the-sheet.com Your Architecture Resource » China

Huaxi: the village that towers above China – video

The Sheet — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:14:08 +0000

Huaxi, formerly a poor farming community, is a powerhouse symbol of the country's economic expansion, embodied by a giant 328-metre skyscraper. Jonathan Watts reports

Jonathan Watts

Ken Macfarlane

Huaxi: the village that towers above China

The Sheet — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:06:44 +0000

Until recently, Huaxi was a poor farming community, typical of eastern China. Now, thanks to the ambition of one man, it is a powerhouse symbol of the country's economic expansion, embodied by a giant 328m-tall tower

An incongruous new sight has risen up in the countryside of eastern China: a skyscraper taller than any building in London or Tokyo, topped by what looks very much like a giant, golden disco ball. The 328-metre supertower, which juts out of the Jiangsu plains like a trophy on an empty shelf, will be opened on Saturday by the village of Huaxi, a communist model community with a registered population of just 2,000 "farmers".

Having been built up to the heavens during a period of global economic collapse, the megatower will be heralded as the latest symbol of China's extraordinary economic expansion. But this bizarre new addition to the landscape also speaks volumes about the land pressures, environmental stress, inequality and rash investment that threaten the country's long-term growth.

The skyscraper will primarily be used as a gourmet dining hall and luxury hotel. Though many of those who live in its shadow earn less than £10 a day, there is no attempt to hide the wealth gap. From a gold leaf-covered reception to a 60th floor inlaid with genuine flakes of gold, the building exudes wealth and excess. Its proudest feature is a one-tonne, solid gold statue of an ox, said to be worth 300m yuan (£31m).

The mega-statistics do not stop there. With 826 bedrooms and dining facilities for 5,000 guests – including southern China's biggest banquet hall – there is almost enough space to accommodate and feed all of the original village residents at a single sitting.

It is the brainchild of Wu Renbao, the driving force behind Huaxi's 40-year transition from a small village to a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with interests in steel, shipping, tobacco and textiles. By turns a communist dictator, capitalist entrepreneur and self-help guru, the 84-year-old is among China's most colourful characters. He is praised for turning Huaxi into one of the richest villages in China and enriching the original residents with annual shares, dividends and free overseas trips. He is also criticised for turning the community into a family fiefdom, in which workers get no holidays and his relatives get the best posts.

He has created a hierarchy largely determined by closeness to the Wu clan. Those from the original 2,000 Huaxi families are at the top of the pyramid. Next come the 35,000 residents from neighbouring villages that have been swallowed up by Huaxi's expansion. At the bottom are 20,000 newly arrived migrants, who provide labour for the factories on 12-hour shifts without weekend breaks. The monthly salaries of 3,000 yuan (£310) are better than average for low-skilled labour in China, but it is hardly a worker's paradise.

Wu is undoubtedly Huaxi's greatest draw. Coachloads of visitors – mostly cadres and retirees – turn up to listen to the 10.30am lecture he delivers every day in a village auditorium that has been decked out to resemble the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. His close connections to the central government ensure supportive policies – for example, planning permission to build a 72-storey skyscraper in an area where the next-biggest building in less than 20 floors tall. Wu says he looked to the mega-cities of the Middle East for inspiration. "This tower is my idea," the patriarch says in such a thick local accent that the interpreter needs an interpreter. "We learned from Dubai, but taking into account our domestic situation, we decided the height should be 328m. Why 328m? Because that is as tall as the highest building in Beijing." Chinese culture loads numbers with significance: 32 is associated with business and eight represents prosperity.

As village officials also proudly note in the invitation to the opening ceremony: "There are 209 countries that lack such a tall building." That includes the UK. Even the Shard London Bridge – which will be the tallest building in the EU when it is completed next year – is 18m shorter than Huaxi's new village centre.

Even for those used to the speed and scale of change in China, this is astonishing. The last time I visited Huaxi in 2005, it was building a cluster of giant pagodas, which then appeared outlandishly large compared to everything else in the village. Today, those same pagodas barely register in comparison to the supertower beside them, which pulsates in all the colours of the rainbow when night falls.

It is a tacky but impressive reminder of how far the village has come since the Mao era. That message is reinforced at the village museum, where old propaganda footage shows farmers breaking rocks, labouring in the fields and living in small, unfurnished homes. It is also evident in the small park, which preserves Wu's first factory, a whitewashed, single-storey building.

"We used to have a very difficult life. We lived in a thatched shed, ate bran and had nothing in our pockets," recalls Wu, whose message can be distilled to a drive for GDP growth. "I think it will never be wrong to expand the economy and make ordinary people rich. In our opinion, that is the priority."

This approach has worked for decades and never more so than during the past seven years, when Huaxi's sales have increased fivefold. But the skyscraper is a towering indicator that business as usual is no longer working. The 3.5bn yuan (£360m) investment is designed to attract tourists and new business to Huaxi as it attempts the leap from dirty industrial centre to an ecologically friendly service sector economy.

In making the transition from third-world village to first-world skyscraper, Huaxi is in many ways a microcosm of China. But the next step will be harder as it tries to cope with the declining competitiveness of its core industry, the inflated cost of land and worries about the environment. In this case, an even wider comparison can be drawn: like the global economy, Huaxi may be bumping up against limits to growth.

Until recently, the village earned half of its income from the iron and steel industry. But today, this has fallen to less than a third. This collapse is due to rising material costs, the expansion of rival firms and falling demand both overseas and in China. "This is the worst situation I have experienced," says Yang Yongchang, who has been general manager of the Jiangyin Huaxi Iron and Steel Company for eight years. "It will get worse in the future. People in this industry are panicking." He says Huaxi is planning to move the factory so it can reinvent itself as a tourist resort and commodities-trading hub. "We're trying to build an ecological village that looks like a forest garden," he says.

The costs of fast, dirty, old-style economic growth can no longer be ignored. Wu Yunfang, the head of environmental affairs in the local communist party, says the village has recently shut down five chemical and textile factories that once used to discharge pollutants into the local Changjiagang river. She estimates the value of the lost production at 150m yuan (£15m), which adds up to a significant environment bill along with the 350m yuan (£36m) spent on emissions scrubbing and wastewater treatment.

Territorial expansion is also becoming more expensive. In the past two decades, Huaxi swallowed 12 neighbouring villages as its industry and influence sprawled outwards. It is not officially a merger. The official terminology is that the villages are "united under Huaxi", but the reality is far more like a corporate takeover. Huaxi paid an annual fee to the surrounding villages and in return it gained control of economic management, land use decisions, labour issues and political appointments.

The loss of independence is worthwhile, according to Zhang Zhongxian, the former head of Xixiang village, who is now working for Huaxi's labour federation. Since his community was subsumed by Huaxi in 2002, Zhang estimates that average annual incomes have more than tripled, welfare for the elderly and disabled has improved and homes and roads have been upgraded. "In five to 10 years, we will be where Huaxi is now," Zhang says. "Many other villagers want to join. Even some from other provinces."

But land costs have risen dramatically. Huaxi's village chief, Wu Xie'en – the son of Wu Renbao – said this was a major factor in the decision to build the tower, which has been dubbed "a village in the air". "With the completion of this building, we can save a vast expanse of land. In China, the trend now is to build tall because the more the economy develops, the more space is needed. Where is the space for China in the future? We must look to the sky." The party secretary says he wants to turn the "city village" of Huaxi into a Shangri-la. "My father made people rich. Now I want to make them healthy and happy," he says.

The tower seems an odd way to do this. But the Wus argue that they have succeeded over the years by anticipating changes in the economic wind and gambling big on the outcome. They are trying again this time. Just in case, the outside world fails to notice, Huaxi has invited the international media to the village's 50th anniversary celebration on Saturday, when its skyscraper will be officially unveiled. To give visitors a better view, villagers have started a helicopter business – a first step in a planned expansion into commercial aviation and high-end tourism.

If anywhere in China can find new areas of economic expansion it is Huaxi. But even with the political connections and business nous, it is hard to imagine that the village will reinvent itself as a tourist centre – particularly given the advanced age of the retired party secretary who is its main attraction.

But Huaxi has proved its doubters wrong in the past. Ahead of the opening of their new skyscraper, the mood on the streets was optimistic. In the evening, locals, neighbours and migrants gather to dance on the village square, a huge expanse of concrete between 15-storey pagodas that pulsate pink, blue, green and yellow. One migrant labourer from the steel factory, who declined to give his name, said the tower would help the economy and create new opportunities. "Nobody would invest so much money in something that wasn't sure to be a success, right?"

Additional reporting by Cecily Huang.

Jonathan Watts

China opens world’s longest sea bridge

The Sheet — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:31:09 +0000

26-mile Jiaozhou Bay crossing connects Qingdao to Huangdao, took four years to build and uses 5,000 pillars

China, which seems to complete mammoth infrastructure projects on a routine basis, has claimed another world-beater with the opening of the longest sea bridge.

The 26-mileJiaozhou Bay crossing connects the bustling port city of Qingdao, south-east of Beijing, to the industrial district of Huangdao.

The eight-lane, 35-metre-wide bridge opened to traffic on Thursday morning, China's Xinhua news agency said. Built over a four-year period the project cost about £1.4bn and uses 5,000 pillars. It shortens the driving route between the two locations by about 20 miles.

Somewhat inevitably, the bridge takes the world record from another Chinese sea crossing, the 22.5-mile Hangzhou Bay bridge, which opened in 2008, connecting the cities of Jiaxing and Ningbo, south of Shanghai. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, at almost 24 miles, is slightly longer but crosses an inland waterway rather than open sea.

China is constructing an even more ambitious bridge. Work began in December 2009 on a Y-shaped structure linking Guangdong province in southern China to Hong Kong and Macau. Building is expected to be finished in 2015, and the bridge is expected to cover about 31 miles, although only about 22 miles will span the sea.

Peter Walker

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

National museum lauds patriotic China

The Sheet — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:01:45 +0000

Almost as big as the Louvre, the new exhibition space overlooking Tiananmen Square is very selective in its history

The new National Museum of China occupies a huge building with a colonnaded facade overlooking Tiananmen Square, opposite the Mao Zedong mausoleum. After three years of renovation and extension work, its 192,000 square metres of exhibition space is supposed to give the People's Republic a museum in keeping with its international standing. Only the Louvre in Paris (210,000 square metres) is larger.

It opened to the public in March, with free admission, but only 8,000 visitors a day are allowed to see the permanent exhibition. So the Chinese turn up early in the morning to see the rooms devoted to national resurrection, ancient bronzes, Chinese porcelain and statues of the Buddha. The rooms on ancient China have just opened.

The task of converting this gigantic Stalinist structure, dating from 1959, and redesigning its entrance hall and exhibition spaces, was given to a German firm of architects, Gerkan, Mark & Partners, better known for railway stations, airports and sports stadiums. History museums all over China have been pressed to dispatch some of their greatest treasures to the capital.

But despite its facelift the institution's prime mission is still patriotic education, fashioning and interpreting Chinese history to serve the party line. A perfect illustration is the permanent exhibition entitled The Path to National Resurrection. It starts with the period of humiliation to which western colonial powers subjected China, highlighting the steps on the way to nationalist reawakening and modernisation, with the foundation of the first republic.

The sections focusing on the People's Republic, established when Mao seized power in 1949, take visitors through the key moments in the history of the Communist party, culminating in the economic achievements of recent years, with the conquest of space, fast trains to Tibet and the Olympic Games.

A smiling Mao appears in just one photograph, talking to party members in 1961 after the disastrous experiment with the Great Leap Forward, which caused the deaths of millions of Chinese. Two others allude to the Cultural Revolution, but fail to mention its atrocities. The only picture relating to the events of 1989, in the square outside, is dated 9 June and shows Deng Xiaoping congratulating the troops enforcing martial law.

"I was surprised to see there is so little detail," said a young biology student, Li, born in 1987. "Some of our teachers talk about Tiananmen and we all look on the net," she added. This mutilated history "infuriates" Yang Jisheng, a former journalist at the Xinhua news agency and author of a monumental study of the great famine, which is banned in China. "Those of us who are familiar with the history avoid this sort of museum. Historical facts have been perverted. The refusal to talk about the past is a bit like plugging your ears while you steal a bell, convinced that no one else will hear," he said.

The concepts of reawakening and regeneration are particularly upsetting, Yang adds. "They refer to periods when China was supposedly glorious. But which period should we consider: the first emperor, the Tang or the Qin dynasty? And which aspects should we retain of these periods, which were after all dictatorships?"

In these days of keen rivalry between the world's great museums, the Beijing show highlights a contradiction deep-rooted in the People's Republic: the first exhibition loaned by a foreign organisation is devoted to the Art of Enlightenment. Thanks to this master-stroke of German diplomacy, Chinese visitors can enjoy 600 works of 18th-century art from museums in Berlin, Munich and Dresden.

At the opening of the exhibition on 1 April, the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, spoke of the ideals expressed by art, such as respect for human dignity, the rule of law and individual freedoms. Such ideas, he added, led to the fall of the Berlin wall, but the Chinese media made no mention of his comments.

Other museums in Europe are thinking about staging shows here too, and the Louvre is already involved in a joint project. The luxury goods group LVMH has started talks about an exhibition on the Vuitton brand and travel. It is slated to occupy four rooms and last two or three months, according to the LVMH spokesperson in Shanghai.

With its prestige, ambitious aims and vast exhibition space begging to be filled, museums from all over the world are courting the Chinese mogul. But this may not be a simple task. As one expert said: "The editorial line of Chinese museums is not always crystal clear."

This article originally appeared in Le Monde

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Norman Foster to oversee development of cultural space in West Kowloon

The Sheet — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:21:32 +0000

British architect's firm announced as masterplanners for waterfront site that will become a major hub for the arts

Norman Foster's magnificent HSBC HQ, which looks out from central Hong Kong to the shores of Kowloon, is one of the great buildings of the 20th century, a brilliantly crafted structure standing 180 metres tall. Costing £500m in 1986, the bank is also one of the most expensive buildings ever created.

Yet the HSBC building is now surrounded by enormous, brash neo-art deco skyscrapers erected in recent years; today, it seems almost toy-like in scale, demonstrating just how big, in every way, Hong Kong (and by extension China) has grown since the British handed back the former crown colony to Beijing in 1999.

But now Foster and his team are back in Hong Kong in a big way. It emerged this weekend that the firm has won a tightly contested international competition to masterplan the ambitious new West Kowloon cultural district, a 40-hectare site of reclaimed land on the Kowloon waterfront that will host no fewer than 17 major cultural venues, including an opera house (watch out, Guangzhou), a museum of modern art known as M+, a 15,000-seat arena and an art school. China is taking cultural development increasingly seriously, as if telling the world that while the country might be best known at the moment for manufacturing on an unprecedented scale, it believes in the arts, too.

The plans make allowance for 19 of the 40 hectares to be dedicated to parkland – much-needed in densely packed Hong Kong – and the entire area will be connected by a planted avenue stretching all the way west to Harbour Tunnel, the lifeline between the two major districts of the city. Traffic will go underground. Every effort will be made to ensure this is a showcase of "green" as well as eye-catching design. The scheme will also include housing and shops; it is meant as a proper, fully integrated piece of the city rather than a vast urban redevelopment project parachuted down on the hem of Hong Kong. As Foster says: "Hong Kong is a great city and this project captures what is important about its DNA: the civic spaces, the squares, the parks, the greenery, the avenues and the small side streets."

With more than 30 years' experience in Hong Kong – along with the HSBC headquarters, the practice also designed the city's Chek Lap Kok airport – Foster and Partners were always on fairly strong ground here, although the firm's earlier masterplan for a West Kowloon cultural district, announced in 2002, was cancelled three years later.

This year, the choice of masterplanner for this enormous project was made from three practices: Foster and Partners, Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and the Hong Kong and Guangzhou-based Rocco Design Associates. But Henry Tang, chief secretary of Hong Kong, admits that elements of all three are likely to appear in the scheme as it develops over the years. The first buildings should emerge from the old docklands in 2015, while the last will not be completed until 2031. Foster says that the masterplan is highly flexible in terms of exactly where individual buildings are placed; the idea is to be neither prescriptive nor simplistic, but holistic.

Fosters will now work with the Hong Kong authorities on the choice of architects for individual buildings. Meanwhile, the great challenge for Foster and Partners will be working out ways to make their parkland scheme meet the rest of Kowloon. It is a densely occupied yet seemingly unplanned part of the city that needs drawing together across extremely busy arterial roads and railway tracks. If the West Kowloon cultural district is to be an island it will prove a failure in decades to come; it has to work as a vast, green, vital and cultured junction box linking disparate parts of Kowloon and Hong Kong as a whole.

Will it work? Yes, with time, some degree of patience (Hong Kong and China like to move quickly) and the involvement, wherever possible, of local people. This, in itself, would be a major step forward for China and will set a precedent for its rapidly expanding cities. Quite how it will all look in the end is open to question – the illustration shown here is only indicative of what might happen. But, as this is Hong Kong, expect some tall towers somewhere in the mix of parks, avenues and a new generation of busy commercial alleyways, towers that will make Foster's bank – just 25 years old – seem increasingly like a prized architectural jewel from a different era.

Jonathan Glancey

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House – in pictures

The Sheet — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:19:51 +0000

Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House has just opened in China in spectacular, asymmetrical style. Here's what it looks like inside and out

Jonathan Glancey

Dan Chung

Zaha Hadid on song: China’s Guangzhou Opera House

The Sheet — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 10:24:32 +0000

Jonathan Glancey at the opening of the Guangzhou Opera House

Jonathan Glancey

Dan Chung

Move over, Sydney: Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House

The Sheet — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 10:22:34 +0000

The world's most spectacular opera house has just opened in China – but it could have been built in Cardiff. Jonathan Glancey reports on Zaha Hadid's stunning new project

• In pictures: Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House

I walk up the ramp of the new Guangzhou Opera House, and suddenly it seems like Chinese New Year. The brand new skyscrapers that surround it, each named after some global finance corporation, burst into neon life, flickering and flashing in a way that makes Las Vegas seem like a mere twinkle. By contrast, the opera house seems almost serene – remarkable given that it's the latest design by Zaha Hadid, an architect celebrated for buildings that shoot across the urban landscape like bolts of lightning. Yet, while the pulsating lights disguise what are regular office towers, once inside, Hadid's opera house reveals itself in all its complexity, at once highly theatrical and insistently subtle.

Set in Haixinsha Square, a brand new stretch of south China's ever-expanding trading city, the opera house takes the form of what appear to be two enormous pebbles that might have been washed up on the shores of the Pearl river, on which Guangzhou stands. Rough-shaped things sheathed in triangles of granite and glass protrusions, one houses the main auditorium while the smaller encloses a multipurpose performance space. There's no question, though, that the opera house is best experienced at night. As darkness falls and the foyers fill up with people, the building magically comes to life.

The opening-night audience has come to experience Akram Khan's cacophonous dance piece, Vertical Road. Yet all eyes are trained on the doors as the architect makes her entrance. Tonight, Hadid is architecture's Queen of the Night, making stately progress through a phalanx of photographers. For the British contingent in the wave-like foyer, there is something special in seeing Hadid inside the building she should have built in Britain years ago.

Ah, yes, the Cardiff Bay Opera House. In 1994, Hadid had designed a magical theatre for the Welsh coast. It would have become the most radical and compelling building in Britain, but an alliance of narrow-minded politicians, peevish commentators and assorted dullards holding the Lottery purse strings ensured it was never built. More than a decade on, Hadid has built her opera house. Of course, it's not the same design, yet the building embodies the spirit as well as something of the presence of the great theatre we could have had in Britain rather than here, 6,000 miles away.

The Chinese had been thinking of an opera house in Guangzhou as early as 1993, when mayor Lin Shusen championed the new commercial and cultural quarter by the river. "It was incredible," says Hadid. "When I first came to Guangzhou in 1981, it seemed such a hard and dour place with everyone in Chairman Mao uniforms. By the late 90s it had begun to grow very fast indeed, but where we're standing now [in the foyer of the opera house], there was nothing whatsoever."

Even in a city famous for building at breakneck speed, the opera house has taken more than five years to complete. But then, this was never going to be an ordinary commission. The main building comprises a freestanding concrete auditorium set within an audacious granite and glass-clad steel frame. The exposed frame is a stunning thing, a kind of giant spider's web protruding in several unlikely directions. It seems to challenge the laws not just of conventional geometry, but of gravity itself.

The Chinese state engineers charged with the project were pushed to new limits. "The magic, though," says Simon Yu, the Scottish-born project architect, "is in the joints that hold the structure in place." We look up at them. Here are star-like, cast steel junction boxes that keep the adventurous structure in tension. They look spectacular. "We made them the same way they made great medieval bells. They were sandcast in an old fashioned foundry in Shanghai where the sparks flew like . . . fireworks."

Between this exposed steel skeleton and the auditorium lie the foyers. Here, you are hard pressed to find a straight line. They waltz around the auditorium, twisting, turning, ducking and weaving. Grand stairs slope and twist majestically from the black granite floors of the foyer up to the balconies and upper tiers of the auditorium. Audience members will find it hard to break away from these spectacular vistas and take their seats.

The auditorium proves to be a further wonder, a great grotto like a shark's mouth set under a constellation of fairylights. The space is asymmetric, but despite its unusual shape, the acoustics are perfect; the work of Harold Marshall, the veteran New Zealand acoustician. Intriguingly, he says that the strange angles of Hadid's auditorium work to produce an acoustic perfectly suited to both western and traditional Chinese opera. "There are very, very few asymmetrical auditoriums," says Marshall. "But asymmetry can be used to play with sound in very satisfying ways; it's more of a challenge tuning it, but the possibilities are greater, and this one has a beautifully balanced sound." Could it have been done in Cardiff Bay? "Of course it could."

"Next year," says Yu Zhang, the president of the opera house, "we will be putting on Chinese versions of Cats and Mamma Mia." No one can accuse the Guangzhou Opera House of elitism. In fact, the aim has been to shape a building, and an institution, open to all talents. In the backstage areas, lucky schoolchildren as well as professional musicians and dance companies will rehearse in stunning mirrored rooms set under rippling ceilings, calling to mind underwater caverns and grottoes.

Outside, the experience of strolling between and around the two "pebbles" is an extension of this architectural performance. The narrow crevice between the two structures reminds me a little of the enchanting entrance to Petra in Jordan through high walls of narrowing rocks. Local people clearly enjoy it. One boy runs up a sloping wall and tries to perform a somersault. Another seems to wonder whether he might race his bike up the opposite slope; but, with so many unsmiling security guards about, he decides, wisely, to pedal on.

An even greater performance lies above. Here, by night, the surrounding towers appear to grow out of the tops of Zaha's "pebbles", creating ever more surreal skyscapes at each turn of the head. These views can be experienced from inside the lobbies, too, lit from end to end by windows cut into the roofs and ceilings. Through these, you can see the drama of the city even while strolling through the depths of the opera house. "The idea," says Hadid, "is that the building is really a part of the city and you're aware of the city even when inside. It doesn't just go away."

A post-opera stroll

Hadid has long talked about the idea of buildings as landscapes, of shaping structures and spaces within them as if they might meander like a river. This is a beautiful idea very nearly realised in Guangzhou. If I have a criticism it is this: instead of dropping down to meet the Pearl River, the landscape of the opera house ends abruptly with further developments, including a viewing stand built for the 2010 Asian Games, and a concatenation of lumpen apartment blocks. It would have been so very special to have stepped out of a performance of Billy Budd or The Flying Dutchman and to have walked down to the river without having to think about which way to turn.

Even then, Guangzhou has to be applauded for giving Hadid and her team such a free hand with the design, when such a building has yet to make its debut in Britain. Despite building on a grand scale around the world, in the UK Hadid has just a school in Brixton, Maggie's Centre in Kirkcaldy and the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics to her credit. For, here is an architect clearly in love with the arts, and who is an artist herself. A performing one, too, as she receives the adulation of Guangzhou walking slowly and yet so proudly through a building that she had been thinking about for almost 20 years.

Jonathan Glancey

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tallest skyscraper by a British Architect tops out in China

The Sheet — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:06:04 +0000

Sir Terry Farrell said fast-growing China gives British architects and engineers an opportunity to capitalise on their expertise

British architecture is about to hit a new high with the "topping out" of a record-breaking 441-metre (1,440ft) tower in south China's finance capital.

The 100-storey Kingkey Finance Tower, based in the city of Shenzhen, is part of a 417,000 square metre office, retail, entertainment, apartment and hotel complex. It will rank as the tallest building ever designed by a British architect and will tower over anything seen in the UK.

The Shenzhen structure is nearly twice the height of 1 Canada Square, the Canary Wharf tower block that is Britain's tallest building. It is also much taller than the Shard of Glass, the 310m-high development near London Bridge that will be the top dog in the UK capital when it is completed.

These claims to fame will see the architect, Sir Terry Farrell, adding another landmark to a portfolio which includes a host of high-profile projects such as the MI6 headquarters, known in the intelligence community as "Babylon-on-Thames".

The tower is the eighth-tallest building in the world, with apartments covering 210,000 square metres and 173,000 square metres given to office space. The bottom six floors will be shops, while the 28 upper floors will be occupied by a five-star St Regis hotel, complete with conference centre. The tower is topped off with a five-storey "sky garden", complete with a variety of restaurants.

"I've always been fascinated by mixed-use developments and that's the key here," said 71-year-old Farrell.

"It will be like an urban district, a market square where you can congregate, meet people and have a coffee. I love the liveliness and the buzz of mixed-use areas, which draw in people for a variety of reasons. Mono-use developments feel dead and just don't work," he added.

Farrell said that the phenomenal growth of China gave British architects and engineers – and, in turn, the struggling UK economy – a clear opportunity to boost their coffers.

"It's often said you go to America for its can-do attitude, the far east for application and detail and Europe for design and imagination – and I think that's still true. There's definitely demand for British architectural and engineering expertise in planning in China," Farrell said.

In fact Farrell, who was behind the redevelopment of the South Bank, Covent Garden and Charing Cross station – and is redeveloping the Earl's Court exhibition centre and regenerating Holborn, Bloomsbury and St Giles in central London, is already working on another even taller building in China.

Last month, his firm TFP Farrells was appointed to help design the Z15 Tower, which will come in at more than 500 metres, or 120 storeys tall.

Farrell, who has a Chinese wife, studied architecture at Newcastle University and city planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tom Bawden

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

British architects at the mercy of China’s copycats

The Sheet — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:53:04 +0000

Established UK firms are now facing a novel challenge: Chinese doppelgangers bidding for contracts in their names

All art, Piccasso once said, is copying. The same might sometimes be said about architecture. A decade or so ago, I was on a bus heading north from Shenzen to Guangzhou in southern China when, half asleep, I looked out of the steamed-up windows and saw what seemed to be the Palace of Westminster. I asked the bus driver to stop, which he kindly did. I rubbed my eyes. It was a block of newly built concrete flats tricked up to look like Barry and Pugin's neo-Gothic masterpiece, complete with clock tower. What I found out later, from architects in Guangzhou, was that a number of Chinese practices employed students to scan images of famous buildings, old and new, into their design software and build them afresh. The results were comic-book versions of buildings from Europe and the United States dotted across the new map of capitalist China.

Ten years makes a big difference. In last week's Building magazine (paywall), David Matthews reports on a form of copying that has far more serious implications – not just for the art of architecture, but its practice, business and profession. Matthews reveals that at least two prominent British practices have been hit by a wave of identity theft at the hands of Chinese impostors, which have cloned their websites and submitted bids for building projects under their names. Broadway Malyan, a firm with offices in 13 cities worldwide including Shanghai, is one such practice.

Aedas, which has offices in Beijing, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Macau, Shanghai and Shenyang, is the victim of a similar fraud. "We had a company that took the trouble of registering in the UK," says David Roberts, the chief executive of Aedas in Asia. "They took information from our website and bid for projects. They had been submitting bids mainly for government projects before we found out." While Aedas was able to close its doppelganger down through Beijing courts, Roberts said his company had been unable to track down those responsible.

Given the international nature of the most prestigious and lucrative construction projects, and the success British practices enjoy globally, such scams may well be the tip of a digital iceberg. To date, the thieves appear to have targeted large, global practices working on a wide range of commercial and infrastructure projects from hotels and office blocks to sports arenas and entire districts of new Chinese cities. But will the web pirates begin to raid British practices with a higher design profile? If Aedas and Broadway Maylan, why not Foster and Partners and Zaha Hadid?

It might be argued that architects have forever borrowed from one another, and even produced copybooks for others to follow. But this latest development moves beyond flattery into criminality. It's one thing to see your latest work copied, but to have a fake firm snapping up contracts in your name is another thing altogether.

Jonathan Glancey

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds