MAD for Beijing

I’d never been to Beijing so was determined to go but, as with many things, how and where to begin? The clever thing to do would be to take a tour and deal with The Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Zhihua Temple and The Great Wall all in one day.

Arriving at Beijing South Station, I made my way to Beijing Station which was the former mainline station, and then walked to Jianguomen Station near my hotel marked by (A) in the map below and within walking distance of Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven as it turned out. I had no itinerary so decided to seek out all the Beijing projects of Ma Yansong / MAD Architects and see where it took me. MAD architects are Beijing-based and, since at least 2006 and their Beijing 2050 proposal, have made the city part of their identity.

This map shows the locations of the two hotels I stayed at, and the projects in the order I saw them.

(1) ZGC INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION CENTER

First up was a trip across town to the Zhonguancun (ZDC) International Innovation Centre. It’s a conference center for ZDC Forum, an annual conference for technological innovation. This part of town called Haidian is home to Tsinghua University, Peking University, the Summer Palace and an abundance of parks. Next time. This time was about orientation. So. I’m here now and what do I think? The building is claimed to be a piece of nature in the city but, set it an abundance of trees and against a backdrop of mountains, nature seemed to be doing fine. A green in summer and brown in winter green roof makes the aerial view special. Here, there were no streets to join up or desire lines to follow and so the entrances don’t match up with the overpasses from which many people might arrive.

Nevertheless, once inside, I can see it being quite a nice conference centre. The huge overhang over a sunken garden insulates the proceedings from the outside world which is either appropriate or not, and the spaces between the halls are huge and suited to milling around and networking over coffee between presentations. It is what it is and quite okay.

The inside seems a bit Haidar Alivev-ey and I wonder how the upkeep on that is going? I’m sure the weather in Baku is less hot and humid than Beijing’s which is not doing this curvy plasterboard any favours, especially with the concealed lighting recesses creating more edges and thus more opportunities for them not to be parallel.. I saw three sets of workers doing some touching up to this building completed last year.

(2) HUTONG BUBBLE 218

I never did find it but I did walk around some nice old streets where I had expected it to be. In these Hutong areas, alleys branch off streets and it doesn’t feel right to snoop around every one. The project is associated with a gallery and I only encountered one likely one. To be honest, I went without bothering to check it if still exists, but this kind of information is difficult to find.

So I’m sorry I never found it but not sorry I tried.

(3) CHAOYANG PARK PLAZA, 2016

It’s always exciting catching a first glimpse of a building one’s looking for but the hulking mass of Chaoyang Park Plaza was in my face while I was still coming up the escalator at Chaoyang Park Station. Okay. So now I’m there looking at this building and what am I supposed to think? I’m not going to walk up to it and scrutinize its details. And it’s unfair to single it out for its economic or ethical justification but, as a member of the public, I am entitled to an opinion on its contribution to the public space we inhabit even if, as an office building, it has limited opportunity to do so. I remember reading that the architect wanted the building to make people think of the mountains in classical Chinese ink paintings. I wanted to believe this but, from most angles, it didn’t although it was clearly more inky than any other building I’ve ever seen. I went into Chaoyang Park opposite and tried to recreate a photograph I remember seeing and that had only mountain, trees and water.

If one wants to make a building look like a Chinese ink painting then this is probably as close as we need to get. It would have been a better representation if the glass hadn’t had a faint coat of dust on it. This is always a problem with glazing less than vertical. [c.f. Dubai] The lack of horizontal indication of floor levels gives the building a monumentality befitting a mountain. It’s just a shame that nearby buildings remind us how large/small the building really is. It might be a bit easier to imagine a Chinese ink painting if those buildings were there. And also the yellow ducks. But there’s nothing wrong with trying to have a built representation of Chinese ink paintings. Those Japanese temple rock and gravel gardens are 15th century attempts to do just that. I can’t deny this project it’s high ambition.

(4) BAIZIWAN SOCIAL HOUSING (a.k.a. Yanbao Baiwan Homeland)

I was looking forward to seeing this as I’d admired it for some years. It’s lovely. The housing and the amenity space for its residents is a deck above street level but the street is also amenity space – as it should be. Deliveries were being made, people were either shopping or going about their business, or just sitting around. I shouldn’t be so amazed when something just works. The plane trees kept the street cool on the hot 36°C 40%RH day I was there. The sky was blue.

It seems like the gates to the residential garden are closed only at night so up I went.

I left thinking all residential developments should be configured like this. To the north is a site with some very nice site offices and worker housing getting ready for something about to happen. I hope it’s Phase II. There’s no site hoardings yet but the company (京投轨道 Beijing Capital (as in investment) Railway(?)) seems to be involved in all types of urban infrastructure.

(5)(B) BEIJING CONRAD HOTEL, 2015-ish

It looked and felt new so I asked one of the staff and was surprised to be told it was about ten years old. (It was completed 2013.) It’s a bit like Chaoyang Park Plaza in being another of those what-can-be-said-about-it-as-architecture? projects. It’s easy to either like it or not like it either as a guest or a person interested in things that get built. The architects’ website says “Through its unique form, … the building’s “living architecture” seeks to embed itself within the fabric of the rectilinear city much as a plant rises through the crack of a concrete sidewalk.” For better but mostly worse, architects are known for attempting to set the criteria by which they want their buildings to be judged by others but if we want to go beyond likes and dislikes then we might as well see if this building does what it was wanted to do. We have “rectilinear city” and “plants rising through sidewalks” so obviously there is some sort of artificial vs. natural thing going on, with nature-ness represented by a partially illogical shape and some curvaceously irregular cladding. The leftmost image below was my first glimpse of the building and I was genuinely disappointed to not see it rising from the ground. Trees prevent anyone getting a good look at how the building meets it, so we can only look at what’s above the trees to judge how embedded in the city it really is. The height is the same height as the building to the north [2nd image] and the building straightens up on that side, leaving the other end (with the deluxe rooms) to point towards CCTV and the city to the south. On the lower levels, the deformation can be easily accommodated by two inclined columns and adjusting the sizes of the rooms.This is all simply doing the right stuff.

Some people say a weed is a plant in the wrong place. In Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye (Timothy Hyde, Princeton University Press) it’s written that some people say “an ugly building is a building in the wrong place” but I don’t feel that with this building. It seems to fit but not so much by growing out of the sidewalk but by doing all the right things with respect to what’s already there.

Of course, saying an ugly building is a building in the wrong place implies that ugliness is for many people the same as saying a beautiful building is a building in the right place, even if this hasn’t been claimed for beauty for a while now. What a context is, is of course disputable, even without taking into account Bill Clinton’s famous claim (during the Monica Lewinski trials) that “That depends upon what your definition of is, is.” Hyde cuts ugliness some slack by saying it’s a catalyst for societal response and if one thinks about it, that’s actually more than we can say for beauty and, as such, evidence that ugliness isn’t the opposite of beauty. But wouldn’t it be a laugh if ugly buildings actually did turn out to be nothing more than buildings in the wrong place, and beautiful buildings nothing more than buildings in the right place – at the wrong and right times, of course. Could we ever let the matter rest? Or are we just more comfortable thinking questions of ugliness and beauty are eternally unresolvable? Fun unpacking all this will have to wait.

With hotels, it’s always difficult to tell how much input the architects had since hoteliers always have their branding to consider. My room was well appointed. I like it when hotels get the bedding and pillows how I like them. I didn’t miss any funky window obstructions and slept well, untroubled by architecture. In fact, I only noticed those windows on the ground floor when I looked at my photographs of the ground floor restaurant after. (Second, below.) I imagine the triple height space was designed by the architects even if it wasn’t decorated by them. Again, I don’t know who was responsible for placing the main kitchen behind that timber paneled many shelved wall but it was a good call because breakfast is served along that wall where it’s easily checked and refreshed by chefs and staff and easy for guests to get to. Breakfast rooms in hotels are usually full of people walking around with plates, trying to avoid bumping into each other. Breakfast rooms always look a bit sad when breakfast isn’t being served but not so here. The afternoon before though, I did wonder why so many shelves had nothing displayed, but I didn’t pursue the thought.

(6) CHINA PHILHARMONIC CONCERT HALL, nearing completion

The average Beijing block size is about 1km square and, trying to find this building, I walked the wrong way around. The building is on the north side of Workers’ Stadium (first image, below) which at 65,000 capacity is not quite as large as the 2008 Olympic Stadium at 80,000. Still, it’s huge and dwarfs this concert hall that’s almost complete now. The other three images are from the MAD website.

The following are as good a look as I could get. I’ll go back, hopefully for a performance and I’m trying to imagine what I’d like that performance to be.

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National Art Museum of China

MAD’s proposal for the National Art Museum of China, up by the Olympic Stadium isn’t going to happen because Jean Nouvel won the competion. Below are some images (subject to change, of course) of the entries. Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend that architecture is all about images and liking or disliking what they depict. Rank these eight from one to eight. Tick tock tick tock …

The order above is my rankings but it wasn’t easy. My 2nd, 3rd and 4th are basically interchangeable. The ZHA looks like more of the same but we can at least get more of an idea than with the Nouvel, the UNS or the Gehry that look like placeholders reprising past hits. Special contempt is reserved for the OMA which is patronizing, the Safdie which is simply bad (as well as patronizing) and the Robert Stuart-Smith which is simply vile.

Another MAD proposal that’s not going to exist in Beijing is the Huangdu Art Center. Living Garden did for a while in 2018 but was a temporary pavilion. Roca Beijing Gallery wasn’t high on my list and I’m sorry I didn’t get to see YueCheng Courtyard Kindergarten. I had a train to catch.

In three days, I didn’t really get to see that much of Beijing after all but I made a start. I like big cities. Beijing and Shanghai are about the same size if the difference between 23.9 and 24.8 million makes any difference but there doesn’t seem to be that rivalry that so often exists when cities see themselves as either commercial capitals or cultural ones. This is refreshing and all very civilized. As you’d hope.

first glimpses

there’s much to point out from low Earth orbit

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Revisited this week:

• Professional Development (1) , further information (2)
• The Mystery of Beauty