Splendidly Fantastic by Julia Lovell

Author:Julia Lovell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9785990336452
Publisher: Strelka Press
Published: 2014-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

A very few of these architects will openly admit that the appeal of China as a working environment springs from its authoritarianism; Rem Koolhaas is a member of that candid minority. “Today’s architecture is subservient to the market and its terms,” he has complained about working in the West. “Architecture has turned into a spectacle.”35 In China, by contrast, the architect thrives under a benevolent despotism. “What attracts me about China is that there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost no other body that we know of today could ever afford or contemplate … On our own, we can at most have good intentions. But we cannot represent the public good, without the larger entity, such as the state. To make matters worse, the more radical, innovative and brotherly our sentiments, the more we architects need a strong sponsor.”36 No architect, as far as I am aware, has admitted that China’s ability to finance their fantasies substantially depends also on its access to low-paid labour; on the maintenance of a delta-epsilon class of rural migrant workers who, despite the hardships and dangers of working on big urban construction projects, can still earn considerably more than they would in the under-developed countryside. And so they keep coming to cities like Beijing, despite exploitative contracts, poor safety regulations and living conditions, and their exclusion from the systems of medical and educational benefits that regular urbanites receive.

“Interview with Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas”.

Sudjic, The Edifice Complex,113-1–14.

Such rationalisations have not gone unchallenged. Observers, rather than beneficiaries, of China’s recent architectural frenzy, take a more critical view of its relationship with the state. Ian Buruma has succinctly expressed the moral ambiguity of Koolhaas’s CCTV commission:

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