Soaring Ambitions
	The world's most visionary architects are rebuilding China. Inside the aesthetic revolution
	By Susan Jakes Beijing

	MARK LEONG/REDUX FOR TIME STREET SMART: Designers Ole Scheeren and Rem Koolhaas have a vision for Beijing

Posted Monday, April 26, 2004; 21:00 HKT
Nothing less than the most novel building in Beijing would do. Zhang Yongduo, an entrepreneur from the coastal Chinese province of Shandong, had made a fortune in a business that improbably paired spas with seafood restaurants. Now he was extending his chain to the capital, and he wanted a landmark to announce his arrival. Zhang didn't know much about design, so he hired a young U.S.-trained Chinese architect to serve as headhunter, instructing him to find a big name with a big vision. That's how in the spring of 2003 Zhang came to meet Raimund Abraham—one of architecture's great iconoclasts and a man whose designs are so radical that most exist only in the pages of a book titled {un}-Built.

Zhang gave the ponytailed 70-year-old New Yorker few instructions. The building would need to accommodate several restaurants, two bathhouses, an art gallery, offices and a massage salon. Zhang said the design should evoke the sea and that it should be "the most radical building in Beijing." A couple of days after their first meeting, Abraham produced a sketch—a meditation on the ocean's violent power in the form of a 12-story block gouged like a cliff at the edge of a raging sea. Zhang was dumbfounded. But after Abraham explained the idea behind the forbidding façade, the client grinned. Construction is set to begin in central Beijing later this year. "There's no way I could get a design like this built in America," Abraham says. "But in China, one starts to feel that anything is possible."

When it is completed next year, Abraham's ode to the oceanic will certainly turn heads. But for the title of "most radical," it will have plenty of competition. China's construction boom has attracted many of the world's finest architects, and amid the hurly-burly of the country's breakneck development they have found a place to realize their most daring visions. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss team responsible for London's Tate Modern, have broken ground on an ingeniously intricate stadium for Beijing's 2008 Olympics. Frenchman Paul Andreu's new Beijing opera house—a titanium-and-glass dome that will repose in a square reflecting pool like a phosphorescent jellyfish—is already starting to bulge alongside Tiananmen Square. Zaha Hadid's signature sensuous curves will gird Guangzhou's new theater complex. Michael Graves has given a makeover to a bank on Shanghai's Bund. Norman Foster is at work revamping Beijing's airport. And Rem Koolhaas' Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture has designed a new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) that promises to be one of the world's largest and most technically complex buildings.

Architecture thrives in societies on the make, and there is no place on earth right now with ambitions the size of China's. Decades of enforced architectural monotony under communism have left the country with few contemporary landmarks, a shortage of visionary designers and an explosive, pent-up demand for buildings grand enough to embody the nation's aspirations. Its cities are expanding fast: 6.09 billion sq m of new buildings were constructed between 1999 and 2002 alone, nearly doubling the country's total built floor space. Add to this a lack of modern urban-design conventions and a vast pool of cheap construction labor, and it's not difficult to understand why so many architects consider China, as Iraqi-born Hadid puts it, "an incredible empty canvas for innovation." Or why Christopher Choa, who came to Shanghai two years ago to head the local office of New York City-based firm HLW, says building in China is "like growing weeds. In my short time here, I've built four skyscrapers and designed millions of square feet of urban landscape. In New York, I'd have been happy to do as much in my entire career."

The concept of the architect as inventor arrived relatively late in China. Until the 1920s when Chinese trained overseas began to return home, the Chinese language didn't even have a word for architecture. Traditionally, the country's builders hewed closely to precepts laid out in a philosophical treatise on construction that dated back to the 12th century. With the ascension of the Communist Party in 1949, building became an outlet for ideology, and individual artistry came to be seen as a dangerous form of bourgeois decadence. Even after constraints had loosened, in the 1990s, architects in Beijing were required to top every new skyscraper with a traditional tiled rooftop. But now, as China gropes for a new national identity, the one common trope that runs through its multitude of recent buildings is an obsession with the idea of newness itself. "Clients here don't know what they want," says Zhang Gong, a Chinese architect who recently returned to the mainland after 10 years working in New York City and Paris. "They're looking for something really odd, something to express newness. So they ask the architect to give them the idea."

The results range from the truly novel to the merely (or disastrously) newfangled. In China, "you're seeing things that no one in their right mind would build elsewhere," says Anthony Fieldman, an American architect recently posted to the Hong Kong office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It's hard to imagine a city outside the mainland that would have commissioned the $543 million Wukesong Cultural Center—an overreaching behemoth of a basketball stadium that is also a hotel, a shopping mall and a 10-story TV screen. It's part of Beijing's Olympic buildup, but no one is quite sure how it will be used after the Games are over. Likewise, Shanghai's much-vaunted Pudong skyline, with its gaggle of futuristic skyscrapers, might look good on a postcard, but it functions better as a symbol than as part of a real city—its arid streets are almost devoid of human activity. "Architecture in China has become like a kung fu film, with all of these giants trying to vanquish each other," says Wang Lu, editor of Beijing-based World Architecture magazine.

1 | 2 | 3 | Next

	Triumphal Arch [Feb. 03, 2004] Shanghai's hottest new bar is the focal point for the city's most discerning style aficionados Linglei Like Me [Jan. 26, 2004] China's mainstream absorbs the counterculture as advertising caters to the young and restless Tomorrowland [Aug. 04, 2004] Japanese Tycoon Minoru Mori wnts to make Tokyo a more livable city Appetite for Destruction [Feb. 26, 2001] A historic neighborhood—and architect I.M. Pei's family home—fall victim to Shanghai's building boom More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine