Despite the widespread impression that there are gobs of dirt and barrels of toxic waste flying all over the People’s Republic of China, its government clearly sees hosting this year’s Olympics as crucial validation of the country and its regime, and is entrusting the Art of Architecture to distract our attention from its horrific environmental–not to mention human-rights–problems.
The main distractions for its debut are several fabulous and fabulously expensive architectural wonderments that only an authoritarian government could accomplish–it being important to keep in mind that projects like the Pyramids or the Palace at Versailles would not have come about by popular demand. Three new works in Beijing stand out–almost at that redefining level of achievement.
The National Theater is a giant sideways egg, big enough to envelop two Kennedy Centers. The French architect Paul Andreu designed the simple ovoid form to float illusionistically in a large square pond of water. The scale, minimalism, structural daring, and perfection of detail are jaw-dropping. So as not to disturb the visual serenity of this perfect image, mere humans enter the structure by descending into a funnel-shaped tunnel running under the pond, unfortunately somewhat like a large feeding slot. The size, simplicity, geometry, and hidden entrance call to mind the Pyramids.
In the Chinese anthropomorphic naming custom, the theater is called “the egg that ate Beijing” because, from some angles, it looks like the head of a not-particularly-friendly gargantuan whale rising from the water. It only recently opened so I have not experienced the acoustics in the curved, echo-creating envelope. Located a block from the massive Tiananmen Square and the extensive Forbidden City, it more than holds its own as a giant place of gravitas in the city.
The major venue for the Olympics is the new stadium, popularly known as “the bird’s nest.” In stadium design, structure is usually the prime expressive element and it is almost a cardinal rule that clarity and economy of structure lead to the best results. But the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron did what always leads to a breakthrough: They shattered that rule of structural economy championed by all the great engineers in the past and made so much redundant structure that it became an overall surface texture.
The composition is not unlike a huge stainless steel basket where every straw is a large bent steel beam. Steel beams and girders weave every which way. The result is a fresh, hugely creative take on an often conventionally rendered program. Compared to this thoroughly novel iconic design, most stadiums anywhere (particularly the new Nationals stadium in Washington) are last century. The “bird’s nest” has not only reconstrued stadium design; it is the kind of unique formal branding, like the Sydney Opera House, that guarantees worldwide recognition.
A few miles away is a building that has exceeded heretofore unimaginable engineering ambitions: It’s the CCTV Tower and is locally called “the dangerous building.” Before it signed on the for the job, Arup, the famous engineering firm, studied the project for months to determine whether it could even be built. The design, by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is a daring defiance of gravity, a deconstructivist design that looks like it is, indeed, going to deconstruct.
Structurally speaking: If you put a pole in the ground vertically there is no problem with it; but if you put the pole in at an angle, it wants to tip over. Now, if you put two poles in at different angles, and those poles have horizontal branches at their tops which shoot out and join in space, you have a potentially mischievous structure. At the CCTV Tower, those poles and branches are massive steel office structures containing multiple floors and weighing more than 100,000 tons.
When I visited the project, the angled towers were framed out and the shooting out into space had begun.
So precise were the calculations that the final welds joining the two horizontal branches at the farthest-out corner of the massive, unsupported building area could only occur at five in the morning, when the thermal conditions in the countless beams, columns, plates, and welds would be almost perfectly equal. The “dangerous building” is already a landmark in Beijing.
From the rooftop bar at the venerable Grand Hotel Beijing, overlooking the Forbidden City, visible in the distance was a gigantic dirt cloud, looking like a fixed cardboard cutout on a cheap theater set, behind which the setting sun would slip, like an old copper penny dropping in a slot. The Chinese government has tried to attack the choking air pollution of its capital city by planting millions of trees, which (on a clear day) make Beijing look like a huge park from the air. When that didn’t work, it began telling half the population it could only drive on alternate days. It also tried closing whole factories for periods of time. (The next step could be that nobody can drive, which is essentially what happens on the gridlocked streets and roads.)
Meanwhile, in Shanghai 20 years ago, I looked out from the Peace Hotel across the Huangpu River to Pudong and didn’t see a single light at night among the farms and small bungalows. Now, Pudong looks like a World’s Fair built for a race of giants. The fair imagery comes mostly from the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, which suggests a radioactively enlarged offspring of the Atomium, the theme building of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Swoopy shapes are everywhere and parts of buildings here and there replicate the forms of large spheres similar to the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.
Among all that pulsing architectural frivolity in Manhattan-sized Pudong sits a more serious effort, the 88-story Jin Mao Tower, completed in 1999, a many-layered stainless steel pagoda by the American architects SOM. This being a hotbed of height hubris, there was a brief shining moment in Jin Mao’s life when it was incorrectly touted as the tallest building in the world, surpassing the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, a much more successful design. (Now, making it seem like a peanut, the Shanghai World Financial Center, right next to it, will be 101 stories when completed, but in the game of heights, it will be surpassed by Dubai’s Burj tower.)
Chinese practicality and money sense show in the square floor plate of the new look-at-me skyscrapers, all of which curiously have such dissonantly wild tops that one has to wonder why. (Perhaps these upper accretions actually make some perverse sense, since the spread and low-lying pollution of Shanghai means the tops are mostly what is visible.) So, we have normal straight-up-and-down buildings, but with an incongruously ridiculous range of carnival tops: hula hoop tops; spinning tops; revolving lunchroom tops; pineapple-inspired tops; or just tops next to rocket shapes with what look like deployable multiple-reentry cones.
The aerospace reference is particularly powerful in the wrapping of an intrusive freeway over the Wu Jiao Plaza by artist Zhong Song in the Yangpu district. Picture it: a long oval structure which, lit at night, looks exactly like the interplanetary spacecraft from Close Encounters of the Third Kind–forever landing right in the middle of town. And in the muddle of the architectural zoo that is Pudong is a rare nod to urban design: a grand double-tree-lined boulevard called Century Avenue, a very welcome gesture to organize a portion of the new metropolis. There is also a sophisticated example of another Western quirk, historic preservation. In the Xintiandi district the American firm Wood + Zapata has restored a series of 1920s low-rise brick buildings into a popular commercial area of restaurants serving delicious mystery meat specialties and offering a compelling contrast to the screwball-topped high rises.
Improbably, the phantasmagorical architectural skyline that is Shanghai, and the architectural applause that is swelling internationally for Beijing, manage to come together as a balanced visual seesaw–and a seesaw worth seeing, or going to experience.
Arthur Cotton Moore, architect, planner, painter, and furniture designer, is the author of The Powers of Preservation.
