Author: Hank M.Chao   Time: 2009-2-10 11:23:49

The architecture in china has changed radically during the recent decades, especially after the China's economic reform.  The major characteristics of the contemporary architecture in china can be summarized as the followings. The size of the construction is mostly under tremendously large in scale. Furthermore, thousands of the buildings have been designed and built under very limited time or even on unreasonable schedules to meet the fast growing and expanding demands of the cities all over China.

 

The architects and designers have to adapt themselves to the time table of the Chinese market; generally speaking, the design deadline is about one thirds than their ordinary schedules. The other remarkable characteristic of the architecture in China is the scale. Most architects are seldom to get involved into the urban planning or town planning since most cities have had well developed in the most developed countries. However, China has had been blocked out from the world for almost a century and tries to catch up in a pace of high speed. Also, the population in China has come up to one thousand millions, the immense needs of the dwellings has become a very critical issue. That is why the  concept of the “residential community or district” might be different from other countries.  Literally speaking, it might mean a “town planning” or “urban planning” in contrast because the scale of developing the dwellings for one single community might consist of thousands of units in fact. Besides, the infrastructure and the public works, such as roads, highways, schools, museums or city landmarks are increasingly planning and constructing. These are, certainly, huge in scale.

 

For example, Tianjin as the 3^rd largest city in China has assigned Surv, which is one of the design firms providing urban planning and architecture design services, to redesign the development of the Tianjin City. As one of the oldest cities of China, the designer confront with the problems of the new and old districts and buildings over the more than 100,000 area.  In the meanwhile, Kurokawa Kisho, one of the greatest master architects in Japan was invited to do the urban planning design of Zhengzhou, which is one of the cities with glory history in the past. The size of the project is regarded as the largest in Mr. Kurokawa’s design career and out of his imagination in scale.

 

There are various kinds of forms in the newly built architecture in terms of styles in China. Almost all of the distinguished and recognized architects from various countries got involved in the major projects in the major metropolitans. As we can see those stadiums for the Olympics games are great works from Herzog & de Meuron, PTW and some other most respectful architects. The great architect, Koolhas from Holland has just accomplished one of his most important designs for the CCTV Beijing headquarter. Years ago, SOM from USA did a great high rise building design for Hyatt Shanghai. Tadao Ando, who is regarded as the master and the pioneer of the minimalism from Japan has designed an interesting building for Tong-Ji University in Shanghai. Zaha Hadid, one of the greatest masters of deconstructionist from London has created a moving form from the Opera House Guangzhou. 

 

Among all of the greatest architects from various cultures, I.M. Pei might play the most important role in the recent construction history of China. Pei is an architect born in China and well-known as a post-modernism master in architecture history. His latest work for the Suzhou Museum might represent the major spirit of the modernization of China. Pei has successfully mixed the traditional Chinese architecture with the contemporary design concept and spirit. By using the traditional Chinese layout on the floor plan, he brought the natural light and modern geometries into the forms of the architecture. Nevertheless, the design of the museum still reveals the traditional Chinese architecture concept of the depth of the space, the flow of the air and the hierarchy of the architecture orders. Beside the endeavor of Pei, Steven Holl has broken the pattern of the standardized and repetitive mass housing in China. The Hybrid Building complex adjacent to the old city wall of Beijing over the 160,000 square meter shows the ancient Chinese loop corridor idea in the contemporary high rise dwelling towers. 700 apartments are connected with the bridges and turns into multifaceted spatial layers. Last, the Grand Hyatt building designed by SOM borrows the ideas of ancient Chinese pagoda and makes the skin of the architecture interesting and elegant in a very fashionable and modest way.

 

Even though there are numerous of architects and designers from the world anticipating the development of the architecture in China, the local architects are making their efforts on the distribution of finding the new direction and forms in architecture. According to my observation and experiences, the developers prefer to hire the local architecture firms to do the mass housing design rather than architects other than China. The developers might hire foreign architects only for some high rise commercial buildings and certain city landmarks. The major reason for the outcome might be the foreign architects usually consider the forms and the beauties as the priority design factor and ignore the basic the layout of the floor plan. However, most Chinese people might considerate the layout and the Feng Shui as the most critical key issue of their living environment. Therefore, the local architects might prevail over the market of the design in larger scales instead.

 

Last, expect the fast growing design market in the architecture field, the other interesting sign in the Chinese market is the publishing houses for architecture and design are growing and expanding in a surprisingly fast speed. I believe it has something to do with the large population of the market is supporting the growing of the press field. The local Chinese press has gradually learned to publish architecture design books in a much higher quality and contents. I believe, maybe the Chinese press might dominates or shares the major the publishing market in the next coming decade. This might be a point of view worth to be paid attention.

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