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Published: January 16th 2010
High Rise Apartments
Suzhou, a town just outside of Shanghai, hosts prime examples of typical housig projects being built around China.As a fresh product of architecture schooling, it seems as though a response to the architecture of China is a completely appropriate way to spend one’s morning on a snowy, cold, wet winter day in Yangzhou. And so, armed with nothing more than a quite Sunday morning, an album or two of
Cake and a very large cup of tea at hand, I will attempt to describe, in four cover-all categories, my thus-far observations concerning design and architecture in China.
The
Big-City Big-Building category:
In the big cities most of the historical buildings have been ripped down, sometime between 1949 and now, and replaced with what appears to be ultra-modern buildings; projects that look strikingly similar to work produced by the studios back in architecture school. These buildings, while they may look ultra-modern on the outside, are put together at an alarming, break-neck rate and also with rock-bottom bidding, and so while the 85th floor is being completed in some Shanghai skyscraper, the toilets on the 10th floor have already broken and need to be replaced.
Everywhere it seems that glass is the greatest material that ever happened to China, only second to concrete and polished tile --
Endless Cleaning.
This crew is one of many full-time crews working away at keeping the buildings clean; a futile effort when the air is so dirty you can taste it. all the buildings use it extensively on nearly every surface where often-times western buildings of similar stature would choose an opaque material offering at least a small amount of insulation. The final product is a large, shiny, well-lit and extremely cold, glass box. Glass is also used for many ceiling elements like front entryways, doors, and very large sky-lites. The super popular glass doors are everywhere and because of the inherent problem of attaching hardware to glass, for many buildings, there are no actual door locks. The resulting method of locking the doors, be it entryways to skyscrapers or back doors to bus stations, is an incredibly logical response -- bicycle U-locks. To anyone with even the slightest knowledge about building codes, a not-so-subtle and quite appropriate sense of panic can hit pretty hard when navigating a flooded bus or train station, in the middle of the day, and finding upwards of sixty or seventy percent of the station exits U-locked shut. Perhaps I should start packing a small hack-saw to aid in my anxiety…
The air quality in eastern China is extremely poor thanks to the massive industrial powerhouse of coal-burning power plants, steel smelters, and concrete factories;
Shanghai Skyscrapers
Wow~ A few of the ultra modern skyscrapers of Shanghai the result of this aggressive industrialization provides plenty of particulate matter in the air to apply a daily film of grime to any surface even slightly horizontal. With the buildings so huge and the air so poor, even a full-time attempt at keeping exterior surfaces clean seems futile -- and so the shiny beautiful skyscrapers we are used to back home invariably appear with gently muted colors and gray-stained glass...
The
Big-City Big-Housing category:
The density in which the urban Chinese live makes any western city appear like a mess of inefficient sprawl. In reading
Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret as well as
China Road by Rob Gifford, we learned that during the earlier years of the Revolution, the Communist Party provided for the people from cradle to grave; housing, jobs, medicine and everything in between with little room for any freedoms - one was assigned a job or work unit and regardless of one’s aptitude, the prearranged destiny was more or less non-optional in the name of
group think. By the mid 1980’s however, it was becoming more and more clear that the experiment in social construct was to fail and the lines were loosened; people soon
found much more freedom in choice of where to live and what career to choose. With millions of people leaving the country in search of a better job in the city, an intense thirst for urban housing has since erupted. Even in our medium-sized city of 4.5 million people (about the geographic size of Billings, Montana) hundreds of building cranes grace the horizon, poking out of the cityscape as the housing developments explode from once-soggy rice paddies. If the air is semi-clear, (a once or twice weekly treat) from our apartment we can see thirteen or fourteen building cranes swooping about their respective building sites.
No matter what the design of any apartment building, however thoughtful or elegant, the Chinese have found a way to pack it in, extra tight, and mass produce. Housing in the big city amounts to block after block of completely identical six to eight story apartment complexes (Yangzhou has a six floor height restriction; in other cities like Beijing or Shanghai, the buildings launch themselves towards the heavens) placed uncomfortably close to each other. While hordes and hordes of people move to the city, the construction scene seems to be moving faster than that
of the migrants and many of the complexes find themselves erected and quite unoccupied, constructed under the more or less safe assumption that, cue Kevin Costner, “if you build it, they will come.”
The units are all built from a similar palate of ultra-cheap wood-laminates, polished tile floors and concrete, efficiently providing a cold and impersonal abode. Little attention is placed on the orientation of windows and huge banks of southern facing windows create an oven effect within. Visual proof of an attempt to combat the sun’s heat lies in the silvery curtains, similar to the space blankets doled out at marathons, found draped across the windows from April through October. Furnaces do not exist in China, and each room that can afford it independently operates an air conditioning unit that looks like a tall slender refrigerator - which provides an electric source of heat in the winter and cool the rest of the year. Because of the complete lack of insulation in any building, only occupied rooms are heated; leaving hallways, kitchens, bathrooms, etc. to match the climate outside. As we walk through the school towards our apartment, especially at night, a loud hum can be heard coming
New "Pack 'em in" Apartments
A back alley we walked down while visiting Hangzhou. from the buildings as hundreds of small A/C units grind away to heat the un-insulated rooms. Oddly, and perhaps ironically, nearly every apartment building has reserved the roof-top real-estate for the placement of dozens of solar hot-water heaters.
The
Romantic Rural category:
One of the few ancient civilizations still in existence today, China’s history and culture go back several thousand years. A still very much alive part of this history manifests itself through traditional Chinese architecture. The problem is that wood burns. And so aside from the Great Wall and a few temples made from stone, very little ancient architecture has survived the ages to be an active part of today’s society. If a structure did survive the test of time, but then happened to seen as either too bourgeois or too religious, it more than likely became a threat to the cause of the Revolution and was ruthlessly razed or turned into horse stables. During the mid 1980’s however, a renewed interest in China’s cultural heritage surfaced and millions of government dollars became invested towards the restoration or reconstruction of lost architecture. This interest, particularly in Beijing and its surrounding area, gained high-priority stature in preparation for
Listen to the A/C whirring...
Each room, individually cooled and heated by electric A/C units. the 2008 Olympic Games.
Usually located in public parks or gardens, much of the classical architecture depicts a more simple life; one jam-packed with tea houses, not-so-comfortable-looking chairs, and plenty of time for reflection. The placement of every window in traditional architecture indicates the framing of an element of landscape on the outside as though one is looking at a painting. Overhead beams and lentils host unique romantic images; ranging from fantastic landscapes to cats chasing mice. Much of the traditional structural work stands free of hardware thanks to the work of specialized carpenters and their use of intricately crafted joinery.
Traditional Chinese art depicting romantic images of landscapes, architecture, and pleasant village motifs flood markets everywhere; interestingly, that same famous traditional Chinese architecture exists quite rarely in real life and has become exceedingly sparse in a sea of concrete and glass. The Chinese economic powerhouse, a fast-moving, all-devouring monster, waits for nothing and only recently have cities slowed the plowing down of their historic structures.
The
Real Rural category:
Removed from the mayhem of daily life in the many mega-cities of China, the rural life architecture relies on a simple template loosely based on the
Yu Bazaar
A newly built-to-look-old Bazaar that surrounds classical Yu Gardens in Shanghai. On New Year's Day, this place was a real croud pleaser. Hutongs well known in and around Beijing. Dictated by the traditions of
feng shui, the plan depends primarily on a central courtyard with the gate entrance to the usually in the South/East corner. On the northern side of the courtyard lies a main hall, often of more than one level sitting opposite to the entryway. Sitting to the east and west, storage halls flank the courtyard and usually house a rusty motorcycle or two and the toilet. The majority of houses built rurally, at least in Jiangsu Province, all enjoy a very similar design and an even more similar choice of materials - glazed tiles and blue tinted glass. It seems as though every single surface, be it floor, wall, or ceiling, always has the same treatment: white glazed 1’ x 1’ tiles. Often, different floors are reserved for different generations with the younger couple and children living upstairs and grandma and grandpa living downstairs.
Traditionally, once a man married, his new wife moved into the home of the man’s family; sometimes occupying a separate room, sometimes not, either way guaranteeing a cover-all retirement home for mom and dad. This tradition has become less and less common as the
Classical Chinese Architecture
A scene inside a beautifully maintained Suzhou garden -- Canlang Ting Yuan or Dark Blue Wave Garden trend of rural exodus dominates Chinese society. Another factor leading to increasing rarity of this tradition can be blamed on the first “one-child” generation recently reaching marrying age. New small families must now decide between living with his parents, her parents, or in a city in search of a better life. These two new trends now pose huge challenges and to tightly-knit traditions of rural Chinese families.
The observation of architecture offers a keen insight into cultures and traditions perhaps not otherwise documented. Architecture is not some new policy nor is it random; architecture is a response to a need - be it an attempt to show one’s political prowess, to remember and exhibit simpler times, or to simply put a roof over the heads of past and present rice farmers. A huge problem with China’s architecture lies in the fact that the rate of consumption, the style of construction, and the size of population occupying the architecture is simply unsustainable and at a scale so massive that it affects the entire world. For now however, as a humble English teacher in a foreign land, I can only observe. And before pointing too many fingers, one must try
Picture on the beam
Scary warrior from the north...look out for those mongols! to understand
why. The answers lie in a complicated web of deeply rooted culture and the emergence of an economy willing to do nearly anything, at nearly any cost, to continue Deng’s dream of glorious wealth.
Clues can be found everywhere to the reasoning of China's architecture. Often times just around the corner of a traditional temple or on the other side of some dirty glass exit door in a busy bus station. The door at the bus station however, will most likely be U-locked shut.
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Donna White
non-member comment
Wow!
Thank you so much for the lesson in architecture. It was very interesting and informative. Your "thesis" impressed me, I will take note of the architecture when I'm there next month. I loved the captioned photos.