Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 26
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Popular Culture Review
their 2001 book entitled Great Leap Forward, which vividly describes the current
situation in the P.R.D., the Chinese architect is now the most important architect
on earth, and our Western notion of the practice of architecture, of architecture
itself, is thus being challenged. Architecture in Shenzhen has now been transformed
by capital, speed, and quantity.
The Chinese architect designs the largest volume of building, for the lowest
fee, in the shortest time. For example, his/her average lifetime construction vol
ume in housing alone is approximately thirty-five 30-story high-rise apartment
buildings, or about one high-rise tower per year per architect (and just in hous
ing!). Each residential tower will take, on average, one Shenzhen architect seven
days to finish the design and to complete a set of construction documents. One
could reasonably conclude that the Chinese architect, therefore, is the most impor
tant, influential, and powerful architect on earth.
Now ask yourself, “how many Chinese architects are mentioned in American
schools of architecture, either by name or in terms of how he/she goes about “do
ing the work’”? Here are the statistics: there are 1/10th the number of architects in
China as in the U.S. (in terms of the number of architects as a percentage of total
population; about 0.039^ to 0.003%), designing 5 times the volume of projects (in
terms of total construction per architect in millions of square meters; about 1150 to
230), earning 1/10th the design fee (in terms of design fee as a percent of total
construction; 6% to 1%), and in 1/lOth the time. If Koolhaas’ numbers and analy
sis are correct, the average Chinese architect is about 2,500 times more “efficient”
than that of an average American architect. If this factor were even close to being
true in Chinese industry, such as in car manufacturing, for example, without a
doubt American industrialists would be getting on the next plane to China to see
how they do it, and to analyze what benefits and costs, direct and indirect, that
efficiency generates.
But how much of this makes the American architectural press and how much
attention are American architects paying to this phenomenon? This pause to assess
is needed. Following Deng Xiaoping’s proclamation that “to get rich is glorious”,
profit-seeking has become a legitimate goal for everyone. The profit from real
estate development in China is seldom less than 30%, a significant return-on-in
vestment compared with the international profit average of 6% to 8%. Architec
ture in Shenzhen has become the channel for investment; building construction
has become such a profit-making tool that a building’s primary function is no
longer to serve human needs. Traditional concepts associated with architecture —
such as Vitruvius’ famous triad of “firmness”/permanence, “commodity”/usefulness, and “delighf’/beauty — have been suppressed to emphasize quantitative
measures like construction volume, capital investment, construction time, cost,
and profit return.