Big pants, golden eggs, welcome to China’s ‘starchitecture’
“Rumor has it,” my guide whispered to me, as I stared down through the glass floor, where the rest of the building should have been, “give it a good shove, and the whole tower would just tip over’’.
Once seen, the CMG building in Beijing, home to China’s CCTV State-run television network, is hard to forget. It’s like a 234-meter M.C. Escher painting. Or Jenga game gone wrong. Locals affectionately call it “the big pants”.
Two towers support what the developers ominously call The Overhang, where several floors of office space juts out into thin air. The whole thing shouldn’t stand up. It defies logic. Which is why I was so unnerved. Especially standing on a glass window.
“It’s OK. It’s built to withstand earthquakes,” my guide laughed.
“Beijing has earthquakes?” I whimpered back, turning more pale.
Co-designer, Dutch national Rem Koolhaas has quipped that the now iconic building “Could never have been built by Europeans’’. I believe him. I come from Britain, home to some of the most stringent planning laws in the world.
An example. In 2016, locals in Richmond-on-Thames, a well-todo leafy southwestern borough of London, put down their gin and tonics and started angry letter writing about a 42-story tower being built in Stratford, 22.5 kilometers away, and now ruining their view.
That’s not a typo. Twenty-twopoint-five kilometers away.
Residents found that if they squished their faces to a telescope in Richmond Park, they could just about make out the blur rising up 7 km behind St Paul’s Cathedral itself 15.5 kilometers away. And that, they huffed, infringed on a view protected by planning rules since 1710.
England is that kind of place. There’s a reason why half of it still has straw roofs.
So to me, China is like a warm bath. Imagination, deep pockets, and a sense of fun have helped turn this country into an architect’s dreamland. For the last two decades, newly minted executives have walked into the world’s leading designers, thudded a suitcase on the desk, and asked: “What have you got?”
Take the new InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland, pictures of which have been doing the rounds on social media ever since it opened its doors last month. The 337 room hotel has been built into the side of an abandoned quarry pit. Technically 16 of its 18 floors are underground, two of them are underwater. In all, it looks otherworldly. The kind of place where 1960’s James Bond would mingle with some of the blue people from Avatar.
China is full of these buildings. City-defining buildings, like the 604-meter twisting Canton Tower, a neon-colored beacon for the center of Guangzhou, Guangdong province. The Henan Art Center, in Zhengzhou, housed in a series of giant golden eggs. Or the futuristic orbs of the Galaxy Soho tower in Beijing, designed by the late “starchitect” Zaha Hadid, and so popular that seemingly every building east of the second ring road has since attached “Soho” to its name in an attempt to ride the coattails.
I also love the trend for putting great see-through holes in the sides of buildings like giant glass polo mints. In England, that’d be called “a loss of valuable floor space”. Here, it’s “good feng shui”.
And these are just the more tame offerings.
Musicians at the Hefei University of Technology in Huainan, central Anhui province, enter through a towering glass violin and practice inside a piano blown up to 50 times the size.
The Meitan Tea Museum in Guizhou province is housed inside a 74 meter-tall teapot supposedly big enough to hold a 112 million cups of tea.
While one ultimate Star Trek fan has even boldly gone where no office design has gone before and spent a reputed 600 million yuan ($97 million) on a 260 meter-long office block shaped like the program’s USS Enterprise, complete with a life-size T-Rex. Because why not?
However, in 2016, the government decided to stop things before it got too silly.
“Bizarre architecture that is not economical, functional, aesthetically pleasing or environmentally friendly will be forbidden,” a State Council guideline made clear, taking the birthday hats off overexcited architects, removing the fizzy soda from their cups.
The designers can still dream. They just have to be more focused. Such as the new quarry hotel. If its explosive popularity shows anything, it’s that Chinese architecture isn’t yet in the pits.