Inside the Egg

The French engineer-turned-architect Paul Andreu uses the word “wait” a lot in English, in the sense of hope, or anticipation. “This is the building they’ve been waiting for,” he says about the people of Beijing. Another use comes in the line he often tells critics. “I say, you don’t yet know how it is. Wait until you come inside and you’ll see what it’s like.”

Like anyone responsible for enormous, state-funded projects, the 69-year-old designer of Beijing’s National Grand Theater has done a lot of waiting. “I know everything about the difficulty of building such a big building,” says Andreu, decades of designing airports behind him, “but this process makes everybody stay tense, including me. Still, it’s a moment where everyone should not criticize it before it opens. We need to wait.”

One senses Andreu could keep waiting forever. Some five thousand miles away from his office near Paris’s Parc Montsouris, Andreu’s translucent, hermetic ovoid theater complex sits in the physical heart of Beijing, beside the Great Hall of the People, within eyeshot of Mao’s Tian’an’men portrait.

Those eyes are not indifferent: the idea of creating a national opera house was hatched in the late 1950s by Premier Zhou Enlai, who believed China needed a strong cultural symbol to match similar theaters in Russia, the United States and France. Some foundations were even dug, but the cost of such a project (the final tally is estimated at 2.7 billion yuan) kept the idea shelved until the 1990s, when President Jiang Zemin put it back on the table and, some say, had a hand in selecting the design.

For the past few years, the dusty dome peeked above its scaffold wall, a lingering monument to China’s ambitions as much to the challenges and controversies that dog such an enormous and sensitive building. More recently, a swath of trees was planted and the grounds open to the public; in September, the building’s central, 2,416-seat opera house hosted a much-publicized handful of nationalistic performances for displaced residents, construction workers and dignitaries (Jiang reportedly took the stage for a solo). But the building’s grand opening is scheduled to happen in the next weeks, some ten years after Andreu’s design was chosen. “We still have a certain number of things that are not finished,” he says, some two months from completion.

Whatever has been said of the opera up until now—it has become the central lightning rod for criticism of foreign architecture in China—Andreu is adamant that the building be judged only after the curtain officially rises, and everything is in place. (The soft opening also served as a test of the building’s lighting and acoustics.) “I hope the people coming into the building to see performances do not see the wrong image,” Andreu says. “If they come into a building in which the lighting by night is not good, is not the one that we wanted, and they say this isn’t any good, the reputation of the building is formed incorrectly.”

Andreu is anxious for his building to be embraced. “There’s nothing wrong with the design itself,” says Andreu. “But I personally want everybody to be convinced of it from the first day, and not after one year.”

In the evening, with its lights off, the opera house is stealthy, its shiny complexion and jellyfish-like form making it look as if it has silently, slowly risen out of the reflecting moat in which it sits. Illuminated from the inside, however, the building stands out vividly from its drab, state-blessed neighbors, as if it has been dropped there, a stunning bequest from another world.

Behind the veil of glass and titaniumTK however, nothing is so placid. An internet search on the Grand National Theater reveals a building under attack for its cost, location and appearance, a construction process proceeding in fits and starts (at least three opening dates have been announced), safety concerns, and a litany of nicknames from “egg” to “blob” to “dung.” Behind closed doors, the building faced budget cuts, bureaucratic hesitation, and at least one reassessment.

“Among the critics there were people who said, ‘This is very bad, you shouldn’t build this at all,’” he recalls. “It’s difficult to discuss with those people because they have their fixed ideas. It’s all about themselves. One should not talk with those people. The only answer I can give them, maybe, is to tell them to enter the building and then talk to me.”

This was not new ground for Andreu. In 1989, he completed the design of the gargantuan Grande Arche at La Defense on the outskirts of Paris, after the death of its main architect, Otto von Spreckelsen. An ultra-modern cubic arch commissioned by the government of Francois Mitterrand to complement the Arc De Triomphe, the Grande Arche, which looks like a more sober, concrete version of Beijing’s new CCTV building attracted a bevy of criticism when it was first proposed, for reasons that echo the criticism of the opera.

Andreu’s modern design of terminal 1 of Charles De Gaulle airport, completed in 1974, also divided opinion, before it came to boost the profile of Paris and the architect. As the chief engineer of France’s Aeroports de Paris (ADP) from 1967 until 2002, Andreu has brought his light, glass-and-steel style to more than 40 airport terminals. One critic dubbed him “airport architecture's dean of Futurism.”

Fundamental spaces though they are (Andreu says they “speak of very ancient things, going through limits, et cetera”), airports lack the sex appeal of cultural palaces. During a trip to monitor construction of the Pudong-Shanghai airport, he learned of the opera house competition, and entered with low expectations. “I went there just to participate because I’m very interested in that type of program. When I saw where it was I realized how important it was in the context of Beijing. The idea of bringing history, political power and culture so close together in a place like Beijing…that’s not something I can hope for again.”

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On a Sunday afternoon in late May of 2004, Andreu was in Beijing on one of his routine site visits when the news came from Paris: a section of roofing at Terminal 2E, his final airport design, had collapsed, killing four travelers. Two of the dead were Chinese citizens.

“I would say it is the worst thing that can happen to any architect in his life, and it was for me. It was a terrible shock. And I look at it with a full sense of responsibility,” he says. “From the beginning, I never wanted to say, ‘It’s not me.’

The design for the tubular concrete jetty, which had been finished less than a year previous, was hardly revolutionary. But weaknesses had been detected during construction, and though they were addressed by engineers, a government enquiry determined that metal pillars and openings in the concrete kept the structure weak. But investigators refused to conclude there had been a “conceptual error”; the government as well as Andreu has acknowledged that the building’s budget may have kept it from undergoing more rigorous safety checks.

But he scoffs at the suggestion by some that the victims were wronged by an unswerving attention to modern design. “It’s not because it was beautiful that it collapsed,” Andreu said. “It’s not because we made it like that that it collapsed. It’s not because we took an uncalculated risk that it collapsed. I’m sure about that. Can we avoid it? I don’t know. I hope we can always do better. But does that mean, ‘Okay, let’s only do ordinary things’?”

Though the opera’s construction was unaffected by the collapse, it did stirred a fresh torrent of criticism. Domestically, much of it was aimed at the building’s total disregard for Chinese aesthetics. Unlike the upward-sloping roofs of the nearby Forbidden City, the lines of the aggressively modern building slid downwards and eschewed feng shui principles; the large main entrance, which tunnels through the exterior moat in an attempt to keep the dome “pure” and free of any apparent openings, has been likened to the passageway of an imperial tomb.

Unlike some of his foreign colleagues, Andreu never made pretensions to incorporating Chinese ideas in his design, opting instead for a determinately ultra-modern approach. “Instead of looking backward, we need to be only looking forward, and be responsible,” he says. It was fiscal responsibility that led an early governmental review to force the budget down by at least 25 percent; other minor changes to the design have been negotiated over the years between Andreu’s office, the client, contractors and local design institutes.

“All the way, I kept the same attitude: ‘Okay, if you have a problem, tell me and I’ll try to solve it. But don’t tell me what to do. You’ve selected my project. I am myself even more critical than you are.’” he says. “I want a dialog of architect with owner. I don’t want to be given typical orders.”

Andreu credits his own determination to stay close to the project for keeping it in his hands, literally. His visits to China, to which he has traveled every month for the past decade, included handling some of the construction himself. The metallic slabs that line the lobby floor, for instance, were made by molds cast by Andreu. “I was able to take my design fully, completely,” he says with obvious yen for a bygone era, and an architect’s fatigue with “not being understood.” For liability reasons, he says, “That’s something you couldn’t dream of in western countries anymore.”

The somewhat haphazard fashion of construction in China, says Andreu has also spurred him on, and not just because he hopes to push things forward. It has enabled him more flexibility in design, so that a change can be adapted relatively easily, without the need for pesky bureaucracy. “If you made an error, if you criticize yourself, and think you’re your work is wrong, in Europe you cannot change anymore, or it becomes a total drama. But in China you can.”

The sheer amount of demand has also made the country an appealing destination. “Very simply, the peasant should go where the grass is green,” says Andreu. So far, he has gone there to design the airport in Shanghai and a stadium for Guangzhou; a 370,000 sq. meter science and technology center is rising in Chengdu. “There are so many projects and so much ambition in China. I think every architect in the world tries to bring something of himself there.”

Whatever the final verdict on the “egg,” the risk of hatching it has been well worth it. “I consider it the chance of my life in fact,” he says. “What better building can I do?”

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Though stylistically, the building most closely resembles a glass dome he designed for an aquarium in Osaka, Japan, in its public mission, Andreu admits the opera’s closest relatives might ultimately be the very public, functional buildings for which he is known. The opera’s enormous glassed lobby is reminiscent of an airport terminal panorama, while the complex’s symmetrical system of walkways resemble the branches one takes to reach a flight. Pushed far back from the street, and with its perfectly sealed envelope, the building can feel as removed from the city as its airport, a point both of arrival and departure.

“An opera in a way is a similar thing [to an airport]. You come from the streets and you enter into another life. You think of the opera, this fantastic art, speaking of your life and your dreams,” says Andreu. “The work of an architect is to make the passage possible.”

To a passer-by, especially an average Beijinger, the building’s shiny skin and sense of removal may just as easily inspire a sense of snobby aloofness. But Andreu hopes his strange building will draw in not only crowds of music lovers and architecture buffs, but those simply baffled by its design. He has in mind TK’s skeletal design for the Pompidou Center in Paris, another lightning rod for criticism when it was built in TK, but which today draws crowds who might otherwise not go to a museum.

For an example of architecture that surpassed expectations, Andreu’s favorite reference is to I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre. A better historical consolation however may be the Sydney Opera House. When Danish architect Jørn Utzon’s building was first revealed, locals scoffed at the bold expressionism of its jutting concrete “shells”; today the building is the most visited landmark in the Southern Hemisphere.

But for every Pompidou Center and Sydney Opera House there are a dozen examples of awful buildings. Unlike many of the testaments to architectural grandiosity that litter the capital, Andreu’s theater—at the vanguard of China’s most daring building projects in decades—will not be afforded a veil of anonymity. For better or worse, it will become a center for performance in Beijing, a lasting symbol of the country’s futuristic ambitions, and the marquis project of one architect’s long career.

“Sometimes, what the people wait for, what they desire, they don’t know. They recognize their desire only when they see it. Meanwhile, a painter, an architect, a musician, has to be totally convinced of what he does,” says Andreu. “He will know only at the end if the people have the same feeling.”