Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 26

22 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.