Soaring Ambitions — page 2

The lively urban street life of China's cities might become a casualty of the melee. The mainland's cities are growing faster and on a larger scale than any in human history. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that by 2015 they will have to absorb some 200 million rural migrants. In the relatively small city of Suzhou near Shanghai, investment in residential construction increased by a factor of 65 between 1990 and 2002. In Shanghai itself, residential housing space has doubled since 1996. Most of the world's great cities have developed over decades or centuries, their neighborhoods evolving to accommodate the shifting needs of the people who inhabit them. China's cities, by contrast, are razed and rebuilt almost overnight. Urban planning in the mainland is at best haphazard and dominated by real estate companies that rent land from the government neighborhood by neighborhood rather than plot by plot. As a result, huge swaths of terrain are often drastically reordered in a matter of months at the whim of a single developer. "The problem with building at such a frenzied pace is that it takes time to think," says Thomas Fridstein, CEO of Hillier Architecture in Princeton, New Jersey, which is working on projects with both the Shanghai and Suzhou governments. And thoughtful urban design is seldom an option. Says Guan Yetong, a planning official for Shanghai's Xujiahui district: "We're so busy managing projects that we just don't have time to think about the big picture."

"You can have the best architecture in the world, but if you have bad planning rules, you've wasted your time," says Richard Burdett, dean of the school of urban planning at the London School of Economics, on a recent visit to Beijing. "When you're building a new neighborhood, you have to work within the existing grain. You have to make an effort to identify the DNA of the city." But much of what passes for urban planning in the mainland looks like genetic engineering gone haywire. The ongoing removal of Beijing's dilapidated old alleyways, or hutong, may be ridding the city of outmoded housing. But the bulldozers are also eradicating the complex social networks and bustling street life these close quarters nurtured. Zoning ordinances (based on design dogmas long since rejected in the countries where they originated but still used in China) dictate that new residential buildings face south and that most must be spaced as far apart as they are high. The result is often a sprawl of sterile apartment blocks, walled compounds and broad motorways that are as environmentally inefficient as they are psychologically isolating. The congenial adjacencies of schools and sidewalks, storefronts and stoops that form the foundation of urban community life are an increasingly rare sight. China's cities have begun to look more like suburbs. "There have been a lot of economists involved in the planning of Beijing," laments Yin Zhi, director of Tsinghua University's Institute of Urban Planning and Design, "but not a lot of people with cultural expertise."

If there's one man whose work in China most embodies the contradictions, challenges and enormous promise of the country's architectural-boom times, it is Rem Koolhaas, the Pritzker Prize-winning designer and theorist whose career runs the gamut from teaching at Harvard to enshrining shoes for Prada. In the spring of 2002, the cerebral Dutch hipster was invited to take part in two prominent design competitions: one for ground zero in New York City, the other for the CCTV headquarters in Beijing. Koolhaas skipped New York and chose Beijing, where the 500,000-sq-m gravity-defying trapezoidal loop he would conceive with design partner Ole Scheeren has since become a lightning rod for controversy. Detractors cite the $730 million CCTV project as the ultimate example of the Chinese regime's tendency to plunder state coffers to glorify its own iron authority and say Koolhaas is an opportunist taking advantage of the country's unique combination of state power and state capital to realize his own artistic ambitions. Ian Buruma, a writer who is a friend of Koolhaas, wondered aloud in the Guardian, a British newspaper, how the world would have reacted if an architect of Koolhaas' stature had in the 1970s designed a TV station for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

But Koolhaas, 59, who was one of the first Western architects to study and write about China's urban explosion, revels in such intellectual tussles. CCTV, he insists, like the mainland itself, "is in mutation" and the building represents an effort to complement the state-owned company's desire to keep pace with the times. CCTV's current headquarters is completely closed to the public. Koolhaas' design, in contrast, includes a public "media park" in and around the base of the building intended to foster more interaction between commissars and the masses. "We are engaged," he says, "with an effort to support within [China's] current situation the forces that we think are progressive and well-intentioned... We've given them a building that will allow them to mutate." Says Scheeren: "In all fairness, without CCTV's change we never would have got to do this project."

Koolhaas is also interested in mutating the way Beijing thinks about public space. Last year he submitted a proposal to the Beijing government urging it to consider more low-rise, courtyard-style buildings for the capital's new financial district rather than the standard norm of office towers. That proposal was rejected, but Koolhaas remains convinced that China represents a crucial front in what he calls his "campaign to kill the skyscraper." Koolhaas has a reputation for theatrics, but in this case his choice of words reflects the depth of his conviction. The skyscraper, he argues, is an important invention that has outlived its purpose. Devised a century ago to fit more people onto the small island of Manhattan, the form fostered extreme urban density. But spaced so widely apart—as in most mainland cities—skyscrapers inhibit human interaction.

"In Beijing, you have these needles and they collect their own little pathetic communities while breaking down the larger community around them," Koolhaas says with a wince. "It's an incredible squandering of the potential for exchange. It creates isolation right in the center of the city." His scheme for the CCTV headquarters represents one possible solution to this problem. Instead of distributing CCTV's many units across a series of towers, his megabuilding will put more than 10,000 of the station's employees—electricians and executives alike—under the same angular roof, entering through the same doors and riding the same elevators. Koolhaas hopes the monumental loop will encourage more companies to consider similarly daring experiments, even if they seem a little, well, loopy.

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