Beijing Architecture: Part 2

By Eric Setzekorn

In the midst of the forest of new skyscrapers, a subtle change is occurring in Beijing architecture which may have more lasting importance than the soaring towers of the Central Business District. Outside the fourth ring road massive new apartment blocks are greatly increasing the average living space and comfort level of the growing middle class.

Built in record time by massive crews of migrant laborers the new complexes promise residents a more controlled and relaxed life , but the centralized, homogenous designs hinder the development of neighborhood feeling and community. The new developments allow the beneficiaries of China’s thirty years of rapid development to isolate themselves from urban crime, noise and pollution in gated communities removed from the majority of the population.

Construction site for massive new complex with over 30 cranes in operation.

The developments have been fueled by easy credit at rates often below the rate of inflation, the desire of city officials to leave tangible legacies, and real estate developers eager to tap into the booming wealth of Chinese professionals. The resulting scale of Beijing’s new communities is unrivalled in East Asia, with the possible exception of South Korea’s chaebol apartment blocks. Single developments can occupy up to a square kilometer, with average buildings up to twenty floors high. Located far from the major commercial areas in Chaoyang or the city center, massive underground parking garages extend up to three floors below ground. Residents are mostly young professionals with university educations and stable high-income jobs in technology, finance or service industries.

Compared to the cramped, five and six story brick apartment blocks built in the 1960s and 70s, the new areas are bright, airy and spotlessly clean. Large kitchens boast a full range of modern appliances and multiple bedrooms allow one-child families to have private rooms, often with a spare room available for visiting grandparents. With average prices ranging from $150,000 to $300,000 U.S. dollars, the quiet dignity of homeownership is relatively accessible and many buyers are in their mid to late 20’s. Although many analysts expect a post-Olympic slowdown, most buyers are confident the double-digit growth in property prices will continue for the foreseeable future.

New, wide roadways with separate bus lanes and elevated subway line.

While home ownership is undeniably a good thing for individual and society, and Beijing needs to continue new development projects to improve the quality of life for its citizens, there are multiple blind spots in the centralized pattern of Beijing’s urban architecture. Much of Beijing’s development program seems to have been copied wholesale from historical bad examples, such as Robert Moses's automobile-centered vision of New York or the hubris of Chicago’s Cabrini Green.

The popularity of grey tile and unfinished stone is practical given Beijing’s harsh environment but presents a rather gloomy, cold and foreboding appearance. Residents spend little time outside their apartments due to a lack of congenial open spaces such as parks or courtyards. Shopping for groceries normally involves a trip to a large shopping center, often a Carrefour with attached parking garage, which can be kilometers away. Due to the one-child policy and the career orientation of many young residents, children are few in number and seldom seen. Large numbers of private security guards in sometimes garish uniforms complete with tassels and braid occupy all entrances and patrol the grounds.

High-end housing development adjacent to elevated subway.

The overall effect is to create a highly structured, managed space with little variation or required social contact. Some of this effect can be blamed on 1950s zoning, which divided Beijing into large city blocks that not only make the city difficult to walk, but also increase traffic congestion and hinder small development of individual parcels of land in favor of large, square complexes stretching from street to street.

A deeper problem for Beijing is the rapidly growing social stratification that has accompanied the housing market expansion. New buildings are built by work gangs of unskilled laborers coming from the countryside who live eight to ten to a room on site until the project is completed. In these temporary structures, sanitation facilities are limited, bare bulbs provide lighting and the un-insulated metal or tents rely on weak space heaters in the winter months.

Mule haulers under elevated subway with local resident in background on roller blades .

View from northernmost subway stop in Beijing, Tiantongyuan on the new line 5, looking south at new developments all completed in last 3 years.

Meanwhile, many residents commute to work by car along wide, well designed highways or can take the modern, efficient metro service which has expanded rapidly into the wealthy northern suburbs. Older, normally working class areas of the city are forced to rely on the crowded and unreliable bus system. Very selective public and private schools have also boomed in these new areas as parents with sufficient income seek to provide their children with every advantage in gaining access to domestic and foreign universities. These schools boast fantastic computer and language facilities and in several cases cricket teams.

Open fields in north of Beijing with subway line already completed and ready for future expansion.

While every city wrestles with issues of growth and income distribution the sheer size, high rates of economic growth and the fact it is the national capital make Beijing an interesting test case for Chinese mega-city development. In the next twenty years, as the ratio of urban to rural population steadily increases, dozens of other Chinese cities will be confronted with similar problems of sustainable, equitable urban growth.

Building Beijing

By Eric Setzekorn

Even before Beijing was awarded the Olympic Games in 2001, the pace of construction in the city was frantic and relentless. A combination of expansive central planning, low interest loans, and a real estate bubble have all contributed to the construction of hundreds of new buildings and massive infrastructure development. Lax regulatory and environmental laws combined with a desire by politicians to make Beijing a “showcase” have enticed dozens of the world’s best architects to experiment with new designs and new materials on a scale not possible in New York, London or Berlin. While some critics bemoan these new designs as “shock and awe” architecture and others point to the loss of culturally significant areas such as the hutongs, the scale and pace of development will likely continue well into the next decade as Beijing continues to grow in population and international importance. A more subtle but lingering problem will be integrating these massive center-pieces into Beijing life in a way that is natural and beneficial to residents struggling to adapt to the ever-changing city-scape.

For all Olympic tourists coming from abroad their first experience in Beijing is the massive Terminal 3 building of Beijing Capital airport opening this spring. As the world’s largest building at 10 million square feet (displacing the Pentagon from the top of the list), it overawes visitors with soaring ceilings and a full range of restaurants, shops and convenient services. The Norman Foster-designed structure cost just under $4 billion and went from proposal to completion in less than four years. In addition to its vast scale, the open building layout and obvious attention to diffusing human traffic flow makes the check-in, security and boarding process relatively painless and less like the rugby scrum atmosphere of LAX. This past week the airport express light rail system opened, linking the airport to the rapidly growing subway system. Gushing domestic news reports with riders saying boilerplate phrases such as “Riding it makes me proud to be Chinese” perhaps overstate the importance of the fairly basic light rail link similar to San Francisco’s BART system. However, with tickets costing 25 RMB one way it eliminates the need for a 100-150 RMB journey into Beijing by taxi, the only previous option. The airport link not only makes traffic sense but importantly, for foreign tourists, eliminates the potential for price gouging by taxi drivers on new arrivals which made many first experiences in China a less than happy one. Terminal 3 is not without flaws: food and beverage prices are high, limited electrical outlets and no wireless internet service hinders business travelers, and baggage service is slow. But compared to Heathrow or LAX, it is a comfortable airport.


Perhaps more than any other, the new CCTV headquarters currently being finished in Chaoyang is the most innovative of the new buildings. The lead architect, Ole Scheeren (partner of Rem Koolhaas; the two are in charge of the design), is a household name to many Chinese not only for his architectural work but as the boyfriend of movie star Maggie Cheung, who has reportedly settled in Beijing with him. The main feature of the design is an angled center section joining two towers and that extends dozens of meters at a ninety-degree angle out over the street without independent support. The towers are also angled counter to the joined section at 6 degrees which creates a unique and somewhat disorientating visual effect. A rigid exoskeleton provides support and gives the building the appearance of deep etches at odd, seemingly random angles which adds to the overall effect. At 234 meters in height with a space of 550,000 meters it is planned to hold over 10,000 personnel for China’s CCTV programs.


One of the most important areas of Beijing’s development is a massive investment in academic and educational infrastructure taking place throughout the Haidian University district. Research institutes for the Chinese Academy of Sciences are now scattered around Haidian and outside of town, in the northwest, a new “Space City” is growing as a center of training, research and experimentation for China’s extra-terrestrial ambitions. The new funding dramatically highlights the winners and losers of China’s education system as it enters the twenty-first century. International relations, finance, business and law departments work and study in modern, state-of-the-art facilities, while social sciences and humanities generally remain in drab, concrete boxes with poor lighting and unspeakable bathrooms that retain their mid-50s Stalinist charm. To take one example, the new business and law building at People’s University (Ren Da) is the centerpiece of that campus’s re-development. Towering seventeen stories over a central courtyard, it divides into law department on the east side and business department on the west. However, while the classrooms and offices may be new, the building is at best ill-suited and at worst blights the surrounding campus environment. The courtyard is paved with gray stone which is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. No vegetation of any kind softens the area and there are no benches for workers to eat lunch or students to read. The stark power of the design makes individuals feel insignificant in size and importance—a valuable effect for government buildings but not appropriate for a university campus.


As the capital of a country pegged by many as the next superpower, Beijing has also seen an embassy building boom as nations from around the world seek to bolster their presence and influence. The largest of the new embassies is the American embassy which, except for the Vatican City-sized monstrosity in Iraq’s Green Zone, is the largest American embassy in the world. Opening ceremonies for the embassy are due to be conducted by President Bush during his visit during the Olympics. Surrounded by a drab, sandstone colored blast wall, the mainly glass and silver coated steel embassy main buildings are in the center of the ten acre compound to protect against attack. On-site facilities include housing for much of the six hundred staff and the ambassador’s villa. The embassy is fronted by a water sculpture inside the security wall which serves both a decorative and protective function. Starbucks operates a small stand in the old embassy but will presumably have a larger facility inside the new grounds to compensate for the increased staff. South Korea, Canada, Australia, Iran, India and Germany have all opened new embassies over the past 24 months, mostly outside the traditional diplomatic area around Sanlitun. All the new embassy complexes feature high blast walls that, however necessary in today’s security environment, make the new embassy area a series of grey or beige bunkers standing apart from the city—a sharp contrast to the leafy quiet streets of the old Sanlitun diplomatic area.

The nerve center of the permanent construction revolution in the capital is the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning, which operates a large exhibition space south of Tiananmen Square that explains the larger agenda and program of building under their direction. The 16,000 square meter building draws more tourist than locals, mainly due to the 30 RMB entrance fee, and offers an antiseptic vision of future Beijing with all the hubris of Disney’s Tomorrowland. Vital issues to Beijing, such as completion of the water pipeline from the Yangzi river scheduled to bring 1 billion cubic meters of water per year to Beijing after 2010, are relegated to dark corners, while soaring models of shiny skyscrapers take center-stage. Lingering public health issues such as water safety, sewage treatment, and pollution, which were supposed to be part of Beijing’s pre-Olympic infrastructure modernization, are likewise dismissed with colorful charts and optimistic verbiage. The exhibition’s pride and joy is the 302 square meter model of Beijing in 2020 (much like another in Shanghai’s Urban Planning Hall) which, in contrast to “primitive” old Beijing, is a “modern Beijing of the future.” The attention to detail is truly impressive, with buildings that delight many visitors as they try to find their neighborhoods (which may or may not exist in 2020).

To be continued in Part 2.

Eric Setzekorn is a graduate student at UC Irvine specializing in military history and is currently finishing an exchange semester with the Beijing University history department.