Vision Formers

Has the recent Olympic Games given China the impetus it needed to produce more daring architecture?

Hosting the Olympic Games brings with it the acme of global PR opportunities. In Beijing’s case, the 800 year old city has used the event to announce a metamorphosis from its dowdy communist image. Across Beijing, in what was architectural blandness, avant-garde structures are sprouting into the smog: designed to prove the communist capital is now cool and forward thinking.

Other Chinese cities have shiny new images as a result of working with a number of European architects. Notably Dutch master Rem Koolhaas, who envisaged the new Shenzen Stock Exchange building, as well as the headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing (due for completion in December 2008).

Beijing’s Great Hall of the People has recently hatched a structure that some call the “Alien Egg.” French architect Paul Andreu has encased the new National Theatre in a titanium and glass egg, floating’ in an artificial lake. Visitors will enter by escalator and appear to plunge into the water. The ultra-modern illusion is presided over by Chairman Mao’s portrait and the Forbidden City. This historical depth of field calls to mind The Louvre and London’s Millennium Bridge. Perhaps this will divert global memory from nearby Tiananmen Square as an infamous meeting place for tanks and students.

But it was Swiss architectural team Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, known for transforming the Tate Modern, who designed the intricate steel Olympic Stadium dubbed “The Bird’s Nest”. This building has become the most symbolic of China’s new architectural profile. Almost equally acclaimed, is the National Aquatics Centre, dubbed the “Water Cube”. Though this time the accolades go to the Australian consortium of PTW Architects.

The buildings’ sheer scale and imagination suggest the country’s efforts to express an emerging national identity and showcase its innovation and technological prowess. They demonstrate an ability to mobilise vast reserves of manpower and resources, and an economy taking leaps onto the world stage.