Splendidly Fantastic: Architecture and Power Games in China

Ask foreign starchitects what has drawn them to China and you tend to get vague exhalations about how China is opening up politically, economically, culturally; about how it is travelling in the right direction. “Architects want to be in the forefront, to be contemporary,” Ben van Berkel remarks. “And if you want to be that, you have to be aware of China. China, at the same time, wants to collaborate, to get better in every aspect of its culture … We should learn from China. It’s not just an economic quickness there, there’s also a drive, an ambition. There’s energy and intelligence.”31 China, Koolhaas has observed, is a “parallel universe” compared with the “backward-looking US”.32 “As a professor at Harvard, I have spent more than ten years carefully studying the direction in which China is developing. I’m convinced that it’ll be positive in the end.”33 (This is a prediction that no Harvard Sinologist — with a lifetime of studying China — would venture to make.) “In China, there’s a debate about progress that isn’t happening elsewhere,” David Gianotten remarks. “I don’t want to compare China with the West. Judgements are irrelevant here … We should embrace the Chinese context, what’s going on; the openness is very exciting.”

Richard Rogers, Toyo Ito, Dominique Perrault

Mao conquered the rest — the southern half — of the square a year after his death, when his orange, embalmed body — a sleeping beauty awaiting the kiss of history

Ambitious architects and dictatorial regimes have long formed a mutual-support act. For architecture, more than any other creative industry, depends on concentrations of wealth and power; on the state’s special ability to marshal resources and manpower. “Architects are pretty much high-class whores,” Philip Johnson (who himself had a thing for fascism in the 1930s) famously declared.

Ambitious architects and dictatorial regimes have long formed a mutual-support act

What architecture does, as no other cultural form can, is to glorify and magnify the individual autocrat and suppress the individual into the mass

Architecture has always projected power

any day now

Over the next year or two, if the property bubble bursts and the retreat from property investment turns into a rout, the skyscraper might take on a new meaning: an emblem not of political and economic triumph, but of overweening ambition and fiscal mismanagement.

the architecture boom seems to be running out of steam. Up and down the country, new cities of towering apartment blocks and expansive boulevards lie empty.