Olympic Landscape

Architecture

By JAMES GARDNER
April 29, 2008

When it comes to dreaming up grand architectural visions, repressive authoritarian regimes are clearly the way to go. There are none of those nettlesome obstructions that beset the urban planners of New York City: community boards and concerned citizens, good-government types and the dithering dysfunctionality of a score of agencies. Well known to all are the hurdles that developers and architects have encountered recently at ground zero and the Atlantic Yards, the acrimony that has beset Columbia University's West Harlem expansion, not to mention the travails of Londoners over furnishing Heathrow with one lousy little new runway.

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Feng Li / Getty

The night scene of the National Aquatics Centre (the Water Cube) which is lit by blue lights.

Meanwhile, in less time than it takes for New Yorkers to draw up a committee to decide whether to vote on drawing up a committee, the city of Beijing has reinvented itself in anticipation of this August's Olympic Games. Whole neighborhoods have been gleefully wiped out in order to build the Beijing CBD, or Central Business District, situated between the capital's 3rd and 4th Ring Roads and now the site of CCTV headquarters, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Meanwhile, in another part of town, the Olympics' main venue, the titanic National Stadium (also called Bird's Nest stadium) — designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron — has just opened. So too has the National Aquatics Centre, known as the Water Cube, by the Australian architecture firm PTW Architects, together with CSCEC + Design and Arup. Perhaps most striking of all is the thrilling new Beijing Capital International Airport, conceived by Norman Foster.

One might be hard pressed to imagine a New York angle to this story of Beijing's heroic expansion, other than in the antithetical sense that I have mentioned. But in fact, it is proof of the internationalization of the architectural trade that each of the four projects mentioned involves a firm already active in this city. Though most of Mr. Koolhaas's projects for New York have come to nothing — and that is not necessarily a bad thing — he is responsible for the Prada flagship on Prince Street, and his 1997 book about the city, "Delirious New York" (Monacelli) is considered by some to be one of the most influential pieces of architectural writing of the past half century.

In addition, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron has recently completed the glinty, laminated condos at 40 Bond St., with its truly awful screen façade, while Lord Foster's Hearst Building, at 8th Avenue and 57th Street, is one of the most ambitiously iconic buildings in Manhattan in the past generation. Finally, the relatively unknown firm of Arup has contributed designs for the Second Avenue Subway.

If recently published photos are to be trusted, the new Beijing airport must rank with Paul Andreu's Terminal 2 at Charles de Gaulle as one of the most enchanting on the planet. It is very different, however, from its Parisian counterpart. Structurally, it invokes a machine aesthetic in the vastness of its main uninterrupted space, with a mullioned skylit roof unsupported by any columns. Elsewhere, discreet columns appear in a reception area of imperious expanse, roofed in a filigreed ceiling that is adorned with diaper-patterning. A more Modernist idiom is reasserted in the curving, cantilevered boomerang of the grand entrance, which consciously evokes the quintessentially mid-century building typology that originated in Pier Luigi Nervi's Roma Termini train station.

Another sort of filigree covers "Bird's Nest" Stadium in the center of the city. From photographs, this building appears far less successful than the new airport. True it has its angles, and there is something of charm in the assertiveness with which it thrusts itself forward to the west. From a distance, as well, it looks imposing at night. But its most distinctive feature, the trellis-like fretwork that expands across its surface, looks like something that seemed smart on paper, but singularly dumb in the flesh. Though its whole point is to attain a gossamer-like insubstantiality, instead it looks plodding and forced, rather like the screen that this architectural firm unfurled across the lower façade of 40 Bond St.

Surface, rather than structure, distinguishes the National Aquatics Centre as well. Within sight of the stadium, this area for swimming and diving competitions looks as if it contains a fairly standard swimming pool. What distinguishes it is the exterior walls, which are formed from hardened Plexiglas and resemble a film-like surface covered with translucent soap bubbles.

Finally, Mr. Koolhaas's CCTV headquarters resembles, by design, a squat, hulking monster whose two plinth-like legs prop up a headless torso. It is among the largest office buildings in the world, with nearly as many square feet — according to one estimate — as the Pentagon. Though it is too early to judge the building's ultimate success, it appears to have been inspired by a torqued version of the Grande Arche de la Défense in Paris, which was designed by Johann Otto von Spreckelsen and completed by, once again, Mr. Andreu.

In that connection, let it be said that one of the most spectacular new works to arise in Beijing in recent years is the wraith-like specter of the National Theater, whose form, come to think of it, resembles that of the Bird's Nest Stadium, but whose gleaming curtain-wall cladding looks far more intelligently realized. It, too, is the work of the ubiquitous, but under-appreciated, Mr. Andreu.

Taken together, the new architecture of Beijing is a partial and mitigated success, whatever its social benefit or harm. But however many eggs had to be broken to make this particular omelet, New Yorkers can only look on in envy and amazement at the boldness, the size, and the inventiveness of these new designs, which would never have stood a chance in Gotham.