These days, fanfare and trumpets typically accompany architects when they begin new projects in China — and with good reason. In recent years, China, along with a smattering of other regions including the Middle East and Russia, has become a global architectural frontier, with star architects like Rem Koolhaas, Paul Andreu and Norman Foster all leaving their mark on the nation’s rapidly expanding cities. But when Zaha Hadid’s new opera house in Guangzhou opened in early March, her name was added to a growing list of high-profile names that is glaringly void of Chinese talent. In an era of larger-than-life buildings springing up in the Chinese landscape, where have all the Chinese architects gone?
They’re still around, with rising architects like Yansong Ma starting to gain recognition alongside their Western counterparts. Aside from winning several international commissions, Ma was recognized by the Architectural League of New York with a Young Architect award in 2006. But in China, where courting famous foreign architects has everything to do with the nation’s geopolitical ambitions, Ma’s success is the exception, not the rule. Modernization in Asia, often symbolized by large-scale architectural landmarks, has long been associated with the West — a phenomenon that can be found throughout recent Asian history.
In the late 1800s, Meiji-era Japan called in German architects Wilhelm Bckmann and Hermann Ende to serve as consultants. Their goal was to herald Japan’s restoration with a symbolic redesign of Japan’s government buildings. Though little came from that collaboration, Hong Kong University Assistant Professor Cole Roskam says that in these exchanges, the relationship tends to work both ways. “It gives well-known architects an international platform and an often generous budget to realize their designs,” Roskam says. “It also provides the government with a critical connection to a presumable trend-setter in international cultural production.”
Though China’s own architectural history is rich, the discipline has yet to fully recover from the effects of Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Intended to cleanse all aspects of capitalism from society, one of the far-reaching effects of the decade-long social upheaval was its disruption of the industrial arts: purged for their capitalist associations, many specialized disciplines, including architecture, became casualties of the movement. Nearly half a century later, architecture has still not fully rebounded, a fact that is compounded by China taking its aesthetic cues from the West, instead of back home.
