The city planner Edmund Bacon once described Beijing as “possibly the greatest single work of man on the face of the earth.” When he was there, in the nineteen-thirties, you could still see that the city, from the walls surrounding it to the emperor’s Forbidden City at its heart, was conceived as a totality—a work of monumental geometry, symmetrical and precise. Even the hutongs, the warrenlike neighborhoods of small courtyard houses set along alleyways, which made up the bulk of the city’s urban fabric, were as essential to Beijing as the temples and the imperial compound, which has the same intricate mixture of courtyards and lanes. Bejing was all of a piece.
It couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t. Mao Zedong tried to change Beijing into an industrial and governmental center, putting up factories and ponderous administrative buildings. But now Mao’s Beijing is nearly as much a part of the past as the Forbidden City. The factories are being pushed to the outskirts, and in their place the city has developed a skyline. It isn’t like the height-obsessed skyline of Shanghai, or the tight, congested skyline of Hong Kong. In Beijing, the towers are sprinkled all over the place. Most of them are mediocre, and some are ridiculous—a few have pagodalike crowns, to satisfy a former mayor who insisted that new buildings appear Chinese—but a handful are among the most compelling buildings going up anywhere in the world. In Beijing, the latest trend is architecture that will force the world to pay attention, and the result is a striking, unmistakably twenty-first-century city, combining explosive, relentless development with a fondness for the avant-garde. Beijing is as ruthlessly unsentimental today as it was in Mao’s time, with little patience for history if it gets in the way of development, and yet the city doesn’t feel as if it were defined solely by growth, like Shanghai, or like the kind of entirely manufactured environment that you see in Dubai. When I visited Beijing recently, the architect Ole Scheeren said to me, “I think Beijing is incredibly strong in its ability to completely override its own history and yet not surrender its identity.”
Scheeren is the co-architect, with Rem Koolhaas, of the most eagerly awaited building in Beijing, the headquarters of the Chinese television network CCTV, a monumental construction that has become world-famous long in advance of its completion, scheduled for late this year. A vast structure of steel and glass, it is a dazzling reinvention of the skyscraper, using size not to dominate but to embrace the viewer. The building will contain more office space than any other building in China and nearly as much as the Pentagon, but, as skyscrapers go, it is on the short side, with just fifty-one floors. Looking from a distance like a gigantic arch, it is a continuous loop, a kind of square doughnut. Two vertical sections, which contain offices, lean precariously inward, connected by two horizontal sections containing production facilities, one running along the ground, the other a kind of bridge in the sky. When you get closer, you see that each horizontal section is made up of two pieces that converge in a right angle. The top section, thirteen stories deep, is dramatically cantilevered out over open space, five hundred and thirty feet in the air, and it seems to reach over you like a benign robot. The novelty of the form—some Beijingers have taken to calling it Big Shorts—takes time to comprehend; the building seems to change as you pass it. “It comes across sometimes as big and sometimes as small, and from some angles it is strong and from others weak,” Scheeren said. “It no longer portrays a single image.”
You might think that, like a good deal of Koolhaas’s work, the building is as much showmanship as architecture, but it evinces a quiet, monumental grandeur. Some of that is due to the color of the glass, which is a soft gray, almost perfectly echoing the overcast Beijing sky. Around the glass, the diagonal grid of the building’s steel framework is visible, the lines getting denser in the cantilever, where the structural stresses are more extreme. Scheeren told me, “I had the fantasy that the façade would disappear against the gray sky and you would be left with only the black grid.”
Like the CCTV building, a new development designed by the New York architect Steven Holl—a cluster of linked apartment buildings—displays a boldness that would be unlikely to escape compromise in a Western city. And, like the CCTV building, its most notable feature is a bridge—or, rather, bridges—high in the air. Holl has built eight squarish towers and one round one (which will contain a hotel), each about twenty stories tall. The residential towers have identical aluminum façades in a grid pattern, with square windows set back and edged in bright colors that Holl says he took from Buddhist temples. Holl placed the towers in a ring around the property, connecting them with glass-enclosed bridges at various heights—a kind of public, or semi-public, street in the sky running all the way around the complex. Some bridges start on one floor and end on another, so that you walk up or down a ramp—a hill in the sky. Each bridge contains some facility that the tenants share—a gym, a café, a bookstore. The most eye-catching has a swimming pool, which feels as if it were floating in the air, seventeen stories above Beijing.
The idea of the street high above the city is intended to counteract the sense of isolation that high-rise living usually brings, and to create an incentive for residents to walk around the complex. “In Beijing, to go anywhere means taxis and traffic jams and pollution,” Hideki Hirahara, the project architect in Holl’s Beijing office, told me as we walked around the site, where construction crews were just beginning to enclose the steel bridges. “We wanted to create all city functions inside the project.”
The Seattle Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas 
 architect  has been awarded the "Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement" at the opening ceremony of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the , on August 28th. The decision was taken by the Board of the Biennale, upon the proposal of the Director of this year's exhibition, . The Board stated that "Rem Koolhaas has expanded the possibilities of architecture. He has focused on the exchanges between people in space. He creates buildings that bring people together and in this way forms ambitious goals for architecture. His influence on the world has come well beyond architecture." The  architect Kazuyo Sejima, who won this year's  is the Biennale's first female director. 

Rem Koolhaas is renown as one of the founders of the  (OMA) in 1975, and author of  ''Delirious New York'' (1978) and ''S,M,L,XL'' (1995). Among his most important buildings are the  at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the  in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille in Lille, the Villa dall’Ava in Paris, and the . One of his most recent projects is the  (CCTV) headquarters building in Beijing. 

The Board also awarded a special Golden Lion in memory of the Japanese architect, , who died in 2006. The Golden Lion for the best National Participation was this year awarded to the . Located in 's  and , the Biennale will be open until November 21.


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