Given the complex forces connecting China and the United States, the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s San Francisco office, had to negotiate difficult political, cultural, and architectural terrain.
“Graceful” is not a word often used to describe the business of development, especially in China, where cities move forward at sometimes ruinous speeds.
“Every city is looking for a facelift”, states Wang Hui, a principal of Urbanus Architects, while talking about his firm’s OCT Art & Design Gallery in Shenzhen.
While the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008 killed more than 80,000 people and left more than 4.8 million homeless, it created the chance to rethink development in some parts of the devastated province.
For the 2010 China National Games, China Construction Design International designed a group of sports facilties that sets a new precedent for integrating large venues into the complex and ever-changing fabric of cities.
The Shenzhen Institute of Building Research (IBR) designed its new headquarters in the Futian District of Shenzhen as a green experiment, using an impressive array of sustainable strategies and technologies.
With all of the mega-projects rising in Beijing and radically transforming the city’s skyline, architects and planners can easily forget that important change can happen on the small scale as well.
