BEIJING’S BOLD NEW BUILDINGS

2008-10-14 09:53:19 [ Big Normal Small ]  Mark Berthold  　Comment

Increasingly people spend their lives in cities, shadowed by skyscrapers. Most of these buildings are riffs on an elongated box. New York in the 1930s redeemed its skyline with such office towers as the Chrysler and the Empire State which enhanced their height with spirit-lifting elegance. It may come as a surprise that Vanity Fair (Kurt Andersen “From Mao to Wow!” August 2008) convincingly likens 21st century Beijing to New York a century earlier, their phenomenal growth sparking architectural daring. The most obvious way to be spectacular remains building yet taller. Asia already has many of the world’s tallest buildings and when briefly living there in 2006 it was Shanghai’s skyline that reminded me most of the movie Blade Runner’s urban silhouette-even before I saw Tom Cruise’s high-rise antics in Mission: Impossible 111. So with the Olympics approaching how was Beijing going to steal a march on its southern rival? By now sheer height was too obvious an answer.

Besides, Beijing has historically been more disposed towards the horizontal than the vertical. It’s not due to being sparsely populated-it was the first city in the world to reach one million and, like Shanghai, its population is now 17 million and counting. From early times Beijing did not share the western view that the prestige of a building was a matter of height. An emperor reflecting on what he perceived as height-obsessed western rulers concluded that their vertical ambitions must reflect their being lacking land. Beijing’s “Forbidden City”, home to 24 emperors, displayed a different sensibility. Whereas Europe used stone, China used wood and a building’s prestige was best displayed by having a large gently sloping roof. This pic was taken from Jingshan Park, a delightful man-made mound overlooking Beijing (the unusually clear skies were thanks to the alternate-day driving rule enforced during the Olympics).



Facing north, the imperial Forbidden City dominates the foreground and high rises keep a respectful distance. Completed in 1620, the palace compound contains 980 ancient wooden buildings-the largest such collection in the world.

To the far right of the Forbidden City (and the Great Hall of the People in between) is the National Center for Performing Arts (aka “the Egg”) glistens in the sun. Like the “Birds Nest” stadium featured in my next article, it is daringly original. So we come to Beijing’s biggest new office building. Indeed the world’s biggest, bar the Pentagon. Just the expression “office building” evokes a yawn. And as Vanity Fair observes, “the bigger a building is, the harder it is to make wonderful”. Not this time. The new CCTV tower rewrites the rules to bend the skyline. Indeed, its construction only became possible in the last decade with the development of more powerful computers. It dominates the neighborhood but by modern standards it is not especially tall-49 stories. Its spell is far more complex. Churchill coined the phrase “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. This describes the CCTV building. As you skirt its surroundings, “big pants” (as Beijingers call it) morphs before your eyes. Rem Koolhaas, co-designer (and former journalist) with Ole Scheerin, sums it up nicely as having “…a delicacy despite its size. It’s something that’s not a tower, but three dimensional, so it defines urban space.” I found strolling in that neighborhood a unique experience and it seemed to be shared by the locals. The Forbidden City took one million workers 15 years to complete yet the CCTV building is quickly becoming equally iconic. China may indeed be one of the world’s oldest civilizations but as the traditionally adorned woman in this poster seems to be hinting, China still surprises-big-time.

Copyright mark berthold 2008

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