Beijing: world architecture pivot - XX Congress of the International Union of Architects in Beijing, China

Architectural Review, The, August, 1999 by Peter Davey

Nowhere could have offered a more appropriate setting for the XX Congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA) than Beijing.

A vast city of 12 million people, it stretches to the horizon in every direction, an exemplar of most of what's wrong in turn-of-the-millennium architecture and urbanism. Articulated and fed by multi-lane highways laid out on a gigantic grid, the city is a weird mixture of Moscow and Houston - with rickshaws. The latter are fading away as old bicycle machines are replaced by tuk-tuks, small vans and little lorries. Except when bicycle and pedestrian lanes and underpasses are provided (not very often), little vehicles have to contend with huge camions and masses of taxis and buses which are either locked into apparently eternal traffic jams or roaring along at terrifying rates. (At least one delegate, the much loved and respected Vivienne Japha, was killed when crossing a highway at night. She was President of the South African Institute of Architects, which she had just negotiated back into membership of the UIA.)

Paradigm slip

Beijing's grid squares are filled with cack-handed collections of medium rise towers and slabs of apartments, offices, hotels and government departments which have neither visual coherence nor even that strange grandeur of extruded capitalism that make New York, Sydney or Singapore so picturesque. Density is too low for such drama; the quality and styles of architecture offer no hope - pagoda hats do nothing to make clumsy buildings either more graceful or more Chinese. New Beijing is a parody of American and Russian urban ideals of the 1960s: all object buildings and motorways. The place is suffering not so much from paradigm shift (whereby general cultural values leap towards a new and creative concensus) but paradigm slip, in which tired, disproved ideals rule.

Yet there are some moments of hope. The highways have lovingly tended central areas greened with hardy clover, box, ginkgo, robinia and oleander. Little parks have been created among the tower blocks, places in which communities are clearly happy. Quite a wide swath round the Forbidden City (the massive imperial palace in the exact centre of the metropolis facing the vast Tiananmen Square) has height restrictions, so preventing (most of) the towers looming over the ancient courts. In this zone are the imperial monuments like the Temple of Heaven, remains of nineteenth-century Peking (in which the first railway station has been converted to McDonald's), and there are some old embassy and commercial buildings set in a shattered matrix of the courtyard houses that made up the texture of the city round the great imperial monuments. Density there must have been roughly the same as what has been achieved in the often creaking concrete panel buildings which form the outer city - the historic low-rise/high-density model has been too little explored.

Conflicts

The urban scene set by conflicts between ancient, sustainable patterns and supposed Modernism generated the best arguments at the UIA conference. Like the government of China, the UIA is not a democratic body in the normal sense of the term, though it claims to represent over a million architects worldwide. Individual national architectural bodies nominate representatives to the council. Hence speakers chosen by the UIA can be ponderous and stolidly establishment - for instance, to be fair in the schedule, the representative from Australia must be allowed to represent the Oceanic region, no matter how repetitive and self-serving his lecture.

Professors Wu Liangyong and Kenneth Frampton were quite different, calling for idealism, humanity and morality in architecture as the next millennium starts. Speaking in the Great Hall of the People (the Chinese Parliament House on the west side of Tiananmen Square) to crowds between 6000 and 10 000 strong - we never did get the exact figure - Wu and Frampton started the show.

The venerable Wu, who was chairman of the conference's scientific committee, castigated contemporary architectural theories, which are 'in a state of inadequacy. They are not coping with today's ever changing and complex situation'. As one of the few architects who has tried to reinterpret the traditional low-rise/high-density pattern of the old city, Wu was in a strong position to point out that 'one model cannot solve all problems ... Developing countries should explore their own path of development, learning from their own mistakes according to their own conditions, rather than copying models of the industrialized nations ... We cannot approach all problems with one method, nor should we expect that the complicated problem of human settlements can be solved purely by technological means'.

He looked back to the classical Chinese distinction between Fa and Dao. 'Fa, or technique, is important, but only when Dao, or methodology, is right can techniques play their proper roles.' Though Wu was far too diplomatic to say so directly, Beijing is clearly a city ruled by Fa. 'In classical Chinese, beauty means "the unity of variety". Within the great cities of our time, variety is everywhere noticeable, but often at the expense of greater spatial and temporal order.'