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Beijing boasts stunning new buildings

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-06-30 09:52

The Water Cube is seen in this picture on January 28, 2008. [Asianewsphoto]

Motorists regularly disrupt traffic on an adjoining highway as they stop to snap photos.
Across from the Bird's Nest is perhaps Beijing's most whimsical building: the Water Cube, the swimming venue for the Games.

Builders used material similar to plastic wrap to create 4,000 translucent bubbles, which were filled with air and bolted to a metal frame. The material allows sunlight to filter in and the sounds of splashing water to flow out.

China Central TV's new headquarters was planned by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who designed the Seattle Public Library, the Prada store in New York and the Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto, Portugal.

Its two 37-story towers of black glass on diamond-shaped steel beams bend toward each other and are joined at the top by a sloping horizontal section that ranges from nine to 14 stories. It looks like a pair of bermudas, and Chinese have dubbed it "Big Shorts."

Not everyone likes the city's changing look.

"Most of the venue designers are foreign, and they don't know Chinese culture well enough," said Zhang Song, a professor in the college of architecture and urban planning at Tongji University in Shanghai. "They tended to focus mainly on surrealism, avant-garde style and postmodernism. These things are very good for a short time, but as times passes by, I wonder if they will last as classic design."

Beijing's other new buildings include a gargantuan airport terminal, with slanted skylights atop an arching roof, meant to mimic scales on a dragon's back. In the heart of the city is a glass and titanium dome nicknamed "The Egg," the sprawling national theater entered by walking under a clear-bottomed moat.

The change is dizzying -- many of the structures have opened just within the past year -- but city planners shrug it off.

"I don't think it's anything to make a fuss about," said Tan Xuxiang, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Planning Commission. "It's like a growing child. I'm a 12- to 14-year-old kid. If you see me after two years and I haven't grown, then I definitely have some kind of illness, right?"

Some, though, lament the loss of old Beijing. While the imperial Forbidden City and other tourist sites remain, many of the old courtyard homes -- nestled amid the city's "hutongs," or alleyways -- have been lost.

The days when hutong dwellers filled the streets in the evenings are giving way to a more modern and anonymous urban lifestyle.

"When people think of Beijing, they should also understand the traditional aspect of Beijing -- the Forbidden City, the numerous hutongs," said Hu Xinyu, managing director of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center. "That's the real Beijing."

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