What happened to all those blue-mirrored-glass buildings that popped up everywhere in Chinese cities in the 1990s? Where are the white-bathroom-tile facades I remember so well from my first trip to Beijing in 1995? They’re probably still standing, but they no longer dominate Beijing’s cityscape the way they did just a decade ago. Today, they sit in the shadow of some of the most daring and sophisticated architecture going up anywhere in the world. You drive by them, but they don’t really register because you’re craning your neck to see OMA’s CCTV tower or catch another glimpse of the remarkable bridges connecting the upper levels of the towers at Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid housing complex. When I visited the Olympics site this April, I noticed hundreds of people standing on highway overpasses and peering through construction fences at the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube before they opened. Everyone was posing, snapping photographs, and gawking. In Beijing, architecture has become a spectator sport.
The city’s rapid transformation from repository of tacky architecture to avatar of avant-garde design is anything but complete. You’ll see plenty of examples of crass commercial development and even some recent manifestations of pagoda-roofed towers and cornball chinoiserie if you visit Beijing today. And the never-ending construction boom has wiped away enormous swaths of the city’s historic fabric. Michael Meyer, an American writer who has lived for several years in a tiny apartment carved out of a decaying coutyard house south of the Forbidden City, chronicles the ever-present threat to Beijing’s hutong (page 72). These narrow lanes and the bustling communities they support once gave the city its unique character, serving as essential conduits for a social structure that emphasized connections between residents and their neighbors. As the hutong disappear, giant towers and malls rise from superblocks, throwing the city’s scale out of whack and creating a metropolis devoted to the needs of the automobile, not the pedestrian.
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