Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 28
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Popular Culture Review
means of obtaining residency in places like Shenzhen, connoting high social stand
ing in China. Shenzhen’s policy, nicknamed the “Green Card Dream” is “to buy a
house and get registered (i.e., to be given permission to reside within Shenzhen).
Architecture is “produced” in the P.R.D. under unprecedented pressures of time,
speed, and quantity; for a large “developing” country like China, speed makes
sense. In the field of construction, speed is the result of straightforward construc
tion technology, freer choices of materials, and unlimited labor resources. The
confidence in construction speed in turn motivates the speed of design. Constantly
updated CAD programs and monographs of world architects, from which to emu
late the particulars of designs, magnifies the speed of design in Shenzhen. Most
“face” projects are done by design institutes, the only legal entity recognized by
the Chinese government for the practice of architecture; their fees are relatively
low. The profit-driven expression “time is money” is the typical client’s motto.
Architects are thus offered attractive incentive by developers to ^"chaogeng'\ or
moonlight, for services outside of design institutes. These are often referred to as
“stomach” projects, which are undertaken strictly for monetary purposes, often
earning the architect ten- to twenty-times the average income from “legal” prac
tice.
Chaogeng has never been a legal form of practice, as a designer involved in a
legal dispute resulting from a chaogeng project could bring criticism to the design
institute. However, Chinese people are eminently practical; the risk is almost al
ways worth it. And “speedy design” is practiced with enthusiasm in Shenzhen.
Clients are willing to pay more for faster service, with the motivation of profit
making. There is great pressure to complete revenue-generating structures quickly.
Chaogeng has become so popular that almost all architects have doubled-up on
projects outside of the design institutes. For example, although a residential highrise was considered a rather complicated building type, it has become one of the
easiest tasks for chaogeng architects.
The prevailing attitude is, “there is only so much one can do . . . since the plan
is pretty much the same for all buildings of this type, all of the work really is done
on giving the building a ‘hat’ and/or some variation in the facade”. For example,
the master plan for a project consisting of 300 single-family houses only took a
team of 5 designers to finish in one night. The complete design and drawings for
the typical detached house in that development required one day. The detailed
drawings for the entire project to be used as construction documents took 15 total
days to complete. The architect’s ability to finish any task quickly has become an
issue to be bragged about in normal conversations. The particular ways and pro
cesses and “clever tricks” in which one can finish a set of construction documents
within a very short time are popular stories shared among designers. Said one
architect, “Architectural details become a non-issue because there is no time foray