NEXT IN LINE
A few days ago I posted about a unique building going up in Beijing, the new CCTV tower designed by Rem Koolhas, with critical praise by Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker.
Today, the New York Times has a feature piece on the architectural renaissance going on all across China, lead in many cases by prominent architects from around the world. The piece also has a great picture of the Koolhas building in the context of the Beijing landscape around it (featured here).
The piece starts with a powerful introduction:
"If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it’s understandable. It’s not just the grandeur of the space. It’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust.
The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.
Designed by Norman Foster, Beijing’s glittering air terminal is joined by a remarkable list of other new monuments here: Paul Andreu’s egg-shaped National Theater; Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium, known as the bird’s nest; PTW’s National Aquatics Center, with its pillowy translucent exterior; and Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for the CCTV television authority, whose slanting, interconnected forms are among the most imaginative architectural feats in recent memory."
But the piece also offers the negative side of these dramatic architectural changes:
"Yet your sense of marvel at China’s transformation is easily deflated on the drive from the airport. A banal landscape of ugly new towers flanks both sides. Many of those towers are sealed off in gated compounds, a reflection of the widening disparity between affluent and poor. Although most of them were built in the run-up to the Olympics, the poor quality of construction makes them look decrepit and decades old.
It’s the flip side of China’s Modernist embrace: tabula rasa planning of the sort that also tainted the Modernist movement in Europe and the United States in the postwar years. China’s architectural experiment thus brims with both promise and misery. Everything, it seems, is possible here, from utopian triumphs of the imagination to soul-sapping expressions of a disregard for individual lives."
What struck me about these two paragraphs, is that one could probably have made the same societal observations about New York and London when they were going through their early periods of dramatic architectural changes, a hundred and two hundred years ago respectively, driven of course by the dramatic economic growth of the nations they represented.
The difference this time with what's going on in China is likely the scale and the pace, spread out across so many cities across China each with burgeoning millions in population.
But China is going through a time-honored phase of fast developing global nations. The architectural "monuments" are merely a way to keep score in the cycle.
Comments