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Friction builds over Beijing's Olympic
revamp
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - The reinvention of Beijing as a modern
international city ready to host the 2008 Summer Olympic
Games has presented Chinese planners with a dilemma -
how to reconcile imported design ideas from the West
with China's unique architectural heritage.
For
a government so stridently nationalistic, the choice has
been striking - a score of landmark projects defining
the future face of Beijing has been awarded to foreign
architects.
What is dubbed Beijing's first
European-style skyscraper, which will host the
headquarters of China Central Television, is on the
drawing boards of Dutch architects from the Office for
Metropolitan Architecture.
The expertise of a
renowned German architect, Albert Speer Jr, has been
sought for an ambitious plan to build a north-south axis
across the city that will connect the new Olympic Park
with the Imperial Forbidden City.
One of the
capital's signature financial buildings - the
headquarters for the Industrial and Commercial bank of
China, the country's largest bank - was assigned to the
US firm Skidmore Owens & Merrill.
In fact,
the preference to harness foreign talent to remake
Beijing into a modern showpiece has been so evident that
plenty of cultural friction has arisen.
The
construction of China's Grand National Theater - which
will sit across the Great Hall of the People and a
stone's throw from the Forbidden City - is perhaps the
most illustrative example of the cultural debates raging
behind the scenes. After being awarded to the French
architect Paul Andreu in 2000, the project has been
criticized as too expensive and too alien to Chinese
culture, and has been repeatedly stalled by an avalanche
of objections.
Downsized and revamped, the
theater construction is now moving ahead, but detractors
grumble that China is blindly succumbing to unhealthy
influences of Western futurism. The design represents a
translucent glass-and-titanium dome floating on a lake,
housing three auditoriums. Visitors will descend through
escalators through the water into an underground hall.
"China has architects with 30-40 years of
experience. Entrusting it to an architect who has only
done bridges and never designed a theater is like
putting a Western boxer on the same level as a Chinese
martial-arts master. It is a national shame," Peng
Peigen, a Beijing-based architect, argued during a
conference organized here by the government to solicit
opinions on the project.
Others counter that an
authentic Chinese architectural style does not
necessarily need to be a modern interpretation of
ancient Chinese forms. A case in point is Beijing's
infamous collection of glass-tower blocks crowned with
pagoda roofs.
When the real-estate boom started
here in the 1990s, the mayor of Beijing tried to protect
the city from over-Westernization by creating a more
Chinese-looking skyline. He insisted that all new tower
blocks built in the capital wear Chinese-style pavilion
roofs.
"Although this aspiration was admirable,
the result was unsatisfactory, and the strips of tiles
on roofs rapidly became known as 'watermelon rinds',"
said Joe Carter, a Canadian architect who has lived and
worked in China since 1985.
"After 50 years of
communism, China is reinventing herself artistically,"
said Zhang Xin, a Chinese property developer. "In a very
short time, we have seen such huge amount of
construction and the release of so much creative energy
that Chinese architects have almost had no time to
search for their own contemporary identity."
Foreign architects, however, have zealously
lined up to satisfy the needs of China's building boom.
Undaunted by the clamor of a nationalist lobby that
wants to see China's skylines mapped by Chinese, foreign
architectural talent had flocked and stayed because of
the country's immense potential.
"For me, China
is like a land of opportunities," says Antonio Ochoa, a
Venezuelan-born architect who has settled down in China.
"Nowhere else in the world would architects be given an
equal chance to design on the same grand scale.
Everything is possible here, and China is still in the
beginning of many years of a building boom."
But
the ambition to create a model city that would outdazzle
everything done in the West has led government planners
to employ foreign architects even when the projects are
regarded as intrinsically Chinese.
To create a
25-kilometer boulevard connecting the Olympic Park in
the North with the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square
in the city center, Beijing planners are consulting a
German urban planner who happens to be the son of Adolf
Hitler's personal architect, Albert Speer. The choice
has stirred many ghosts from the past in Germany, where
architects have suggested that there is an uncanny
parallel between the Beijing axis of Albert Speer Jr and
the north-south axis planned by the elder Speer for
Hitler's new Berlin, which was to be called "world
capital Germania".
"Is the son trying to copy or
rather outdo his father?" asked an article in the German
newspaper Die Welt last month.
But Chinese
officials say that Speer Jr's design closely reflects
their own intentions of creating a central axis that was
laid out in the planning of the imperial capital
centuries ago.
"Following the Confucian
tradition, Beijing was planned along a north-to-south
axis, representing the authority of the state," Zhu
Zixuan and Reginald Yin-Wang wrote in their essay
"Beijing: The Expression of Political Ideology" on the
importance of this north-south axis. "The Imperial
Palace, government offices, religious buildings, and
minor royal residences were all located, symmetrically,
on the east and west sides of the central axis.
Political power and social position were clearly
demarcated on the urban landscape," they said.
As the Chinese government has stated its goal of
"integrating the 2008 Olympics with Chinese
characteristics and spiritual civilization", its choice
of mainly foreign architects entrusted with the search
for Beijing's new architectural identity remains
puzzling to many.
(Inter Press
Service)
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