Soaring Ambitions — page 3

It's unlikely anyone will try to replicate the CCTV edifice, though. The structure of the building (scheduled to be completed in time for the Olympics) is dizzyingly complex. The skyscraping anti-skyscraper consists of two towers braced against each other at a height of 160 m. No two of the 55 stories have the same floor plan. The entire structure is sheathed in a supporting mesh that must be adequately rigid against Beijing's windstorms but flexible enough to withstand earthquakes. According to Scheeren, the project has engaged 75 engineers for more than a year to compute the stress on every I beam—calculations that, he says, must be three times more precise than those required for an ordinary skyscraper. After an initial nod from the jury—which consisted of foreign and Chinese architects and CCTV employees—Koolhaas and his team spent the summer of 2002 in a tiny workshop in a Beijing hutong preparing a model for China's political leaders, in part to convince them that the building would actually stand up.

It was partly that hutong sojourn that inspired another of Koolhaas' mainland projects: a study for Beijing's urban planners on the preservation of the city's dwindling stock of old buildings and neighborhoods. On a stroll through the capital he points out a surprising list of structures he would like to see kept in place: courtyard homes, 1960s apartment blocks, and a pair of stainless steel sculptures that resemble lollipops covered in spikes and already look painfully anachronistic, even though they were erected only five years ago. Ensuring that Beijing's residents have visible evidence of how their city has evolved, Koolhaas asserts, is a necessary counterpoint to his forward-looking building designs. "I find it very important that we don't do hit-and-run projects," he says. "I don't want to be a carpetbagger. Westerners have really been, in a certain way, exploitative. They use the opportunities but they don't really think about the impact. We're trying to engage in a kind of systematic investigation of what—in the current circumstances and with the current economy—would be a plausible repertoire of urban forms. I think you can invent new forms that are about street life. That's what interests me: to maintain the specificity of this city."

	I don't want to be a carpetbagger. Westerners have really been, in a certain way, exploitative. —REM KOOLHAAS,  Dutch architect

Property developers rarely share these preoccupations, but there are exceptions. Zhang Xin and her husband, architect Pan Shiyi, co-founders of the private real estate developer SOHO China, are among the country's most outspoken defenders of the urban habitat. After phenomenal success selling space in her husband's SOHO New Town, a colorful housing complex on the east side of Beijing, Zhang is now trying to create opportunities for prominent architects to make Beijing a more intimate city.

Last December she announced the results of a competition for part of a vast redevelopment scheme in the southwest corner of the city that will transform a trucking depot into a residential and commercial complex with a daily traffic of 200,000 people. Zaha Hadid, who last month became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Prize (architecture's highest honor), won the contest with a design that calls for winding alleyways, boomerang-shape towers and a variegated array of high- and low-rise structures—a conscious departure from Beijing's monotonous mess of concrete towers. "The goal of the project," says Hadid, "is to create instant complexity as if the place developed over 20 years."

It's a controversial notion, but one that China must test if it hopes to give birth to cities that rise to the challenges of its rapid urban growth. Closer to the center of Beijing at another of Zhang's projects, Jianwai SOHO, the idea of the instant neighborhood is catching on. A dazzling asymmetrical arrangement of transparent white apartments, offices and shops designed by Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto, connected by a suspended web of sidewalks, it is Zhang's attempt, as she puts it, "to advocate urbanism to the market, to create a neighborhood rather than just a compound." So far, the market seems convinced. The project's first three phases of construction—about 300,000 sq m—have completely sold out.

No one can tell yet whether SOHO's developments will resuscitate community life any more than Abraham's imposing façade will sell seafood or Koolhaas' megabuilding effect megachange. What is certain is that however the buildings of this new era are regarded by future generations, they will serve as a powerful record of the explosive, deliriously ambitious, brazenly inventive climate in which China's cities are now being reshaped. It will be a landscape hewn in the thrashings of a sea of change.

With reporting by Huang Yong and Jodi Xu/Beijing

1 | 2 | 3

	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