Chinese modern architecture

As with many other elements of the Chinese culture, tradition has been mixed with modern technology. Although many traditional buildings still exist, almost all new buildings are built with Western style architecture. It's not uncommon to see skyscrapers in a large city of China. Traditional houses, however, are still exquisitely built.

China`s modern architecture tends to reflect political and aconomic, rather than ethnic and climatic, considerations. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, treaty ports were built up in the European colonial manner by the foreign merchants, banks, shipping firms and missionaries who conducted their affairs there. Today, the former offices, warehouses and churches – often divided up for Chinese use – still give certain cities a distinctive look. Hankou ,part of Wuhan , has a customs house and whole streets of colonial buildings, as do the former east-coast concessions of Shangai, Qingdao, Yantai, Shantou, Xiamen and Guangzhou. European inspired building continued on into the 1930s.
After the communist takeover, there were various attempts to unite Chinese styles with modern materials. When employed, this strategy was successful, and many modern rural dwellings still follow traditional designs , simply replacing adobe walls with concrete. But during the 1950s while Russia was China`s ally, a brutally functional Soviet style became norm, requiring that everything from factories to hotels be built as identical drab, characterless grey boxes. Since China opened up to the western world and capitalism in the late 1970s, however, there`s been a move towards a more “international” look, as seen in the concrete-and-glass high-rises going up across the country. While brighter than Russian model, these are, in general, hardly any more inspirational or attractive, and are afflicted by a mania for facing new buildings in bathroom tiles. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of this trend is that any indigenouis characteristics are seen as old-fashioned, and yet, compared with similar buildings in the west, these new buildings are very poor imitations. Yet even , here there are occasional attempts to marry the traditional Chinese surrounded by walled compounds and topped with curled rooftiles.
In recent years, with a great deal of money and resources washing around, the Chinese urban landscape is set to be ripped up and reconstructed yet again. Eye-catching, prestige projects by the worlds most expensive architects have begun springing up , particularly in Beijing, which is to be showcased as a dynamic, hip city in time for the Olympics in 2008. The city`s residents – three hundred thousand of whom have been relocated to make space for the boom – point out that this much reconstruction would only normally take place after a war. The new CCTV building by the radical Dutch firm OMA will be a truly bizarre structure, a double Z with a hole in the middle and no right angles, nicknamed “the twisted doughnut”. There are plenty who doubt whether it`s possible to build. The national theatre (“the egg”), three halls under a dome floating at the centre of an artificial lake, has been designed by French architect Paul Anreu, and will be and astonishing sight, specially considering its location at the heart of the staid communist city. In Shangai the Xintiandi complex of accommodation and restaurants is a rare example of an extravagant architectural gesture that`s still recognizably Chinese, a collection of shikumen, houses with stone gateways, painstakingly reconstructed with original materials. Happily, this seems to have started a trend, and Chinese cities may soon start to look a little more Chinese.