hectare development consists of 68 towers, and apartments range from 55 to 150 square meters and have between one and four bedrooms. They all have balconies, which provide outdoor space and act as sunshades to cool interiors in the hot and humid summers. The center of the development is a large, semicircular plaza with a community center, a supermarket, a small department store, and entertainment rooms where residents can play mah-jongg and chess. Other features include a large underground parking garage and grocery stores. The architects are now working on a second project for an additional 10,000 residents.

[Zephyr]

You have been a busy bee in passing this along zupermaus.

I am familiar with most of it, but when it pours out in front of you, en masse, you have to be humbled by the scale of it all. There is much flash and creativity in it as well.

I am still reminded of Rem Koolhaas' controversial statements about the source of much of this creativity being outside China, and the recent developments regarding the Olympics, all tempering my reactions.

But it is what it is ... simply overwhelming.

[zupermaus]

Pearl River Bridges, Guangzhou:

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20071003_ed983aa8d3d2158720d2XqkMZbXY3MTB.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20071003_993bfa1ebd46eb778e5fJiPqtX0B1iEw.jpg

another one

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20070922_668ba82c47e9c634c66fFhco7jEqkNP5.jpg


Liede Bridge:

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20071006_a291fdbde87a99d7c5be8bx9eQja10ZB.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20071006_ae60a62260aca024f9079QDz771oRCZX.jpg


more Guangzhou:

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/JiMzMjQzNzsmIw==_DEu8xlnl3Glu.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20071021_ab951fe2bbb2470da304StHpESggojSR.jpg


http://photo5.yupoo.com/20071028/170528_1483623564_syqtftcz.jpg

W Hotel

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20070914_7b0142881c2d7e4d0fdaaxKkO4AzsFId.jpg


http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20070914_22a8e42badf152dd1bd2rIobykwx29tP.jpg


Luoxi Gardens
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v188/cityx/Architecture/LuoXi2.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v188/cityx/Architecture/LuoXi1.jpg

Guangdong Museum

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v188/cityx/Architecture/GuangdongMuseum1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v188/cityx/Architecture/GuangdongMuseum2.jpg

Guangzhou Opera House:

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/hadid/guangzhou/1guangzhou.jpg http://www.arcspace.com/architects/hadid/guangzhou/3guangzhou.jpg

http://www.infoservi.it/public/Zaha_Hadid_Interior.jpg http://www.infoservi.it/public/Zaha_Hadid.jpg

http://www.concierge.com/images/ideas/starchitecture_2007/ideas_starchitecture_015p.jpg http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/guangzhou-opera-house-02.jpg

Guangzhou twin Towers

http://www.guards-formation.com/uploads/news/images/Guangzhou%20Twin%20Towers.jpg

http://img395.imageshack.us/img395/3751/guangzhoutwintowers0024pi.jpg

Guangzhou West Tower close up, 1438ft, 438m

http://img290.imageshack.us/img290/6500/proposaleight26mo6ac.jpg

Leatop Plaza 302m final design

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/gz-29G.jpg

Park Hyatt 305m under construction

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/update%20supertalls/gz-a8g.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/update%20supertalls/gz-a7g.jpg

Pearl River Tower under construction, 309m

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/gz-38G.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/gz-44G.jpg

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/gz-39G.jpg

B210 Plot Tower 338m approved (very thin plot)

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/update%20supertalls/gz-a6g.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/update%20supertalls/gz-a1g.jpg

The Pinnacle 360m, under construction

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/gz-01G.jpg

[zupermaus]

Sino-Singapore committee approves Tianjin eco-city draft master plan [/size][/b]


2008-04-08

SINGAPORE, April 8 (Xinhua) -- The Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city Joint Working Committee approved Tuesday the draft master plan submitted by the combined team from both countries.

The committee, co-chaired by Singapore's National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan and China's Vice-Minister for Housing and Rural-Urban Construction Qiu Baoxing, gave the go-ahead to the proposal.

And the proposal will be released by the Tianjin government for public consultation in mid-April.

The plan incorporates natural existing conditions of the site, such as wetlands and rivers. It will also include a mix of commercial, residential and business park developments.

The proposed city will also have a comprehensive public transport network that features an LRT line, buses and extensive cycling and foot paths.

Buildings will be erected using environmentally-safe standards and the use of renewable energy will also be promoted.

The eco-city is another cooperation project announced by both countries' leaders last November when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited Singapore, following the construction of the Suzhou Industrial Park in eastern Jiangsu Province.

The eco-city will serve as a model for sustainable development for other Chinese cities. It can attract about 1.5 million people to work and live in.


http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-04/08/content_7942589.htm

[zupermaus]

Ziwei Mall
Xi'an - China

Design Completion: 2003
Building Area :
- Total, 5 000,000m2
- Retail, 3 000,000m2
- Residential, 2 000,000m2
Architect: Aedas Architects (http://www.aedas.com/)

This large project combines three fundamentally different retail experiences into an overall master plan complimented by a residential population. The retail components are: Home store and furniture market, “Standard” retail shopping mall with entertainment/ food and beverage, and an exterior shopping street. The project also has a mid-sized exhibition area with supporting hotel and business center.

The site is located at the intersection of two large city arteries. The positioning of the retail focuses out toward this corner to try and maximize visibility and frontage for the retailers. Equally important to the success of this project was for the different retailing components ability to leverage the audience from the complimenting retail. The shopping street becomes this “glue” which ties the project together with flow being continuous and uninterrupted throughout the site. Intermixed with this is a contemporary notion of mixed use residential dwellings which help this development achieve a 24 hour, 365 day year cycle which provides a mutually beneficial relationship to both retailer and resident.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v188/cityx/Architecture/ZiweiMall1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v188/cityx/Architecture/ZiweiMall2.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v188/cityx/Architecture/ZiweiMall3.jpg

[Zephyr]

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/gz-16G.jpg


I have seen twisting towers such as these repeatedly fail dynamic load tests, and have a tendency of generating excessive turbulence at street level - but there are these days, innovative bracing techniques to balance that out and make them possible. With more severely twisted towers on the horizon, compounded by irregular shapes (such as those proposed for Milan), these Chinese towers may seem tame by comparison.

[zupermaus]

those are in the rejected designs section of my first post. Theyre not going to get built, another design was chosen.

[zupermaus]

Tianjin Xiabailuo district

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/Hexi2.jpg

More Tianjin

OTC Plaza

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/OTCSecuritiesPlaza2.jpg


Hebei District plan

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/Hebei1.jpg

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others/Hebei2.jpg


China 117 Tower under construction, 570m:

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-01G.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/update%20supertalls/tj-a18g.jpg


Nanjing Road tower 550m, this is the 1st design so will probably change

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-25G.jpg


Yanzhao Building 378m, once again an initial design:

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-24G.jpg

Sino Steel tower, 358m under construction:

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-23G.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-21G.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-20G.jpg

Tianjin Teda, approved winning design:

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-18G.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-19G.jpg

Jin Tower, 337m under construction

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-27G.jpg http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/tj-28G.jpg

Hongqiao district masterplan massings proposal:

http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/update%20supertalls/tj-a8g.jpg





Changchun
Shimao city plan, groundbreaking was a few months ago

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20080421_51a929da252261f6ac03WKHsl47P4O7T.jpg