July 28, 2016—Hong Kong
Article 5
No more weird buildings— China’s architectural revolution. Text by Aric Chen
Photographs by Adrian Gaut
Can the use of a single adjective transform an entire country’s built landscape? In China, where the utterances of a sole individual have been known to spark everything from revolutions and famines to the most spectacular economic rise in history, you might be forgiven for thinking yes. When President Xi Jinping, who’s been described as China’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping and possibly Mao Tsetung, called for an end to qi-qi guai-guai (“weird”) buildings at an October 2014 symposium on the arts in Beijing, many took it as a smack across architecture’s face. Few countries have built as much, and attracted as many prominent architects, as China in recent years, and even fewer have taken their building sprees to such forward-looking heights. The end of an era seemed nigh. China’s architecture boom of the past decade has transformed the country into a hothouse for experimentation. It has pushed the limits of built form to exhilarating extremes and allowed meaningful ideas to flourish, while also creating shape-shifting icons that have made mega events like the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo seem like mere excuses for producing more. For every CCTV tower, Guangzhou Opera House, and Bird’s Nest stadium attached to a first-name-basis architect— Rem [Koolhaas], Zaha [Hadid], and Jacques [Herzog] and Pierre [de Meuron], respectively—there has been a Harbin Opera House by Ma Yansong (MAD Architects), an OCT Design Museum by Zhu Pei, and a Yaluntzangpu Boat Terminal in Tibet, by Zhang Ke. That is to say, the phenomenon has been comprehensive, reaching into the biggest cities and the remotest corners, giving both established and emerging designers—from China, as well as abroad—a proving ground perhaps unlike any other in the world. That being said, it has also produced some real dogs, to say nothing of too many projects that for social and urbanistic reasons should never have left the drawing board in the first place. Like all great epics, the “weird building” boom has revealed both the best and worst in us: heroic ambition, heady idealism, and untamed creativity, but also hubris, vanity, and shortsighted opportunism.
Document No. 9
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