The Shock of the New
Since the end of the Qīng dynasty Běijīng has suffered a long series of architectural disasters at the hands of planners with political goals, property developers solely interested in lining their own pockets, and corrupt alliances of the two. The area surrounding the northwest corner of Tiān’ān Mén Square has representatives from many periods: the finest surviving Míng-Qīng grandeur alongside pockets of the city’s most ancient vernacular housing; the most pompous Soviet-style neo-classical buildings the late-50s government could afford (with Russian assistance); the drab and dysfunctional utilitarian residential blocks of the ’60s and ’70s; the modernity-with-Chinese-characteristics aesthetic nightmares of the ’80s; the international blandness of the later ’90s; and finally aggressively experimental architecture that’s the talk of the planet and worth flying to Běijīng to see in itself.
Across the arts the challenge in modern China has been to incorporate Chinese tradition into contemporary and often entirely foreign forms, materials, and techniques. Full-scale debate on this began not long after the 1912 arrival of the Republic, with the construction of buildings such as the Rockefeller-funded Peking Union Hospital of 1921 — a plain, sensible, modern edifice topped by a self-consciously Chinese roof that the foreign architects felt was a required nod to its surroundings (still standing in Shuàifǔ Yuán Hútòng, just east of Wángfǔ Jǐng Dàjiē).
The doyen of Chinese architects, Liáng Sīchéng (梁思成), began a struggle to preserve the ancient city even before the proclamation of the People’s Republic. He proposed the full adoption of modern materials and international design styles to build a new administrative centre for the city well to the west on a site at Wǔ Kē Sōng already cleared for this purpose by the Japanese. He also wanted to preserve in its entirety of all of old Běijīng within the city walls, turning the tops of those walls into a public park. All new towers should be outside the walls — the Second Ring Road — a proposition with which modern Běijīng residents remain in almost universal agreement.
In mere practical terms the centre of the city lacked adequate accommodation, transport, sewerage, or water supplies to accommodate a vast new bureaucracy.
A senior Party member, Liáng nevertheless found himself at odds with some of his colleagues, with Party officials, with influential Soviet advisers who insisted on Stalin’s policy that new construction should have a local flavour, and with Běijīng mayor Péng Zhēn (彭真), and he even dared to criticize Máo himself.
Liáng’s proposals were rejected, and eventually he and other architects were driven off the planning committee, leaving all decisions to be made on the basis of politics. Against Liáng’s advice, the city walls, many temples, and many memorial arches were pulled down to facilitate the creation of broad boulevards. Liáng’s suggestion that memorial arches should be dismantled with care and rebuilt elsewhere were ignored.
Liáng fell back on campaigning for new building within the walls to be kept to a minimum, for heights to be no greater than that of the Tiān’ān Mén, and, reversing himself on the subject of local style, felt forced to insist that new construction be in keeping with the look of old Běijīng.
This mainly resulted in the construction by various government agencies of modern buildings along Cháng’ān Jiē with pointless, ugly, and expensive dà wūdǐng (大屋顶) — vast, sweeping glazed tile roofs. As forecast, commuting became a problem, and in some cases the water pressure was inadequate to reach beyond the second floor.
The dà wūdǐng were criticised by Máo for their unnecessary cost, and in the 1950s Liáng was forced to write a self-criticism, although the original advocates of self-consciously Chinese additions had been the Soviet advisers to whom Máo had listened, overriding Liáng.
Yet during the 1983–93 rule of mayor Chén Xītóng (陈希同) it was widely understood that to get any significant building project approved it had to have at least some Chinese characteristics, resulting in a forest of utilitarian towers topped absurdly with bits of Forbidden City roof, many still standing. The worst example is Běijīng’s West Railway Station, a vast cobbled-together assemblage of out-of-scale Chinese motifs and of truly world-class hideousness.
Since 2005 the Chinese press has announced every year or two (each time as if a fresh initiative) that satellite cities will be created around Běijīng to allow people to live closer to their places of work and to cut down congestion in central Běijīng — precisely the problems forecast by Liáng 50 years earlier. In July 2014 the municipal government banned construction of new hotels, exhibition halls, universities, hospitals, office buildings, manufacturing and wholesale businesses in the Inner City, for reasons of ‘scientific development’ — precisely Liáng’s solution 50 years earlier. In 2017 it demanded credit for deciding to relocate some of its offices 30km east to Tōngzhōu, ‘to address overcrowding, congestion and pollution’ Xīnhuá reported cheerfully, while failing to note that the government’s failure to make such a move 70 years ago was a principal cause of those very problems. Finally in late-2018 some Běijīng government and Party organs began to relocate, including the omininously named Běijīng Secrecy Administration Bureau.
The late 1950s saw the creation of Tiān’ān Mén Square and the buildings lining its sides as part of ten grands projets designed to showcase the triumph of Chinese communism on the tenth birthday of the founding of the People’s Republic. Largely constructed with Soviet funds and expertise, the nearest examples of their particular brand of marble-lined pompous political neo-classicism could be found in Ulaan Baatar, Hanoi, or Moscow rather than elsewhere in Běijīng.
The aim of the current cycle of building is little different, but now the pockets are deeper. The power to impress is so much greater when the unlimited imagination and enthusiasm of foreign architects is harnessed to building costs one tenth or less of those in the West and the ability of the Chinese authorities to make projects happen at will and simply drive away residents whose land is needed. Foreign architects are drawn by the chance to work at a scale rarely possible in the West due to costs and constraints of space, and local architects tend to complain that China is being used as a guinea pig for outlandish designs and extremes of engineering that they often (wrongly) predict will fail.
The results are the stuff of coffee-table architecture books and would be the talking points of London or New York if built there. But they were the everyday gossip of Běijīng’s lǎo bǎi xìng (老百姓, ‘old hundred names’ — ordinary people) even before completion, and the nicknames they’ve been given are very revealing. Public opposition may be silenced, but it can still mutter in private.
The late Paul Andreu was perhaps unfortunate to be the first foreign architect involved in a Běijīng modern mega-project, and from the moment he won the international competition to design the Grand National Theatre in 1998 the French architect’s plans came under continuous fire, not least from Chinese architects miffed that a foreigner should be carrying out such a significant project right in the heart of the Chinese capital. Two petitions against his design were submitted to China’s top leaders in 2000, signed by 49 scientists and 109 architects respectively, and as late as 2004 there was speculation it might be cancelled.
Some protests were about the cost. Originally budgeted at ¥1.4 billion, the building doubled in size and expanded its features during subsequent discussions with the commissioning committee, ending up with a budget of ¥4.7 billion.
But in China architects are almost always asked to scale down projects partway through, and construction was halted at one point while Andreu was asked to reduce the cost to no more than ¥2.6 billion. He managed to cut down the budget to ¥3 billion, and the final cost as the building neared completion in 2007 was given as ¥2.7 billion. But who knows the truth? No two estimates of the costs of any mega-project ever tally, and on these figures Andreu’s effort turned out to be easily the cheapest of them anyway.
Other protests concerned the building’s advanced and highly un-Chinese design, and its proximity to the Great Hall of the People. One Chinese architect was quoted by China Daily as saying that Andreu had no idea about Chinese culture. Looking at the products of Chinese architects over the past 50 years this might be thought rather a good thing, but the ordinary people of Běijīng don’t think so, and they liken the building to an egg or eggshell, often calling it the Yā Dàn (鸭蛋) or Duck Egg, or variations on this. It is one of the most disliked buildings in the entire city.
In China, names and the way they liken one thing to another or simply happen to have the same sound as a word for something else, are important. There’s no nickname for Norman (Lord) Foster’s ¥21 billion Terminal Three at Běijīng’s Capital Airport, but that may just be because only a small proportion of the city’s residents ever fly anywhere. Those who do get into planes (and it has been forecast that the new terminal will handle 55 million passengers yearly by 2020) may be able to see the 3.25km-long and 785m-wide building’s nominal resemblance to an uncoiled dragon, which perhaps helped it to win the competition.
Its claim to be the largest permanent covered structure ever built was superseded in late 2019 by the opening of the Zaha Hadid-designed Dàxīng International Airport to the south of the city, but it remains bigger than Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 put together. Yet it opened in spring 2008 having been put up in less time than it took Heathrow Terminal 5 to get planning permission (although it took a further 12 months to appear on the airport’s website). There are few concessions to Chinese tradition here, except in some of the red of the interior colour scheme. But the standard cost-cutting partway through, which leaves few of the foreign ‘starchitects’ getting their usual percentage (a familiar feeling for foreign businesses in China), has reduced the number of skylights, making for a gloomier interior than originally planned.
The Duck Egg’s main competitor for the title of most unpopular building in Běijīng is Dutch architects Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s ¥6.4 billion CCTV Headquarters for China Central Television. While it is located where Beijingers think tall buildings ought to be — outside the Third Ring Road — its shape, in the form of two tilted towers connected by an L-shaped bridge that seems to make it impossible that the structure should stay upright, could hardly be more contrary to Chinese ideas of geomantic harmony.
When Hú Jǐntāo (胡锦涛) replaced Jiāng Zémín (江泽民) as Chinese president in 2003, work halted on the building for a year, perhaps because it was too visible a sign of extravagance, and perhaps as part of a behind-the-scenes power struggle between the incoming president and an outgoing one who wanted to carry on pulling strings.
Named a Constructivist doughnut by some, and the first real-life videogame building by others (buildings in games do not pay attention to gravity), it is known locally as Big Shorts or Big Underpants (大裤衩. Dà Kùchǎ). Others prefer Wāimén Xiédào (歪门邪道), an impolite phrase meaning ‘dishonest practice’: a low name for a highly expensive building.
A secondary tower in the complex in the shape of a crumpled ‘L’, known as ‘Big Boot’ (大靴子, Dà Xuēzi), was gutted by fire shortly before its completion and on the last day of city-centre fireworks celebrating the Chinese New Year in 2009.
CCTV itself admitted responsibility, since the cause was a display of illegally large fireworks organised by its own employees, but its news broadcasts failed to contain any report of the conflagration, although this was the biggest story in the capital for some time, and the fire was visible from across the city.
Many Chinese bloggers and chatroom commentators were delighted at the destruction, although much of this was due to a general loathing of CCTV as a monolithic media mediocrity rather than simply of the architecture. A young Chinese racing car driver called Hán Hán (韩寒), one of China’s most popular bloggers, took the opportunity to describe CCTV as ‘looking like the world’s number one eunuch media’ (全球第一大太监媒体的形象, quán qiú dìyī dà tàijiàn méitǐ de xíngxiàng).
These comments were rapidly ‘harmonized’ (deleted) by the authorities, but CCTV would have had to build something much more harmonious to have avoided criticism in the first place. Both towers and the cluster of more humdrum buildings around the China World Trade Centre are now dwarfed by the neighbouring 528m-high CITIC Building, at the time of completion in late 2019 the tenth tallest building in the world, designed by American architects Kohn Pedersen Fox to echo the slender-waisted zūn (樽), a traditional vessel for drinking wine.
For instance, the people of Běijīng do seem universally to have taken to Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron’s National Stadium, and call its latticed ring the Bird’s Nest (鸟巢, Niǎo Cháo). This positive association with a harmonious object from nature and an expensive dish from celebratory banquets is entirely fortuitous, however. Part of the reason for the shape of the structure was to disguise support for a sliding roof required by the original brief, making the 90,000-seat stadium at once an indoor and outdoor venue. If the architects had any Chinese theme in mind it was the crackle glaze found on some ceramics.
Partway through construction the budget was cut, twice, by a total of more than 40% to around ¥2.3 billion. The Swiss, who had already cut the steel from 80,000 tons to 50,000 tons, and accepted a substantially reduced design fee, waited patiently until the client suggested scrapping the roof, saving 15,000 tons of steel and perhaps ¥400 million at a stroke, but ironically removing the very element that drove the original design.
It may or may not be relevant that Běijīng vice-mayor Liú Zhìhuá (刘志华) was convicted in 2008 of taking the equivalent of over US$1 million in bribes related to Olympic construction.
The neighbouring National Aquatics Centre by Australian architects PTW also receives good reviews from the common man. Known as the WaterCube (水立方, Shuǐlìfāng), it’s actually a low rectangular building whose irregular exterior lattice, informed by computer studies of soap foam, is filled with 4000 ETFE polymer bubbles as much as 9m or more across. These let light into the building from all sides while weighing only 1% of their glass equivalents. In a rare nod to the environment amid all the vast expenditure of energy in construction, it runs on 30% less power than conventional buildings of its size.
Other modern architecture includes American Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid complex of eight residential towers (Xiāng Hé Yuán Lù 1, just off the northeast corner of the Second Ring Road). It’s not much to look at but notable for being powered by geothermal wells. Grand old man of Japanese architecture Arata Isozaki’s snail-like CAFA Gallery is worth visiting, as are the late Zaha Hadid’s locally hated swirling office complex Galaxy SOHO on East 2nd Ring and organic Wàngjīng SOHO (Wàngjīng Jiē, off the Airport Expressway), famously copied elsewhere in China even before its completion. Hadid had the last laugh, her sprawling Dàxìng International Airport, opened in 2019 but already the subject of much approving international commentary, is claimed to be the largest airport terminal in the world—the greatest architectural mega-project in Běijīng.
Some Chinese architects are finally breaking free and attempting work of international flair as Liáng Sīchéng advocated. However, he could scarcely have imagined anything like BIAD UFo’s curious Phoenix TV International Media Center, resembling a giant coil of barbed wire at the south end of Cháoyáng Park (and now open to the public for several months at a time when its lobbies and passages are used for art exhibitions—phtv.ifeng.com/english/bpc.shtml), or Professor Zhōu Qí’s (周琦) 35-storey headquarters for the People’s Daily (just off Cháoyáng Lù, east of the Third Ring Road).
There’s been so much ridicule online concerning this building’s resemblance to a giant golden phallus that Internet searches and micro-blog mentions of it are now blocked. But it’s too late — the people have spoken. And perhaps it was the last straw for President Xí. In October 2014 he announced his disapproval of ‘weird architecture’.
Politics is to interfere yet again as Běijīng drafts new but all-too-familiar regulations requiring less flamboyance and more historical resonance: probably a U-turn back to dullness and big roofs.
Return to Tián’ān Mén Square.
Tiān’ān Mén stories: Miraculous Máo, Square of Heavenly Discord.
Links below to neighbouring sights and to other Běijīng stories. Or see Main Index to A Better Guide to Běijīng.
