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From the Pyramide du Louvre to Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art, we look back at the daring and elegant designs that made architect IM Pei a household name

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A 20 metre high Thomas Heatherwick structure at Shanghai Expo will show Britain at the cutting edge in design and business

Britain may have spawned the Swinging Sixties, punk, Cool Britannia and numerous hot designers in the past 50 years, but for many Chinese, it's still a place where Oliver Twist is stumbling through a pea-souper, and horsedrawn carriages clatter along the cobbles.

The British government has set itself the task of changing that perception forever, by wowing the 70 million visitors to this year's Shanghai Expo — with a £25m see-through "seed cathedral".

British designer Thomas Heatherwick, known for distinctive works such as Manchester's The B of the Bang, has created a 20 metre high building made up of 60,000 transparent acrylic filaments, each of which holds a seed from Kew Gardens' huge Millennium Seed Bank – a worldwide project to preserve a quarter of the world's plant species.

The government, which has stumped up most of the £25m cost of the project, hopes that as the 7.5 metre long spikes sway gently in the breeze, potential Chinese investors will be inspired to bring their business to Britain, UK exporters will be inspired to strike up new contacts, and Chinese students will be attracted to the idea of studying here.

"The Chinese view of Britain is a rather old-fashioned one; it's all to do with Britain as being a heritage country, a traditional economy – there's an awful lot of cobblestones and fog," said Sir Andrew Cahn, director of UK Trade and Investment, which has the job of promoting Britain abroad. "We think of Britain as a cutting-edge, forward-looking country."

Having just returned from seeing the pavilion almost completed in Shanghai last week, Cahn said he was uncharacteristically passionate. "I'm a world-weary 58-year-old civil servant not given to enthusiasms, but I got very excited about this building."

Heatherwick said the brief laid down by the Chinese organisers of the Expo was, "Better City, Better Life," and he had been inspired by the fact that – despite its reputation for fog and Victorian grime – Britain pioneered public parks and botanical gardens. "Each of these tiny little seeds has boundless potential - to feed us, to cure disease - and that seemed to be a good symbol for the British contribution," he said.

Heatherwick is perhaps best known for "B of the Bang," the 56 metre high metal starburst built to mark the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002, which had to be dismantled last year amid safety fears about its giant metal spikes.

UKTI plans to hold more than a hundred business events in Shanghai and other Chinese cities during the six months of the Expo, and the pavilion's five private sector sponsors, including drug firm AstraZeneca and Barclays bank, will be able to use its "VIP rooms" to hold meetings.

China is spending $55bn (£35bn) – more than twice the cost of the Beijing Olympics – on the monumental Shanghai showcase, which will include almost 250 pavilions, and is expected to draw up to 70 million visitors.

British business has been criticised for being slow to realise the potential of the rapidly expanding Chinese market, which the government believes will be critical for helping to generate a solid recovery from the deepest recession in a generation.

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Exhibiting a rotting tofu hut alongside a dragon made of underpants, Shenzhen's third biennale of architecture glories in the dizzying excess of China's urban growth

At the top of Shenzhen's Lotus Hill, a statue of Deng Xiaoping is frozen in purposeful mid-stride. From here he gazes down on this southern Chinese boom city, teeming with 14 million inhabitants, separated from Hong Kong only by a river and a border. Follow the path down the hill, through manicured gardens and past young families (the average age in Shenzhen is 30, the age of the city itself), and you reach the megastructure of the Shenzhen Civic Centre. Its overwhelmingly massive, blue undulating canopy evokes classical Chinese architecture, but is rendered in bold, postmodern, friendly style. It shelters Shenzhen's governmental buildings, and a vast complex of indoor and outdoor public spaces. This un-forbidden city is currently playing host to the extremely ambitious, yet awkwardly titled, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, which attempts to document the pace of change in this unwieldy new metropolis.

When Deng declared Shenzhen China's first liberalised Special Economic Zone in 1980, the city – at that point a mere fishing village of 20,000 – became a sort of economic laboratory for the nation as a whole. Where Shenzhen went, the nation followed: into a fervent embrace of capitalism and urbanisation. One of the city's many entrepreneurs is Barack Obama's half-brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, who moved here in 2002 and opened a chain of restaurants called Cabin BBQ (strange, considering he's a vegetarian). Ndesandjo just self-published a semi-autobiographical novel, From Nairobi to Shenzhen, and last week was named the city's official "image ambassador". Shenzhen's patriarch, however, will always be Deng, whose image dominates billboards, and whose waxwork figure enjoys tea with Margaret Thatcher in a bizarre diorama at the top of the city's tallest skyscraper.

The biennale, now in its third edition, is a government-sponsored attempt to establish one thing Shenzhen lacks: a cultural scene. The theme is city mobilisation, which chief curator Ou Ning – who lived here throughout the 1990s, when growth was so fast that the phrase "Shenzhen speed" was born – says is an experiment to unite citizens "in a time that lacks centralised force, spiritual solidarity and practical organisation". While most architecture biennales are unappealing cocktails of dodgy architectural art and dense technical presentations, this one has a more popular touch. More than 60 installations by artists and architects occupy an underground hall at the civic centre, the massive public plaza above it, and various spots around the city.

Most of them are interactive and easy to understand. You're greeted in the main exhibition space by a Chinese dragon composed of 12,000 American Apparel vest tops and underpants, made in California and specially imported, hanging from the ceiling in undulating, colour-coordinated patterns. The piece, by LA-based art duo Ball Nogues, attempts a temporary reversal of the world's normal movement of goods, which usually flows from Guangdong province – known as the workshop of the world – into the US.

Other pieces in the biennale similarly reflect on China and Shenzhen's rampant growth, but without delivering polemics or concrete proposals. This isn't only because of the threat of censorship, but because the role of architecture in a modern city is relatively tiny. Some exhibits merely enrich your thinking about Shenzhen: a video by Danish artist Bjarke Ingels of parkour free runners leaping miraculously around the city's treacherous building sites; a small hut made out of tofu by artist group Polit-Sheer-Form, which is gradually collapsing, rotting, and stinking out the hall; and seemingly ancient images of a sleepy, smalltown Shenzhen, from the 1960s to the early 80s, by local photographer He Huangyou. One photo shows an almost empty Shennan Avenue in 1980. It's reminiscent of the photographs of Sheikh Zayed road in Dubai circa 1990 – another city that's just 30 years old – except here, instead of desert, the road is bordered by rice paddies and the last vestiges of jungle.

The biennale has a provisional feel to it: installations are constantly being rearranged and repaired, and video projections function only sporadically. But the main virtue of the exhibition is that it propels you out into the city with fresh eyes. Liu Xiaoliang's obsessively detailed metal sculptures, Demolition Relocation (2009), model the gradually disappearing "urban villages" of Shenzhen. These haphazard neighbourhoods of densely packed "shakehand" buildings (so close together that residents can reach out of their windows and greet their neighbours) have been constructed in the absence of planning regulations, many of them by former farmers now unable to work. A timeline by the Hong Kong-based architects IDU tells the story of Shenzhen's urban village of Caiwuwei, which had a population of 27,000 before it was demolished to make way for a new business district in 2005. IDU emphasise that this isn't an eviction sob story; the farmers set up the Caiwuwei Village Company to ensure they profited from the development of their land.

Even though Caiwuwei is now mostly gone, Shenzhen still has around 20 other urban villages, which accommodate unregistered migrant workers from all over China (Shenzhen has more than 6 million of them). But what do these villages actually look like? Curious to find out, I asked a biennale volunteer to write down the name of one in Chinese and hopped in a taxi, which eventually dropped me off outside a huge, luxurious mall called Holiday Plaza. I assumed that the taxi driver had misinterpreted the directions, or that this urban village had also recently bitten the dust. But, just a block away, opposite a surreal amusement park called Window of the World – complete with a replica Eiffel Tower bedecked in neon Chinese characters – I discovered the dark, intricate warren of the Baishizhou urban village. It's an outdoor shopping mall, with tiny storefronts and ramshackle stalls selling an unimaginable array of stuff, from knock-off DVDs to vegetables and vitamins. There's no division between indoors and outdoors: family life spills on to the streets and all business activity, such as shoe mending, sewing, wood-cutting, hair-cutting, internet surfing, pool-playing, and most of all, cooking, is done out in the alleyways and in the main square – which also has a hospital in it.

Urban villages might be Shenzhen's equivalent of the hundreds-of-years-old hutongs in Beijing. It would be a travesty if they too were demolished to make way for gated apartment complexes and sterile shopping centres. Might Shenzhen's urban planners learn from these unplanned but apparently highly functional neighbourhoods? In November, a 47-year-old woman named Tang Fuzhen in Sichuan province set fire to herself and died rather than be evicted from her home, which stood in the way of developers. Last week, the government resolved to defend residents' property rights against such illegal eviction and demolition. So perhaps there is hope for Shenzhen's exceptionally energetic, if dirty and often derided, urban villages. Alternatively, as IDU pointed out at the biennale, the farmers themselves may choose to cash in on their increasingly valuable property.

Back at the biennale, late at night, the sound of screeching and creaking cranes echoes wistfully across the plaza. It's merely a sound installation by the architects DnA. But I heard exactly the same noises from building sites everywhere in Shenzhen. And up on the civic centre plinth, overlooking the plaza and the city beyond, Bureau des Mésarchitectures have constructed a pair of swings, called Double Happiness (2009), raised on a 10-foot-tall platform. It's the biennale's most popular piece, and it sends you lurching out towards the luminous horizon of skyscrapers, as if propelling you into the future. You're made to feel both nauseous and exhilarated.

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More than 30,000 items on 1982 list have vanished, in part due to China's aggressive development, survey finds

China's aggressive development has swallowed up tens of thousands of historic sites in the last three decades, experts conducting a national survey have warned.

Officials from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) realised that the locations had disappeared while trying to compile a full list of the country's ancient tombs, temples, homes and other sites. Many have made way for roads and reservoirs, they discovered.

One conservation campaigner told the Guardian the damage caused over the last 20 years was worse than during the Cultural Revolution, which in its early stages saw Red Guards ransack religious sites.

Swaths of Beijing's historic courtyard homes have fallen to the wrecking ball in just the last decade. The old town in Dinghai, Zhejiang, has been almost completely destroyed. The Shanghai family home of the famed architect IM Pei, supposedly protected by the city, has gone.

In some cases – such as Qianmen, a centuries-old shopping street in the capital – historic buildings have been replaced with ersatz versions. In others, sites have vanished entirely. Last month there were reports that illegal mining in Inner Mongolia had destroyed a section of the Great Wall.

Shan Jixiang, director of SACH, said it had examined more than 775,000 sites and hoped to complete its inventory by 2011. Previous attempts, in 1956 and 1982, were never completed and only around 225,000 spots had been registered when work began in 2007. The number has soared thanks to a better-trained team and improved equipment, and to a wider definition of cultural heritage.

Some 30,995 of the items on the 1982 list have vanished, officials said in a statement. SACH said the decline also reflected inaccuracies in the 1982 survey and new counting methods, which meant that in some cases multiple entries were now registered as a single site. Even so, it warned that the large-scale construction of infrastructure over the last three decades had had a major impact on the country's heritage.

"As our country's economy developed, major irrigation and high-speed electricity projects started construction. Urbanisation sped up and new village [building] projects were carried out. Though the cultural heritage departments at all levels [of government] have tried hard to protect sites, they still could not avoid the disappearance of some," the administration said in a statement.

"Major natural disasters like earthquakes and floods have also resulted in the disappearance of many cultural heritage sites, while illegal activities and crimes like tomb-robbing destroyed some as well."

Liu Xiaohe, deputy director of the survey, told the state newspaper China Daily that officials were doing all they could to preserve as much as possible. He pointed out that in one case China spent 300m yuan (£26.5m) to relocate Sichuan's 1,700-year-old Zhangfei temple when the Three Gorges dam was built, rather than see it destroyed.

But he added: "We have about 800,000 historical sites in China, but only 80,000 people are working for relics protection. Places like the Palace Museum [better known to foreigners as The Forbidden City] take up more than 2,000 of them, which means some places have no one to take care of them. What we can do now is try our best to protect the significant sites, like the Summer Palace, while for those less important sites I am afraid they should give way to economic development."

Liu said the survey had cost 1bn yuan already and much more was needed because it cost about 300,000 yuan to survey each town. To date the team has covered almost 36,000 towns and districts. The administration will not release details of the sites included – or those that have vanished – until the register is completed.

Sun Yuexin, founder of the Chinese Cultural Heritage Protection website, suggested that some might not have existed even in 1982. "Some local governments would exaggerate the amount of relics they have, so as to ask for more funds from the central government to protect relics," he told China Daily.

He Shuzhong, of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre, said he believed that the problem was greater than the survey suggested.

"The last 20 years have been the worst time for cultural heritage site protection with the rapid development," he said. "It is even worse than in the Cultural Revolution – then, most damage was to movable items, but not to ancient tombs or buildings or old towns. For example, many ancient tombs have been robbed and in the [redevelopment] of old towns many old buildings have been demolished. Beijing used to have 25 protection areas and I believe only half of them are still well protected now."

He added: "The key to improving the situation is to improve local people's attitudes towards protection. The government has made many mistakes in the past and is still making some now, so we need people and the media to play the roles of monitors and critics."

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It was China's biggest ever firecracker. Clad in glistening titanium zinc alloy, Beijing's 159-metre (522ft) Television Cultural Centre tower (TVCC) shot up in flames on Monday night, ignited by ambitious fireworks during new year celebrations that could barely hold a candle to the all too brilliant architectural conflagration that followed.

At least one life, that of Zhang Jianyong, a political instructor of the Beijing fire brigade, was lost, and an undisclosed number of people were injured, but for all the ferocity of the fire that reached the top of the brand new cultural centre and hotel complex, the structure of the building looked to be remarkably unscathed.

"As yet, we can't be sure what's happened to the building," said Cecil Balmond, vice-chairman of the global engineering giant Arup, and TVCC's structural engineer. "I need to get back to you once I've flown over and taken a look for myself. I'll be on a plane as soon as possible."

The structure of the TVCC tower - like that of its dominant sibling, the spectacular 238-metre China Central Television (CCTV) tower to the south in Beijing's fast developing central business district - is radical in design and immensely strong. Both buildings are built to withstand major earthquakes while using far less steel than conventional skyscrapers. It is this radical structure that gives the towers their irregular, and challenging, look, and at the same time makes them immensely strong and stable. Fireproof, too? "We can only hope so," said Balmond.

The TVCC tower was due to open in May. A cultural centre owned by CCTV, its 31 floors house a hangar-like, 1,500-seat TV studio for live events and spectaculars, a giant ballroom, cinemas and exhibition galleries crowned by a 241-room, five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel. The design is by Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam-based architects OMA with Balmond, whose office is in London. The German project architect, working on site, is Ole Scheeren.

Known locally as either the Boot or the Termite's Nest because of its distinctive profile, and with many local detractors, the TVCC tower is overshadowed by the sheer might and structural ingenuity of the CCTV tower. Designed by the same team, and due to open this summer, CCTV is a breathtaking building that will be the star architectural attraction among the 300 skyscrapers planned for this quarter of Beijing.

Resembling some colossal, three-dimensional Chinese character, the slightly terrifying, sci-fi-looking building will be home to every aspect of China's state-run broadcasting company. Instead of conventional floors and lift-shafts, its ground-breaking interior forms one enormous, continual loop from its lobby to roofline public restaurant that is projected into space at one vertiginous corner.

Beijing's TV towers are the two most daring, and daunting, new buildings in the city. They have been hugely expensive and, secreted behind lofty security walls, have been seven years in the making.

For Koolhaas, a Jakarta-born Dutch journalist and film-maker-turned-world-famous architect, the project has always tasted sweet and sour. For all the extraordinary openness of the CCTV and TVCC towers in terms of structure and internal planning, and the fact that the public will be made welcome in both buildings, China's state TV company is rigorously censored and highly controlling. Koolhaas's detractors - mostly those who dislike flamboyant "iconic" architecture - have accused the architect of selling out to an authoritarian regime.

Koolhaas was keeping quiet yesterday. A man of beguiling and often inscrutable intelligence, he is quite aware that impressive architecture has a habit of outlasting even the most determined political set-up. Its finery might have been scorched away, and cries of "hubris" have risen with the smoke, yet the TVCC tower looks to have survived its first, and fiery, brush with Chinese fate.

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There's never an auspicious time for a building to burn down, but the spectacular fire at the TVCC building in Beijing will be taken as a particularly bad omen, coming as it does at the end of the Chinese new year holiday. It has not been a particularly great time for China's international reputation recently. Since the high of the Beijing Olympics, they've had rumours of lax construction standards following the Sichuan earthquake, a damaging scandal over contaminated baby milk, and the global downturn has hit the nation's runaway economy. New Year is traditionally a time when the slate is wiped clean, a fresh start. So how to respond when the Year of the Ox begins with the destruction of what was set to be the architectural event of the year – if not the century so far? For extra irony, if the rumours are true, firecrackers set off by illegal new year's revellers were the cause of the blaze.

There are two things to be thankful for. One, that the building is not yet completed, and was therefore unoccupied. And two, that it wasn't TVCC's sister building, CCTV. They were designed as a pair by trailblazing Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture, as the headquarters of the state broadcaster (Central China Television).

Of the two buildings, CCTV is definitely the star. Koolhaas has described it as an alternative to the tyranny of the skyscraper. Instead of soaring straight up into the sky, the building bends in on itself, describing a giant wonky square in the sky – a continuous loop of TV studios, offices, and other facilities that reconfigures the typical top-to-bottom relationships of the traditional office building. In comparison, TVCC is the dowdy sister, a relatively simple arrangement of boxes containing a hotel and a performance theatre, all wrapped in an angular cloak of metal. The scale of these buildings is easily underestimated. I visited them last year, just before the Olympics, and as I stood at the very top of CCTV in a hard hat, amidst a huge tangle of steel girders, the streets of Beijing barely visible through the freezing rain, I was blown away by their vastness. TVCC is 34 storeys, with a cavernous interior. CCTV is 52 storeys – the equivalent of four Canary Wharves bolted together.

The cause of the blaze, and the impact it will have on the building's scheduled opening this May, are yet to be determined. Although the state broadcaster had admitted some responsibility, it is still possible that Koolhaas himself will get the blame for this incident – entirely unfairly.

Even before the Olympics, certain quarters were wondering if China hadn't allowed itself to become a testing ground for experimental European architects. What purpose is Herzog and de Meuron's Bird's Nest stadium serving now that its two weeks of fame are over? Did they really need to splurge that much on Norman Foster's vast new airport? Or the Water Cube, or the new World Trade Centre or the new Opera House – all designed by foreigners?

Koolhaas is directly in the firing line in this respect. He's a consummately gifted communicator, who can make his buildings seem like the only logical solution, or at least the coolest alternative. But he has built few household-name projects to date (and nothing permanent in the UK), and CCTV/TVCC was set to cement his reputation as one of the greats. Hopefully it still will, but there may be now voices in Beijing querying whether China got taken in by his silver tongue and slick presentations, especially now that the building is sending out a very different message to what was intended.

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A new 44-storey luxury hotel in downtown Beijing was today engulfed in a fire thought to have been caused by sparks from fireworks as the city celebrated China's biggest holiday.

The Mandarin Oriental hotel, still under construction, went up in flames as the skies above the Chinese capital were filled with fireworks during the lantern festival celebrations, which follow the lunar new year.

Thick black smoke poured out of the building and showered the ground with embers. At least seven fire crews were on the scene, and police held back crowds of onlookers and closed a nearby elevated highway to ensure safety. There were no reports of injuries.

One onlooker, Li Jian, said he saw smoke rise from the hotel roof shortly after a huge burst of fireworks showered it with sparks.

"Smoke came out for a little while, but then it just started burning," Li said.

Crews put out much of the fire within three hours although smaller fires were still burning.

Fireworks are usually heavily restricted in Beijing's commercial area but the rules are waived each year for the lunar new year holiday. Today, the final day of the exemption period, marked the first full moon since the lunar new year, and massive fireworks barrages exploded in the skies over the city.

The 241-room building, which was due to open this year as one of Beijing's most luxurious hotels, is next to China Central Television's landmark Z-shaped headquarters, a major prestige project for the city. The television headquarters was not affected by the fire.

Both buildings were designed by the Dutch architects Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren for the firm OMA. Both were nearing the end of construction.

The fire had destroyed years of hard work, said Erik Amir, a senior architect at OMA, who rushed to the site.

"I think it's really sad that this building is destroyed before it can be opened to the public," he said.

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