A new generation of master builders is creating a modern metropolis on top of an ancient framework, writes Clifford Coonan.
In the 14th century, Chinese master builders constructed the imperial city of Beijing on cosmological principles, centred on an axis around the Forbidden City, with the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of the Sun as key points, a metropolis laden with symbolic meaning. Clustered around the imperial core were the hutongs, the warren of laneways composed of siheyuan, the old walled courtyards where the people of the northern capital lived.
Now the world's brightest and boldest avant-garde architects, including titans such as Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Zaha Hadid and Paul Andreu, are transforming Beijing ahead of the Olympic Games in 2008.
This new generation of master builders is imposing a modern high-rise metropolis of glass, steel, concrete and titanium on the old grid of the imperial city.
Beijing, a city of 14 million people, and the administrative centre for a country of 1.3 billion, is seeing the kind of construction that normally happens only after a war.
Marco Polo said of medieval Beijing that there was "so great a number of houses and people, no man could tell the number". The Italian traveller should take a look in four years' time when the 19 projects that make up the Olympics plan are finished. This is not mere cosmetic surgery; this is regeneration at a cost of around €60 billion.
"Experiment is the character of China today - from the economic system to the political system to the way of living, the way of doing business, everything is happening for the first time. And that spirit is carried out into the urbanisation process," says Zhang Xin, a Beijing native who grew up in Hong Kong and London.
Zhang's company SOHO China is considered one of Asia's most progressive developers. She recently gave British-born Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid one million square metres to create a futuristic swarm of residential blocks, although construction has been put on hold because of re-planning in the area. Zhang also commissioned top Australian architect Peter Davidson to build a new project called SOHO Shang Du. Speaking in the group's headquarters in a newly built precinct of white towers in the central business district, Zhang says Beijing is the only Asian city using so many avant-garde architects. "The top avant-garde architects are working in Beijing and their work will represent a different quality of city outlook," she says.
PROBABLY THE MOST controversial architect working in Beijing at the moment is Rem Koolhaas, a design renegade famed for his punk rock sensibilities. Koolhaas's office, OMA, is building one of the biggest buildings in the world for Chinese state television CCTV, which will be one of the truly magical buildings of the Beijing construction boom. The budget is €600 million, though some analysts say it could end up costing nearly €1 billion, which would also make it one of the world's most expensive buildings.
Ole Scheeren is the OMA partner who is in charge of the CCTV project. "It's one of the biggest buildings in the world," says the young German-born architect in an interview in the imposing Beijing Hotel, not far from Tiananmen Square. He talks animatedly about why it was vital OMA did not build yet another skyscraper in Beijing. "Skyscrapers have become an entirely commercial typology, where a little piece of land with a high value is repeated as often as possible to maximise the profit. It's then combined with this striving to be the tallest as the ultimate goal. But you can only win for a certain length of time because then someone is going to be taller than you."
The CCTV building has been called a "twisted doughnut"; a 1980s-styled, brightly coloured letter Z-shaped, 230-metre high construction, a continuous loop without right angles. A companion structure next door is shaped like a big boot and will provide more than half a million square metres of studios, offices, exhibition space and a hotel. Work finally started on the building last month. There had been talk that the government had balked at giving the go-ahead because of the scale and cost of the project.
The influential journal Building Design recently published a list of the top five power brokers in world architecture and four of them are involved in building in Beijing. Chinese President Hu Jintao made the list with his "unrivalled power to hire the best architects on the biggest and boldest projects available anywhere". Also among the movers and shakers are Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss-based duo best-known for London's Tate Modern gallery, who are building the iconic Olympic stadium.
"The stadium's appearance is pure structure. Facade and structure are identical. The structural elements converge into a grid-like formation - almost like a bird's nest with its interwoven twigs," is how the architects describe their €400 million stadium. This description has struck a chord with Beijingers, who refer to it as such. The stadium is grey outside, inspired by the grey of Beijing courtyards, and red inside. With the government keen to be seen controlling the overheating economy, the builders were told to cut the costs of the project, which meant a sliding roof was erased from the original design.
Sir Norman Foster will do for Beijing's airport what he did for Berlin's Reichstag when he builds a second terminal there, modelled on the mythical Chinese dragon, with a shining red body and yellow-green tail.
Frenchman Paul Andreu's contentious National Theatre has been dubbed variously as the "duck egg" or the "eggshell", which lies diagonally opposite the Forbidden City on Tiananmen Square. The theatre will cover almost 119,000 square metres. Its shell is of titanium and glass and will be lit with differently coloured lights at different times of day. It came in for criticism after Andreu's terminal building at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris collapsed in May, killing four people including two Chinese travellers.
Transforming Beijing is a test of endurance worthy of the Olympic Games themselves, as hundreds of thousands of residents are relocated while their houses along the traditional hutong alleyways are destroyed.
The introduction of so many foreign architects has unsettled some local architects, who feel that much of what is intrinsically Chinese about the city will be lost as developers seek to make a quick buck.
Zhou Rong, who teaches at Tsinghua University, says a sense of perspective is important. "Cities are very like human beings. Would you be prepared to give up all your memories as the price for driving a Mercedes-Benz? Probably not. So why do we allow this happen to our city?" says Zhou.
"Some of what's happening on these sites cuts off the city's memory. Beijing is losing its cultural and historical sense. Its Chinese characteristics are lost," says Zhou. "Going by the rate at which Beijing is losing its hutongs - around 900 a year - there will be hardly any left by 2008. If Beijing keeps developing at this speed, it will become an extremely flat city with no sense of historical depth."
OTHERS COMPLAIN THAT the rush of foreign architects has turned the capital city into some kind of testing site for weird, expensive designs. However, many home-grown architects, groomed in the Beaux-Arts and Soviet styles commonly taught in architecture schools, are not yet ready to take on some of the tougher agendas of contemporary architecture.
And domestic architects have been slow to rise to the aesthetic challenge as the city grows. Most of the buildings thrown up since the economy started to boom have been terribly dull - skyscrapers erected seemingly at random in the Central Business District or clumpy, square office blocks with fake traditional Chinese-style roofs perched on top, producing a skyline that looks slipshod and haphazard.
At a recent gathering of international architects in Beijing, Paul Andreu said the new architecture was constructive to the change of the cityscape, and most importantly, in harmony with the surrounding environment. "I don't see it as bizarre," he said.
It looks increasingly as if those in favour of the skyscrapers have won the argument over whether Beijing should be a high-rise city. The great Chinese-born architect, I. M. Pei, on a visit to Beijing a few years back, bemoaned the quest to build ever higher. "I said long ago, you should be able to look out over the walls of the Forbidden City and see nothing but blue sky. Of course, now it's grey sky. But you see sky."