Voices

Appreciate modern architecture

By Daniel Garst (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-26 08:12

When I moved to Beijing in 2006, one of my best expatriate friends, an Irish attorney who came here in the late 1990s, informed me that once upon a time, the city had just one tall tower, the Capital Mansion north of Sanlitun. Now there are over 300 skyscrapers in the Central Business District alone. Beijing, it is often said, currently resembles a circus tent, with highrises ringing the dwindling number of low-slung courtyard houses in its inner core.

Many of my expatriate friends deeply loathe Beijing's modern makeover. For example, my Irish friend, who moved to Madrid a year ago, once called the capital the ugliest big city in the world, adding that it had just two attractive buildings, the Forbidden City and The Temple of Heaven.

Lots of Beijing's new buildings are indeed at best undistinguished and at worst downright awful. The former includes the new CNPC head office in Dongzhimen. Its beautiful white marble exterior is more than offset by a chunky design that makes it resemble several two-drawer filing cabinets joined together. And the glass and steel building, with three humps near the Xizhimen subway station, is easily the biggest eyesore in the capital.

In addition to the ugly and undistinguished, many of Beijing's modern buildings are just plain weird. The recent construction boom has drawn most of the world's avant-garde superstar architects to the capital and they have been given free rein in designing highly unconventional structures.

For example, the new Bank of China headquarters in Chaoyangmen sports a concrete bunker-like appearance. The renowned Chinese-American architect, I. M. Pei, who designed the pyramid-like Henan Provincial Museum, has strongly criticized this building, even though its architects were his two sons', Chien Chung Pei and Li Chung Pei.

Other highrises seem to have been designed mainly with outer space in mind - the downward slanting tops of the Twins Towers on Jianguo Avenue remind me of a pair of flying saucers. And numerous Beijing office towers, including the Full Link Plaza down the street from the Bank of China headquarters, are topped with a spiral-shaped antenna resembling a ray gun from some bad science fiction movie. Is the city trying to defend against a Martian attack?

In fact, Beijingers have called perhaps the capital's most iconic modern building, the National Performing Arts Center, the "Alien's Egg", as it bears more than a passing resemblance to a UFO.

Another good description of the center comes from one of my old students at the language school where I taught English for two years. This young female software engineer wrote that the center's roof makes it look a half-submerged ball floating in water.

But unlike many expatriates, I think that more than a few of these quirky new buildings are really cool. One of my favorites is the new tri-towered Raffles Center in Dongzhimen.

This highrise is especially beautiful in the evening after its exterior panels are lit up in blue and red. I also like the Parkview Green Mansion, which resembles a huge green-colored hot house and is nearing completion on the Dongdaqiao Road.

And I'm one of the few people in Beijing, expat or Chinese, who likes the new CCTV tower. My Chinese friends all call it "big underpants", but I find its unique double Z shape, along with the large and dramatic cantilevered overhang and diamond-like facade, to be really stunning.

Finally, more and more of Beijing's newest modern buildings have been designed and built in an eco-friendly manner. The best example is the attractive Prosper Center highrise on Guanghua Road. Last fall, I attended a cleantech forum on building design and construction and was told that the center is the greenest building not just in Beijing, but in all of China.

Several columns back, I wrote about my love of strolling about hutong during the day. However, at night I much prefer the view from the floor to ceiling window in the sitting room of my seventh-story flat in a new Sanlitun highrise apartment community over that of sitting room in a courtyard house, even a really nice courtyard house. The window looks directly at the almost-completed Sanlitun Soho towers and that view beats staring into a dark courtyard or narrow hutong.

Indeed, once the Sanlitun Soho highrises are finished and lit up at night, this view will be very much like looking at my two favorite Georgia O'Keefe paintings New York Night and Radiator Building at Night. O'Keefe did these paintings in the 1920s, when New York was being remade architecturally, much like Beijing is being remade today.

I have come to appreciate both the traditional, historical and modern facets of the capital and hope that a balance can be struck between them.