Beijing is a city in the grip of the most explosive bout of reconstruction that the world has ever seen, It is the capital of the world's fastest growing economy, and the focus of a titanic struggle between a totalitarian political system, and the liberalization that is the presumed product of its economic transformation.
That Beijing is now witnessing the arrival of the international architectural caravan that moves from boomtown to boomtown, form Tokyo to Dubai, is intimately connected with all three of these issues. In one week in September, Beijing saw Arata Isozaki, Zaha Hadid and Winy Maas come and go. Norman Foster is competing to build the city's new airport, Jacques Herzog is preparing for the start of construction of the Olympic stadium. Christian de Portzamparc is designing a new suburb. Riken Yamamoto is finishing a huge residential development. Clearly the city is preparing to move on form the generic anonymity that has so far characterized its tidal wave of construction.
China is the place that western architects visit either in search of work, or to indulge in disaster tourism, a place to come and gawp on the edge of the urban abyss of monstrous, uncontrollable growth. Rem Koolhaas has managed to combine the two, a conflation that threatens to put at risk his carefully developed stance of critical detachment.
"What should one make of famous architects competing to build a new HQ for Central China Television," asked the Anglo Dutch writer Ian Buruma in a London newspaper last year. "Unless one takes the view that all business with China is evil, there is nothing reprehensible about building an opera house in Beijing, or even a corporate headquarters", he mused. "But state TV is something else, CCTV is the voice of the party, the center of state propaganda, the organization which tells a billion people what to think", he said, pointing out the essential brutality of a regime that combines raw capitalism with an absolute prohibition of independent trade unions. "It's hard to imagine a cool European architect in the 1970s building a TV station for Pinochet", Buruma concluded.
Koolhaas claims that the 210m tall structure, with 550,000m2 of space he has designed for CCTV is "not a traditional tower, but a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical sections that establish an urban site rather than point to the sky".
For CCTV building a huge skyscraper that looks like nothing else in the world is the architectural equivalent of the Chinese space programme, a conspicuous symbol of success. But there is also a subtler message. Switch on CCTV and rather than the clumsy propaganda that you might expect, you get cool MTV style graphics. In the same way, a Koolhaas building is a highly visible demonstration that the Chinese state is no longer an out-of-touch culturally backward dinosaur.
Koolhaas has certainly made much more headway in Beijing than Albert Speer, son of Hitler's favourite designer who is hard at work lobbying the city authorities to take up his plan for a 24-kilometre long north-south axis for Beijing - with the Olympic stadium at one end, and a huge new railway station at the other. "What I always try to do is to find a politician who will take my plans, look at them, and say, "this is my idea", then it works", says Speer. It's a scheme that eclipses his father's work for Adolf Hitler and his axis for Berlin that would have been just 5 kilometers long, but also involved shuffling railway stations.
What nobody really understands yet is how the inscrutable set of rules that govern Beijing's starting transformation really work, which is what makes Speer with his neo-Haussmann approach seem so quaintly irrelevant.
The Today Gallery used to be the Beijing Beer factory's boilerhouse, a utilitarian brick and concrete structure from the 1960s, caught in a sweeping bend of the electrified tracks leading into the city's central railway station. Deftly transformed for its new purpose by the Beijing architect, Yung Ho Chang, it opened in September with Second Hand Reality, a group show by a dozen Chinese artists. Its main space is a four-storey-high void, a diminutive version of the Tate Modern's turbine hall. But Today's opening night was nothing like a Bankside private view, and Beijing is still nothing like a western city, despite the influx of Australian chefs, cigar bars and McDonald's. Just take a look at the kitchen hands chopping up trays of slippery grey poultry entrails on tables set up on the pavement outside the restaurant across the road. Once you negotiate the security team guarding Yung Ho's striking steel mesh entrance ramp, you are confronted by a screen showing a continuous loop of mute film showing the women of the people's liberation army, storming trenches, marching through the countryside, repelling the imperialist paper tiger.
It's a counterpoint to the evening's main event, a performance by four women artists dressed as nightclub dancers in colour-coded satin and sequins. Upstairs on the mezzanine level a twice life-size fiberglass representation of Chairman Mao is sleeping peacefully under a floral print quilt. "Is this irony?", I ask Zhang Xin, a 35-year-old property developer who won a Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale last year when she hired a dozen Asian architects - Young Ho among them - to design a villa each for a residential development aimed at China's new rich that she called the Great Wall Commune. Zhang Xin, who spent three years working on an assembly line in an electronics factory, before getting her degree at Cambridge, hesitates: "you know, the Mao years have left a mark on everything." Edging past the sleeping Mao, you open a door and are instantly hit by the acrid tang of cheap confectionary. Song Dong's installation, Eating the City, is a megalopolis made out of cakes and biscuits organized on two huge tables, spotlit like a billiard hall. There are wobbly towers of water fingers and swiss rolls, plazas of liquorice and chocolate.
Song Dong's cakes could the closest thing that you will find to a vision of what the city is going to be. There is a municipal planning commission, but the rules that it attempts to apply to urban development were formulated 40 years ago by soviet planners who wrote the density code based on their experiences of building workers flats in East Berlin. The necrophiliac grip of a long-dead system, is tempered only by the power of connections and corruption. Twenty-storey height limits mysteriously metamorphose to produce 30-storey buildings. Land ownership is rarely clear, even though, in theory the state retains freeholds and issues 70-year leases. The result is to make the most explosive burst of urban growth that the world has ever seen, into an utterly random, and unpredictable process, in which the state takes its lead from private developers, and the national bank finds itself without the power to tighten credit terms to stop a boom turning into a disastrous bust.
This year Beijing celebrates the 850th anniversary of its foundation as an imperial city constructed to guard China's northern frontiers. Built as a physical representation of the universe, for the first 800 years of its existence, it retained essentially the same character, the walled palace inner city, organized on a strict north-south axis, contained in a sea of courtyard houses, the hutongs with lanes too narrow for motor traffic, and rarely even the most rudimentary sanitation. Mao spent his first night in Beijing after the communist victory in 1949 in the forbidden city, with his Confucian texts at his bedside in conditions that his imperial predecessors would have recognized. And while Mao with the help of his Soviet ally attempted to turn the city into the center of a modern China, importing new industry, the city's imperial structure remained unchanged, Beijing hardly existed as a city. The party defined compounds for industry, for the universities, for the army, for the hospitals and for the embassies, and ensured that there was minimal communication between them. A big factory might accommodate as many as 10,000 people including workers' families, with housing, schools, and canteens, in a single, self-contained entity, and the families could spend all their lives within the perimeter wall. The city had no urban tradition in the western sense, people did not use the big streets created for ceremonial events. The scale was intolerable for pedestrians and offers a hint of what Hitler and Speer would have done to Berlin. There was no democratic space, no commercial area no restaurants even. After 9am the city seemed to shut down altogether, reduced, less than a decade ago, to medieval darkness.
The new Beijing has set out systematically to destroy both the old hutongs, and the monuments of communist transformation.
Powerstations and bankrupt engineering factories are being torn down for offices and luxury hotels. Thousands of houses have been demolished to create new business districts and apartment towers.
The second ring road, which marked the city limit up until the 1980s, has been followed by the construction of a third, a fourth and a fifth. The sixth is now underway. These concentric rings create a strangely disorientating sense of the city, cars move schlerotically around disconnected clumps of newly completed towers that leave the centre as empty as Detroit, like a dartboard with the void of the forbidden city as its bull's eye. A city that until 1990 had no central business district, and little need of it, now has a cluster of glass towers that look like the rejects from Omaha and Dubai.
Almost by accident, the area to the east of the city center, where the endless avenue that cuts across the city's primary north-south axis meets the second ring road is now the focus for a random sprouting of high-rise towers. This is where the embassies were built when the communists moved the diplomatic district out of harm's way, out of the city center.
When the opening to the outside would came, it was the obvious place for hotels and commercial towers to be built. The government tried to create a counterbalancing financial center on the western side of the city, demolishing thousands of courtyard houses to build the Bank of China, a collection of robot-like structures lined up on either side. Immediately to the west of Tiananmen Square thousands of courtyard houses have been flattened to allow for the building of the national opera house; the notorious glass egg designed by Paul Andreu, whose contribution to central Beijing's oppressive, wide-open prairie spaces is to flood the opera house's setting, surrounding it with water.
East and West Beijing are linked by a gigantic boulevard, where the few remaining landmarks that foreigners recognize, the Beijing Hotel, and the Friendship Department store linger on in the midst of a parade of brutish landmarks each gaudier than the last. The former Beijing car factory has been leveled for Koolhaas to build the new headquarters of CCTV.
Not far away sits what was the China No 1 Engineering factory, where 10,000 workers lived and toiled in the largest factory in Asia. The setting for the Gang of Four in their vain efforts to rally the Red Guard, the factory is being wiped out by Yamamoto's compelling grid of dazzling white skyscrapers. This is Zhang Xin of the Great Wall Commune's biggest project so far. Construction started in January 2001, the 900,000m2 residential project will be finished next year.
The bank mortgages that make it all possible did not exist in China until 1999. On the tour of the construction site, one of the team points out the slogan painted on one of the remaining low brick sheds that used to dominate the site "Long Live the Party". It's scheduled for demolition within the week. "No we can't preserve it, the zoning regulations mean that everything has to go."
Now the focus of demolition is shifting toward the Olympic area to the north. Its called a park, but if you hurry you can still what it really was. The "park" was a busy residential area until just a year ago, with little grey-walled houses, workshops and stores. The area has been cleared as effectively as the fire storms caused by allied bombing raids that gave Tokyo its post-war start.
Beijing is a city that is changing so fast that there is even a chance that it may manage to finesse the persistent grip of an ideology-free but still ruthless communist party. If that is true then Koolhaas is off Buruma's hook. If one is less optimistic, then Beijing's emerging crop of new landmarks will one day be reduced to the same status as Shanghai's Bund in 1949 with its crust of smart jazz-age art deco towers overwhelmed by the People's Liberation Army.
