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The People's Republic of China announced this month the ban on lifting towers over 500 meters high and the application of very severe restrictions for projects over 250 meters. To have a stopover: the four towers of the old Real Madrid Sports City, at the north end of Paseo de La Castellana, touch but do not exceed the 250-meter mark. The tallest skyscraper in Europe, the Kommerzbank in Frankfurt, measures 259 meters and across the continent there are only 20 buildings over 200 meters. In China, on the other hand, they have 678 two hundred . Five of them measure more than 500 meters and three more are currently under construction, despite the ban. The Suzhou Hungnam Center, in Jiangsu province, is the first major project that has cut its longings for greatness and has resigned itself to measure 499 meters compared to the planned 730 meters.
The measure includes a coda: China also prohibits architectural plagiarism. As is the case with many news from Beijing, it is difficult to determine its content: the plagiarism figure probably does not refer to the more or less cloned architecture of the infinite housing towers but to pop architecture : the recreations of Eiffel towers and palaces Versailles that sometimes come to us in soulless photographs.
How to interpret regulations like this? Does the Chinese Government promote a new way of living in its cities? " President Xi Jinping has spoken several times about architecture , it is a subject in which he has personal interest. He once spoke out against extravagant and imported architecture and defended a more austere work and typical of local culture. I imagine that these prohibitions go along those lines, "explains EL MUNDO architect and critic Eduardo Prieto, who knows the work of his Chinese colleagues through academic exchange.
"The priority of the State in architecture has been to offer decent accommodation to millions of people living in almost medieval conditions. That was the national emergency, a hygienist revolution like the one that occurred in Europe in 1900 and that China has completed very quickly. The bad thing is that this objective was such a priority that everything else did not matter: if urban planning is chaotic, what is it going to do? If pollution is an obvious problem, what is it going to do ... What really Impressive Chinese cities are not the 700-meter mega-skyscrapers. What impresses is the succession of 30, 40-story towers, which one sees all the time, as if one were in an urban jungle , "explains Prieto.
Why do Chinese cities look so rough to visitors? "Because it is the only way for that huge population to fit on the strip of coastline where most people live. The flight from Beijing to Hong Kong takes four hours and there is not a single time when you don't see a city through the window. It is as if we put a billion people on the coast of Spain and France, "explains José Antonio Sosa, Professor of Projects at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Sosa worked on a project in Beijing in 2008, in an intervention on the hutongs in the Chinese capital in which other European colleagues participated, including Rem Koolhas. "Until that time, China imported architecture, it brought European architects to do its great works. They took us to a gala party, put us on a podium and treated us as if we were in Hollywood. It was a bit embarrassing ... But At that moment everything began to change. There was a generation of highly educated Chinese architects in the United States who were coming to the market ":
After the 2008 Olympics, China stopped buying architecture. No more those stories that were told at that time about Chinese clients (it was never known whether private or representatives of the Administration) who came to Europe and commissioned young architects with basic projects that they mispaid . Then they expanded and cloned them in huge developments. "It also happened to Eduardo Souto de Moura. He made a basic for a four-story building and later discovered that they had built two blocks of eight," recalls Sosa.
His colleague from Tenerife Fernando Menis has also worked in China as an architect and as a teacher: "The prohibition of architectural plagiarism, if it comes now, in part, I think it is due to a natural evolution of a developing country, it is growing and going taking increasingly sophisticated measures. We might be tempted to think that a society's civic culture precedes and produces prosperity but, in my opinion, it takes a certain economic level first to arrive at a code of practice shared by the majority "
"Regarding the height of the buildings," Menis continues, "the ban may have to do with various concerns. For example, the density in cities, which the Covid-19 epidemic has called into question. It may also have to do with safety. Very tall buildings are more difficult to manage and make it more difficult to ensure safety in emergencies. "
"In our office in Shanghai we have local clients and Spanish groups with investments in China. We make hotels, mixed-use buildings, some master plans and participate in competitions," explains Madrid architect Gonzalo Echarri, from the Ortiz León studio. "The deadlines with which we work in China are very fast and intense, we need to give an immediate response . We always work with alternative versions and give many turns to each decision. It builds well in offices and worse in residential, it is not That image is true that everything is very precarious. The administrative processes are complex, but we do not suffer much because we normally limit ourselves to the initial design phases of the project, and the Chinese Design Institute is in charge of these functions. "
Does the ban on the 500-meter towers mean that the Chinese want to have other types of cities? "The 500-meter towers, even in China, are very exceptional. I have no data to say that there is a new urban sensibility," Echarri replies. "We insist a lot on making a responsible architecture on environmental issues and apparently they are sensitive to these things . In fact they have their own certification equivalent to LEED."
Echarri comes to say that, basically, the ban on mega-skyscrapers has a pragmatic reason : there is a height from which the towers become inefficient. "The function / shape ratio is no longer profitable, with a very poor useful / built ratio on the lower floors of the building and with investments that are not profitable". A 250-meter tower can offer very high usage performance and a footprint low environmental. In contrast, a 500-meter tower is very expensive to inhabit and maintain and needs immense structures, here and in Beijing.
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