An Architectural Dream World

Beijing and Shanghai, like other Chinese urban centers, have been undergoing phenomenally rapid change, As their populations swell (Beijing has more than 11 million inhabitants; Shanghai, more than 13 million), government incentives continue to provide unprecedented opportunities for developers and architects from around the world.

Many areas of both cities have changed beyond recognition. It's tempting to regard these new urban landscapes simply as chaotic places that reflect the worst of imported Western city planning: relentless sprawl, choked highways and the disappearance of history, culture and community.

As the British architect Richard Rogers, whose prize-winning urban scheme for Pudong was turned down by Shanghai officials, wrote in his 1997 book,"Cities for a Small Planet" "Unless the government of China commits itself to planning for sustainable cities, it will soon be faced with massive congestion, pollution and social dissatisfaction on an even larger scale than is endemic to the cities it is using as role models.

"

Yet in terms of design, Shanghai and Beijing are starting to embrace the good-not just the bad and the ugly. Shanghai's passion for tall buildings is essential to sustaining its booming population efficiently(with 2,000 people per square kilometer, it's a much denser city than Beijing).

Among the global talents who've been drawn to China, architects Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) of New York have designed what may become the world's tallest building there: the striking World Financial Center in Pudong will top out at 460 meters in 2008. It will just tower over the Jin Mao skyscraper, currently the highest in China, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Also going up is a 43story office building designed by New York architect Li Chung (Sandi) Pei, son of I. M,.Pei--which will include a small promenade with the shade of trees, something sorely needed in Pudong. And Beijing officials, mindful of the global spotlight that will be turned on their city with the 2008 Olympics, are in the midst of a massive building effort that will likely cost more than $20 billion.

"The Olympics will really be a new engine for the city," says one official, citing the push to build infrastructure and clean up pollution--as well as a new openness to the international community. Several key commissions have gone to avant-garde European architects.

Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands has created a stunning scheme for the $600 million broadcasting headquarters of CCTV: a511,000-square-meter structure in the form of a continuous loop with a huge opening in the middle. His fellow Pritzker prize winners Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland won the competition for the $500 million main Olympic stadium, with a design that looks like a gigantic bird's nest.

"It's an architect's dream to work in China," says Zhang Xin, CEO of SOHO China, one of the most progressive developers in the country. "Nowhere else offers the scale that Chinese cities do."

Not that all trendy foreign designs are met with enthusiasm. French architect Paul Andreu's futuristic scheme for the National Opera near Tiananmen Square-featuring a titanium-and-glass dome that appears to float on water-has been so controversial that construction screeched to a halt in July 2000 after 150 local architects and engineers petitioned for revisions to the design.

After some modifications, building has resumed. "It's a novel and ingenious design," proclaimed the committee that chose the scheme, "It's a piece of s--t," says U.S.trained architect Alfred Peng, who teaches at Qinghua University.

DESPITE THE COMPLAINT that government officials are infatuated with whatever is new and flashy, it's clear that exposure to global architecture and ideas is slowly creating a more sophisticated design culture in china .Chang Qing,46,chairman Shanghai, recalls his student days in the late 70s: "We didn't have any outside contact with the rest of the world." Now he hosts frequent exchanges with architects from Europe and the United States. As recently as five years ago, young Chinese architects relied on foreign magazines and books to churn out cheap copies of Western high-rises-often topping them with ridiculous roofs like conical hats or pagodas. (To be fair, their counterparts in the West were guilty of equally ugly postmodern towers.) But now, many more designers from China are studying abroad or working at leading international firms. "Architecture is improving because there's more competition," maintains Venezuelan architect Antonio Ochoa, who's lived and worked in Beijing for 10 years. "You see the excitement now in magazines, on TV and on the Internet. People are discussing architecture, and this is a good sign."
A homegrown talent pool is emerging. "When you consider where they've come from in just the last five years, there's such a level of sophistication," says William Pedersen, a partner in KPF. Outside Beijing an upscale housing complex called Commune by the Wall is showcasing the gifts of young Asian architects, including two from China and one from Hong Kong. The dozen villas, each wildly varied in materials and plan, were included in last year's Venice Biennale."We wanted to project the best to the world scene," says developer Zhang, "and to make Chinese think about the importance of architecture."

But while examples of good design increase, the battle over planning and historical preservation rages. In Shanghai, 50 percent of the building stock the existed in 1949 has been razed-including at least 39 structures supposedly on a government list of protected buildings, according to Tess Johnston, an American expat who's been documenting disappearing colonial structures. "All historic buildings are in good locations "in shanghai", so the value of the land is very high," notes Tongji University's Chang. Critics fear shanghai will become as bereft of historic architecture as Hong Kong or Singapore. Yet there are glimmers of hope. The old colonial buildings of the Bund-which was first threatened with demolition during the Cultural Revolution-are now likely to be cleaned up, not destroyed further.

Though many locals are happy to move out of dilapidated houses into fresh, modern apartments, a handful balk. This summer in Shanghai, 100 people staged a protest over plans to relocate them. In Beijing, where the old brick courtyard houses rarely have indoor plumbing , most residents may want modern apartments, too-but not necessarily on the fringes of the city , where they tend to be placed.

And for many people, the loss of the courtyard housed is a blow to the essence of Chinese culture. Writer Zha Jianying quotes a friend who sadly said, "Modern Beijing is a city where it's impossible to find a spot to hang one's bird cage." But now some old neighborhoods of hutongs are slated for preservation, and a few pieces of the imperial city wall, destroyed in the 1950s, have been excavated and restored.

POCKETS OF PRESERVATION, of course, can't stop the tidal wave of redevelopment and new infrastructure--oceans of concrete fashioned into new highways, subways, light rail, overpasses, bridges and airports in both Beijing and Shanghai. But what could shift the direction of these cities--if more inventive urban designers hold sway-is future planning.

The Pudong model-whose strict rules require that high-rises be surrounded by green, rising in neat rows "like the candles on a cake," as architect E.C. Liu puts it--is based on once visionary ideas that are now nearly a century old. The place recalls Le Corbusier's Contemporary City, and in its immensity and coldness, it's a failure in human terms.

Officials have encouraged the construction of offices over residential towers, so much of the place dies with the daylight. Even office workers don't flock to the huge Superbrand Mall, a glittering ghost town of shops where the salesclerks outnumber the customers.

But in other parts of Shanghai, "mixed use" neighborhoods keep humming 24/7 with restaurants, apartments, clubs, shops and offices all intermingling. In the newly developing Central Business District of Beijing, plans call for correcting the mistakes made in redeveloping other parts of the city, according to SOHO China's Zhang.

"People love density," she says. "With the CBD, they're trying to create an area where you can walk around," Still, the enemy of urbanity in China, as it is every where else in the world, is the automobile. In many parts of Beijing the roads have been widened to inhuman scale, the charming old bicycle paths often obliterated.

In Shanghai there are 1.5 million registered cars, and 580 kilometers of new highways to be unrolled by 2005, Even SARS led more people to buy cars as they grew wary of public transit. Still, if everyone had a car in Shanghai, the city would come to a dead stop. "Shanghai needs to convince people they don't need an automobile to achieve the greater good," says architect Steven Townsend, a director of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Asia.

Achievement and working toward the greater good are qualities in high supply in China. And it is those qualities that some believe could change the future of China's cities. Koolhaas sees a great potential for ingenuity urban design, going beyond 20th-century Western models.

"What I sense as an important issue is the quality and nature of the city," he says. "I think there is vastly more awareness and consciousness . It's a really interesting tipping point." To Pedersen of KPF, the potential talent in China is just beginning to be unleashed in the cities.

"One can only imagine what's going to happen in China, when this whole creative energy of these amazingly entrepreneurial people is liberated," he says. "This energy is going to find its expression, obviously, in the arts and in architecture," To what extent the emerging generation of designers and thinkers can alter the course of rampant development isn't yet clear, but the opportunity to create a new kind of city is as great in China today as anywhere else on earth.