orientation

changing the desire

2008-12-15T02:21:00.000-08:00

If you think of the architects that we love the most, the ones that have really affected us, they didn’t simply build what they were asked to build – they built something that was surprisingly better than what they were asked for. They changed the desire. The good architect is the one who makes you realize that your desires could be more adventurous, and then who satisfies those new desires in ways that are very, very positive. That – that – is a really important social mission. If you say that the traditional architect monumentalizes existing desires, that doesn’t sound like such a hot mission anymore.

-- mark wrigley in an interview with bldgblog.

it might be obvious, but isn't that what we want from every leader, and what we only get from the visionaries? the possibility for possibilities.

but is it good enough that only architect (or the client) is actor? where is there room for the public?

Return to America

2008-12-11T00:33:00.000-08:00

A middling Hollywood film from the mid 90s. Actually you don't know if it's from the mid 90s or the late 90s or the late 80s -- it doesn't matter -- but the first thing you notice, somehow, is the sloppy set design and beige colored walls and corny background music. And then the cornier half aware acting, all framed by angles and techniques described in the early chapters of film school textbooks. The lighting alone makes you want to want to sit far away from the TV, crawl into the corner of the foreign hotel room. But it also, all of it, sucks you in too. And though you could have sworn you've seen it before, you can't help but watch it, can't even help but watch the terrible advertisements that interrupt it all. The way you want to watch a big wreck.

Some excerpts from the film:

"In the worst case scenario...I have to sleep here." - man on cell phone with slicked hair
"I asked for an early holiday. They didn't tell me I could only take off two weeks before Christmas!" - handsome man with a TSA jacket
"Go beyond the image, the controversy...CNN Showbiz" - television
"Tomorrow night, Larry King talks to Caylee's grandparents." - tv
"...but today Oprah weighs 200 pounds. She says she's embarassed." - tv
"Whether the economy is up exponentially or down exponentially, things here keep rolling along very well." - a man from the DC government
"What a modern airport." - my father, upon landing at Dulles, 20 years ago

"Modernist funeral home." - me, upon landing at Dulles, last week

An old couple never looked so scared and pathetic to me.

Dawn of a New Century: Ordos 100

2008-04-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

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I have just returned from Ordos, for the second installment of what is now known as the "Ordos Project", where I found myself trying to document every last bit of it, not unlike Ai Weiwei, whose role hovered somewhere between bemused, fatigued camp counselor and mad scientist. What happens if we ferry 100 architects to the middle of nowhere -- site of architectural dreams, knotted setting of stories that could be by Borges or Kafka or Melville, but also epicenter of bewildering expansion, test bed for unprecedented urban experiments, a massive mine of coal and gas and milk and cashmere and so much. An ecological dare. And again, through all of that, or despite all of that, a place where architectural dreams are made. A laboratory where Western fantasies meet Chinese ones. How different can they be? And what will they have to do with realities? We'll see.

I should be writing more soon -- I have so much material -- because even if this doesn't get built (and I think it will) this is as interesting as an art project and a social experiment and a symbol, if not of future urbanism and architecture, of our desire to find meaning in it. It could be very interesting as a film, and an article or two, or a hundred.

This article originally appeared in Urbane magazine in April, before the second phase trip, and an earlier version appeared in the South China Morning Post.

Forget the Commune by the Great Wall. This month, dozens of architects will come to the Inner Mongolian desert to being laying the foundations for a new town that will be one of the world’s most sensational architecture extravaganzas. One hundred architects, one hundred villas, designed in one hundred days.

In 1226, on his way to rout the Western Xia regime, Genghis Khan is said to have picked his burial spot: the verdant grasslands near the modern city of Ordos, Inner Mongolia. On the same site today sits a mausoleum complex containing a wealth of Khanate memorabilia, ersatz Mongolian relics, and a vast fake ger, or traditional tent, where dinners of lamb come with a song-and-dance depiction of the warrior’s life, performed mostly by Han Chinese. Notably absent however is Genghis Khan himself, who ordered that his body never be found.

“Wherever they died, they would be buried on site, without a tomb,” says Cai Jiang, a leading local entrepreneur of Mongolian descent, as he flicks ash from his cigar. “We shouldn’t have any trace at our death, because by then we have already spent so much time building our living spaces.”

The 40-year-old billionaire from Baotou says he also intends to leave no trace, but that might be hard given his worldly ambitions. With a self-made fortune from milk and coal, and the backing of a government awash with natural resource earnings, Mr. Cai has launched a construction project that would surely impress Genghis Khan, and make even the most ambitious Beijing developer blush: a river-ringed RMB 4.5 billion “creative culture” town made up of museums, theaters, studios, office buildings, apartments, and, at the center, a set of one hundred villas, each designed by a young international architect in about one hundred days.

“This does not happen often in the history of architecture or in China,” Ordos’s deputy mayor, Yang Gongyan, said in January at the opening meeting for the quasi utopian project, called the Jiang Yuan Cultural Creative Industries Park. The unlikely meeting looked more like a UN summit than an urban planning consultation. Next to Cai sat assorted assistants, municipal planners, Party officials, and artist Ai Weiwei, who is working for Cai as master planner and organizer of the villa project, dubbed Ordos 100. Mr Ai famously helped Swiss star architects Herzog & de Meuron design Beijing’s Olympic stadium before slamming it as a state-sponsored “pretend smile.”

Also present were forty wide-eyed architects from 29 countries, who had been handpicked by Herzog & de Meuron, and flown in for the first phase of the project (another group arrives this month). “It’s like a fairytale,” said Alexia Leon, an architect from Lima, Peru, during a celebratory dinner. “China makes a lot of things real that seem unreal.”

Before reaching the mostly empty steppe land where Cai’s town will grow, half an hour by car from the current city center, visitors must pass through the city’s own new district. In less than three years, a 32 sq. km swath of grassland has been transformed into a super suburb, replete with giant Genghis Khan statues, futuristic cultural buildings, a forest of new apartment complexes, and hundreds of faux classical villas that fade into the distance. In the past year, hundreds of kilometers of piping and road has been laid, and nearby, a new airport has opened, placing the city within an hour’s reach of Beijing.

This hyperspeed approach to urbanization is a testament to the area’s breakaway success. Last year, Inner Mongolia overtook Beijing to become China’s second biggest economy after Shanghai (Ordos ranks 28th). The province also became the literal engine for the country’s economy: its 2007 coal output rose an estimated 75 per cent to roughly 350 million tons, surpassing the old coal-mining base of Shanxi. Foreign direct investment in Ordos is the highest in the province. In the old district of Dongsheng, where per capita income surpasses Shanghai, the parking lot of the five-star Holiday Inn hosts a revolving fleet of Range Rovers and Porches. A Shangri-La is under construction.

“Of course every city wants to be the best,” says vice mayor Yang. For Ordos, that means reaching beyond its typical industries of milk, cashmere and coal. To attract more investment, and diversify the city’s economic profile, officials have not only turned Ordos into a manufacturing base for car, chemical, and coal-to-fuel projects, but have also set their sights on China’s most emergent industry. Taking a cue from Beijing and Shanghai, officials now see creativity, enshrined in everything from art districts to advertising agencies, as the premium that could raise the city’s profile, and inject the economy with a boost of innovation. In 2006, the Ordos government announced its intention to become Inner Mongolia’s cultural industries leader, providing a base for film, music, web and fashion, and drawing in tourism from around China. “We want people to come here not just for business, but to relax, go shopping. We want to attract more creative talents, create a space where people can work, work creatively, and live comfortably.”

To get there, officials are turning to entrepreneurs like Cai, who have the funds and the “flexibility” that governments do not, says Yang. And whereas the city’s previous creative industry venture—the privately-funded Genghis Khan mausoleum—feels like a worn-out cultural theme-park, Cai’s Jiang Yuan town, what she calls “a world class architecture museum that’s also a place to live and work,” will “open the door to the world for Ordos.”

Some locals have voiced opposition, citing the distance of the Jiang Yuan development from the old city, high costs of construction and ecological damage that a population boom could mean for an already fragile environment. “Ordos will become a hell on earth,” wrote one critic on an internet forum. Another commented: “It is impossible to have a few million more people, at best, on what is also a natural resource-based industrial city. Water supplies, the environment and other aspects do not create the conditions for a metropolis. And the distance between the two towns will only increase operating costs.”

With his open collar, Hugo Boss suits, and suave goatee, Cai certainly looks the part of the heady private investor the government is banking on. He plays it well too. “Because this is so costly, 4.5 billion renminbi, it’s not rational or practical for the nation to invest in this kind of thing,” he says. Though “one hundred” and “Ordos” have become almost mantras for him (“100 architects, 100 percent creativity, 100 pc everything”), Cai says quality, not quantity is crucial. “If we only focus on the numbers, we won’t be earning enough.”

Soft spoken and circumspect, Cai is nonetheless “really, really good at pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in China,” says Michael Tunkey, an architect who is designing separate villas and an opera house for the Ordos site. When he accompanied Cai to a meeting with top executives from Harley Davidson last year, Cai, who owns half a dozen of the company’s motorcycles, proposed opening a Harley Davidson café in Ordos.

“These guys went from being very polite to showing real interest,” says Mr Tunkey, who attended the meeting. “He had the ability to fly to Milwaukee and, without being able to speak the language, convince them that there’s this great thing happening and they might want to consider being involved. When most people get to his level of leadership in China, they want to avoid things that will lose face. But when he believes in something, he doesn’t see why anyone would see differently.”

Despite a cool, brooding visage, Cai is gracious, and can be infectiously enthusiastic. He is especially proud of the first buildings at Jiang Yuan: a set of utilitarian art studios by Ai Weiwei and a glass-and-slate contemporary art museum designed by Beijing-based architect Xu Tiantian, which contains pieces from his own collection by artists like Xu Bing and Fang Lijun. Though he avoids discussing the occasionally touchy political subtexts in his collection, Cai says he admires the “freedom” of art, and hints, carefully, that it doesn’t have enough. “The arts nowadays need the best climate they can get here in China, be it purely artistically or commercially. This is something the United States already knows.”

For Cai, finding a space for creativity and building audiences around it means embracing the link between art and commerce. “As Inner Mongolia has become more economically mature, I started to think there’s something missing in our cities, like a cultural life. Money alone doesn’t make a city rich. And yet, this isn’t just about a museum or even the other facilities, but an entire complex with a commercial bent, with advertisement firms, designers, cultural companies. I want to fill peoples’ minds, but also their wallets.”

When the new town begins to open late next year, Cai hopes to use it for his own companies, including ventures in engineering, natural gas, coal and, with a 50,000 cow ranch near Baotou, milk. Ordos, he hopes, will become the brand name for a series of projects. Though he currently sells his milk through provincial conglomerate Meng Niu Group, he plans to establish his own luxury milk and yogurt brand. By linking the city with his products, Cai imagines a synergy that could turn Ordos into a household word. “You can imagine after fifty or one hundred years, people will be talking about this project. Whether my name is remembered is not so important. But the name of Ordos will spread.”

The reason for that, Cai insists, is the architecture. “It’s the most obvious cultural name card of a city,” says Dai Xiaozhong, the vice director of the Jiang Yuan project. Last year, Cai made serious overtures to star architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Herzog & de Meuron, but only the latter agreed to participate, selecting the one hundred architects who would design the town’s villas. That suited Cai perfectly. “We would like to support young artists, give them a stage and a voice. Also, because the young architects are barely affected by tradition, they will have some new ideas to offer.”

Even without big name recognition, and nary a design sketch, the project is already building buzz for its scale, speed, and collaborative style. “From the start, this should be a star project, because in our human history, nobody has done anything like it,” says Ai Weiwei, who last year opened a pavilion park in his hometown of Jinhua, Zhejiang province, featuring the work of 17 architects. On one hand, the Ordos project is about “cultivating” a developer like Cai, “who has a slight idea about architecture.” But Mr Ai is more concerned with the architects. “Architects are so educated, so concerned about protecting their knowledge, so attached to personal creativity rather than communicating and fighting and getting themselves into new circumstances and using their basic, original strength, their courage. Whenever you set up a condition questioning normal behavior it’s always interesting.”

Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, a Finnish architect involved, insists that the commission offers an escape from the profession’s culture of competition, which often results in wasted work and pitiful salaries. “Young architects always say there are not enough projects to do. This is the brilliant solution. Instead of competitions, collaboration!” Lyn Rice, who heads a practice in New York, says the commission provides not only “an incubator” for shared ideas but an opportunity to break out of the “McMansion” template of housing common to large suburban construction in the West—and increasingly in China. “That is an opportunity that we simply do not have in our home countries.”

Still, say architects and critics, many questions remain unanswered. Zou Huan, a professor of Architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing wonders about the project’s relevance to the larger context. “What I doubt a little is how a city could be created without a deep analysis of its social and economic aspects.” Along with other concerns about how the villas will engage the public and each other, the architects also wonder if the entire area will end up fallow, like a larger version of SOHO China’s much-hyped Commune by the Great Wall. Cai rejects those ideas, but says the uncertainties are precisely why he convened the architects in the first place.
“I’m always looking for more talented ideas, more creative ideas to develop this concept,” he says. “That’s what makes this special. We need new ideas, right? Because nobody has done such a project before.”

Love it

2008-03-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

XIU XIU

Women As Lovers (KRS)

His hair-pulling electro-dirges may not suggest it, but Jamie Stewart clearly knows how to get things done. With Women As Lovers, the dashing brainchild behind Xiu Xiu has managed to a) make his sixth full-length record in as many years, b) add a third member, Ches Smith, on drums, and c) produce an album that is, as a press kit puts it, "more approachable or communicative on a basic human level" than previous outings. That's saying a lot for experimental rock's most painstaking, pain-obsessed perfectionist, but Stewart likes it hard. Still, let's be clear about this claim to accessibility: Named after a heavy novella by Austrian Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek and with titles like "You Are Pregnant, You Are Dead" and "Guantanamo Canto," Women As Lovers is not exactly Norah Jones territory. It refuses to compromise the instrumental complexity (gamelan gongs, saxophones and a blitzkrieg of machines are busy at work), the razor-sharp vocal intensity and unrelentingly dark (and witty) lyricism that have become staples of Xiu Xiu's confessional oeuvre. But Stewart also offers some of his most delicate, straightforward work to date—on the tortured love song "I Do What I Want When I Want" and a cover with Swans' Michael Gira of Queen's "Under Pressure," he forgoes his mercurial tempos and yelps with the clarity of someone who has returned from hell. Amid a parade of misery, it may be Freddie Mercury, not Stewart's hero Ian Curtis, who gives the record its mantra: "Why can't we give love that one more chance?"

Alex Pasternack

Published in Paper on February 1, 2008

Number one guy

2008-02-27T23:09:00.000-08:00

Hot Chip
Made in the Dark

The "chip" in the band's name might be a reference as much to computers, which often provide the delectable beats and glitches, as to a piece of chocolate: that candy might best approximate the bite-size, sweet, and occasionally bitter sound of electro-pop, soul and R&B that this hip London outfit has nearly perfected. While the catchiness of the band's earlier dance tunes still lingers, namely on the exceedingly playful and playable Shake a Fist and Ready for the Floor, Alexis Taylor's seductive vocal and the band's slippery synths, slow claps and reverbs do best on slow-jam ballads like the title track and the charming longing tune We're Looking For a Lot of Love. With this, their second stellar album, the band deserves to find it.

The Wu and the Wy

2008-01-27T23:03:00.000-08:00

Music Reviews

Wyclef Jean
The Carnival II: Memoirs of an Immigrant
Wyclef was once a wily MC in the Fugees. Today, every time a cell phone rings in Beijing, his voice can be heard chanting Shakira's name over a Latin beat. That's not a bad thing in itself, but his music is. The first post-Fugees album, The Carnival, was as great as it was visionary for the genre-blending that's become a staple of current pop music. Nearly a decade later, Vol. II is a lesson in what's wrong when you turn your albums into the musical equivalent of the UN. Sure, there’s something thrilling about seeing Akon, Norah Jones, T.I., Mary J. Blige, and Paul Simon on one record. But the buzz quickly wears off, and by the time the deluxe bonus tracks kick in – including the grating dancehall head-shaker China Wine, featuring Mandopop star Sun – it’s hard not to pine for that Shakira ringtone. Alex Pasternack

Wu-Tang Clan
8 Diagrams
The passing of Ol' Dirty Bastard in 2004, and signs of fracture amongst the remaining eight Wu-Tang members (RZA has recently fallen under public criticism from Raekwon as well as Ghostface Killah, whose new solo album is directly competing for chart space), sounded like the finishing moves for hip-hop's grimiest family. But this new album, their sixth, sounds like a return to happier times. Of course, nothing is happy about the Wu sound: Over RZA's dark, cinematic beats and kung fu flick samples, the Clan offers street-sweeping, timeless poetry to produce the most solid set of Wu bangers since 1997's Wu-Tang Forever. If the dud The Heart Gently Weeps, billed as the first song to "sample" a Beatles track, is the album's weak spot, Rushing Elephants and Wolves are its fists of fury. Alex Pasternack

In the Mood for a Road Trip: Wong Kar Wai Speaks

2008-01-02T23:07:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, Wong Kar-Wai became the first Chinese filmmaker to open the Cannes Film Festival, with the premiere of My Blueberry Nights. As his first English-language film hits the Chinese mainland, the director sat down with that's Beijing to talk road trips, music, Zhang Yimou and, of course, Beijing's ever-changing landscape ...

by Alice Xin Liu and Alex Pasternack; photos by Simon Lim and courtesy of Jet Tone Films

that’s Beijing: Some people have described My Blueberry Nights as a new beginning. Is it?
Wong Kar-Wai: Did I say that this was a new beginning? [Laughs] Yes, you can say that it is a kind of new beginning. A new attempt. I have made films in the West, but they were from the perspective of a Chinese person. This time we are telling the story of an American, not a Chinese. I am trying something new with a different language and culture.

that’s: Can you describe some of the difficulties of making your first English-language film?
WKW: I have written all my other films, but the scriptwriter for this movie [crime novelist Lawrence Block] is American, as I needed someone to help with expressions in English. In many cases, I also ask my actors to participate in the process of filmmaking. The actors this time helped me with the language in the film. Because you know that every language has its own culture, so I asked the actors how something would be expressed in their culture. I needed them all to get involved.

that’s: What was your experience of working with actors you haven’t worked with before, like Jude Law, Norah Jones, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman and David Strathairn?
WKW: At the beginning I thought there would be some difference. To put it simply, actors are … instruments. Perhaps the process of making the film is different in America compared to China, but the content of the film always stays the same. How the actors act, and how they participate in the making of the film, stays the same.

that’s: You’ve dubbed the film for the Chinese mainland. Tell us more about this decision.
WKW: Norah Jones is dubbed by Dong Jie, Jude Law by Cheng Chen, and David Strathairn is done by Jiang Wen. I thought at first that this could be a bit strange, but after making this version I don’t think so anymore. I think this version helps the Chinese viewer get into the film. Now I feel it can be shared. The dubbing methods here still belong to the ’60s, like when they dubbed Russian or Yugoslavian films. There isn’t a creative process – it’s a strict translation. But I believe dubbing should be a creative process. It should be like this the world over. This isn’t just a traditional dubbed version; it’s more.

that’s: If you could describe My Blueberry Nights in one word or sentence ...
WKW: I haven’t thought about one word [or sentence], but if I could use music I think it’s like Norah Jones’ song, The Story, which she wrote after the whole process of filming. Her voice is why I asked her to act in the movie, because I think it has a kind of … straightforwardness and cixing [magnetic] feel to it. Some films are high-pitched, but this one is low-pitched.

that’s: Sure, but compared to In the Mood for Love and 2046, My Blueberry Nights ends on a pretty upbeat note.
WKW: The film is about the beginning of love – what happens afterwards is left up to the viewer. 2046 is about the houyi zheng [after-effects] of love. The love has finished and the film is about how Chow recovers from it.

that’s: Do you think these sorts of stories really happen to people?
WKW: Aiya! Lots of men have said that it’s their story, that they are the man in the film! And I say to them: Aren’t you lucky! [Chuckles]

that’s: Music plays an important role in My Blueberry Nights, as with your other films. How did you choose it?
WKW: For My Blueberry Nights we drove from New York to the West Coast. We drove for five hours a day and didn’t do much apart from listen to the radio, which played songs particular to the region we were driving through. So we followed that pattern. This film describes the journey of one girl during one year, going to different regions in the US. And in each region the feeling is different based on the records of that region. So in the South, whose music do you look for? Someone gave us Otis Redding’s music – it plays as you walk into the bar in Memphis. In New York it was Cat Power.

that’s: In your other films, such as Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, there is usually one song that plays a vital role in the whole film. Did you ever choose the music first and then fit the story to it?
WKW: It’s different every time. Sometimes you make a film for the music, and other times it’s the opposite. For example, this bar [that we are sitting in]: If we came back tomorrow they would still be playing the same music, and if we came back the next day, they would still be playing the same thing. It would basically be playing this, which represents this same situation. A very big regret I have is that I never learned to play an instrument. But I would like to be a DJ.

that’s: I read that your father was a nightclub owner, and that as a child you followed him around and encountered the lowlifes that became subjects for your films.
WKW: Meiyou a! My father owned the best club in Shanghai at the time, and I was never allowed to go! In nightclubs like that in the past, they always had a photographer, and my father used to bring home the pictures they took – all of mei nü, many beautiful ladies.

that’s: How did you develop your artistic style, together with cinematographer Christopher Doyle and art director William Chang?
WKW: It’s a very organic process – we have collaborated for so many years. We have areas on which we agree, and areas in which we supplement each other. Of course the process didn’t come easily. Many tears were shed and there were fights, especially when we first started. But then we [Doyle and I] became an old married couple.

that’s: Your working relationship with Tony Leung has been compared to Martin Scorsese’s with Robert de Niro. What’s your take on this?
WKW: Didn’t you just answer your own question? [Laughs] We experience something intense together – like with Chris Doyle – and you also witness the changes during different stages of their career. So it is very hudong [interactive].

that’s: We know that you emigrated from Shanghai to Hong Kong at the age of 5. Do you feel nostalgic about Shanghai?
WKW: Of course I do – I was born there. I have my impressions, but the Shanghai I remember is different from Shanghai as it is now. But I still have relatives there, so I still feel close to the city.

that’s: Will your next project be The Lady in Shanghai [a tale of love and espionage rumored to star Nicole Kidman]?
WKW: [Smiling] This is one possible film, yes.

that’s: Some scenes of In the Mood for Love were originally meant to be set in Beijing. Have you any other plans to make a film in the capital?
WKW: I have. But chaiqian [demolition] is happening at such a fast pace. There is so much being demolished. For My Blueberry Nights, we wanted to take the longest journey – but the furthest Norah’s character went was the west coast [of the US]. But from the point of view of the earth, she should go to the other side, which is China. At the time we decided that it should be Beijing, and we wanted to film around Qianmen, but by that time they demolished the place that we had chosen. It was actually quite a commercial street. But Tian’anmen Square was in the background. It had a traditional ... structure, but it had many contemporary details as well – you could see that it was a changing city.

that’s: Do you think you will return to the United States in the future?
WKW: I’m a tourist – I’m not returning! [Laughs] I just visited the country to make a film. If there is the right project and there are other stories I want to shoot, of course I’ll return there. But it’s not my base.

that’s: How do you see your work in comparison to that of other popular Chinese directors?
WKW: Every director’s vision is different. I think a film culture is interesting if it has different things.

that’s: But Zhang Yimou’s, Chen Kaige’s and Feng Xiaogang’s blockbusters all tend to look and feel the same ...
WKW: But this is a question of their motives and goals. I don’t think you can judge a director solely on one film. Judge them on their careers. There is a phrase that Beijingers use, right? Zhanzhe shuohua bu yao tong [literally, talk standing up and your waist won’t hurt; in other words: everyone’s a critic]. As a critic or a member of the audience, it’s very easy to say “I liked that film!” or “I didn’t like that film!” So simple, right? Zhang is still in a process … he has traveled from Red Sorghum to where he is now. He is still traveling.

that’s: Do you know where you are traveling to?
WKW: Who knows, right? Bian zou bian chang ba – I’ll sing as I walk! It wouldn’t be so good to know.

Foo for Dumb Thought

2007-12-27T23:04:00.000-08:00

Foo Fighters
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
There was a time when the Foo Fighters’ name was not the only funny thing about the band. They made smart, playful alt-rock with videos to match (Big Me, Everlong, Learn to Fly); just recently they covered Prince’s Darling Nikki at the VMAs. But as their new album title indicates, fun is not exactly their thing anymore. While the last outing, the two-disc In Your Honor, saw Grohl and company baring their biggest hard rock teeth yet, and to somewhat good effect, now they have dulled into Yet Another Modern Hard Rawk Band. Tracks like Let it Die, Long Road to Ruin, and Summer’s End are as flat as their names suggest. They might take the advice of another song title: Cheer Up, Boys. Alex Pasternack

Inside the Egg

2007-12-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

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.”

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?”

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.”

Ironandwinehouse

2007-11-27T23:05:00.000-08:00

Iron and Wine
The Shepherd's Dog

Like his thick beard, Sam Beam’s addictive voice is blanket-soft but not without a certain roughness. Where his previous bedroom-recorded albums buried his most valuable instrument in a hushed haze, almost covering up his rich lyricism in the process, The Shepherd’s Dog brings more detail to Beam’s voice. And he’s got a richer musical palette to match, a range of instrumentation and percussion on top of his old plaintive country guitar. Even as these add texture and help him explore genres, including bhangra (White Tooth Man), West African pop (House by the Sea) and even reggae (Wolves), beneath it all, Beam’s voice and lyrics still thrive. The sense of loss that so beautifully tied earlier albums together has faded, but on this, the best folk album this year, much has been gained. Alex Pasternack

A Tool for Change

2007-10-07T01:59:00.001-07:00

Elements of Style

For fixing China’s English, David Tool makes no apologies. “Some of the American media, even the Italian media, they say, ‘why are you doing that? You’re ruining all the fun.’” They might just have a point. In years past, signs with such gems as “Racist Park” (the Minorities Park) and “speaking English only” (a sign at a local school) have tickled Beijing’s foreigner community with even more linguistic folly than a press conference on the White House lawn. But thanks to the work of Tool, a 65-year-old professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University and the city government’s unofficial grammarian, that’s changing. He’s just, for instance, helped complete a list of 2,743 recommended dish translations for the city’s restaurants. Tool’s Chinese name, Du Dawei, or Lao Du, as he is called in meetings with city officials, dignitaries and Tsinghua advisers, means to “prevent” or “put an end to.”

Indeed, at well over 6 feet, with his imperial white beard lining a chiseled jaw, silk Mandarin jacket and slight South Carolinian twang, Prof. Tool is not the sort of person with whom you want to make light of English malapropisms. And yet even he sometimes has to admit that, yes, the material he’s working with is pretty good stuff. “‘The Dongda Anus Hospital’ is funny. ‘Garden of Curled Poo.' ‘Don’t fall down.’ All those things,” he says, over plates of sushi at Wangfujing.

The humor, he is relieved to know, is not the result of some cultural arrogance. “For us Americans or British, its verbally funny, not culturally funny. We’re laughing at the language,” he says. “But often the Chinese don’t hear that. And I just want to clear that up. I don’t want the laowai to look insensitive culturally. I don’t want that situation,” he says, “a bunch of asshole Americans standing in front of the anus hospital having their picture taken.”

After having a laugh, it’s common procedure for foreigners to wonder how sign language like “On the taxi the guest stands forward” could ever get past the authorities. Some might even for a moment consider filing a complaint. But Tool, a former Army colonel, assistant dean at the University of Southern California, and an avid lover of Chinese culture, will not stand idly by. When he’s not teaching nearly 300 university students, writing a cultural guide to the city or lobbying for the city’s elderly and handicapped, the professor is known to regularly stop into shops to inform shopkeepers, in the best Chinese he can muster, about their bad signage. It was a visit by him last year to Dongda hospital that led to the hospital’s name change. “We’re talking about a huge sign—the letters are bigger than me. But within a week they changed it. Even the common man on the street is appreciative.” On more than a few occasions of store-wide language sweeps, other shoppers have even given him the thumbs up.

Tool’s syntactical crusade began in October 2001, with a letter he wrote to the Ministry of Culture, after seeing a Peking opera in Xi’an. Tool’s attempts to enjoy the hijinks of the Monkey King were foiled as much by the translation (“there were ‘auspicious clods’ in the sky instead of “‘auspicious clouds’”) as by a group of Germans laughing loudly in the audience.

“My first reaction, was, this must be really embarrassing to the Chinese, as opera is one of the highest art forms in China,” recalls Tool, who has spent 11 years in China. “The bigger issue is how can the laoban, the management of this theater be so thoughtless as to present their own culture in such a careless way?”

Tool wrote to the government that he would go to any cultural institution and correct English for free. To his surprise, they replied: “‘We’ll let you go to the museums,’ they said, ‘but first how about first doing the subway?’” Soon after came the ring roads. Then the city’s cultural sites. A committee was formed, Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Committee. A retreat last year resulted in six heavy manuals, covering signs for everything from transportation to hospitals to Olympic venues.

When someone once mentioned the city’s menus, Tool balked at the idea. “That’s too big an issue,” he says. But not wanting to confuse Olympic visitors (“Wikipedia chicken,” anyone?), last year the authorities ordered a sprucing up of dish translations. “We’ve gone through 189 pages of menu items twice,” says Tool, with no small tinge of exhaustion in his voice after last month’s final discussion about the list. Between controversies over direct translations (“fish-flavored pork”) versus more poetic ones ("Hunan style pork"), and the use of French phrases (“shrimps with leeks” or “shrimps en casserole”), it was a tiring process, with a few too many cooks in the kitchen.

But at the end of the day, cleaning up phrases like “hot steamed crap” – for the good of China – is one of Tool’s loves. “Most Chinese think I’m a fool because I do this for free,” he says. “And I do feel underappreciated sometimes. But if you are doing something just because you want praise, you probably aren’t doing it for the right reason,” he says. “If people don’t appreciate it, that doesn’t lessen the value of what I’m doing.”

A Not-So-Quiet Desperation

2007-10-07T01:02:00.000-07:00

The emotional arc of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

There seems to be little in Karen O’s explosive stage presence with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs that reveals much about Karen Orzolek, the soft-spoken, contemplative 30-year-old beneath the lead singer. “My persona in the band is unhinged and empowered, a bit mad,” she says of her famously fearsome charisma. But what may not be apparent in O’s performance still speaks volumes. Like, for instance, her little-known Asian heritage.

“I believe that a great deal of my persona in the band is a reaction to the more conservative side of myself,” says Karen O, who is half-Korean. “I have enjoyed playing concerts in Japan and Korea because I feel as though the Asian audience can relate to this reactive persona of mine and the celebratory aspect of our shows. It’s a big celebration of passion in the human spirit, the deeper darker side as well as the soaring transcendent side.”

On paper, talk of ethnicity and a universal human spirit might sound trite for a band that made its name with the loud and messy garage-punk fireworks of its 2003 debut, Fever to Tell. But listen to Brian Chase’s studied but raw percussion, Nick Zinner’s howling guitar, and Karen’s primed voice, swerving between pathos and punk, and you hear how emotionally sincere rock music can be. Live, the music gets acted out through Karen’s paroxysms, her glam costumery, beer spitting and modern dance; if the human spirit ever existed in indie rock, it is in their show, and it’s being celebrated.

“When I was a kid, going to rock shows changed my life, and it became something and somewhere where I found my identity and purpose,” says guitarist Zinner. “I would hope that we are giving an experience like that for some people.”

When they bring that hope to Beijing for the first time at this month’s Modern Sky Festival, it won’t just be another milestone for Beijing’s international music cachet, but probably for the band too. The surprising breakaway success of Fever to Tell was as much a testament to a popular fatigue with slick production as to the pop sensibilities knit within the band’s messy, brutal art-rock. Blogs buzzed, venues sold out, the record went gold; the band is still baffled by it.

“I can’t make any sense of why we have had the success we’ve enjoyed,” says Karen, who first formed a duo with Zinner in 2000 before enlisting her college buddy Chase as drummer. For Zinner, whose bewilderment with rock stardom is registered in an ongoing photography project, the first big shock came last year in Dublin. “We played to 30,000 people, with everyone singing along. Before that, our last show in Ireland [in 2003] was to 40 people in a pub.”

“It was one of those ‘Whoa, how did this happen?’ moments,” says Zimmer. “I still don’t know the answer, but I’m grateful to be asking the question.” To be sure, there have been many other markers of success – some obvious, others more dubious, such as when Karen O was featured in a sneaker ad. “Nowadays, you hear indie bands on commercials all the time, as it’s become a way for people to hear your music, so it’s not such a black and white definition to ‘sell out,’” explains Zinner. Drummer Chase underscores the ambiguity: “It’s definitely possible to do things for superficial gain and keep the integrity of the art. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.” Gold Lion is the opener to the band’s second album, Show Your Bones; that the song should be named after a music award won by the sneaker commercial is as much a statement of the band’s ambition as of its poise.

If it hasn’t soured their ideals, the turbulence of success has touched their music, and for the better. Their more recent material, including the new EP Is Is, reflects their maturation, with greater drama and dynamics than before. And, aside from darker costumes, Karen promises more of an “emotional arc” on stage. “Musically, it was very important when we started for everything to be very minimal and direct,” says Zinner, “but over the last few years, we’ve wanted to incorporate more sounds, more elements, more emotions, for the biggest expression we could make, without limits.”

That open-eyed approach is also evident on the band’s blog, where a headline about their Beijing visit flips around the typical PR jargon: “China To Rock the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.” For all their apparent self-confidence, the band’s blistering live show would be hollow without a strong bond with their audience – a bond they’re looking forward to building in Beijing. “Success is about connecting with as many people as possible,” says Karen, “giving them something to feel passionate about in a genuine way.”

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs play at the Modern Sky Festival. RMB 60. Time TBA. Haidian Park (6282 2006/7/8/9) festival.modernsky.com

from That's Beijing

The Biggest Middle Kingdom

2007-09-30T01:11:00.000-07:00

With the world’s biggest sporting event only 11 months away in the world’s most populous nation, it’s hard to resist the urge to spout superlatives. Sure, we all know that China is home to the largest restroom (Chongqing), largest audience at a flute performance (Hong Kong), largest horse race (Inner Mongolia), largest condom (Guilin), as well as longest rubber dam (Xiaobudong in Shandong), longest family genealogy (Confucius), and most golfers on a single golf course in 24 hours (Shenzhen). But let us not forget Beijing’s own claims to bigness.

Statue carved out of white sandalwood
In Yonghegong’s Wanfu Pavilion lies the Maitreya Buddha. The 18-meter-high statue is carved out of a single sandalwood tree trunk.

Ruby
Weighing 8,184g, the world’s largest ruby is owned by Beijing Fugui Tianshi Jewelry Co. Ltd. That’s what we call a very crazy stone.

Human-chair stack
Sit down for this: the world’s tallest stack of human chairs was 21 feet high, assembled, of course, by the Peking Acrobats.

Plastics recycling plant
Last month, Beijing opened the world’s largest plant for processing recycled plastic, capable of taking in 60,000 tons of waste annually, or one third of the city’s total waste in plastics – equal to saving 300,000 tons of petroleum per year

Domino run
In 1999, a record 2,751,518 dominoes were toppled in 32 minutes and 22 seconds at the gymnasium of Peking University. The dominoes had been set up over 40 days by a team of 53 Chinese and Japanese students.

Dancing dragon
In February 2000, the advent of the year of the dragon, a 3,333-yard-long dancing dragon came to life on the Great Wall, near Beijing. No, it wasn’t real, but the 3,200 people inside it were.

Largest theatrical performance building
The 12.9-acre Great Hall of the People, which can seat an audience of up to 10,000 people, is the world’s largest space for theatrical performances. It also happens to sit near the largest palace in the world (with 8,886 rooms), on the world’s largest square (97.9 acres). Just to set the record straight, that’s the size of 74 American football fields.

Wheel
Next year, the world’s biggest Ferris wheel – or what its builders call “Iconic Viewing Platform” – will rise 280 meters above Chaoyang Park, each air conditioned capsule taking up to 40 passengers on a 30 minute rotation. But given Beijing’s pallid skies, what exactly will they be able to see? “The visitors will have a fantastic view over the park and its surroundings,” says Stephan Matter, CEO of Beijing Great Wheel Co.

Largest jumper
The largest hand-knitted sweater, manufactured by Beijing’s Heng Yuan Xiang Co. this past April, had a chest measurement of 8m (26ft, 3in), a body length of 4.3m (14ft, 1in) and sleeve length of 3.1m (10ft, 2in) – room enough to fit a Beijing bus full of people. Alex Pasternack

An Olympic Makeover

2007-09-08T02:48:00.000-07:00

How the capital is reinventing itself for 2008 and beyond

by Alex Pasternack

"Not bad.” A fresh-faced young man from Hebei province was talking about his job – cleanup around the Olympic Park during an eight-hour workday – as the hulking steel girders of the remarkable National Stadium rose in the distance behind him. He wore a slight grin that seemed completely unrehearsed, far from the city’s ongoing “smile” campaign intended to spread Olympic spirit to the world.

With a year to go until the Games, the biggest coming-out party the world will have ever seen, it’s hard not to find traces of that spirit everywhere in Beijing – on lips, on billboards, on the city’s massive construction sites. Clearly though, it’s a buzz that has little to do with athletics.

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for China,” says Sun Weide, deputy director of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games (BOCOG). Despite perpetual concerns about a post-Olympics bubble-burst, the Games, he says, will be nothing short of a great leap forward. “When Sydney held the Games, it had already finished its development,” he explains. “One major difference is that Beijing is in the process of fast modernization and urbanization. We’re not worried about any kind of slowdown.”

Sun’s ability to rattle off statistics is almost as impressive as the numbers themselves: 12 percent annual GDP growth, a USD 8 billion Olympics budget, and half a million visitors – but also 241 “blue sky days” last year, 198km of new subway track, 1 million cars off the roads, and 11 new world-class venues.

But what will those statistics mean on the big day? And with all the attention focused on the largest orgy of international love and nationalism ever to hit China, who has the time or energy to consider what they will mean the morning after?

I asked some in the know to give a glimpse of what the city will be like when the torch arrives, and when it leaves.

Congestion question
This month, Beijing will stage what will likely be the world’s biggest car prohibition in history – one year before the big event. The city will “persuade” one million cars off the roads, including government vehicles and other “non essential” vehicles, in a dry run for next year’s even more serious traffic control measures. Beijing has said that come August ‘08 only “Olympic related” traffic will be allowed to park near the venues; for the rest of us, the best options will be an upgraded public transit system, which will be free to all ticket-holders and Olympics staff.

The officials are optimistic: “Traffic,” says Liu Xiaoming, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Communications Commission, “will not be a headache at all, but rather will become an enjoyable experience by 2008.”

Others are not so sure, but the results, whatever they may be, will not be for lack of trying. Along with road additions and improvements, the city will expand its use of electronic traffic notice boards and intelligent traffic signals, which change depending on traffic conditions. The government is also said to be exploring car restrictions like those of Shanghai (with its prohibitively priced licenses) or London (with its city-center congestion charge). The city is also attempting to ease traffic in downtown areas by building new municipal centers in places like Yizhuang, Shunyi and Changping. After the Olympics, it is rumored that the city government’s offices will move to the eastern district of Tongzhou, while the former headquarters of the relocated Shougang Steel Group in western Shijingshan will provide the new seat of China’s national government.

But RMB 250 billion in public transit upgrades – said to be the Olympics’ greatest physical legacy to the sprawling metropolis – will likely mark the greatest change to the lives of Beijing’s commuters. By the closing ceremony, a mix of faster bus routes and three much-touted spiffy new subway lines – including the Haidian-CBD line 10 – will make IC (yi ka tong) fare cards a necessity (paper tickets, in fact, will be completely phased out). Also helping push public transit will be an upgraded bus fleet, an increasing portion of which will run on cleaner natural gas or electric hybrid technology. A high-speed airport rail will also whisk travelers to the city’s airport (and its stunning new Norman Foster-designed Terminal 3) in under 20 minutes from stations at Sanyuan Qiao and a massive new transportation terminal at Dongzhimen.

As for Beijing’s reputation as the capital of the “kingdom of bicycles,” it can’t last forever. “With more and more cars in Beijing, they need that road space,” says Duan of Tsinghua. That – and the small possibility for future restrictions on cars – is why even he’s willing to put up with waiting in traffic: he says he’s trading in his bike for a sedan.

Breathing easier
As the city ramps up its USD 13 billion efforts to prepare for the “Green” Olympics, the “haze” (up until this year, the official term was “fog”) is also getting harder to scrub. Though 2006 saw 241 “blue sky days,” exceeding the government’s target by three days, the target of 245 blue skies for this year is one that officials admit will be “very difficult” to achieve.

No wonder: the car, one of the biggest culprits, is growing in number on Beijing’s roads at a rate of 1,100 a day. Starting last month, the city was the first in China to impose Euro-III auto emissions standards, a move that should cut automobile pollutants by 30 percent; by 2008, it has promised to take 300,000 high-emission vehicles off the roads.

Attempts to clean up coal plants and factories in nearby provinces, efforts to tackle heavily polluting companies, and a temporary cessation and slow down of construction projects before, during and after the Games may also improve air quality for the time being.

At the very least, officials say that residents can expect better publicized alerts that will warn of pollution by city district – and an increase in the “experimenting” with rainmaking technology, which will come in handy not only for clearing the summer skies during the opening ceremony, but for washing away the city’s dirt and, er, haze.

Home sweet home?
Breaths are bated, some anxiously, some hopefully, for a burst of Beijing’s property bubble. When the spotlight fades and everyone goes home, the logic goes, the city will no longer be a seller’s market. Problem is, the spotlight isn’t set to fade, Beijing’s population is set to keep growing, incomes will rise, and the addition of new, world-class infrastructure like metros and malls will help keep up overseas and domestic interest.

“Post-Olympics, we don’t really forecast a decline in prices,” says Anna Kalifa, head of research at property firm Jones Lang LaSalle. Though Beijing’s first housing price downturn might be on the cards, due to added supply in the city center and an exodus of foreigners and migrant workers just after the Games, prices won’t dip significantly, especially for areas downtown and near the Olympic venues. And, though schools and other amenities will keep most foreigners on the east side, Kalifa predicts that improved public transit, new shopping centers and the vibrancy of the college areas will draw more attention and development to Beijing’s western side.

One thing sure to make the city more appealing will be a slow down in construction. The city has ordered cranes to stop city-wide this October, and even after they start up again, post-Olympics, the rate of construction is expected to be nothing like as furious as it is at present. That should mean less noise and less dust streaming through the windows of our (rented) apartments.

And while all the development has meant that the city’s famous hutongs may be going the way of the bicycle, some point out happily that the city’s fixation on oppressively large streetscapes is waning, while a sense of civic duty is growing. It’s a shift due to private rather than public interests, says Anna Kalifa. As public gathering areas are becoming more common at shopping centers and office developments, she notes that residential community groups are growing in number as well. Bolstered in no small part by private property laws set to go into effect this autumn, such groups have a strong incentive to maintain the public spaces around their buildings. “It’s the difference between people hanging laundry outside their windows or throwing trash everywhere and not being able to do that,” she says.

Reaching out
When the lights go up on the opening ceremony on August 8, 2008, the occasion will be significant not just for what’s seen, but how. Beijing’s will not only be the first Olympics to be broadcast in high definition TV, but also across digital channels and the Internet, allowing a Beijinger, for instance, to choose to watch the ceremony on a so-called “3G” mobile phone, a growing number of screens in the back of Beijing’s cabs, or the city’s new TV-equipped subway lines.

“The Olympics gives us time to catch up in technology, but it also changes the entire communication infrastructure in China,” says Hu Bo, who produced the promotional films for Beijing’s two Olympic bids. A host of new “hardware” isn’t the only thing Beijing gains from the Games, he says, but a chance to push forward the “software” – the technical skills and creative content – crucial to shaping the country’s cultural realm and, come the lighting of the flame in Beijing, its international image.

“Beijing will have one hour to contain 5,000 years of history,” says Greg Groggel, a writer studying the Olympics Games’ effects on their host countries, of the opening ceremony. The stakes in Beijing are arguably higher than they were in the host cities typically compared with Beijing: Seoul in 1988 and Tokyo in 1964. “This is a chance for China to share something beyond economic power,” he says.

That something, says media analyst Shaun Chang, is now growing in the capital, thanks both to cultural institutions like museums and foundations but also to the widening creative realm opened by the Internet and digital technologies. “There’s this space in which we are allowed to grow and develop,” she says. Despite some hurdles faced by China’s web-based culture, “the government is creating a more relaxed environment to allow investment into this area.”

Public works and a charm offensive
Creating a good impression for the hundreds of thousands set to land in Beijing in 2008, and the surge of visitors expected afterwards, is an Olympian challenge that Beijing is not leaving up to chance. On an aesthetic level, the city government’s plans include traditional renovations of popular streets, such as Yonghegong Dajie, and the expansion of green spaces. In addition to the sprawling Olympic Forest Park in the north, Beijing is doing what it can to spruce up the city’s canals and has promised 30 more parks will be added to the outskirts of the city by 2008.

Handicapped access is also a concern for Olympics and city officials. David Tool, a volunteer advisor to the city, says that while the city’s cultural sites are beginning to improve access, hotels are lagging. For instance, Tool says, the hotel hosting the Paralympics Organizing Committee only has ten wheelchair-accessible rooms.

And among those initiatives set to leave a mark on the city, perhaps none is as obvious as the spread of English across the city’s street signs and menus. “The English signage and recorded messages will be okay for the Olympics for the most part,” explains Tool, who has also led a campaign to clean up Beijing’s written English. Spoken English is just as much a concern for him as for the government, which is behind a seemingly unending stream of English campaigns. Enabling more interaction between foreigners and Chinese volunteers, especially retirees and students, could be one of the Games’ greatest legacies, not only enriching the experiences of visitors and locals, but further blurring the sometimes uncomfortable divide that separates Beijing’s laowai from its laobaixing.

On a more basic level, improvements have also been promised for public bathrooms and food safety, while the government has helped organize training sessions for service staff in everything from professional skills to “Olympic knowledge” (which may or may not mean that hotel staff will be able to settle bets about medalists in the 400 meters at Helsinki ‘52).

Experts are also hoping for a smoothing of the visa procedures at Beijing’s Public Security Bureau, which has yet to announce how it will cope with an unprecedented number of potential lost passports and visa extensions – and an international crowd like none it has ever seen. At least fixing the queuing at places like the PSB is a no-brainer: “Judging from the pre- and post-Olympics situation in Japan and Korea,” says Tool, “Beijingers and eventually all China will adopt the line as the civil way to behave while waiting for anything.”

Also helping to comfort visitors and foreign residents will be a continued influx of international-level services, like hotels (currently about 40 are five-star-rated), movie theaters and malls. “Beijing is easier now than it was just three years ago,” says Jones Lang LaSalle’s Anna Kalifa. In the past six months especially, she detects a shift from a city “where [as a foreigner] you had to know where to go” to a place more like Shanghai or Hong Kong, “where you can see what’s going on.” She claims foreign property investment, which helps draw international brands, helps in noticeable ways. Recently, for instance, the luxury Parisian grocery Fauchon chose to open its first Chinese mainland store at the shopping center Shin Kong Palace.

“People are getting more confident,” says Hu Bo. “When there’s a great expectation on you, you have to deliver more good work.” David Wolf, of corporate advisory firm Wolf Group Asia, says that added confidence will mean improved services and language skills. “When the Olympics are all over, the most important change will be in the minds of the people of Beijing. They will see themselves as living in an international city, and that simple change in perception will have long term consequences.”

Greg Groggel: Olympic Watcher

2007-09-07T01:17:00.000-07:00

Greg Groggel is on an Olympian mission. The 23-year-old Thomas J. Watson fellow from Omaha, Nebraska has spent two months in each of the former host cities – including Mexico City, Munich, Sarajevo, Sydney, and Seoul – to study the social, economic and political impact of hosting the world’s largest event. Before he left Beijing in July – to return next year, of course – that’s Beijing caught up with the intrepid Olympic observer.

that’s Beijing: What makes Beijing’s Olympics so different from any other?
Greg Groggel: To understand this we need consider the similar Olympics: Tokyo [‘64] and Seoul [‘88]. First came economic dominance (but not global respect), then knowledge of these countries’ culture, politics and art. Beijing is hoping to use the Olympics to share something beyond economic power. That’s exactly what the other countries did too. That’s why there’s such a nationalistic element to these games. Think of Atlanta [in ‘96] – no one would call those America’s games, but these are China’s games, not Beijing’s games.

that’s: What do you make of the way that Beijing is changing in advance of the big event?
GG: All the projects happening now are happening because of the Olympics. That includes widening roads, adding subway lines – they’re giving a facelift to their entire city. And they’re being bold with their graphic and architectural design. The only comparison I can think of is Munich, with their Olympic stadium [the Olympia-stadion]. They opted for a very unconventional, very modern, iconic design. It was really controversial at the time … but it symbolized the country’s new direction. It is as architecturally relevant today as when it was built in the late ‘60s.

that’s: So much seems to be under control. What unexpected
issues do you foresee?
GG: People are starting to make the connection between the stadiums and the issue of migrant laborers. That’s going to be a pretty prominent issue that will come to the surface in the next year. There were street sweeps [in Atlanta], with homeless people kicked out of the city for two weeks. Cities get so overzealous that everything goes perfectly, they forget about the issue of how you treat their citizens.

that’s: What have your travels told you about the post-game scenarios?
GG: The best example is Sydney, which underwent a post-Olympic depression. You also had all these planners saying that there should have been a plan … how they were going to use the venues afterwards. The media started to give the venues the dreaded white elephant label. From what I’ve read and tried to ask, there’s not really an emphasis on post-Olympic planning [in Beijing]. Most of the energy is going into those two-and-a-half weeks.

that’s: Let’s be frank. How ready is Beijing?
GG: The city is behind linguistically. A lot of that is going to depend on the work of the volunteers who are coming in and the international visitors. And right now, Beijing isn’t really the global capital that they [the organizers] think it is … they’re not close to being done, though they talk a lot about how far ahead they are. Alex Pasternack

Dog Days

2007-08-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

Beware of dog

"We’ve entered the danger period,” Mary Peng of the International Center for Veterinary Services, a private animal hospital in Chaoyang, recently told us. The “danger period” she was referring to covers this time of year, when many foreign dog owners relocate to Beijing – unaware of the 35cm size restrictions on dogs in the downtown area.

“Every year, especially around this time, we have people who bring in big-ass dogs and sign leases for properties within the Third Ring Road.” It’s a situation that leads to “an awful lot of heartache.”

“It used to be that foreigners could get away with a lot of things, but you can’t just plead ignorance anymore,” she added. In one case, Peng recalled, an owner of two golden retrievers was ratted out by neighbors to the Public Security Bureau (PSB), which is responsible for dog registrations. A warning was issued, tears were shed, and the owner had no choice but to forfeit her lease and move outside of the Fourth Ring Road.

Rules are rules, but they also have some logic to them. Keeping big dogs out of downtown, as per a 2003 law, helps allay public fears about potential injuries and illness. “The laws are very practical,” Peng says. “They address public health and responsible pet ownership.”

But Deborah Lukic, whose family includes a “huge” Tibetan mastiff, says big dogs might be the subject of undue concern. At home in suburban Shunyi, she says neighbors sometimes appear to faint at the sight of one-and-a-half-year-old Leo (who, admittedly, is the type of dog known for fending off bears and tigers on the Himalayan plain). “There’s a general fear to the point of exaggeration about anything that’s not a Pekinese or a French poodle,” she says.

Yet for all the concerns about big dogs in Beijing, fears among dog owners may be even greater. Stories of dog seizures by the police have spread on Internet message boards. “They can take your dog,” Peng says. Though the PSB brings dogs to shelters for certain periods of stay, euthanasia is not uncommon when dogs go un-adopted. And, Peng says, “big dogs have a harder shot at finding a home.”

But Peng says concerns about police brutality are exaggerated, and worries that foreigners are avoiding dog registration out of fear. “There’s this notion that the police are horrible, and that China hates dogs,” she says. “But the only thing that will protect any dog is [being] a legal dog.” Alex Pasternack

Owners can register their dogs at the local Public Security Bureau (PSB) for a fee of RMB 1,000 (USD 130), with additional discounts for dogs that are spayed or neutered. An annual permit (shenfenzheng) includes a check-up and rabies shot, and can be renewed for RMB 500, typically only in June. Size limitations vary by district, and big dog owners are advised to check with their local PSB.

Drinking Up

2007-08-07T01:18:00.000-07:00

The city comes clean on its tap water

A small article in China Daily last month began simply enough: “On 1 June, the Beijing Waterworks Group announced that the city’s water supply is safe to drink without boiling.” The news could not have come at a better time. For a month, pollution-abetted algae had been taking over China’s lakes – Taihu, Chaohu, Dianchi – turning water the sickly color of Swamp Thing. In February, Evian, that impeccable French mineral eau, was stopped at China’s border, 118,000 liters of it charged with containing an “unacceptable level of bacteria.” To make matters worse, tensions were still publicly boiling over between Danone, the maker of Evian, and its former Chinese partner Wahaha, over an alleged violation of their joint venture. The same week, an op-ed in the China Daily reminded us how “the manufacture and shipping of bottled water adversely impact the environment and the ecology.”

But something still tasted funny. Further on, the article revealed a more poignant detail: the most recent tests had only been run at the plants, failing to account for the city’s 7,000km of pipes, some quite old, that the water traverses to reach residents’ taps. So the tests likely missed all kinds of stuff of which mama wouldn’t approve. “We have a dilemma,” said the director of the Beijing Waterworks’ water quality center. “The water piped out is clean and safe but gets contaminated before it reaches users.”

Eva Sternfeld, who runs the China Environment and Sustainable Development Reference and Research Centre (CESDRRC), painted a more muddled picture. “As far as I know, Beijing tap water is one of the best in China. I heard a German business woman took a bottle back to Germany and had it tested there [to find that] the quality is okay,” she wrote by e-mail. “But it depends where you live in the city.” Water works Nos. 9 and 8, which pump water to most parts of the city, including the Olympic area, are known for satisfactory water quality – pipe contamination aside. But some older plants, such as water works No. 1 near Dongzhimen and water works No. 7 in the south of the city “have some problems with nitrates.” An (accidental) experiment two months ago in sipping tap water in one of the city’s cleaner water precincts found the liquid to be non-fatal, wet, and perhaps palatable.

Still, any future reservations or criticism about Beijing’s water quality should bounce off the city like water off a (Peking) duck’s back. “The [pipe] problem more or less exists in many cities of the world, wherever you have old buildings and an old water supply infrastructure,” says Sternfeld. Besides, athletes, officials and other visitors staying at the Olympic village next year will have access to tap water that the city guarantees will be drinkable … at least at the plants.

Alex Pasternack

bib bim bjork

2007-07-28T23:13:00.000-07:00

Björk

Volta

After the experimentation of her last record, Medulla, it’s hard not to take Björk’s promise of a collaborative “dance” record with a grain of Icelandic sea salt. Yes, she did call in hip-hop guru Timbaland and her old producer Mark Bell (he of the techno blips of Debut and Homogenic). But the un-pretty results here – Earth Intruders, Declare Independence – shake the booty less than the senses, and end up paling in comparison to the sleepy contributions of Antony Hegarty of Antony & the Johnsons, Malian kora player Toumani Diabate, a 10-piece orchestra, and pipa player Min Xiao-Fen. Forget moving bodies: it’s alongside the pipa on I See Who You Are that Björk’s ever-volatile voice moves most. Alex Pasternack

China, Blade Runner Style

2007-07-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from a spread that ran in March in tbjhome.

THE BEIJING OLYMPICS by Alex Pasternack
leaving more than a sporting legacy
Somewhere behind the Olympics hype, behind the mascot dolls and the banners, China has embarked on its most ambitious construction project since the Great Wall. While sports buildings, and Olympic construction in general, may tend toward the triumphal, smart design has never been particularly associated with sporting events. But with green thinking and radical engineering and materials, this trio of Beijing Olympic buildings is blazing a new path.

Digital Beijing
The communications center for the Games styles itself after a computer motherboard – a design that looks better than it sounds. Water streams down a set of irregular, vertical LED panels, which are carved into the side of the building's shoebox-like envelope, a mix of concrete, aluminum and glass. On the ground floor, architect Zhu Pei (along with the Shenzhen firm Urbanus) borrows the translucent Plexiglas material that covers his Blur Hotel (see Travels in Style, p44) to construct a "digital carpet" – a translucent floor capable of displaying projected images. The building's end facades also rely on a new material: unlike costly stone, which was originally planned, the architects chose a lightweight aluminum that resembles stone at a fraction of the cost of the real thing.
Architect: Studio Pei Zhu/Urbanus
Cost: not available
Completion date: late 2007

Water Cube
Like the nearby National Stadium, the National Aquatics Center draws inspiration from nature, but on a microscopic scale. The "Water Cube," as it's become known, is clad with 3,000 air pockets made of a recyclable Teflon-like plastic in a pattern evocative of one of nature's most common shapes: the arrangement of organic cells, or the natural formation of soap bubbles.
Such a design not only mimics nature's most efficient way of filling three-dimensional space, it also makes for efficient construction: "We realized that a structure based on this unique geometry would be highly repetitive and buildable whilst appearing very organic and random," says engineer Tristram Carfrae, whose firm Arup assisted Australian architects PTW and the CSCEC in their design. Ingeniously, the matrix of thin steel pipes that crisscross between the bubbles will also keep it standing through an earthquake, without the help of concrete or structural beams. And the translucent envelope lets in more light and heat than glass, helping to warm the building's five pools and slashing energy costs by 30 percent. It's not just the greenest of the Olympic designs, but it's also the most widely acclaimed. In one survey, Chinese citizens found it to be the country's most popular new design.
Architect: PTW/China State Construction Engineering
Corporation (CSCEC)
Cost: not available
Completion date: late 2007

National Stadium
Though its exterior steel lattice structure is meant to resemble the twigs of a bird's nest, the 42,000 tons of steel that bend around and even support the futuristic National Stadium, designed by Swiss architects (and recent recipients of the UK's Royal Gold Medal) Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, evoke more a Martian mothership than a sports arena. While government officials were initially keen on a groundbreaking design being broadcast around the world, concerns about safety and cost (the original price tag was RMB 3.8 billion) seemed to endanger the project early on. But with the clock ticking, the government gave the green light – on the condition that a costly retractable roof be removed.
While the building's open shell fosters natural air circulation, it also covers gaps in the lattice with a translucent membrane like that used on the Aquatics Center (above); even if it rains on the opening ceremony, the shell will protect the stadium's 91,000 spectators, and in futuristic style. What happens to the stadium after the Olympics flies the coop, a concern for any Games host, will be up to Beijing's imagination.
Architect: Herzog and de Meuron
Cost: RMB3.1 billion
Completion date: late 2007

CCTV Headquarters
Much ink has been spilled over the China Central Television headquarters, but words still seem as weak as knees before this acrobatic wonder. The building's two 40-story, 60-degree-leaning towers connect by a cantilevered bridge that has inspired as much dismissive disbelief as speechless awe from designers worldwide. According to the project's German co-architect, Ole Scheeren, "It's one of the most complex buildings ever built." Along with Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect and founder of OMA, Scheeren created and has been managing the project in Beijing with a team of OMA designers dozens strong. While engineering firm Arup provided the unique engineering feats to make it work in an earthquake zone ("It's the most analyzed building we've done. Actually, it's probably the most analyzed building, period," says Arup's Rory McGowan), it is the army of ten thousand construction workers who really testify to the scale and complexity of this remarkable building, which may be the Chinese government's best answer to the pyramids of Egypt.
Architect: Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)
Cost: RMB5.8 billion
Completion date: 2009

AROUND CHINA by Alex Pasternack
China’s future?
With all eyes on China, the projects underway across the country are all trying to out-do each other – whether they be the tallest, the greenest, the slickest, and now even the deepest – both Beijing and Shanghai are fighting it out for the most jaw-dropping designs.

Songjiang Quarry Hotel, Shanghai

How to position a modern structure within an idyllic natural setting is a special challenge in China, where tradition often demands that architecture accommodate nature. Though that tradition is often broken, the Songjiang Quarry Hotel near Shanghai goes for the opposite extreme: it hugs the side of a 100-meter deep quarry, standing two levels above the rock face and plunging two levels below the lake's bottom. Down there, guests can enjoy an underwater dinner or check into rooms that face a ten-meter-deep aquarium. The bottom levels also provide access to water-based and extreme sports like rock climbing and even (thanks to a planned cantilever above the quarry) bungee jumping.
The building itself looks like it's taking a plunge off the cliff side. "We drew our inspiration from the quarry setting itself, adopting the image of a green hill cascading down the natural rock face as a series of terraced, landscaped hanging gardens," says Martin Jochman, who led the design team from UK firm Atkins. A transparent glass "waterfall," in imitation of the existing one, is planned for the center of the building – a central vertical atrium connecting the base of the quarry with the roof of the hotel. To top it all off, the designers incorporated green roofing and geothermal energy extraction, meaning the hotel should not only slide into its setting, but have a minimal impact on it as well.
Architect: PTW/China State Construction Engineering
Corporation (CSCEC)
Cost: not available
Completion date: late 2007

National Grand Theater, Beijing

Hot potato – or rather, egg; it is not so much the ambition of its complex design, but the surrounding controversy that's delayed the completion of this building for three years. French architect Paul Andreu's much-ballyhooed egg-shaped opera house is more fitting for a science-fiction movie than its Tiananmen digs, say local critics. As such, the building has become a lightning rod for scorn towards foreign architecture across China. Aside from concerns about how the glass dome and the large moat that surrounds it will stand up to the grit of Beijing's environment, the building has been questioned not just for its friendliness to the environment, but for its questionable feng shui: the building's entrance, through a glass tunnel beneath the moat, is more evocative of a traditional tomb than an opera house. The 2004 collapse of an Andreu-designed extension to Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, which killed two Chinese citizens, didn't help the building's cause.
Still, its eye-catching design, approved shortly after China won its bid for the Olympics, represents a radical turn by Chinese leadership away from the stale, utilitarian architecture of the nearby Great Hall of the People. And the theater itself, which at night will be visible from the outside of the translucent dome, signals a fresh and international approach to performance space in a city that desperately needs it. Acoustic tests are scheduled for this summer, but officials still aren't naming a date for the opening performance.
Architect: Paul Andreu
Cost: RMB2.69 billion
Completion date: 2008

Shanghai World Financial Center
If the planners of the Shanghai World Financial Center (WFC) have their way, the title of world's tallest skyscraper will soon belong to China, at least for a moment. Even if the WFC, designed by KPF's Bill Pedersen, is soon eclipsed by other towers (such as Sir Norman Foster's planned Russia Tower in Moscow), when completed in 2008 the 101-story tower will still stand out amidst the forest of skyscrapers rising in Shanghai's Lujiazui financial district in Pudong, which is arguably the planet's tallest neighborhood.
A pair of "cosmic arcs" rises up the building's narrow, prismatic face, accentuating its height. At its apex, a distinctive and elegant six-story trapezoidal "sky portal" (which has earned the building the nickname "the giant bottle opener" from locals) is not just a nod to feng shui but a clever way to relieve the pressure from high winds. Visitors can gaze out through the haze from the observation deck located at the summit, or from an observation platform at the bottom of the sky portal, said to be the world's highest open-air gathering space. In addition to its business appointments, the tower will also include high-end shops and restaurants and a Park Hyatt, which will be (last superlative, promise) the world's highest luxury hotel.
Architect: KPF
Cost: RMB850 million
Completion date: Early 2008

PEARL RIVER NEW TOWER, GUANGZHOU by Alex Pasternack
Guangzhou goes green
You might not expect the headquarters of one of China's biggest cigarette manufacturers to be especially environmentally friendly. But Guangdong Tobacco Company's new digs, the Pearl River Tower designed by New York's SOM, takes sustainability to new heights. It aims to be the world's first zero-energy super-tall building. Getting there requires not just green add-ons like solar power but a thorough going-green design from top to bottom.
Taking advantage of its prime location along the Pearl River (not far from Zaha Hadid's opera house), the tower relies on three energy sources there for the taking – sun, water and even wind. The smooth, double-walled facade incorporates photovoltaics to gather solar energy, and is covered by fully glazed low-E (emittance) glass and integrated shades, insulating the interior from unwanted heat and glare.
The building's curtain wall also collects condensate for water use and air to assist a sophisticated heating and cooling system that uses 40 percent of the energy of traditional approaches. Outside, the building's curves push wind to openings positioned at the tower's mechanical levels, both relieving strenuous wind pressure and, brilliantly, funneling wind to turbines that will generate much of the tower's power. Also included is a water recycling system and a fuel cell system underneath, which forgoes grid electricity for more efficiently produced natural gas.
Altogether, the architects say, the 71-story Pearl River Tower has the potential to generate as much energy as it uses. And it's likely to generate new ideas for sustainable tall building designs too. It's at the forefront of the development of the Pearl River New Town, challenging the Twin Towers and the GZTV Tower not just for recognition, but to be the symbol of new Guangzhou. It may not have the sheer height of its challengers, but in an age of climate responsibility, it may gain more international respect.
Architect: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
Cost: not available
Completion date: 2009

GUANGZHOU OPERA HOUSE by Alex Pasternack
space opera
If Paul Andreu's bulbous Beijing opera house evokes the UFOs of a fifties' fantasy, Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou concert hall comes from a galaxy much farther away. The halls' stealth-like shapes, meant to replicate river pebbles, blur the line between the freaky, surreal computer-generated world where many of Hadid's adventurous designs tend to remain and the very real banks of the Pearl River.
It's one of China's most daring new designs, and a coup for Guangzhou. Aside from its 1,800-seat theater and 400-seat multi-purpose hall, the opera house engages with visitors from the nearby Haixinsha Tourist Park and Zhujiang New Town via its large promenade, cafes and shops. While the Pritzker-winning, Iraq-born architect's design may be at odds with traditional Chinese opera, or any opera for that matter, it's poised to hit the right notes.
Architect: Zaha Hadid
Cost: RMB1 billion
Completion date:
late 2007

VANKE CENTER, SHENZHEN by Alex Pasternack
crouching building, flying dragon
Steven Holl and Li Hu's adventurous commercial-residential complex is a perfect compliment to their Beijing Linked Hybrid. Where that development envisions a system of bridged residential towers connected like a dance circle, their Shenzhen project, commissioned by and for real estate developer Vanke, floats above the ground like a flying dragon.
By turning tall into long and lifting the snaking, aluminum-encased building on pillars, the design accommodates height regulations while providing for better interior views of a nearby lake – and shading an expanse of public and green space below. "We like to fuse the social with our approach to buildings," says Beijing-based Li Hu. He believes that keeping many functions within a single complex (in this case, commercial shops, a hotel and Soho) not only enriches buildings' social commitment, but can help to tighten the fabric of sprawling Chinese cities, which are clogged on the ground and in the air by construction and traffic. The building also wears green on its sleeve, with a green roof, sun-protected facade, water recycling, and a set of geothermal wells to provide heating and cooling.
Architect: Steven Holl
Cost: not available
Completion date:
late 2008

Riding the Rails

2007-07-01T02:26:00.000-07:00

A sneak peek at the new Line 5 subway

Somehow, it wasn’t ironic that the Olympic Committee had to drive us to Beijing’s newest subway line in a tour bus. Correction: we weren’t driving at all. We were sitting idle in traffic. Therein was the reason we were visiting the subway in the first place. As the city slowly edges toward Bangkok-style traffic, officials have planned for three new lines in time for the 2008 games, and are promising the world’s largest subway system by 2020. Though it’s not set to open until September, the city is already testing, tuning and touting the north-south line 5, the first addition to its soon-to-be rapidly expanding subway network.

For now though, one of the only clues to that future lies beneath Chang’an Dajie, at an unassuming underpass across the street from Oriental Plaza. A couple of young security guards jumped up from their naps when we arrived, promptly opening a shiny metal gate to let us descend into the newest Beijing underground. The floors and walls were still clean, the escalator unfinished; at the bottom of a long set of stairs we found ourselves in what looked like an unfinished set from Star Wars. Gleaming signs, LED lights, a glass-encased control room, and cables rising from the floor waiting to connect to card-scanning turnstiles that will replace the subway’s ubiquitous ticket ladies. Before a tear could rise up, we regained our senses and scanned the room for other signs of Beijing’s “high-tech” Olympics: lasers, 3-D maps, new bathrooms.

And then we saw the future, hanging along the platform: large flat-screen TVs showing traffic information, news tickers and, for no reason at all, the latest Harry Potter movie. TVs also hung on the walls of the train itself, showing slow-motion images of athletes hurling themselves through the air interspersed with dramatic ribbon dancing and every now and then, the Beijing 2008 logo. Come the Olympics, commuters will be able to watch the sporting events live. As we stood in front of a screen and beneath a stream of cool air – having been whisked to the new Yonghegong subway station, which looks slightly like a modern version of the temple above – it dawned on us: might the lazier among us pass on the actual games (or on a visit to Yonghegong for that matter) for the air-conditioned idyll of the subway?

That good idea almost flew out of our heads as we wandered out of the car; more precisely, it was knocked out by a collision with the overhead handrail. That, along with the subway door itself, was noticeably shorter than on the city’s current subway. “You’re too tall,” a subway official told us with a smile. “But what about Yao Ming?” we asked. No answer.

Height prejudices aside, the subway is a definite improvement: the stations are spiffier (if a bit sterile), the train’s wider on the inside and, like Hong Kong’s MTR, has no doors in-between cars, a cool trick that turns the subway cars into one long moving hallway. And somehow, the air underground felt clean. Plus: three kuai is a lot cheaper than a ticket to the Olympics.

Permalink 09:17:53, From that's Beijing's City Scene

Harp on it

2007-06-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

Andrew Bird

Armchair Apocrypha

In other hands or mouths, Andrew Bird’s crossword-puzzle vocabulary and lyrical obsession with science, psychology and obscure history might come across as pretentious; or, worse, pedestrian. But accompanied by his trademark layered violins, glockenspiels and guitars – and his elegant voice, as capable of deadpan as jazzy soul – the Chicagoan’s profundities are like juicy tidbits of a refreshing and witty late Sunday afternoon conversation (or therapy session). Set around modern fears and revelations, the conversation began with 2003’s Weather Systems, Bird’s first solo album, and continued on 2005’s brilliant The Mysterious Production of Eggs. On Armchair Apocrypha, Bird’s ruminations have grown even deeper, with rich musical flourishes to match. On tracks like Heretics, Dark Matter, and Cataracts, Bird isn’t just feeding us food for thought; these are some of the sweetest pop candies of the year. Alex Pasternack

tha ring master

2007-06-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

Dan Deacon

Spiderman of the Rings

Bespectacled surrealist musician plus trash-salvaged electronics plus a love for German synths, video games and children’s shows: to get some idea of what this means, just search Youtube for his name. There, in the space of three minutes (and on some local TV morning show no less), the Baltimore native unspools his magical assault on dance music …

Wait, no – the robotic blips, voice and organ, are far too friendly to be part of any assault, and too far afield to be responding to anything, period. So goes his grandest LP to date. Replete with sublime feedback, grinning choral sections and helium-tinged hip-hop hooks, it’s like a glass of spiked Tang at a circus after-party: not exactly the kind of thing you savor, just the sort that puts a big toothy grin on your face. Alex Pasternack

Beijing's Migrant Smog Problem

2007-06-16T01:07:00.000-07:00

Where Does the Capital's Air Come From?

Among environmental scientists and cab drivers alike, the cause of Beijing’s pollution—and thus how to stop it—is an old topic of debate. Now, thanks to a municipal research program to clear the air for the “Green Olympics,” it’s a $3.2 million question. If the task were as easy as shutting down local factories, phasing out coal-fired heating, cleaning up power plants, and restricting traffic during the Games – plans already being carried out by officials – Beijing would be on course. But as researchers have realized in recent years, much of Beijing’s dirty air is drifting in from outside. But figuring out from where, and what to do about it, is looking much more complicated than anyone expected.

“The general implication is that it’s not going to be so easy to clean up Beijing for the Olympics,” says Kenneth Rahn, an environmental engineer and visiting scholar at Tsinghua who works with the university’s Air Pollution and Control Institute. While his students study everything from ozone to nasty sulfur dioxide, Rahn’s passion is aerosols, or the microscopic particles that create haze and may contribute to health problems when lodged in the lungs. These days, Rahn is seeing a lot of the stuff coming from outside Beijing. “If you focus on Beijing alone, you’re only controlling half the problem.”

The usual suspects – that is, metal smelters in Inner Mongolia, Mongolia, and Western Siberia – appear to be the source of much of Beijing’s external pollution. But as Rahn and his team are learning from their measurements, much of Beijing’s imported pollution is also coming from coal-fired factories and cars to the south of Beijing, from areas as far away as Shandong province, Henan province and Shanghai. The implication is that these areas too may need to clean up ahead of the Olympics. “This is something really new,” Rahn says.

During a typical pollution cycle, Beijing first feels its smog-carrying breeze from the northwest. Then, winds from the south begin to pick up, traveling easily across the flat coastal region that Rahn affectionately refers to as The Bathtub, for the way dirty air here easily “sloshes” around. When it arrives in Beijing, the migrant smog mingles with local particulate matter—until a cold front or rain washes it away in the direction of Korea, Japan or even the U.S., leaving behind a few days of blue Beijing skies.

But how many days of blue skies will Beijing get during the Games—and will the city meet Olympic air standards as promised? According to Rahn, while Beijing’s pollution cycles become weaker and less frequent in summer, they begin to reappear with moderate strength in August, just when the athletes roll into town. “That means that the degree of air pollution during the Summer Olympics is purely a matter of chance,” he says. Blue skies could happen, he says, but “if you forced me to take a guess, I would say [Beijing] won’t meet the standard.”

For the future, Rahn says China needs stricter emissions controls on cars and policies like the U.S.’s landmark 1970 Clean Air Act, which enforced pollution standards for all new factories and power plants. “It’s not about the Olympics but the next fifty years.” For the time being though, his advice to Beijing’s Olympic planners is simpler: “Best to pray to the Mongolian Weather Gods.”

In China, Protest by TXT

2007-06-10T23:42:00.001-07:00

One million text messages. That's how residents of China's port city of Xiamen spread word to protest -- and eventually halt -- construction of a chemical plant on Thursday, according to local news reports. The $1.4 billion facility was meant to produce the petrochemical paraxylene, exposure to which can cause eye, nose or throat irritation, affect the central nervous system and may cause death. Though international standards dictate that such a plant should be 100 km from the nearest city, the short text messages that mobilized Xiamen's smart mob warned the factory would have been only 16 km away.

While the central government is clearly showing more interest in protecting the environment, local governments, eager to cut corners in the name of economics, are helping block the path to sustainable development. But the Xiamen protests, thousands of people strong, are the latest sign of people power in China, where tens of thousands of protests over tainted land and water are recorded every year, threatening the government's dream of a "harmonious society" while pointing the way forward for environmental action in a place that seriously needs some.

That local officials in Xiamen reportedly began blocking text messages too in an attempt to stem the protests, and that the protests continued apace, is an indication that, try as it might, China's authoritarian controls simply can't keep up with the power of cell phones blogs, bulletin boards, and the smartmobs they might create. (Local governments are getting into the SMS act themselves, using text messages to warn citizens of floods and even stop protests.)

Clearly, stopping protests just isn't possible the way it used to be. Between increasing countryside unrest (there may be nothing scarier to the government) and deadly pollution (China's rural cancer rate rose by 23 percent in the past two years, and more than 70 percent of the country's waterways and 90 percent of its underground water are contaminated by pollution) something's gotta give.

Since the plant's not been completely scrapped, residents are still protesting, according to Reuters. And the more word spreads, the more likely it is that protests will continue elsewhere too. An large expansion of a chemical plant in the southeastern city of Quanzhou that produces paraxylene and other chemicals was announced in March, funded by China's No. 2 oil company, Sinopec, Saudi Aramco, the Saudi government oil company, and ExxonMobil Corp. Paraxylene is a key material in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) saturated polyester polymers--the stuff of which the world's plastic bottles are made.

Double Edge

2007-06-07T01:21:00.000-07:00

Tag Team Records and Modern Sky team up for the second CH+INDIE fest

Just for the record, the second annual CH+INDIE rock fest, subtitled “The Wrath of Khan,” is not a reaction to other yaogun festivals in Beijing. (That its name was inspired by a murderous tyrant in the second Star Trek film is little more than nerdy homage.)

“We just wanted to represent as much independent Chinese music as we could in one day, but in a more relaxed kind of way, with beers and ice cream,” says Matt Kagler, head of Tag Team Records. His label and Modern Sky, Beijing’s other big US-China record company, have organized the outdoor festival not to compete with the city’s other fests, or even simply to showcase the labels’ bands: “This is just about music we’re into,” says Kagler.

But that straight-up approach means that it is a far cry from the rambling multi-genre orgies of festivals like the MIDI Modern Music Festival or Beijing Pop. “Basically, sometimes at festivals you get curious bookings, hodgepodge-y type stuff,” explains Kagler. Instead, CH+INDIE (pronounced “Chindie”) features a tight, wholesome line up that’s the rock equivalent of a street-side jianbing, and easier to digest. Day one features six bands, including lo-fi indies Arrows Made of Desire, post-punk outfit Scoff and local legends Brain Failure; lunatic SUBS kick things off a delicious day two, featuring spacey Lonely China Day and local darlings Joyside.

If such healthy servings of sweet Beijing rock are not enough to justify the 45RMB per day entrance fee, the organizers ensure that five kuai of each ticket will go to Altruistic Alcoholics, who are using the cash to build schools in Hubei. In true festival style, the charity will set up a booth on the lawn alongside Red T, Sugar Jar and The Veggie Union.

And just as Kagler promises there’s no beef between CH+INDIE and other local fests, his festival also promises no beef, or other meats for that matter. Though he’s not a vegetarian, Kagler called local food collective Veggie Era, in the name of alternatives. “I’ve never seen anything like that in Beijing. I figured we’d try something different.”

The record labels will of course have booths too—and maybe even right next to each other. In an environment that doesn’t exactly encourage profits (“You’re happy just to break even”), there’s no sense of competition; promoting Beijing’s music with a unified front is a matter of survival. Sure, love for the music is top priority at a showcase like CH+INDIE, “but, hell, we may even make a little bit of money, which would be nice for a change,” says Kagler.

As they have relied on joint shows to spread the word in Beijing, both labels are also striving to position their bands in the widening overseas spotlight. Last April’s edition of the U.S.’s indie music mecca, the South by Southwest Festival, saw visits by Lonely China Day and post-punkers Rebuilding the Rights of Statues (Re-TROS), while Joyside recently played sold-out shows in Europe. Meanwhile, Tag Team and Modern Sky are starting to sign U.S.-based artists.

At home and abroad labels’ collaboration is rooted in cross-promotion, but it helps that Kagler and Modern Sky manager Meng Jinhui are chummy. “Jin and I like to drink beers and listen to Joy Division on vinyl 'til someone gets sick.”

Both labels wear that post-punk love on their record sleeves: Re-TROS, which is represented by Modern Sky in China and distributed in the U.S. by Tag Team, are clear Ian Curtis acolytes. While it’s hard to complain about that influence, Kagler is happy that as China’s rock scene gets more exposure, it’s also growing more original too. “A couple of years ago everything sounded like Green Day and Limp Bizkit,” he says. “Now there’s some really good stuff going on. I wouldn’t have said that three years ago.”

Leading the way are some new venues like upstart D-22, which has been cheered in all corners since it opened last year. But its Wudoakou locale, far from the club-land on the east side of the city, has created what Kagler dubs “the East-West thing.” “These bands that play at D-22 hardly ever play in Chaoyang,” he explains. “There’s no animosity, but somehow it just goes down that way.” He’s hoping CH+INDIE, which features D-22 staples like Scoff and Joyside, will do something to bridge the gap.

For all the free love, rock-and-roll attitude, Kagler has a decidedly un-rock-and-roll piece of advice to fans: arrive early. Rules are rules, especially when it comes to outdoor noise restrictions, and the festival, which opens at 4 pm, needs to wrap up by 11.30. “But it’s cool. There’ll be plenty of stuff to eat, drink, and hear,” he says. “It is after all a festival.”

School Shooting, 24 Hours a Day

2007-06-06T22:17:00.000-07:00

I wrote this after the shootings at Virginia Tech.

It's sad that it takes a tragedy to awaken our senses, to compel us to start important discussions. But it's even sadder when such a tragedy fails to awaken us at all. Of course, the shootings at Virginia Tech certainly highlighted significant problems with America's confused system of gun control—or lack thereof—and reignited debate about one of America's oldest rights. It also showed flaws in the mental health system at some of the country's universities, and with the way that hospitals and police communicate about potentially dangerous individuals. And it pointed to, as if on cue, the powerful influence of Hollywood and video games, the dangerous blurring of violent art and reality in the hands of a student whose own gruesome fiction writing foretold his plans.

At least that's what the news told us. In fact, what the media told us and didn't tell us about this massacre might be the deeper problem. The press's early misfiring (pardon the expression) about the shooter's identity—the Chicago Sun-Times and other outlets labeled him Chinese to the ire of many here—was only the auspicious beginning of the media frenzy that was to follow. Dutifully, America's 24-hour television news channels (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) stepped in fast, and for the next week paid attention to almost nothing else. And yet, something about that attention seemed inadequate, counterproductive even, to explain anything about what happened that day in Virginia.

The facts, few but grim (33 victims, the deadliest mass shooting in American history), and the imagery and language (police cars, helicopter shots, distraught students and talk of "a loner," "coping," etc) were part of what seems to be a now-familiar TV journalism template. In the contemporary American consciousness, "SCHOOL SHOOTING" has become practically an American fixture, a phrase we have grown accustomed to seeing about once a year on the bottom of the CNN screen, in serious red or black lettering with an animated target hovering in the background, as if we need a reminder of the severity of the situation, or of some immanent danger that remains. Four days after the incident, CNN's ticker still told me that the shooting was "Breaking News."

The accompanying commentary—in this case, the chatter of a news anchor filling airtime over idle video footage, or a repetitious talking-head debate on gun control and school safety—with the addition of new journalistic props, like students' amateur video, photos, blogs, and social networking comments, all seems intended, I feel, to satisfy the audience's questions: How? Why? More often though, all this news spectacle appeals to is a simpler need: the public's "need to know," and the morbid curiosity, voyeurism and hunger for sensation that comes with it.

Nothing wrong with that—as the popularity of youtube.com can attest, we all like to watch reality this way sometimes. Yet, one suspects, the more we watch, the less we can see. That is, the more we sink ourselves into some oblivion of information and images, the harder it becomes to confront and understand the reality underneath. As critic Susan Sontag reminded us in one of her last essays, this idea is not an offspring of our recent 24-hour news cycles: in 1800, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, poet William Wordsworth denounced the dulling of sensibility produced by "the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies." This overstimulation acts "to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind" and "reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor." I am reminded of how, following the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, a friend of mine recoiled at my description of that killing. I had called the events "cliché"—horrible word choice to be sure, but after the "spate" of school shootings that preceded Columbine in the media—that's how a school shooting felt: something to be expected.

And yet, there is nothing to be expected at all about a person opening blind fire upon classrooms of students and teachers. But expectation, familiarity, and a kind of fatigue, is one of the few outcomes of the media frenzies that follow (the "circus" of reporters grew so big that a week later Virginia Tech students issued a statement begging the media to go home). The valiant attempt to explain what happened and even to comfort audiences—two journalistic responsibilities that were not completely forgotten by the news coverage—ultimately ended in little more than sensationalism. And worse: while the video, photos and hate letters sent to NBC News by the evidently TV-savvy killer shed some light on his mental state, broadcasting large parts of his "media kit" only hurt the victims and fueled concerns that his menacing image would inspire copycat acts.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that such an event, and even the killer's messages, should not have been reported extensively. Rather, I'm pointing to the effect of which Wordsworth wrote, the way that a saturation of shocking data can dull our senses. Consider America's fatigue with the violence in war-torn places like Sudan, Afghanistan or Iraq. On the day thirty-three students were killed at Virginia Tech, sectarian violence killed two hundred people in Iraq, including the dean of the college of Political Science at Mosul University and a professor from the school's Faculty of Arts. In January and February, 110 students, faculty and staff were killed by suicide bombings at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University.

This I did not learn from CNN. The networks' incessant coverage of the shooting excluded practically all other news of the day. And even if there had been no massacre in Virginia, Iraqi violence would likely have been given little attention anyway, given the public's fatigue of that kind of coverage. On one hand, American networks like CNN ought to be paying more attention to Iraq; on another, TV news' steady stream of sensation, meant to keep us from switching the channel, might help dull our ability to think, or even to care.

I don't mean to suggest that the media should hold back on its imagery in an attempt to return us to some imaginary state of heightened sensitivity: ultimately, real-life violence isn't going anywhere. But just as there is a difference between watching and seeing, between consuming data and understanding it, there is a difference between journalism's "facts" and "the truth." The former can be shaped into an intense news segment, with a tone evocative of the Hollywood movies that some have blamed for violence. But the latter, the truth, is much harder to convey. One truth for instance, neglected in the media's fear-laden coverage of the Virginia shooting, is that violence among youth in America is much more common out of schools than in them.

Of course, it is the sanctity of a school that makes such a shooting so shocking, so apparently worthy of heavy media coverage. But the "shock" of the incident overshadows another crucial truth, one that Americans and people around the world often forget: no amount of amateur video, no amount of interviews with stunned students, or even stern messages about gun control by political talking heads, is going to help us understand what happened or prevent this from happening in the future. That's the job of citizens, politicians and even, one hopes, journalists, who can discuss, ask questions, and engage others in conversation—about topics like social isolation, violence, guns, and the media itself. Because thinking and talking about reality is much better than watching it on TV.

City Scene: How High for Houhai?

2007-06-03T01:12:00.000-07:00

Is RMB 110 million too much for a courtyard? In Beijing – where a full-fledged traditional courtyard home (siheyuan) has become as uncommon as, say, an affordable apartment – maybe not. If the place is one of the city’s choicest courtyards, located in a serene hutong with a view of Houhai, probably not. And, if you’re a Russian billionaire on the prowl for new lao Beijing digs, well, it sounds like a downright bargain.

In March, those facts coincided to result in Beijing’s largest courtyard purchase to date: RMB 36,324 per square meter for a courtyard in Houhai (see tbjhome, May 2007), Beijing’s most sought-after old-school address. Bordered by alleyways to the north and the lake to the south and extending 3,000 square meters – it takes ten minutes to walk around the thing – it’s one of 40 remaining large courtyards in the old city. Of course, no billionaire’s courtyard would be complete without a lavish renovation featuring wood from a Thailand rainforest, which in this case will cost another 300 million kuai.

“I’m not surprised at the price,” says Hu Xinyu, of hutong preservation group Friends of Old Beijing, who remembers a 1,000 square meter courtyard selling for about RMB 10,000 per square meter a few years ago. Sources tell that’s Beijing that an even larger Houhai courtyard space is up for sale with an asking price of over RMB 200 million – a trend that is sure to continue in the run-up to the Olympics. “What I’m concerned about,” says Xu, “is the idea behind the investment.”

In the heyday of the courtyard, during imperial times, the most highly decorated courtyards – those with lavish doorways and screen walls – were entrusted to only the most prominent imperial officials. That thinking might have been behind the Beijing government’s decision in 2004 to open sales of courtyards to private buyers. As development was rapidly overtaking Beijing’s old quarters, the idea was to turn protection of the city’s legendary courtyard homes over to the market. Among those answering Beijing’s courtyard call have been billionaires like Asia’s richest man Li Ka-Shing, and Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendi Deng – and though foreigners only account for five percent of courtyard sales, many think that number is growing.

On the one hand, large purchases like the recent one in Houhai could help the cause of the hutong and courtyard homes, spruce up neighborhoods and perhaps draw in more money. “In general, gentrification can do something good, as long as the process is managed in a careful, slow pace,” Xu says. “But I’m afraid about the wealthy taking over the courtyards and, without knowledge or feeling, renovating them in an improper way.”

Rules exist, of course, to ensure that any fancying-up of a traditional courtyard honors its dynastic roots: a law passed last year stipulates a fine of up to RMB 200,000 for illegal modifications.

Given all the attention it’s received, adding a few minarets and gold leaf to the Houhai courtyard will be impossible to hide, and sources close to developer Wantong say that the home’s renovation will be faithful to its heritage. There will, however, be a swimming pool in the basement.

Alex Pasternack and Jessie Wang

An Olympic All-access Pass?

2007-05-07T01:24:00.000-07:00

Last month, the government issued what may prove to be a stunning announcement in advance of the Olympics: starting this month, journalists seeking interviews with government officials need only obtain the permission of the officials themselves. Up until now, landing an interview as a foreign journalist required advance preparation, patience, and permission from on high—three things journalists aren’t exactly in love with. At least until October 2008, when the new rules are meant to end, this reporter could, theoretically, dial up the president on the old red phone without having to go through all those pesky handlers. “Hu, a quick one: who would dominate the balance beam—Zhang Ziyi or Li Gong?” I wouldn’t ask that question of course, because I already know what he’d say.

Which raises the question: just how earth-shattering is this policy shift if everything else remains the same. If officials know that someone up above is still listening, will they really turn into ragingly candid interviewees, letting loose on everything from China’s prospects on the 100 meter dash to civil society? The very same day the new rules were announced, a city court denied an appeal by Zhao Yan, a New York Times researcher, of his three-year prison sentence, which many see as an attempt by the government to dissuade Chinese reporters from going “foreign.”

The rules also allow reporters to travel freely in China without official permission, but what happens if the local police don’t know the rules? “As long as local authorities are adequately briefed, it shouldn’t be that difficult to carry out,” says Melinda Liu, president of the Foreign Correspondents Club. Less ambiguous perhaps is the repeal of television limitations, which formerly meant that all satellite signals had to go through China Central Television. “There have been ‘technical difficulties’ with broadcasts in the past,” says Norman Bottorff, manager for the AP’s television operation in China. “If we have our own uplink equipment then there will be no one monitoring our broadcasts.”

The outlined regulations had the press corps stroking their chins at the thought of their new prospects, especially when Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said, “We want to create an enabling environment for foreign journalists.” And in an ideal world, what would “enabled” foreign reporters do with this newly granted freedom? tbj canvassed Chinese and foreign freelance journalists, wire correspondents and reporters including AP TV, National Public Radio and The Hollywood Reporter for a correspondents’ holiday wish list.

“Tibet and Xinjiang. It would be nice to be able to go to these places without having to pretend to be a tourist.”

“Three gorges stories. I'd go to places where people are being relocated, or the places near the gorges where people have just moved back.”

“I'd like to be able to stay overnight in a village. These days, if you're a foreigner, especially a journalist, somebody shows up and tells you to go to the nearest hotel.”

“A tour of Zhongnanhai. Or army bases. I've applied for some. I would obviously like to do an elite unit; paratroopers or something that. We can't get access to any of them currently.”

“I'd like to hire a Chinese reporter, as opposed to just a news assistant.”

“No more 'technical difficulties' with satellite broadcasts. That shouldn't be a problem if we have our own uplink equipment.”

“Sitting on a film bureau censor's meeting. They're a rotating group of senior cadres, but nobody knows who they are. Basically a star chamber for the movie industry.”

“The ability to go to Shandong, to interview Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist. Find out … what's going on with his case. Now, if you try to get into the village, they … send you away.”

“We could have a piece of paper, a regulation in Chinese that I can show to local county level provincial level officials or cops saying that I should be there.”

“I'll head straight to the AIDS villages in Hebei.”

“Well, just to keep things related to the Games, as the government hopes, how about a story just around the time of the Paralympics on the lack of handicapped wheelchair ramps in every major city throughout China?”

City Scene: An Ocean Beneath Our Feet

2007-05-06T23:33:00.000-07:00

China’s capital has no shortage of environmental woes: rivers are disappearing, land is sinking, and now the government is spending RMB 100 billion to build an aqueduct to transport water from the Yangtze River. Come spring’s sandstorms, the place starts to resemble the lost, and very parched and sandy city of Petra. But underneath it all, deep within the bedrock below, lies … an ocean?

Well, sort of. “We used the word ‘ocean’ to describe the approximate volume of how much water we think might be contained inside this attenuation anomaly,” explains Jesse Lawrence, a researcher from the University of California at San Diego who discovered the geological mystery dubbed the “Beijing anomaly.” It may sound like a baddie from a horror flick, but the anomaly is in fact an enormous layer of water-infused rock, deep beneath eastern Asia.

Rather than discovering water, Lawrence and his former professor, Michael Wysession, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, happened upon it via seismic measurements from around the planet, through a process Lawrence likens to listening to muffled music through a wall. They noticed that seismic waves traveling beneath Asia appear to slow down and dampen, or attenuate, in a big way. A distortion this huge, says Lawrence, can only mean the Big Dumpling is sitting on rocks full of water – an ocean’s worth of it.

But how did it ever get down there? And (wonders the wily entrepreneur) how on earth do we get at it? Lawrence explains that water seeps down from the earth’s surface to the earth’s depths through a quarter-billion-year process called subduction. Typically, water trapped in rock begins its return to the surface after sinking 200 kilometers, eventually to escape through volcanoes and other fissures. In this case, however, slabs of cooler, water-enriched minerals beneath us have continued downwards to depths of 600 to 1,200 km, taking about 13-20 million years to do so, Lawrence estimates.

Eventually, at such infernal depths, the rocks destabilize, releasing water that later reenters the earth’s surface water cycle. Of the impact on Beijing, says Lawrence, “the anomaly is deeper than the deepest earthquakes, so no fear there.” But the depths are so great that the chance of squeezing water out of them is as tiny as the percentage of water trapped in the rocks – about 0.1 % by weight. “Even if we could reach these depths,” says Lawrence, “it would be nearly impossible to extract the H2O from the minerals. Desert sands likely have as much or more water.” Nonetheless, given the capital’s increasing lack of liquid, perhaps it’s time to start digging. Alex Pasternack

Chik it out!

2007-04-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

Music Review: !!!

Myth Takes

If there’s a modern soundtrack to the kind of wanton behavior witnessed at sweaty, shirtless, college dance parties, Myth Takes deserves a place on it. Previous records from the aptly-named dance-punk outfit (pronounced with three clucks of the tongue) had bursts of brilliance but couldn’t match the live performances, wherein seven men armed with searing guitars, horns and a trance-inducing rhythm section back up the indefatigable, party-starting Nic Offer. But that consistent live energy is sprinkled all over this new record, from the twangy, tribal title track to the album’s spacey, funky centerpiece, the courtship treatise Heart of Hearts. If it occasionally gets to be a bit repetitive, well, then you’re listening too hard … and not dancing hard enough!!! Alex Pasternack

Green architecture in China

2007-04-03T03:38:00.000-07:00

I'm growing increasingly interested in the developing -- and from an energy and environmental vantage-point, crucial -- story of green building in China. Here's how the director of the wonderful documentary Design:e2 sees things:

One piece I wrote at Isabel Hilton's invaluable web magazine China Dialogue starts constructing one version of the story:

Years before China completed its first certified green building, a team from Beijing went to meet with engineers in the US to discuss environmentally-friendly design. But when the Chinese team showed some early sketches to their American colleagues, the response was not what they were expecting.

The American engineers said the plans were completely unworkable – the lighting design, water systems, ventilation and so on would all to be redone. This setback left Gao Lin, the lead Chinese architect on the project, “looking completely shell shocked,” recalls Robert Watson, a senior scientist with the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, who advises the Chinese government on green construction. “He blinked and looked at me and said, ‘It’s like I’m seeing architecture for the first time.’”

Recently, I've followed up a little bit at Treehugger:

... as Beijing's 3rd annual international green building expo rolls into town, some recent developments have lifted our optimism for green building in China. First, after declaring it would stick to its goal of reducing energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 percent by 2010, the government passed a draft law during last week's National People's Congress supporting a "circular economy" that would wed the "three Rs" with China's development...
Meanwhile, a new energy-efficient growth model (with possible new resource taxes) aims to tame that development, which is unsustainable now matter how you look at it. And then there was the passage of China's first property law, which could pave the way, so to speak, for smarter growth. Of course, no solution to China's problems is now possible without the participation of the market. No wonder that the state-run English daily carried a front page headline yesterday urging private developers to comply with current building laws and go green. The developers in China—and green capitalists everywhere—better be listening. “If the government has a policy, develops a standard and enforces it, then the market has to react,” says Yong Tao, a professor spearheading the US entry to a green housing showcase that will open alongside the Beijing "Green" Olympics next year. For a green construction market, he says, “the potential is there.” That's the thinking behind Beijing's 3^rd annual green building expo, which starts today. Slowly--slowly--green energy is building.

Stay tuned/

Is the (Architecture) Party Over?

2007-04-03T03:24:00.000-07:00

A stadium modeled after a birds’ nest, a z-shaped skyscraper, the largest airport in the world and an opera house that looks like an egg. Approved in the wake of Beijing’s Olympics win and China’s entry into the WTO and still unfinished, buildings like these, each by a renowned foreign architect, are already helping shape Beijing of the future.

But they could soon become things of the past. An “opinion” released last month by the Ministry of Construction and four other government bodies seeks greater restrictions on large-scale public building projects—an edict apparently aimed at outlandish and costly designs by foreign architects.

above, the proposed ren building in Shanghai, by Dutch firm PLOT

“In recent years, in some places there's been a fever for international tenders for major public buildings, especially landmark projects,” said an unnamed spokesman, according to the Chinese government's official Web site, gov.cn. “Some foreign architects are divorced from China's national conditions and single-mindedly pursue novelty, oddity and uniqueness.”

While the beginning of the decade saw rampant rubber-stamping of ambitious construction and development projects, the central government has lately sought to cut down on wasteful projects in an attempt to rein in economic growth and reduce energy use.

“Some local governments aren't acting in the interest of national conditions and financial strength, crave unrealistic 'achievement projects' or 'image projects', don't emphasize conservation of energy and resources, or use too much land,” said the document, avoiding specifics.

Among those welcoming the new provisions was Peng Peigen, a professor of architecture at Tsinghua University who has been China’s most outspoken critic of “bad and ugly” foreign architecture. The document, which he hailed as a “major decision,” could reach provincial and municipal levels within two years. “But,” he said, “it will take eight to ten years to heal the wounds to the city’s morphology.”

For years, Peng and a group of Chinese architects have captivated the press and national leaders with their publicity campaigns against some of Beijing’s biggest foreign projects. For instance, he says Herzog and de Meuron’s National Stadium is oppressive in form, wasteful for its use of steel, and at odds with Beijing’s layout. (The design beat Peng’s own Olympic submission, which positioned a flowering stadium directly along the city’s central axis.)

But Peng’s public enemy no. 1 is Paul Andreu’s Grand National Theater—dubbed the “ducks’ egg” by some—which he says is extravagant and grossly out of touch with its surroundings. Last year, he wrote to Premier Wen Jiabao criticizing it and other of China’s “monsters” by foreign architects who see China as a “new weapons testing ground.”

Still, Peng, who is a Canadian citizen, is quick to point out that some of his favorite buildings are foreign-made, including Adrian Smith’s iconic Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, and even Herzog and de Meuron’s tubular Munich Allianz Arena, which he says is much lighter and more efficient than their Beijing stadium. “[We’re against] architecture that’s bad,” he said. “It’s not because it’s foreign.”

But the new document places a premium on domestic submissions for construction and design plans over the work of foreigners. Until very recently, foreign architecture companies were required to cooperate with local design firms on any project. While the requirement was meant to encourage exchange and provide checks, most foreign architects have lamented the cultural and technical hurdles of working with China’s quickly developing architectural sector.

But despite the challenges, local partnerships are key, said John Pauline of Australian architects PTW. His team worked with a local design firm to develop the National Aquatics Center, nicknamed the “Watercube,” said to be the public’s favorite Olympic design. “It’s almost impossible to do architectural work here without collaboration,” he said. “And if we hadn’t collaborated, the Watercube wouldn’t look anything like the way it does.”

Hoping it isn’t the start of a wider, stricter campaign against foreign designs, Pauline sees the government’s warning as part of a growing process. He recalls how Sydney’s famous Opera House was met with public uproar in the 1950s, especially for its Danish pedigree. “‘Why are you taking work from Australian architects?’ people wondered then. Now you wouldn’t find one person who would say that,” he said. “It’s just something you have to embrace.”

“Foreign architects, whether they be European, Korean, Japanese, improve Beijing, they don’t set it back in terms of aesthetics,” he said. “The more you’ve got the better off you are.”

A version of this ran in That's Beijing HOME in April 2007

How to Repel the Sand

2007-03-29T05:34:00.001-07:00

something i wrote for that's Beijing last June, but soon, too soon it will be relevant again (I'm hiding behind the curtains).

In the old days, village officials in China’s arid north would pray to the gods for rain. These days, when rainfall is badly needed to end droughts – or, increasingly, to clean up the city in advance of Beijing’s “Green Olympics” – the government doesn’t need to offer sacrifices to the heavens: it shoots chemicals at them with anti-aircraft cannons.

While China has been using rainmaking technology since the 1980s to stem droughts, the worst rash of sandstorms to hit Beijing in a decade has given officials new cause for aiming at the skies: giving the city a good rinse. After the roughest of last month’s sand attacks dumped 330,000 tons of sand on the city, the government responded by launching seven rocket shells and burning 163 pieces of “cigarette-like sticks” containing silver iodide. And voila! “The heaviest rainfall in Beijing this spring,” reported Xinhua.

While the effects of rainmaking on local ecosystems and health still remain unknown, there’s something disconcerting about forced rainfall (and it’s not just because cleaning the city apparently must involve chemical apparatus suggestive of a cigarette). “It’s a passive solution, it’s not a solution at all,” says Wen Bo, the local representative for the San Francisco-based group Pacific Environment. Like the “green wall” of trees currently being built to shield Beijing from sand, Wen says rainmaking is at best a quick fix to the sandstorms, which magnify the health dangers of the city’s already heavy smog. Beach weather in Beijing would be better addressed, Wen says, by local governments in nearby Hebei and Inner Mongolia making greater efforts to improve irrigation and vegetation practices and replanting trees.

Complicating the matter, as two recent government studies demonstrate, is disagreement over the cause of sandstorms. One study blames traditional spring ploughing techniques, which loosen topsoil prior to planting, while another identifies the routes that such storms take to reach Beijing, pinpointing the origin not in Chinese farmlands but in the deserts of Mongolia. Whatever the causes may be, Wen worries that rainmaking in Beijing threatens to “wash away not just the dirt, but people’s memory” of the actual problem – a case of saving face, but not necessarily the environment. Alex Pasternack

Arcade Fire: Neon Bible

2007-03-28T23:13:00.000-07:00

I can brag that I saw Arcade Fire just after the release of their debut album Funeral, because like the record, that crowded, sweaty night was the clarion call for nothing short of an indie-rock rebirth. Of course Win Butler and Co. band made no attempt to hide their debt to proto indie-rockers like David Byrne or David Bowie or even Bono, all of whom would come to give props or even join them on stage for their second tour (that time through, they sold out the sports arena). And rightly so: for a long while afterwards, little else could touch Funeral’s gorgeously bittersweet energy, a rag-tag marching-band spirit that made death sound lovely. But the after-life, as told on this follow-up, ain’t so sweet. The majestic cities and long loves that coursed through the first album have been upended by wars, hurricanes and other current disquietudes, amongst which Butler’s soaring, heartbroken yowl and the band’s orchestral flourishes are searching for at least a momentary escape. Turning from MTV to the hope of “World War III,” our narrator insists on “Windowsill,” “I don’t want to live in my father’s house no more” and “I don’t want to live in America no more,” just before the triumphal percussion rolls in. Whatever may be missing of the first album’s majesty, whatever sonic novelty may be lost here and whatever despair may be gained, Neon Bible is proof that hope remains, at least for innovative rock music.

Imperial labrynth

2007-03-27T23:20:00.000-07:00

Movie Review: Inland Empire

Directed by David Lynch

Like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire is a place name in that strange American fun-house of a town, Los Angeles. But instead of snaking, it sprawls, and of course it’s much farther from the comfort of shore.

So we find ourselves in Lynch’s new Dadaist horror masterpiece, which he filmed on grainy digital video and (gulp) without a script. Perhaps the plainest indication of what we’re in for is that the movie isn’t even set in its eponymous locale. Whereas Mulholland Drive had Internet message boards buzzing with theories as to its Gordian-knot plot, Inland Empire is a movie best contemplated in the Internet of one’s own dreams … or nightmares. Only here can our interpretations fail gracefully, dissolving into psychedelic fuzz or falling down rabbit holes – much as the heroine does throughout.

At the beginning of the movie, Nikki Grace, an obscure film actress (Laura Dern), lets in a strange visitor. The awkward conversation that ensues is as hilarious as it is frightening, setting the stage for all the sublime discomfort to come. The woman’s two ominous parables, one about the birth of evil and the other about a girl who gets lost at the marketplace, both nod to the freakish Hollywood world that Lynch’s movie concerns and inhabits.

Nikki has just landed a new role (enter Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons) in a movie called On High in Blue Tomorrows, which, of course, is cursed. But we’re cursed too as we follow her through the slippery worlds of the movie set, suburban barbeques, tripped-out whorehouses, an assortment of anonymous women in trouble and an apartment inhabited by a family of catatonic rabbits. Unlike the real Inland Empire, so I’m told, this one is a very fine place to get lost. Alex Pasternack

Pulling Up Architecture By the Boot

2007-03-05T00:47:00.001-08:00

OMA’s 'fun palace' in the Central Business District

While the twisting, otherworldly shape of Beijing’s new Central Business District landmark, the CCTV Tower, took months of head-scratching effort by engineers and designers to develop, the look of its lesser-known sister structure, the Television Cultural Center, or TVCC, was reportedly birthed in a eureka moment. On a trip in Italy in 2002, Rem Koolhaas, the famous lead architect, faxed a quick sketch of the design—resembling a dramatic, angular boot—to the Rotterdam headquarters of his Office of Metropolitan Architecture. His design team quickly got down to work. But ironing out the details of the building, which will house a luxury hotel and various public functions, would turn out to be a challenging affair to rival that of its physics-defying sibling.

“In a way, TVCC proved more challenging to the team than CCTV,” said an OMA designer in charge of the project, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the project. While the careful geometry of the CCTV building, which is thought to be one of the world's most complex buildings, afforded little modification, she said, TVCC's relatively free-form design and various practical needs gave way to bouts of head-scratching. "The building has so many functions, and putting them together in a way that looks chaotic but with actually considerable logic, that was very hard.'

Adding to the challenge, the designer notes, was the firm's special brand of perfectionism, and the pressure that comes with building next to one of the world's most highly-anticipated buildings. 'It was a case of OMA fighting against itself, of trying to create with an equivalent sense of quality or perfection as CCTV.'

Challenges aside, the building was always meant to be a more lighthearted, pleasurable affair than its hulking sibling next door. Nicknamed the “fun palace” by OMA for its orientation toward public cultural events, the TVCC will house a 300 room luxury hotel (the developer is said to be in talks with Mandarin Oriental), restaurants and spas, recording studios and a 1,500-seat theater that can be used for televised events.

Most of the functions meant to serve the people are housed in the strange geometry of the first four floors, while the 'leg' of the boot contains a central 20-story tall atrium and the hotel's suites. Each room protrudes from the building's facade like randomly-arranged shoeboxes--a scheme, according to co-architect Ole Scheeren, inspired by a termite’s nest.

While its central concrete section was completed in January, workers will spend the months until the building's opening late this year applying finishing touches and adding the structure's unique outer skin. For that section, which craws across the building from east to west, the architects chose titanium zinc alloy, a material that will rust with a certain dignity, giving the building a bronzy, matte surface and providing a protective layer. "This will endure time better than other metal buildings," she said.

Already, the building is a starkly iconoclastic addition to the otherwise conventional skyline of the Central Business District. To its designers at least, it’s provided a much-wanted thrill. "It's almost a miracle, after four years of hard work, to see the building stand up against the skyline," said the architect. And while it may not be able to compete with CCTV in terms of sheer drama, the shape of the building should eventually prove to be a welcome, more expressive complement to the strong geometry of its serious older sister.

While CCTV won't be finished by the time TVCC opens, in December 2007, it is expected that the larger building's main structure will be finished by the Olympics. ‘The current plan is that during the Olympics, you would see the CCTV building stand in complete façade,” said the OMA designer. While time will tell what the TVCC’s experimental design will mean on an everyday level for those inside the building, one thing is clear: the view is certain to be awesome.

Quincy Has a Jones For China

2007-03-03T04:18:00.000-08:00

When Quincy Jones came to town in late May—to announce, according to a press release, that he would “write songs for Beijing Olympic Games”—That’s Beijing naturally had a hundred questions to ask the 71-time Grammy Award jazz nominee, media impresario, and Michael Jackson producer. What sort of songs would he write? Would the songs be used during ping-pong or wrestling matches? Would your songs certainly be used? How do you keep your white suit so clean? How’s Michael doing, and when could we expect him to come to town, too? When you told reporters in Shanghai that you hoped to “see the people, enjoy the music, touch the land, taste the food and even smell the air," did you also mean in Beijing?

Just as we nervously started to shoot off a few of these questions in the sleek lobby of Beijing’s Olympic Tower, the otherwise animated Mr. Jones, 73, fell silent, escorted That’s Beijing away from his entourage, and calmly grabbed our pen and notebook to scrawl a note in slightly shaky handwriting. “NOME SANE” it read. Given the circumstances, it seemed like it could have been code for “where’s the nearest exit?”

“Um, uhh. What is this? ‘Nome sane’?” That’s Beijing squinted, raising its sunglasses.

Quincy kept his on, and spoke the words. “Know what I’m sayin’?”

It was cool, strange, amusing, and cryptic. In other words, it was like any a public statement by the Beijing Olympic committee, except in jive.

And probably just as well. Before they began their press conference, Mr. Jones, Jiang Xiaoyu, the executive vice-president of Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG), and a gaggle of advisors held a quick planning meeting in a side room. There, it quickly became clear that neither side quite knew what Mr. Jones’ involvement would be.

Mr. Jiang seemed to explain that Mr. Jones’s song wouldn’t necessarily be used during the Olympics. Or perhaps it would.

At another point, when discussing his exact involvement, Mr. Jones leaned in. “You don’t understand. When you have someone do the theme music for the Olympics, they do both the composing and the orchestration!” Hearing the translation, the Chinese contingent smiled and shifted in their chairs. That was not part of the plan.

“I just want to figure out what to say when I’m on the air,” said Mr. Jones. So we, the press, could know what he's saying.

The preparations for the 2008 Games—from building the stadiums to tackling the traffic problem—are many and complex, and choosing the music is no exception. While every Games employs the original Olympics theme song, “Bugler's Dream,” a fanfare written in the 1950s by a French composer named Leo Arnaud, each host city traditionally chooses another piece of music to mark their turn. Or in the case of Beijing, a few: the “Song for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games,” the "Song for Volunteers of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games” and the “Theme Song for Volunteers of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.”

To choose just the right songs—and theme song—the organizers are running an open competition that has just entered its fourth round and will continue until 2008. So far more than 500 pieces of music and 5000 lyric works have been contributed; Mr. Jiang seemed to say that, once finished, Mr. Jones’s song would be thrown onto the pile too.

But what kind of theme song would Mr. Jones, who has won 23 Grammy awards, submit? First of all, he explained, he would be working on theme music, not a theme song. Hmm? “Let me ask you this, do you know the words to Star Wars?” He da-daa-dahed the famous theme by John Williams (an erstwhile Olympics theme composer himself). “You catch my drift? Theme music, it doesn’t have words—theme songs do.”

The jazz master, who has collaborated with Miles Davis, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, and who was encouraged to submit a song by pal Jackie Chan, would not be accepting money for his piece. “This is not about [making] money. I've already done that.” While he hasn’t started writing it yet, he said he imagined his theme would be a “global gumbo,” incorporating pop music, western themes, and of course, traditional Chinese stuff. “I love that instrument, the one with the strings,” he said pantomiming the guzheng, the Chinese zither.

But that certainly wasn’t all the impresario loved of China, which was “awesome,” he told a room full of reporters. “I've several times considered selling my home in California and staying here. Between the food, and the culture, and the beautiful people—the beautiful ladies, incredible ladies, the most beautiful, beautiful women I've ever seen in my life, whaaaaow! Oh, good God. I don't know how you're going to translate that.”

He said he was going to spread the word about China among his friends, certainly a not unimpressive group (Bill, Mandela, Kofi, and Sean were among those mentioned). “You can rest assured, you have a great ambassador.”

Sadly, in addition to leaving un-assured about his precise involvement in the Olympics, That’s Beijing missed its chance to ask Mr. Jones about Mr. Jackson. Would he be coming to the Olympics? Given the one-time King of Pop’s recent tour of Asia, and Jones’ star-drawing abilities, we think we might know the answer. Nome sane?

a version of this piece ran in That's Beijing, July 2006

Front of the Bus

2007-02-28T09:15:00.000-08:00

The traffic in Beijing is so bad, it is said that even its most efficient denizens can only accomplish one task per day. Hoping to change that local wisdom, the Beijing Municipal Committee of Transportation managed to do a few things one day in late December: it announced new bus fares, a reorganization of the bus network, and a massive increase in public transit spending, all aimed at transforming Beijing’s uncomfortable but necessary relationship with the bus.

Beijing buses a move

While much hullabaloo has been made over the city’s future (and perennially under-construction) subway lines, which have received as much as 80 percent of transit spending in recent years, the city has decided to place unprecedented emphasis on the city’s buses, which have long been a symbol of Beijing crowdedness and inefficiency. Though Beijing’s buses serve 10 million passengers per day, 3.5 times more than the subways, traffic-weary officials are desperate to make bus riding more common—or even, somehow, cool.

“We are trying to make using public transportation fashionable for Beijing citizens," Liu Xiaoming, a transportation bureau spokesman, told reporters.

Since last month, Beijing bus riders have only needed to fork over 1 yuan (12 U.S. cents) per ride, instead of the distance-based fares that once set riders back anywhere as much as 4 kuai. In addition, the transportation bureau announced that over one hundred overlapping lines within the third ring road will be axed; the 1,500 buses currently driving those routes will be relocated to connect the more than 300 communities that lie outside Beijing proper. The city will also be injecting 1.3 billion RMB (166 million dollars) into Beijing’s bus companies this year.

Perhaps the city’s most controversial decision under the “buses first” plan—-to eliminate the city’s half-century-old bus passes—is supposed to make way for two new electronic smart cards: a monthly pass allowing commuters 140 trips for 45 RMB and a deposit card that offers a 20-percent discount on bus trips. But the death of the bus pass, instituted as part of the city’s social welfare system in the 1950s, might as well have been an attempt to shed the bus’s rusty image.

“In the past, bus transit has been viewed as an inferior transit system compared with subway and light rail,” said Jin Fan , director of the China Sustainable Transportation Center.

The new attempt to pump life back into the bus system also comes after a decade of what many experts agree has been a dramatically unbalanced approach to the city’s transit investment, with its large focus on building roads for the city’s exploding car traffic. “The Chinese central government now recognizes the urgency to restore balance to this equation,” Jin said.

Just how much a change in that equation will affect Beijing’s increasing love for the car is even less clear than the air over the 2nd ring road on a spring day. Some wonder, for instance, whether lowering the bus fare by a kuai or two will really attract those who can already afford to drive. Ten days after the fare reduction, sources at bus companies said the number of passengers had not increased dramatically.

Meanwhile, the transportation bureau estimates that the cost of the fare reduction will be at least 1.3 billion yuan—money, some experts argue, that could have been better spent on more crucial improvements, such as bus frequency and quality. If it hopes to get through its transportation bottleneck, experts agree that Beijing must take a holistic approach to public transit, after a model like Singapore.

“They’ve focused on the quality of their transit service, the timing, the punctuality, comfort, and implemented a set of complimentary policies to entice people to use transit rather than cars,” said Song Yan, an urban planning expert. Such measures include gas taxes, a congestion pricing system for cars entering the city center, and a quota on imported cars. Though Beijing already places a high tax on foreign imports, officials say they have no other plans to reduce cars in the city. “When you have one policy, even when implemented to a full extent, it wouldn’t necessarily do that much,” Song says. “You need a whole package of policies.”

One policy officials hope will make bus riding more attractive is bus rapid transit, or BRT. Increasingly popular among city planners and environmentalists alike, such a system simply relies on dedicated lanes with few stoplights and sleek, double-length buses. “It is as fast, reliable, comfortable and easy-to-use as a rail-based system, but is more flexible and can be built more quickly at a fraction of the cost,” said Jin Fan. Reducing traffic for buses also increases fuel efficiency and reduces the idling that leads to nasty emissions. Last summer, the World Bank reported that the single BRT line that Beijing currently operates, running south starting at Qianmen, can shave over 20 minutes off what would otherwise be an hour-long commute. The city is building three more lines.

Officials have also announced plans for a series of transportation hubs and low-fee parking lots to make transit connections easier and discourage car use within the city. “This is just the first step of our reform,” said Li, the transportation director. “We will make adjustments as we implement the plan.”

In other words, like much else in Beijing, solving the city’s public transit will take much longer than a day.

A City Within the City

2007-02-28T09:13:00.000-08:00

Architect Li Hu's Mega Hall Moma project emphasizes public spaces and green design

Beijing is vanishing, the architect Li Hu said one recent evening. It might have sounded like a sensational statement you would expect to hear from one of China's leading architects. The partner-in-charge of Steven Holl Architects in Beijing slid over to the window at his office at the Mega Hall Moma, a luxury apartment development near Dongzhimen, and peered into an empty courtyard.

“There's no coffee shop near here,” the 33-year-old architect said. “The office can't just go out after work for a drink. There's a massage parlor, and that's it.” The firm's office comes rent-free from its client, which owns the development, largely because it can't be rented. “No one wants to work in a gated community,” he says. “And nobody want to live in one either.”

The rush in recent years to buy upscale property around the Central Business District, or anywhere near the city center, over once-popular suburbs like Shunyi, may prove his point. And yet, he explains, in a city growing at the speed of over half a million people a year, the word central has started to lose meaning. “Beijing's turning into a giant suburb,” he says, lamenting the street life that's vanished in the process. “Everywhere in China, the city is disappearing.”

Li Hu's not being sensationally gloomy, nor does it seem, could he be. This is his statement of purpose. When he and his partner and mentor, the American architect Steven Holl, were asked to build a sibling to Mega Hall Moma, the architects might have just mimicked the successful enclave of sleek luxury towers. But Holl and Li Hu set their sights higher--or, more precisely, in-between, as in the spaces that separate buildings, and separate buildings from people.

“How to bring back the street life of the old city under a new modern design, that was our idea,” Li Hu says, with unfriendly words for the very “super block” zoning and hutong-killing development that makes his building possible. “There are certain things we can't change,” he explains, including the placement of the actual buildings, which were planned by a different architect. But to make the best of the situation, the 210,000 square-meter site beckons the public not only with shops and cafes, but a patchwork of green space, becoming what the architects call a city within a city. “We're injecting a different system onto the existing grid.”

No wonder the Linked Hybrid, or “Modern MoMA” as it's been branded, looks unlike any apartment building in Beijing - nor anywhere else for that matter. Its eight 20-storey towers of apartments and commercial space are connected by gently sloping footbridges, which allow free circulation between shops, cafes, a health club, and exhibition spaces. The elevated plaza in the middle features a reflecting pool, a series of gardens, a four-screen cinema with an outdoor projection and a hotel, from which anyone can enter the bridge loop.

Brochures call the design “filmic,” which somehow captures the dramatic sweep of the buildings, with their silver facades and colorful film-frame windows, as they swirl around in a walk-able storyline. But the non-linear design emphasizes surprise and disjuncture too, the random relationships and occurrences more typical of a city than a standard Beijing apartment block. “It's not just about convenience,” Li Hu says of the building's connectivity, “but about the connection between people.” In that sense, the building vaguely resembles a ring of dancers celebrating the public space at their feet.

Still, considering that the apartments' current price tag (RMB 7.3 million on average) is over three hundred times greater than a typical Beijinger's yearly income, some might wonder if the dancers are merely trampling on everyday Beijing rather than cheering it. Li Hu doesn't just acknowledge the irony of a luxury public space in a city like this; he sees the mix of public and private uses as the project's central challenge, and its raison d'etre. Mention the building's sex appeal, and he gets uncomfortable. His architecture is not “sexy,” he urges - it's social.

Li Hu's and Holl's other big project, a mixed-use development in Shenzhen that will house the offices of Chinese mainland real estate developer Vanke, embraces a social role too. The snaking, cubist aluminum structure, what Li Hu calls a “horizontal skyscraper,” floats above the ground on pillars, creating a large public space beneath. At a time when public space is competing with private development, Li Hu sees such designs as vital. “How do you convince private developers to make a social contribution?” he ponders.

Similar questions prompted him to start his own firm with his wife, the architect Huang Wenjing, in 2002. For now, Open Architecture Studio's affordable and modular housing designs remain the subject of research, though Li Hu speaks of actual construction (and of future full-time work on his own firm) with a sense of urgency. “Architects tend to only serve the top classes,” he says. “We're trying to make architecture available to everyone.”

With the Linked Hybrid, the architect's ambitions are no less grand: “We want to change how people live, react, relate, and interact with other people.” It was an ambition that the developer, the Modern Land Group, didn't exactly share. At certain points, everything from the bridges, which test the limits of building code, to the mix of commercial and residential space to the project's openness, was questioned. “There was no desire, no activity, no support for this,” he says of the client, and a campaign of “educating and fighting” ensued. Even as costs have risen, Li Hu says he's not made a single compromise in the design. Still, he adds, “we're still trying to convince them today.”

Such determination is one of the biggest clues to Li Hu's background. After graduating from the architecture department at Tsinghua University, he left his hometown of Beijing to spend ten years abroad, first at Rice University in Houston, then in Princeton and in New York, working for Steven Holl. The experience in the U.S. and New York in particular (where he lives part-time) not only heightened his appreciation for good urban design; it raised his suspicions of government planning boards and demanding clients - two staples of China's architectural scene. “They criticize me for not knowing their way of working,” Li Hu says of pesky apparatchiks. “And I don't want to work that way.”

One thing that both architect and developer could agree on from the start was that the building should have a light “environmental footprint” (impact). Green space covers almost every flat surface, from the roof gardens to the seven mounds of the central plaza. The pond water there is constantly recycled along with the building's wastewater, and displacement ventilation ducts embedded in apartment floors circulate fresh air and reduce heat loss while pipes in the concrete slab ceilings provide super-efficient temperature control. Underneath the site sits one of the world's largest geothermal systems, an array of hundreds of 100-meter wells that draw heat to the apartments in the winter and pull heat out in the summer, eliminating the need for boilers or electrical air conditioners.

The green focus has garnered a nod from Popular Science and earned the building a coveted US Green Building Council LEED pre-certification, one of a handful in China. “We did everything you can imagine in one residential building.”

But Li Hu is less interested in the technology inside the buildings than the life in-between them. The Linked Hybrid's “city within a city” approach not only reorients the urban scene to a human scale, but also attempts to make cars obsolete for its residents. “Saving the environment,” says Li Hu, “that dimension is much larger than a geothermal system,” he says. “It's about density, and public transportation, and your lifestyle.” He hopes that the building's philosophy will soon provide a low-cost model for future low-cost housing in the city.

Whether Beijing can embrace an approach to development that's just as holistic and hybrid, will depend on the collaborations of city planners, developers and architects, he says. “Saving the city is not an individual effort.” What role he and his building will play ultimately depends on the city's biggest interest group: the public. “If you create a space that works, there's a potential for people to use it,” he says. “And then it will not be doomed.”

a version of this article appeared in that's Beijing HOME

Crash

2007-02-27T23:21:00.000-08:00

Babel

Directed by Alejandro Iñarritu

To harsher critics, Babel might seem like just that. Mexican director Alejandro Iñarritu’s new film takes to an extreme the jumbled recipe of films like Traffic and Crash: loosely-connected storylines swirling around heavy social issues, painted in epic brushstrokes. As with his earlier Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Iñarritu adds to this his butterfly-effect existentialism, by which whatever thing happens here will end up changing the world over there. In this case, the here and there are Morocco, Tokyo and the border between the US and Mexico (each shot on location, remarkably). While only one is a literal boundary, Babel tells us that unseen borders threaten to divide us everywhere – from those people we don’t know, those we know best and even from ourselves.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who play an emotionally-estranged couple on an African vacation, wear no makeup as they struggle through their own calamity, a choice that matches Iñarritu’s love of close-ups and gritty, high-contrast images of alien locales. Except for the scenes in Tokyo, the film’s most moving portion, Iñarritu’s style almost threatens to distract from the movie itself.

Though the chaos it portrays may seem bewildering and overwhelming, the movie seems to be saying that confusion is inevitable. Even if they speak the same language, people don’t hear each other, and that slightest disconnection can unleash anarchy upon the world. Alex Pasternack

Beijing Goes Underground

2007-01-07T23:21:00.000-08:00

Fulbright scholar Jason Lee was overheard at a house party last month waxing enthusiastic about one of Beijing’s newest subway lines. “I mean, listen to this. I’m going to be able to go from Zhichun Lu to everything I’d wanna do: Gongti, Guanghua Lu, Guomao … ”

Lee’s ebullience didn’t exactly rub off on the party’s other guests, but his excitement is understandable. While only subway lines four, five and ten will be finished for the Olympics, officials recently announced that when the subway expansion is complete in the year 2020, it will include 22 lines and stretch to 561 kilometers, overtaking London’s and New York City’s subways as the longest metro system in the world.

But the city isn’t stopping there. Last month it made two other groundbreaking announcements: First, Beijing’s strategic underground city (the network of tunnels that currently weave beneath the Tian’anmen area) is currently being expanded so that by 2012 it will occupy 20 million square meters, making it the world’s largest network of its kind. President Hu Jintao has called it an “important strategic effort” for national security and for the safety of future generations.

Embarrassingly, Beijing’s underground city actually lags 40 years behind that of cities in Europe and the United States. In the event of a sudden large-scale disaster or war, shelters in the Western world can hold 80-90 percent of local citizens, while Beijing’s underground city can currently only provide safety for 8-10 percent of its people.

Another development flying below the radar (unless you attended November’s International Conference on Underground Space): Beijing is exploring the possibility of tripling the city’s 30 million square meters of public underground space “to ease ground traffic congestion, land use tension in downtown areas, and environmental problems.” The plan, proposed by the Beijing Urban Planning Commission, includes construction of six underground expressways by 2020 to further ease traffic congestion, mainly within the Second and Third Ring Roads. Aside from the logistical problems of such a project, Duan Jinyu, director of the transport planning department at Tsinghua University, told tbj it’s misdirected simply because “people don’t feel pleasant in underground space.”

Nevertheless, Jason Lee is looking at the bright side of the underside: “The flexibility of this new transportation will give Beijingers a better lifestyle.” However his excitement over Beijing’s subterranean dreams is somewhat hypothetical, perhaps like the plans themselves. “Actually, I won’t still be around in 2008,” he revealed after the party. “But I live so close to where the subway could be.”

A Real (Estate) Hassle

2006-12-15T01:20:00.000-08:00

New regulations aimed at cooling speculation are throwing foreigners for a curve—some say unfairly

The “one residence policy”

A few months ago, Andrew Archison, a technology consultant from California, finally found a place in Beijing he could call his own. Like many of the luxury apartments that appeal to foreigners here, the one-bedroom near Chaoyang Park, in a complex called Chateau Regalia, wasn’t finished yet. Still, without much Chinese and only a scant familiarity with the city, Archison had landed an apartment in the world’s hottest and most convoluted real estate market, a system tangled in an increasing mix of market forces and decades-old government regulations. With “a big smile on my face,” he says, he signed his name and made his requisite down payment.

“Then, the bomb dropped: ‘No sales to non-Chinese citizens,’” the sales manager told him some days later. In his mind, nine weeks of scouting apartments and tens of thousands of renminbi vanished as fast as a block of unprotected hutong [courtyard homes]. He felt helpless. “Can you imagine the horror?”

It might have been just another bump on the rollercoaster ride of Beijing real estate, but Mr. Archinson had actually banged up against a set of regulations issued last summer by the central government aimed especially at stemming foreign property purchases. Intended as an “urgent” measure to cool Beijing’s steaming property market, the rules stipulate that a foreigner must have lived and worked or studied in Beijing for at least a year before buying a new apartment (and soon, perhaps, a second-hand one), and that they may only purchase a single unit for personal use. In addition, any profits from home sales must be registered with the government before being expatriated. The rules also close an old tax loophole by mandating that foreign companies investing in real estate have offices in China, and that foreign companies investing in projects worth more than USD 10 million put up more than half the capital. Though Mr. Archison eventually received his deed through some guanxi-powered rule bending, his housing fate still rests in the hands of the government.

Increasingly, home buyers from abroad are finding themselves similarly caught in a labyrinthine, anti-free market system that some call unfair, and perhaps unproductive. From message boards to boardrooms, foreigners have cried foul, claiming laowai discrimination. “And what if the rest of the world made it illegal for Chinese to purchase real estate?” one Internet comment read soon after the regulation was issued in July.

Experts meanwhile point out that the intention of calming the market is wholesome. “If that’s the aim of the government, it may not be an unreasonable policy to implement,” says Nick Jones, Beijing director of Knight Frank Property Consultants. “The question is whether it will actually work.”

Indeed, no one can question the fact that the need for lower housing prices is especially dire in Beijing – a crunch that officials claim stems from a spate of over-construction at the luxury end of the market and increasing market speculation, especially from abroad. The tent cities that have cropped up outside the Fifth Ring Road are only the most extreme symbols of a costly housing market, and the government has already committed to providing more low-cost apartments. But the greatest brunt of the market’s effects is being borne by a young middle-class, says Wang Xiaowei, a broker with real estate agency 5i5j. “Lots of Beijing’s young professionals, for personal financial reasons, can’t afford a mid-sized apartment at around 45-70 square meters in size,” which, Wang says, are in highest demand. But as much as he hopes for a slight cooling of the market to attract more buyers, Wang is mostly indifferent to the new rules aimed at foreigners – and not because he has few foreign clients. “The real estate market for foreigners is quite minimal, and much of the money coming into the market is from Chinese investors,” he says. “I don’t think [the policies] will work.”

Considering that foreign buyers make up a mere 5 percent of real estate investment in Beijing (and only 12 percent of foreign investment in Beijing real estate goes into residential property), some say the rules are aimed at the wrong people, with little effect on the market at all. “In a way, it’s a public appeal to Chinese sentiment,” says Anna Kalifa, associate director and head of research at real estate consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle, of the government’s move. “There’s this media perception that foreigners are buying up everything, but the fact is that foreigners don’t make up a huge part of the effect.” Instead, domestic investors, and especially locals, are the actual source of the market’s “hot money,” she says. Only 15 percent of investment in the “top luxury category” in Beijing comes from abroad, while 88 percent of all Beijing housing – “the good, the bad and the ugly” – is purchased by Chinese citizens, she adds. “I’ve met many Chinese who own three apartments in Beijing, but I don’t know one foreigner who does.”

Another group of big buyers are Chinese from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. But unlike non-Chinese foreigners, overseas Chinese are not affected by the one-year residency rule. And while the law requires overseas Chinese to use their property for their own use, it’s unclear how that – or the rest of the regulations – will be enforced.

So far, experts say this sort of vagueness has meant that, no matter where you’re from, dodging any of the new regulations is possible, somehow. For Mr. Archison, it was a matter of going to another sales manager, with fingers crossed. “I have no idea what discussions were taking place behind the scenes, but the sales agent assured me it would work out.” Says Kalifa, “a sale is a sale is a sale” to agents, developers and landlords. In other words, where there’s a will – and luck, guanxi and hard cash – there’s a way.

For potential buyers, it’s a question of how much of those things you have. “There’s always going to be a gap” between regulations and enforcement, says Phoebe Gluyas, a manager at property investment firm Sinolink. For instance, banks and landlords – those presumed responsible for enforcing the regulations from the start – are unlikely to keep track of whether an owner is using a property for their own use.

Although they have not necessarily made buying a home impossible for foreigners, the new rules have had one definite effect: purchasing property has certainly become more expensive. “Once there are rules like this, people,” as in real estate agents, lenders, developers and landlords, “can simply demand more money,” says Gluyas. To get around the one-year residency requirement for instance, foreign individuals and companies must arrange to have their purchases registered as assets of a local company, rather than as personal assets. “It’s a loophole we have used before,” says one agent. “Now the prices have just gone up.”

Another deterrent issued last summer has also made things more expensive: the minimum down payment for foreigners purchasing new apartments larger than 90 square meters has been raised from 20 to 30 percent of the unit price. Meanwhile, based on the government’s recommendation, many banks have upped their deposit and lending rates for those intending to take out a mortgage. This is what’s really a pain for foreigners,” says Kalifa. “If you have your eyes set on a home, these sorts of changes would push back your plans a bit.”

Already, buying an apartment in Beijing is a confusing and frustrating process. Littered with multiple bank trips, long waits, and a hefty dose of uncertainty even for the most grizzled China hand, the process is said to take at least a year – six months just to find the right place, plus another six to close the deal. The new national rules only make purchasing more Byzantine, paper-heavy and costly, analysts say, capable of deterring purchases by middle class foreign residents. “People living here for a few years and interested in investing just don’t have the money,” says Kalifa.

For those who do have the money, experts advise homebuyers use added caution – even when sellers promise that the new rules don’t matter. Using an escrow account to transfer payments and a good lawyer with bilingual abilities are two of the most crucial tools. (“And always wait until the seller has the deed in hand before buying,” warns Kalifa). And for those who currently own property, the new regulations may also throw a wrench into future plans. The government has levied a 20 percent capital gains tax on sales of second-hand properties, and imposed a 5.5 percent resell tax on units sold within five years of purchase, up from the previous standard of two years. The new rules also state that foreigners must obtain government approval before repatriating any proceeds of property sales or rentals. And for anyone considering selling their upscale property, the new market restrictions mean they could be selling to a tougher market.

According to recent reports, prices for housing throughout Beijing saw their lowest month-on-month increase on record, .03 percent, in October. Still, say analysts, the market outlook for Beijing remains strong in spite of the new rules. Property prices for upscale housing are expected to continue their rise. “In the real estate market in general, we saw a bit of a quieting-down of the residential luxury sector, but it’s starting to go back up now,” says Oliver Thirwall, a senior real estate manager at institutional investment firm GSS. Buyers’ attention has shifted to second-hand properties, which are currently unaffected by the rules, while demand has remained high even for new property centered around the Central Business District and Finance Street in Xicheng. “I don’t think [a slower rise in sales] is a long term thing at all,” he says.

To many, it’s a sign that the new rules are ineffective. Despite government assurances, the vice-chairman of the Beijing Real Estate Association acknowledged to the China Daily last month that the regulations have achieved little success. In part, experts say, that’s because the property market is so heavily driven by local buyers and developers, whose appetites continue to grow along with the city’s booming economy (13 percent a year) and skyrocketing salaries (11 percent). “You just can’t have that type of growth in massive infrastructure investment and expect the housing market to only grow one percent,” says Kalifa.

In addition, the new restrictions are easily avoided by large companies, which the government partly blames for driving the property boom through their investments in luxury properties. While the cost of doing business may have risen, interest in Beijing’s real estate sector hasn’t faded, and large investors have the capital and expertise to wade through new policies that small buyers do not. But the ones hit hardest may be the small foreign buyers and investors who have lived in Beijing for years and now find themselves lost in a sea of double-talk, added paperwork, and high costs. Says Sinolink’s Glyuas of the rules: “It’s aimed at the wrong people.”

The experience of people like Andrew Archison, the buyer of the apartment near Chaoyang Park, proves just that. “I'm not in this for the speculation … but these types of rules leave a bad impression for someone who wants to invest in the people and the culture of China – the law has made it hard for me.”

Blogspot is Back (Panopticon Never Left)

2006-11-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

Or should I say, for now. They opened the firewall for blogspot some weeks back (along with Wikipedia!) just before they closed it again, and more strictly than before. But blogspot is now allowed once again, a fact evidenced by this very post. (Hello, again!)

It never made sense to me that China would block blogspot without blocking the dozens of other blogging sites. Perhaps it had something to do with blogspot owner Google's unwillingness to play ball with government censors as yahoo had done in notoriously releasing the name of a blogger to the government; but has Google's policy changed?

In fact, that's the worst thing about the censorship: we don't know. The censorship is so random, and it's so hard to know what will be censored, or why or when, that it feels almost calculated to be random. That of course creates the sense that the government has a wide r reach than it really does, and generally messes with your head. You'll never know what site will be blocked, because the government's always on the move, always got its eyes out.

It's the internet version of Foucault's panopticon: power all-visible yet always unverifyable.

... the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

(Also see Rebecca MacKinnon's good post on human rights and the Great Firewall.)

Lester Brown Breaks it Down

2006-10-09T05:22:00.000-07:00

Getting China and the world to tell the "ecological truth"

In 1995, a little book about food security and the environment entitled Who Will Feed China made him an enemy of the state. American economist and head of the Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown’s demand for “ecological truth” left him lambasted by scientists and officials for his “anti-China stance.” But as the country’s environmental crises became harder to deny, Brown could no longer be ignored. When he visited last autumn, Premier Wen Jiabao requested a meeting; months later, Wen reportedly quoted Brown in a speech. His last book earned him a book award from the National Library of China and an honorary professorship at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. When leaders ask him if the world can afford to carry out his recommendations – which, in his latest book, Plan B 2.0, are estimated to cost USD 161 billion – his response is simple: “The question shouldn’t be can we afford it; rather, can we afford not to do these things?”

tbj: You’ve gone from pariah to hero in China. What happened?
Lester Brown: China’s grain production peaked in ‘98 and has declined since then. At first they were amazingly critical [of my views on Chinese agriculture]. I hadn’t realized at the time how sensitive food security was. No one in an official position could say the grain supply would decline because that would mean China would have to become dependent on the outside world – and that was simply anathema. So they attacked [my] analysis.

It took about a year. They were forced to redefine what self-sufficiency was. Soon it became [acceptible among government officials to say], “It’s okay to import a little bit of your food, a small share of our grain supply.” The first publisher who wanted to publish me, from Guangdong, was denied. Now the People’s Publishing House publishes all my books.

tbj: What’s the biggest environmental problem facing China now?
LB: Water pollution is a big problem, especially when it reaches a point where underground water supplies are being polluted. Surface water flows fairly fast. But it’s difficult because we don’t have many measurements, we don’t know the concentrations of pesticides or heavy metals, and we don’t have enough data to know what kinds of health problems are likely to result. We know that certain types of pollutants cause certain types of health problems. But we don’t have the data on the pollutants themselves to reach any conclusions. We know that three million people die each year from air pollution, but we don’t have a comparable number for the number of deaths from toxic water supplies.

A much more visible problem is the loss of vegetation in the west and north, and the formation of a huge dust bowl there. The expansion of deserts is getting worse year by year. [The resulting sandstorms] are clearly affecting the Koreas and Japan and, to a much lesser degree, the US. One of the things happening at the ground level is that a lot of villages are being abandoned – we’re talking about thousands of villages, not a dozen. According to Wang Tao [Director of the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute], 24,000 villages have either been abandoned entirely or partly depopulated. In this war against the deserts, China is losing. And with the degradation of the land comes environmental refugees, which means even more people moving to the cities.

tbj: You’ve written before that China’s grain woes may mean it could soon compete with America for the US grain harvest, driving up food prices and leading to potential food shortages. How pressing is China’s food situation now?
LB: Grain production has dropped since ’98, recovering a bit in the last few years. Meanwhile, China’s soybean production hasn’t increased much at all in the past few decades, though consumption has. Ten years ago the country was self-sufficient. Now it’s importing 60 percent of its total annual supply of 29 million tons. Japan by contrast imports only five million tons of soybeans a year. It’s ironic because China gave the world the soybean.

It’s been partly a loss-of-resource problem and partly an incentives problem. They’ve strengthened incentives – that’s why we‘ve seen an upturn in production that puts China in a much better place than it was three years ago. But it’s still losing cropland each year, and still losing water resources. At what point the loss of underground water under the north China plain will directly affect food production remains to be seen.

tbj: Even as arable land is decreasing, China has reported an increase in its grain supplies. And the new five-year plan calls for more farming protections. Do you think the Chinese government is approaching the food problem in the right way?
LB: I think the government has to assume a strong leadership role on that issue and devise some way of buying out herders or paying them to reduce the size of their herds, in order to systematically reduce the pressures on grasslands to a level that is sustainable. Otherwise, the dust bowl will continue to get bigger, dust storms will get worse and deserts will continue to expand. Aside from the government asking herders to reduce herds by 40 percent, I’m not sure what they’re going to do.

tbj: These days, China is depicted as an environmental nightmare by the West. At the same time, the West has been criticized for outsourcing its carbon emissions along with its manufacturing. How should the world be thinking about China’s environmental woes?
LB: In some areas the US gets a lot of blame too. China is only doing what the rest of us did earlier. It’s so big and it’s doing it so fast, that it kind of overwhelms the ability of natural resources and the ability of the environment to deal with waste and carbon emissions. I see China as providing a wake up call for the world.

The US is now no longer the world’s major consumer of resources. Only in oil [consumption] does the US still lead. That gives us license to ask the next question: What if China catches up to the US in terms of resources per person? If China does reach the US’s current income level, which it’s supposed to do by 2031, and if they spend their money more or less the same way, they would consume twice as much paper as the world now produces – there go the world’s trees; they would drive 1.1 billion cars (the world currently has 800 million) and consume 99 billion barrels of oil a day. The world is producing 84 billion barrels right now and it may never produce much more.

The Western economic model of consumption – the fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economy – is not going to work for China. It’s not going to work for India or the other industrializing countries that are dreaming the American dream. And it won’t work for any other country either. We’re all competing for the same oil, grain, and steel. China is making it clear that we have to build a new economy, with renewable sources of energy and a much more diversified transport system – an economy that reuses and recycles everything.
Lester Brown’s Plan B 2.0 is readable online at www.earth-policy.org

from that's Beijing, November 2006

Water-less Beijing

2006-09-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

Beijing has invested billions of yuan in massive projects to increase and improve its water supplies, but with a new initiative to change how the public uses the wet stuff – from raising the prices of water to promoting cutting edge toilets – do we sense desperation?

The driest major city in the world keeps getting drier, with an annual reserve of about 300 cubic meters of water per person; an acute shortage is generally considered to be 1,000 cubic meters or less. 2006 marks the eighth consecutive year of drought in the North China Plain, the longest drought since the founding of the People’s Republic according to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA). “It’s as bad as Israel,” says Ma Jun, the president of the Institute of Citizens and the Environment. “It’s hard to be optimistic.”

“They are moving in all directions now, including the right ones,” says Christoph Peisert, a conservation expert with the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, who advises the government on water management. “But there’s not yet enough public interest in reducing the waste of water.” Last month, Ma Weifang, an official with the city’s sustainable development promotion committee, said that based upon the city’s current water consumption and efficiency levels, Beijing could face one of the worst droughts in its history at the same time as hosting its “Green Olympics” unless citizens learn to curb water consumption and use recycled water more efficiently.

To encourage these steps, the Beijing government in May issued its tallest water orders yet: It has promised to investigate water usage at construction sites, golf courses and saunas, imposing fines of up to RMB 10,000 if necessary. There’s also a mandate to install water-saving faucets in Beijing’s households. Recycling water is another strong focus, especially at car washes. While one car wash tbj visited was already using recycled water, no worker, or any other Beijing residents we’ve surveyed had heard about the recent water-saving campaign. Ma says, “At the moment, when they open the tap, they don’t realize what the effects are.”

While water consumption has reached a tipping point, Ma points out that the government’s conservation efforts can only do so much to ease the city’s shortage. Diminished ground water, for instance – which has caused Beijing to sink 10cm per year, reportedly threatening the stability of the new, heavy Olympic venues – can only be countered by improved irrigation and continued rainmaking, says Wen Bo, a local environmentalist. “Right now the government seems to have no way out.”

Replenishing the city’s water resources will require an even greater effort. The government recently announced plans to divert water from a Yangtze River tributary, which lies 1,200 km away from Beijing and whose polluted waters are an environmental concern. “I don’t see so many problems with the idea,” says Peisert, with a tone of resignation. In any case, it’s clear that further efforts need to be made to address both China’s ongoing environmental problems and the capital’s chronic water shortage – never before has a new water efficient toilet sounded so good.

(from the August 2006 issue of that's Beijing)

On the Road Again: Ma Jian | Stick Out Your Tongue

2006-09-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

Ma Jian envisioned Tibet as Nirvana. The book he wrote after his journey offers a darker vision

BY ALEX PASTERNACK | HONG KONG

In 1985, writes Ma Jian, he headed from Beijing to Tibet hoping to "work out what I should be doing with my life." Ma, like so many discontented romantics, envisioned the Himalayan land as a spiritual refuge from the modern world. But it was just a dream. What he discovered instead was a place whose heart had been ripped out. The few temples that remained after years of cultural and political purges by the Chinese government were guarded by soldiers and littered with slogans instructing allegiance to the Communist Party. The Dalai Lama had been exiled for more than three decades, and those who had stayed behind seemed consigned to a ruined fate.

In an afterword to Stick Out Your Tongue, a newly translated collection of short stories he wrote following his three-year journey to Tibet and other far-flung parts of China, Ma says he returned home more confused than before, feeling "as pathetic as a patient who sticks his tongue out and begs his doctor to diagnose what's wrong with him."

The diagnosis from Chinese officials, when Ma's book was released in 1987, was that his treatment of Tibet was "filthy and shameful" and had "nothing to do with reality." Every copy was ordered to be destroyed. But the collection quickly became a hit among the samizdat set; some enterprising black marketeers even copied it out by hand. Ma, who had once worked as a government propagandist, thus found himself forced into hiding. After stints in Hong Kong and Germany—with the occasional secret return to Beijing—he ended up in London, where he wrote a superb memoir, Red Dust, which appeared in translation in 2002. Where that narrative bounces along China's dusty roads and industrial backwaters like a better, eastern On the Road, the five short stories in Stick Out Your Tongue paint a more meditative portrait of a land that barely seems to move at all.

That's not to say the book isn't moving. In cool, spare prose, Ma powerfully conveys the double dislocation at the heart of his stories: a people estranged from their own home are described in four of these tales by the same Ma-like narrator, a dissident writer whose own life has been uprooted, too—not only by cultural crackdowns but by a string of failed loves. A Han Chinese in a land where the Han are despised, he has abandoned any fantasies about Tibet's peaceful locals: instead of sticking out their tongues—a customary greeting in Tibet—they throw stones at him. The glistening lakes and wide plateaus of central Tibet—where we find the narrator at the start of the hypnotic opening story—offer no solace either. Potentially sublime rustic experiences are tainted by brackish water or the stench of manure and animal hides. The narrator's hunt for enlightenment has already ended, and the traditional Buddhist sky burial of a young woman beaten to death by an abusive father is little more than an exotic photo-op. Just as the ritual of dismemberment ends, when "every piece of her had vanished from the site," the emotionally distant narrator remembers his appointment to go fishing with the woman's former lover.

The mistreatment of women by men is a common theme in all five of these stories. Beneath Tibet's enchanting surface, suggests Ma, lies the reality that its women are routinely forced into marriage, sex, prostitution and drugs. Yet Ma's bleak descriptions of their lives are not without a dreamy—though somewhat perverse—sense of redemption. A feisty, unfaithful wife burns and withers on a bronze stupa that her husband has built, only to be rolled up by her lover and devotedly draped on his wall. The final story—the tale of a young female monk forced by her elders through abusive rituals of spiritual enlightenment—ends the book as it began, with a beleaguered corpse that again seems to disappear, magically, into the scenery. This time, however, the woman isn't destroyed but transmuted like a bodhisattva, her body transparent: "A fish that had somehow gnawed its way into her corpse was swimming back and forth through her intestines." The narrator, who buys the woman's skull as a souvenir and hopes to sell it to finance his travels, writes her story "in the hopes that I can start to forget it," but the memory will not disappear.

Nor will the impression left by Ma's book, with its captivating blend of despair and hope, violence and dark humor, death and regeneration. In Ma's ambivalent portrayal, Tibet is as uneasy a place to live as it is to describe, and Tibetans possess a nuanced humanity often denied them—on the one hand by the idealized fancies of the Western imagination, and on the other by the Chinese government's oppression. The tongue of the book's title, then, is not only a reference to the traditional Tibetan greeting, but a complex symbol of ridicule and illness and vulnerability—and an invitation to see inside Tibet's dark mouth some precious signs of life.

From TIME asia Magazine, June 26, 2006 Vol. 167, No. 25

Who Needs Friends When You Have Money?

2006-08-26T23:09:00.000-07:00

A salesperson robotically waving a wand that distributed a light mist, another dispassionately demonstrating a spinning top to a couple of curious African men, two of a handful of customers, while a television showed a program about the Olympics. On display were jade sculptures, silky qipao, a paltry assortment of tea, and a selection of benign English-language paperbacks. All the typical tchotchkes of friendship – that is, diplomatic, state-sanctioned friendship: business as usual at the Beijing Friendship Store.

Just when things couldn’t look any more stereotypical, the ever-ebullient Mark Rowswell – known to television audiences as Dashan – strolled off the escalator and onto the second floor. Somehow it made sense: China’s most famous laowai shopping at Beijing’s most famous laowai institution.

Built in 1964, the Friendship Store catered exclusively to tourists and diplomats, who could find along its aisles some of the Western goods and souvenirs that were unavailable in other state-run shops. State media have announced that by the end of the year, the store will be torn down to make room for two office towers, a serviced apartment building and a new eight-floor department store. Dashan was undisturbed on hearing the news.

Developed in part by Macau-based casino impresario Stanley Ho, the new complex is supposed to be finished in 2009, at a price tag of around RMB 4 billion. That’s about RMB 4 billion more than the store made in 2005, when it took home a net profit of RMB 79,200; an improvement over a loss of more than RMB 3 million in 2004. The planned-economy, Soviet-styled relic – with its famous Soviet-style customer service – just hasn’t been able to keep up in the unfriendly free market of modern Beijing.

Didn’t the store at least have the market cornered when it came to friendship? China’s top foreigner let out a chuckle and delved into the history of “friendship.”

“In the ’60 and ‘70s, ‘friendship’ meant ‘preferential treatment’ or ‘cheap,’ and had the connotation of a kind of third world brotherhood,” he explains. “But ever since the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, as a foreigner in China you’d always avoid anything with the word friendship on it,” because it meant paying an inflated price.

Alex Pearson, a Beijinger since 1982, remembers when the Friendship Store was an oasis of convenience. “We could find things like milk, yogurt and cheese, and Walkmans, radios, Hi-Fis …”

Lynn Gan, Rowswell’s wife, remembers the store differently. As a Chinese person “you had to have some kind of connection to come in here,” she said of the days when the store required that customers have foreign passports and Foreign Exchange Certificates as currency.

A cheery young sales clerk acknowledged the store could use an upgrade, but with some regret in her voice. “It’s going to become stricter,” she said of the management.

Would the new Friendship Store at least be friendlier?

She thought about it for a moment. “It’ll probably be more expensive.”

from the August 2006 issue of that's Beijing

Towering Ambitions: An Interview with CCTV Architect Ole Scheeren

2006-08-15T00:34:00.000-07:00

Ole Scheeren of OMA is driving the world’s largest architectural project, Beijing's CCTV+TVCC

by Alex Pasternack

Important architects tend to look and sound as ostentatious as their designs, which is why you may not immediately recognize Ole Scheeren. The angular 35-year old German was sitting in a coffee shop in the Central Business District recently, wearing a shirt with an open collar, a pair of jeans, a day-old beard on his schoolboy face, and none of those self-consciously eccentric glasses by which architects are sometimes known. Discussing his latest project, his speech was unassuming, thoughtful, and curious; he even arrived early. He hardly seemed, in other words, like the lead designer behind the CCTV Tower, the hulking loop of a building that, two years from completion, has already become both Beijing’s controversial new icon and the world’s biggest architectural marvel.

“If you would preoccupy yourself with feeling so great about what you’re doing, there is an implicit loss of criticality vis a vis what you’re doing,” he says in his light, clean European accent about CCTV going to his head. “And in the case of this project it would be a fairly fatal to the momentum. It requires total attention at every point at time. There’s very little time to think about it.”

Nor does the project give Scheeren much use for the sort of rhetorical flourishes for which architects, like his famous Dutch mentor and co-architect on the project, Rem Koolhaas, are sometimes known. And when Scheeren does say things like “this may be the most complex building ever built,” he’s not kidding.

Since it was approved in an orgiastic moment of development in 2002, the 450,000 square-meter glass and steel China Central Television headquarters literally twists the conventional skyscraper into a gravity-defying three-dimensional trapezoid in the impossible style of M.C. Escher. Nearby sits a companion building, the public-oriented Television Cultural Center (TVCC), which resembles a cubist boot. They’re a feat of architectural gymnastics (and careful diplomacy) that has left many confused, worried, or downright disbelieving. One might just be just as incredulous about the architect’s age.

“Being 35, in a lot of professions, you’re a grandfather already, but in architecture you’re seen as being young,” he says. Raised by an architect-father, and harboring building aspirations early on, “in a way I have the feeling that I started quite early, so I don’t feel quite that young anymore.” But, how prepared could he be to manage a team that at one point exceeded 400 architects and engineers? When I marveled aloud that this project would be the biggest, in terms of scale, that he or OMA had even built (his last project was a triplet of Prada stores in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), he replied with a slight grin: “Actually, it’s one of the largest buildings ever built.”

Scheeren isn't worried about his relative lack of experience. “First, you have to ask what type of experience is relevant to run a project like this. It’s a project that exceeds the scale of anything done so far, and so experience is not valid in the traditional sense,” he says, without a note of pretension. “And it takes an enormous energy that you can hardly generate in your 60s,” an age group that Koolhaas recently reached.

“The point is to say you don’t know how it works, and don’t know how the context works, and to develop a structure that allows change within the process.” It turns out that that sort of radical thinking informed the design all along, from its hastily-imagined loop to the lattice external steelwork that supports the building. But such uncertainty—and at such cost, with an initial reported budget of $700 million—didn’t sit well with either critics or the authorities. A year after a contract was signed, the government ordered a review of all new buildings, and (so rumor went) the television building was to be taken off the air. For one and a half years, the CCTV construction site sat untouched. When the cranes rose again, following a rigorous official review, the budget had reportedly grown to $1.2 billion. But Scheeren wasn't fazed.

“The thing is, we never stopped working on the project,” Scheeren says. Continuing work in offices in Beijing, Rotterdam and London not only helped to maintain the schedule, Scheeren maintains, but also preserved precious morale, which is hard-won in a profession so vulnerable to the kind of political shifts and opaque bureaucracies which are rife in China.

But Scheeren also acknowledges that such a daring design could not have been undertaken anywhere but in Beijing, with its racing-car economy and cosmopolitan aspirations. This is not to indicate that China is a “wild east,” a vertiginous playground for foreign architects to test-drive their imaginations, he says. “I find that repulsive.” On the contrary, China’s progressive architectural vision and ambitious plans have placed on the architect a particular burden and opportunity: nothing less than helping usher in a kind of revolution-through-design. “It’s not a condition you can take lightly,” he says of building in China. “It’s a chance to make yourself part of a progressive environment.”

To be sure, the CCTV project—with its radical shape, recreation areas named the “fun belt” and the “fun palace,” and a section specially designed for visitors—seems an unlikely undertaking for one of the world’s largest propaganda machines, and a government famous for concealment. This (disturbing) irony hasn’t gone lost on Scheeren. Indeed, he practically revels in it.

“[Building] CCTV was seen from the beginning as a tool for change from inside the company,” he says, alluding to a cadre of risk-taking “younger people leading CCTV, lying beneath the skin of the older generation,” who championed the design. When he talked about the building recently at an exhibition in its honor that he curated at the Courtyard Gallery and soon to move to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Scheeren practically avoided discussing the design, focusing instead on what the building’s open layout might mean to the everyday Beijinger, and for a 21^st century China. “It’s a change that exists beyond the realm of architecture. I’ve always been interested in that.”

Indeed, dramatic change and breadth have been the motif of Scheeren’s work as much as his life. It was an early introduction to the profession through his architect-father and his first commission at age 21 that initially burned him out. For a while, playing rock music seemed more appealing. “You’re so close to it, it’s uncomfortable,” he says of his architecture pedigree. Things changed when he heard a presentation by Rem Koolhaas, whose own interests beyond architecture (he had once been Holland’s most promising young screenwriter) reignited Scheeren’s interest. “I realized that someday I wanted to work with him.”

After butting heads with teachers at the design academy in his home town, the south-west German city of Karlsruhe (“They were impressed but not in a pleasant way…At the end of the year, all my models were destroyed with the excuse that they fell off the shelf”), Scheeren decided to continue his studies in London. On the first day of school however, he found himself driving to Rotterdam, where OMA’s main office is located, in a friend’s borrowed car. It mattered little that when he woke up at a local youth hostel, he found his car ransacked: he marched over to OMA with all that remained, the clothing on his back and his portfolio.

“In retrospect, it’s hard to figure out how it all happened,” he says as he stares at the table, slightly smiling. “Maybe I had the feeling that I had nothing else to lose.” Koolhaas threw Scheeren onto a project that seemed on the verge of failure, with two weeks until deadline. The 18-hour days paid off, he says proudly. “It was the only competition oma had won in a year and a half.”

But the restless Scheeren left OMA almost as quickly as he had arrived, taking a graphic design gig in New York, and reenrolling at school in London. But he stayed in touch with his mentor-cum-colleague Koolhaas. When the designer Muccia Prada called on OMA to design some new boutiques in the U.S., Koolhaas called Scheeren. “I never wanted to go back to Rotterdam,” he says, “but the project was so intriguing.”

When OMA bid on the CCTV project in 2002 (declining an invitation to make a proposal for Ground Zero), Scheeren made his biggest shift yet, from designing clothing boutiques to constructing one of the largest buildings in the world.

Having relocated to Beijing that year, Scheeren discovered that the first challenge was figuring out how to explain the wacky design. The initial model for the building, which, cast in plaster, looked more like a deranged sculpture than a television headquarters, proved unimpressive to some of CCTV’s leadership. “It’s a very direct, literal culture and that’s an issue that you have to deal with when you enter the realm of conceptual issues,” Scheeren says. He and Koolhaas scrambled to build a more literal, transparent model, and weeks later a contract was signed.

Aside from not having enough time to study Chinese (“it’s the biggest frustration of being here… My plan is that before the building is finished. I need to get a whole step ahead”), Scheeren is still adapting to the process of constructing buildings in China, which “at such a breathtaking speed, cannot happen in a fully coherent matter.” But he hopes to inspire some change, too.

“I think part of the role of architects coming to build here is not only to bring a different sense of design but to try to step back and urge them,” planners, developers, clients and contractors, “to open up more lines of communication.” Scheeren says he aims for slower, careful consultations when proposing projects, like his successful bid for a new Beijing Books Building and a Prada “epicenter” store in Shanghai (When we met, Scheeren said OMA’s chances to renovate the stock exchange in Shenzhen were “promising.”)

Though the CCTV Tower’s exterior design work is essentially complete, and the first floors have started to peek above the scaffolding, Scheeren and his 20-person Beijing office have shifted to working on the building’s interior. And then there’s the job of still convincing people that the building is actually going to be built.

“Many people still don’t believe it’s going to happen,” Scheeren says, with some exasperation, but also a bit of delight. The truth is, neither can he.

“You think it can’t happen. And then you finally see the piles being driven into the ground, and the steel rising,” he says, with a faint smile. “These are the only moments that you believe that it is really happening.”

a version of this article was published in that's Beijing Home magazine (tbjHome), August 2006

Russian Doll : Regina Spektor

2006-06-06T05:33:00.000-07:00

It's an old story: Wide-eyed nine-year old Jewish girl flees Russia to the shores of New York with her parents, who barely make ends meet while she passes her time exploring their Bronx neighborhood, the old Tin Pan Alley, and the piano keys — a remnant from years of practice in the old country and exposure to the classics (Chopin but also Pushkin). Soon, the setting becomes a downtown Manhattan nightclub, and she's stringing ragtime ballads, jazz standards, folk renditions, energy and vaudevillian pizzazz across the keys. Sheer talent plus a twist of fate would attract the attention of a snazzy producer and a wealthy band of patrons and ta da: Our heroine enters a world of minor celebrity nearly as surprising and strange as her musical narratives.

"We stopped at this truck stop in Colorado, and I'm in the fucking Subway, and there was a girl there getting a sandwich," Regina Spektor recounts a few weeks ago, using the f-word in the most excited, innocent way possible. "I saw her staring and she saw me and I thought about going up to her, but I thought maybe she was just staring, you know, didn't know who I was. Well. I got on MySpace today and someone wrote ‘I love your music and I smiled at you in the Subway.' I mean, wow."

Regina Spektor is running into fans in the strangest places; she's playing sell-out shows in the English countryside; she's getting written about on a hundred message boards and websites; she's on the phone from a hotel room at her latest tour stop, San Francisco. She also has a new album on a major label, Begin to Hope, a follow-up to 2004's Soviet Kitsch. It was a rough version of the latter that first pricked up the ears of the Strokes, who invited her on tour with them, and their producer, who recorded Kitsch. Almost three years later, and 17 years after fleeing Moscow, wow is still very much the theme. When on stage, perched on the edge of her stool, playing with her hands, chatting, the 26-year-old SUNY Purchase graduate still seems amazed, impressed, perplexed by it all, as if she's still learning something big from the crowds fawning over her.

"I can't imagine that kind of devotion, it's really beautiful," she says of the dedication which pushed fans across multiple states to see her play in Colorado in early May. "I played a show in Scotland where kids said they flew from Australia. In Bristol, people had come from Berlin," she says. The curly-haired Russian Jew from the Bronx with real estate on MySpace is trying to figure out where she is, and why people would bother coming that far. "I don't even know how to drive."

When she gets behind the keyboard however, Spektor could hardly sound more in control. From her measured debut, 11:11 through the more fanciful Songs and through the rich Kitsch, Spektor's fingers have learned to dance in jazz and pop and blues rhythms — occasionally parting ways to handle a drumstick on the nearest chair — with a precision matched by a voice that soars and halts aspirated, speaks in tongues and Russian and French and New Yawk accents, raps and, when a chair isn't available, carries the percussion too, beatbox style. On "Twenty Years of Snow," a new song that imitates a Polish mazurka, Spektor's plaintive minor chord progressions twinkle rapidly beneath a voice that ranges from fragile to breathy to speak-y before rolling into a rap that beckons a bop interlude before the recapitulation, where she stutters it all to a close. Such idiosyncratic stylings have earned her the fad label "anti-folk," along with comparisons to Tori, Bjork, Norah, Fiona, Ani and Joni. While perhaps flattering, these names don't do much more justice to Spektor's style than, say, likening her to Ronnie Spector. "Associations are associations," she shrugs, "but I definitely feel like my songs are my songs."

Whereas the adventurous vocal experiments of Soviet Kitsch could sometimes border on preciousness, Spektor's verbal tics on Hope — grunts, breaths, word-bendings and so on — become neater devices for her four-minute fables. The addition of electric guitar courtesy of The Strokes' Nick Valensi and the machinery of producer David Kahne even uncover a new, upbeat poppiness ("Fidelity," "Better," "Hotel Song"), while making room for even more improvisational tricks (see the Billie Holiday tribute "Lady" and the funky admonition "Edit"). Spektor recalls her reaction to first hearing a finished Hope: "I was like, ‘I love you, record." While she only had two weeks to record Soviet Kitsch, Spektor had a leisurely two months for her latest. "It's the first time in my life where I'm so excited that I want people to hear it, where I'm not giving a record to people with a disclaimer that it's not what I wanted it to be. I made it how I wanted to make it."

When asked about what inspired the record, Spektor characteristically points to nothing smaller than the world. "It's so diverse, it's a dream for anybody documenting anything. It's here! The world, write it down!" Her reluctance to talk shop is less a sign of coyness than honesty. "You know — a lot of it is imagination." And this is what most makes the record Spektor's: as usual, each of her songs is a character study in which love is cradled by the tragic knowledge that it can't last. The effects differ, as seen in the heartbroken biblical riff "Samson" and the exhilarating Joni Mitchell-flavored ballad "On the Radio": "This is how it works / you're young until you're not / you love until you don't… you hope it don't get hard / but even if it does, you just do it all again." Her large revelations writ small are sung with the same naïve wonder and confusion and graciousness she shows before her audiences — and which her rapt audiences in turn often show before her.

From a distance, the paradoxical feelings of her song-stories appear as echoes of lost nights, secret loves, and, inevitably, of her own complicated bond with the motherland. Mention returning to Russia, and Spektor sighs. "It's actually really complicated. I haven't figured any of that out. I definitely want to go back but haven't figured out when, or how. It's intense." When her family fled Russia, they were, as Jews, legally considered aliens within their own home. "I definitely love the culture, the people. But it's also very anti-Semitic, lawless, harsh. It's a place where I don't really feel like it's my home at all." Her first lyrics in Russian come in the album's most haunting ballad "Après Moi," where she quotes the poet Boris Pasternak: "February. To take ink and weep, / To write, sob your heart out, sing."

Spektor acknowledges the influence of another Russian literary genius, the tragic comedian Anton Chekhov — but not because of the dramas for which he's famous. "In the plays, he gets too rambly or too philosophical or something, which ends up pushing you out, and reminds you you're a reader or an audience member." It's an impression that hasn't gone lost on her own work. To her, his short stories are more compelling. "They're amazing because they're completely all encompassing. He takes you within them."

Begin to Hope is out on Sire Records on Jun. 13.

This story was published in Paper on June 13, 2006.

Emotional rescues

2005-09-09T22:56:00.000-07:00

The hurt beneath the howl of Xiu Xiu
BY ALEX PASTERNACK

SWEET DISCORD On tour, Xiu Xiu are Jamie Stewart and his cousin Caralee McElroy.

alking to Jamie Stewart, the singer/guitarist who leads the noisy experimental SF Bay Area band Xiu Xiu (pronounced "Shoo Shoo"), can be almost as disconcerting as listening to his music. He’s polite, quiet, and modest, adding small question marks to his sentences and even tossing in a familiar "dude" now and then. It’s all more in keeping with what you’d expect from an emo band frontman than from the mastermind behind some of the more terrifying howls, screeching guitars, and unapologetically dejected lyrics in indie rock. Yet just like a Xiu Xiu song, he’ll touch on a subject that’s uncomfortably personal, like the suicide of his father, Michael Stewart, who produced Billy Joel’s Piano Man. On last year’s Fabulous Muscles (Kill Rock Stars), Stewart sang, "I feel like I’m not nice because sometimes it is hard for me to think something happy about you." But on the new La Forêt (Kill Rock Stars), a sense of resignation has set in; when Stewart entreats himself along with "people I hurt" to "shut up, shut up" ("Ale"), he’s accompanied by a tuneful clarinet melody.

Xiu Xiu have a taste for discord — atonal arrangements filled with foghorns, tape hisses, and violent beats and topped off by Stewart’s whispery vocals and the melodrama of his confessional lyrics. The latter have inspired open-mouthed fandom from sensitive scenesters who find solace in his pain, and attacks from critics as being cloying and histrionic. "People have thrown lit cigarettes at me and audiences have yelled all kinds of nasty shit," Stewart says as he prepares for a national tour that brings Xiu Xiu to the Middle East this Saturday for an afternoon all-ages show. "Then there are also people who drive 800 miles to come see us play and ask if they can come sit in our van for three days because they don’t have a bus ride home."

On Fabulous Muscles, Stewart worked mostly without his amorphous band, eschewing the buzzing and shrieking of earlier recordings in favor of neo-new-wave synth-pop, decaying house beats, and an entirely acoustic title song. The darker, denser band effort La Forêt splits the difference between convention and daring instrumental explorations, between subtleties and extremes.

"It’s not a plus or a minus or a forward or backward," Stewart says of the album, which he recorded with a full, mostly temporary line-up that included Xiu Xiu staple Cory McCullough and Caralee McElroy, Jamie’s cousin and lone back-up musician on tour. "The motivation for writing a less-pop-oriented album wasn’t ‘Oh, Fabulous Muscles is the past — we must shun pop now.’ At the time we were working on La Forêt, we were interested in more experimental music." The Bay Area collective Yellow Swans and a smattering of modern classical composers are detectable influences here, in addition to, Stewart notes, Okinawan vocal performances, gamelan orchestras, and Islamic liturgical chants. Centering lush winds and stirring strings, ringing vibraphones and thick electronic beats, Stewart’s voice floats free as he meditates on decay with a waver that recalls both Conor Oberst and Ian Curtis. "We always write about things that have been going on in the lives of people around us. There have been a lot of difficult things that have happened, and a long history of mental illness in my family."

Politics also plays a role. Fabulous Muscles’ evocative monologue "Support Our Troops, Oh" finds its match in La Forêt’s condemnation of the Bush administration during the atonal "Saturn." In the rollicking "Muppet Face," Stewart squeezes in the lines "smells like Fallujah" and "pull down your pants by the Shiites." But he hasn’t lost all hope. "I’m certainly interested in being happy. But working on being happy is definitely working."

Xiu Xiu + Frog Eyes + Yellow Swans | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | September 3 | 617.864.EAST

Published in the Boston Phoenix, September 2 - 8, 2005