Dawn of a New Century: Ordos 100

.


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.”