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Digests | Report

China Digest #02

Creepy CCTV

Beijing is full of strange people doing strange things with buildings. This week OMA/Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV has reached a certain state of completion as work has begun to connect the two towers. Back in the days, 2004, Koolhaas described in Content the way how they would connect as follows: “On October 28, at 9am, I heard one of Balmond’s engineers describe, without irony or noticeable weavering, how the encounter and eventual joining, at 200 meters, of sloping steel structures that, through their relative positions on the ground were exposed to different amounts of solar heat-gain, could only take place at dawn, when both had cooled off during the night and were most likely to share the same temperature.” Nowadays, nobody seems to talk about this exciting dawn-moment, and it seems that it is possible to do without it. Throughout the last year, DutchTom has been actively stalking the building and made some amazing collection of CCTV’s construction. Check out his flickr-page to understand his obsession with the building. Chinese artist and architect Ai Weiwei posted on his blog also a couple of his drive-by-shooting of CCTV, which looks more like some Towers in the Mist.

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More Creeps

Some interviews with architects just can give you the creeps, especially when they deal with China. Reuters features a very short interview with the Italian architect Mario Bellini who wants to join the architectural revolution here. And explains as follows his motives; “What could be attractive about working in China is the fast timing, because architects always feel they haven’t got a long enough life.” One Chinese architect that has a strange relation with the architectural revolution is Ma Qingyung, principal of MADA s.p.a.m.. Archinect features a series of interviews with him. And he seems to have another opinion on the same topic: “In China, a designer could just draft something up and very soon you’ll see it being built, and being built just like you drew it. So, it makes a very scary practice where you must… Nobody is really challenging you in such a complicated way, so to me it’s dangerous because then if you’re not critical to yourself you can build something very bad…”.

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Beijing Preservation

On December 19, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning and the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage jointly released their list of architectural structures designated for protection. The list covers 188 architectural sites in Beijing, including the China Children’s Art Theatre, the 798 Factory and the Beijing Youyi Hospital. More info. The online journal China Heritage Quarterly has just published a new issue about the princely mansions of Beijing. From their website; On the eve of the 2008 Olympic year, we are featuring articles on Prince Gong’s mansion and its attached garden, as well as discussing the fate of Prince Chun’s mansion nearby. We also conisder the history and heritage of another one of the city’s fallen princely residences, that of Dorgon, Prince Rui. We will return to the theme of Princely Mansions in Issue 14 (June 2008), the focus of which will be ‘Beijing, the Invisible City’.

**********************************************Real Estate

Shui On Land, one of China’s largest and most visible real-estate developers, recently announced it has successfully acquired by auction the development right and land use rights of the land in Zumiao Donghua Lane, Foshan City, Guangdong Province. Foshan is located in the Pearl River Delta, close to Guangzhou and Hong Kong. According to the press release, the Foshan Government aims to transform the city into an international and modern economic hub that embraces the mixture of the Lingnan-style and cultural ambience. According to one source, this project would be called “Foshan Tiandi”, a nostalgic restoration project similar to that of Shanghai’s “Xintiandi”. Shanghai Xintiandi was the first development in the Taipingqiao Redevelopment Project and is nowadays an urban tourist attraction imbued with the city’s historical and cultural legacies. The design was done by Ben Wood, principal of Studio Shanghai.

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More Real Estate News

A recent study by China Securities Journal found that real estate developers have been fast expanding their land banks across the country over the past 11 months at the same time nationwide, average land prices increased by 9.8 percent, 13.5 percent and 15 percent respectively in the first three quarters of this year, according to figures released by China Real Estate Chamber of Commerce.At the same time land prices are increasing, Chinese media is reporting on the phenomenon of the “House Flu”. Danwei runs a small feature on this stating that trading volume is dropping for both new and second hand housing. Developers are beginning to find different methods to attract consumers, including price reductions, cash rebates, and even “buy a house, get a free car” gift deals. But buyers are increasingly holding on to their money in the hopes of getting further price reductions. This news explains the dropping of housing prices in Shanghai.A logical next step in this evolution would be “buy a car, get a free house”.

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Art Basel Beijing

More real estate, but this time in combination with art. The Financial Times runs a small article on the fact that Art Basel Miami Beach is exploring branching out to Beijing with a new partner, Design Miami. It mentions that the overall is being supported by the Dacra Group, an urban redevelopment and property company that created Miami’s Design District. Dacra Global, the international arm of his company, has an alliance with Beijing-based construction company Modern Group to build 50 per cent of the retail component of a $100m, 230,000 sq metre development called Pop Moma and Grand Moma in Beijing. Pop Moma was designed by Baumschlager+Eberle.

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Bert de Muynck is an architect, writer and director of movingcities. He lives and works in Beijing, China. Bert de Muynck|movingcities