Architecture with Chinese Characteristics

IF architecture is frozen music, as German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, then Chinas premier cities are filled with towering symphonies.

Up-and-coming metropolises seem intent on instilling batophobia – the fear of being near tall objects – in their residents, and Chinas first-tier cities are no exception. The current construction boom in the country kicked off around the turn of the millennium, and since then, the functionalist, swimming poolmoulds that were architectural de rigueur for decades on the mainland have slowly sunk into the shadows of skyscrapers, with each new corporate pinnacle striving to be taller and bolder than the last.

To some extent, the scraper race continues today. At 600 meters, the twisting Canton Tower in Guangzhou was the tallest tower in the world when it was opened in September 2010. (The Tokyo Skytree, at 634 meters, usurped the title in March 2011.) And the Shanghai Tower, which will reach 632 meters when completed in 2014, will be the second tallest building in the world, outreached only by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

But closer to street level, Chinas cityscapes are also changing in less ostentatious ways.Leading architects working in the country are shifting away from extravagant showpieces and looking toward sustainable, mixed-use architectural works that draw on both Western and Chinese aesthetics and allow more room for civic spaces. The aim: to create pleasant, green and inspiring urban backdrops for the one billion Chinese expected to be living and working in the countrys cities by 2025.

To learn more about these changes I met with Leo A Daly III, chairman of Leo A Daly, an architecture, engineering, interiors, and planning firm headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Daly boasts an impeccable oeuvre in China that in-cludes the Shenzhen Excellence Century Center, the Haitong Securities Building in Shanghai and the Cheung Kong Center in Hong Kong.

“My father and I started working in China through a Hong Kong office in 1967, and since then there have been so many paradigm shifts in the domestic industry that weve lost count,” Daly tells me over an espresso on the 68th floor of Shangri Las World Summit Wing. The hotel occupies the top 16 floors of the 330-metertall China World Tower, Beijings tallest building. From our vantage point, steel and glass mountains rise high above rivers of bitumen; the dramatic geography of the citys central business district throws weight behind Dalys words.

Green Leap Forward

“Among all the changes in architecture in China over the last decade, the push for sustainable design is perhaps the most pervasive,” says Daly. By sustainable design, he means that a buildings operating costs and demands on the environment are a lot lower: construction materials are locally sourced, more room is put aside for landscaping and foliage, wear and tear costs are less, buildings retain heat in winter and lose it in summer, and water consumption is reduced.

“Its a demanding set of requirements that adds 10-15 percent to the cost of a building and requires architects to work with engineers, technicians and systems designers right from the first drawing.”

Policy to encourage “green buildings”has been included in the last two of the central governments five-year plans. Now, if youre building in China, youve got to be green.

The 12th and most recent five-year plan stipulates 35 million square meters of green buildings to be built in Beijing in the period 2011-2015. The countrys Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development has instituted a three-star green building evaluation standard, and the goal is that by 2020 the proportion of newly built green buildings in Beijing will be on par with that of developed countries. A more lofty aim is that average energy consumption in buildings across the country will be down 65 percent by the same year.

These targets are essential if China wants to reign in energy consumption in its rapidly expanding cities. The World Bank estimates that by 2015 half of the worlds building construction will be in China. According to a recent report called“Preparing for Chinas Urban Billion” by the McKinsey Global Institute, China will build 430 billion square feet of floor space, or the equivalent of 20,000 to 50,000 new skyscrapers by 2025. Fifty thousand skyscrapers is the equivalent of 10 New Yorks.

The Chinese government plans for 10 percent of this new floor space to be green. But even if it reaches this target, at the rate new buildings are going up, reducing the countrys energy consumption could be a Sisyphean task.

Dalys firm seems to be doing its part to ease the energy burden. The companys Beijing office will design two key areas of the China-Singapore Ecological Sci-Tech City, to be built in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province over the next 10-15 years. According to the design, there will be landscaped courtyards, green roofs, a green sky atrium and lakeside gardens. Geothermal pumps will reduce energy consumption; operable exterior shading will minimize solar heat gain, and a modular green wall system will improve indoor air quality.

Another of Dalys projects is Plot B of China Mobiles new International Headquarters Campus in Changping, north of Beijing. Daly won the international design competition in April of this year, and is working with local Beijing studio WDCE on the 148,000-square-meter plot to “design with an emphasis on reducing ecological and energy consumption impact.”The plot borders on a green park space, and the roofs of its two research and lab buildings will feature landscaped spaces planted with grasses, annual and perennial materials.

Foreign Devils?

Sustainable design is a relatively new concept in China, but some things about doing business in the country never change. Understanding the culture is still paramount.

Daly attributes his firms success on the mainland to this respect for the countrys culture, plus his decades-long experience of working here. Unfortunately, some foreign architects in China have been accused of lacking this cultural understanding.

Domestic observers have criticized foreign architects working in China, saying they use China as a trial space for controversial designs.

One well-known critic, architect Peng Peigen, a professor at Tsinghua University, is on record as saying: “Theyre[foreigners] using China as their new weapons testing zone. The stupid things they build could never be built in their own countries, in this life, the last life or the next.”

A commonly held opinion, often expressed in vitriol on the countrys microblogging service, Weibo, is that these projects lack any consideration for domestic architectural traditions. By ignoring the built environment around their projects, foreigners are creating eyesores, critics say.

Foreign firms point out that they won design competitions for these projects that Chinese firms were free to enter, and that cashed-up Chinese firms want brand-recognition and media coverage –bang for the architecture bucks.

But this shock-and-awe architecture may be on the way out as Chinese firms get better at designing buildings that Westerners cant – identifiably Chinese projects in greater harmony with traditional Chinese aesthetics.

Back to Roots

“Ten years ago, foreign architects in China were given a blank slate to chisel their dreams. Nowadays, local firms are still interested in absorbing Western technical expertise, but the focus is on indigenizing design,” says Peter Schubert, a partner at Ennead Architects, an award-winning New York City design studio with a presence in China.

“Theres only so much you can do with skyscrapers. Theyre a modern –Western, I should say – concept: a symbol of monetary success. But its hard to build unique features into them that represent a culture. Now, as China sets about building its new wave of cultural developments –museums, universities, research centers, mixed-use corporate campuses and civic spaces, theres room for the local culture to shine through,” he says.

One Chinese architect who has gained an international reputation for his efforts to bring an indigenous aesthetic to domestic architectural design is Wang Shu. Wang won this years Prizker Prize– known as the “Nobel Prize of Architecture,” becoming the first Chinese citizen to do so.

Some of Wangs notable designs, which are all in China, include the stunning Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum and Xiangshan campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he salvaged two million tiles from demolished traditional houses to cover the roofs of campus buildings. Wang also designed the library of Suzhou Universitys Wenzheng College to be halfunderground so as to take into account Suzhou gardening traditions that suggest buildings located between water and mountains shouldnt be prominent.

Indigenized design is now being championed thanks to trailblazers like Wang, but that doesnt equate to a wholesale rejection of Western aesthetics, says Peter Schubert. “As people get richer, they have more time to spend on leisure activities. Civic spaces and walkable communities become more important, and citizens want that mix of corporate, retail, residential and outdoor spaces that makes city life exciting,” he says.

Europe and American architects should have something to offer in creating mixed-use buildings and especially in the design of urban spaces, Schubert argues.

“If you look at Europe, the spaces in front of buildings were traditionally very important – the squares, piazzas, parks and so on. In China, ‘wall culturemeant that it was the spaces inside – the courtyards and inner sanctums – that were the focus. Over the next decade in China I think well see more spaces built for street life beyond the walls. U.S. and European firms have expertise in helping that life blossom. In Shanghai, the European architectural overlays in the city mean its already happening there.”

“Its all about improving the living standards of Chinas urbanites,”Schubert says. That seems like a goal on which foreign and local architects can work together.