There is a world shortage of cranes, you can’t get scaffolding for love nor
money, and I’m waiting for news of a run on milky teas with three sugars.
The planet has become a building site.
Britain is enjoying its biggest building boom since the 1980s, thanks to the
Olympics, skyscrapers in every town and the Government’s public building
programme. But this is just the tip of the world construction iceberg.
Countries from the US to Kazakhstan are in a building frenzy. They are all
eclipsed, however, by the greatest building site of all: China, whose
appetite is so insatiable that it is gobbling up half the world’s concrete
and still has room for a third of its steel for pudding.
This is a boom time for architecture. Dubai, Beijing, Shanghai and Moscow are
staking their claim to a place on the architectural stage, with no absurdity
too extreme. Revolving, iPod-shaped and half-mile high buildings are going
up everywhere.
To mark the boom, The Times has picked the ten biggest, most significant
building projects now under way. All are impressive. Most are gargantuan. A
few are ugly as sin. But some are actually rather good. And all are going to
change architecture, and the world, as we know it.
2008 OLYMPIC STADIUM, BEIJING
Herzog & De Meuron
If anyone knows about the ability of a command economy rolling in money and
cheap labour to achieve the architecturally impossible, it’s Herzog &
De Meuron.
Even as you read this, an army is slaving day, night and every second in
between so that the viewers at home will have something pretty to look at in
the background while the runners are limbering up at the Olympics next year.
Vital statistics 330 metres (1,083ft) long, 220 metres wide, 69.2
metres tall, 250,000 square metres in area, 100,000 capacity. All well and
good, but have they got as many lavatories as Wembley?
Beauty or beast Let’s agree on “handsome”.
Will it change the face of architecture? Herzog & De Meuron are
test-driving countless technological advances through it, all to realise
their dreams of an architecture whose façade and structure are one.
The wow factor Well, the Lea Valley’s got a job on its hands.
THE GRAND EGYPTIAN MUSEUM, GIZA, EGYPT
Heneghan Peng
The conundrum for Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum is not the same as the one
faced by the Ancient Egyptians, who, with the Pyramids, practically invented
iconic architecture. It’s rather the opposite: how to build with panache in
a site of utmost sensitivity beside one of the birthplaces of architecture.
Heneghan Peng – not a big name, but a mid-sized firm from Dublin – beat
illustrious competition to win this job with a design that just about
squares the circle, or the pyramid. It is a massive series of
landscape-hugging halls planned like the scratch of a big cat’s paw, its
roof pixellated into triangles.
Vital statistics The largest archaeological museum in the world, with
the Pyramids to boot. Beat that, Beijing.
Beauty or beast Babe. Love that transparent alabaster.
Will it change the face of architecture? No. But this is what true
architecture is all about: place-sensitive, uplifting and sorely needed.
The wow factor You betcha – though doffing its cap to the wow of wows,
the Pyramids.
BURJ DUBAI, DUBAI
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
China may have the biggest everything else, but the United Arab Emirates will
at least have the fastest lifts at 40mph, and the tallest man-made structure
for about 30 seconds before some mayor in China goes a millimetre higher. So
cautious are Burj Dubai’s developers, they are not revealing the final
height until the last rivet has been hammered in. Still, they can rest
assured that they have the most hideous skyscraper on Earth – a twee Emerald
City lookalike churned out by the architectural megafirm SOM.
Vital statistics That would be telling. More than 700 metres, or maybe
800, with possibly 160 floors or maybe 200. So far it’s 484.1 metres. Random
fact from the website: the concrete weighs the same as 100,000 elephants.
Beauty or beast Monument. Jewel. Right ugly bugger. Like Vera Duckworth
dressed to the nines.
Will it change the face of architecture? Please God, no.
The wow factor I’ll give it that.
THE SIMON WIESENTHAL MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE, JERUSALEM
Gehry Partners
They’ve picked their moment. Hamas and Fatah at daggers drawn, Israeli fighter
jets bombing Gaza.
Not that getting here’s been easy. Why did laid-back Frank Gehry dip his toe
into the biggest political cauldron? To help him, he says, to reconnect with
his Jewish roots.
The brickbats began flying in milliseconds. American-financed cultural
imperialism! Architecture as group hug! Now the building is in a court
battle because nobody checked that they weren’t building on Muslim graves.
Vital statistics About 3 acres (1.2 hectares).
Beauty or beast In the words of the critic Michael Sorkin, it
“uncomfortably evokes the ‘deconstruction’ of Yassir Arafat’s headquarters
in Ramallah into a pile of rubble by Israeli forces”.
Will it change the face of architecture? Depending on your love for
Gehry, it is typically eclectic – or a washing machine.
The wow factor More the Frank-what-are-you-doing factor.
TERMINAL 3, BEIJING CAPITAL INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Foster and Partners
Anything Rem can do, Norman can do bigger. The country building the biggest
dam, the longest bridge and the biggest shopping mall (though check with
Dubai first) simply must have the biggest building site, constructing the
biggest airport building in the biggest airport.
Apparently the Chinese authorities edited down the scheme for fear of being
ostentatious. The biggest feat, though, is that they persuaded Foster to
ditch his trademark neutrals for Chinese reds and golds, and got him to make
the building in the shape of a dragon.
Vital statistics One million square metres, 7 storeys, 2.4 miles
(3.9km) long, 35,000 builders, 53 million passengers by 2015.
Beauty or beast Nothing Foster does is ever strictly ugly, Gateshead’s
Sage concert hall aside.
Will it change the face of architecture? It’s been a decade or two
since Foster did that. This is just one of his tents – a big tent.
The wow factor In spades.
THE TATE MODERN EXTENSION, LONDON
Herzog & De Meuron
The architects’ return to Tate Modern, which gave them their first big break,
tells us a lot about how London has changed.
Back in the conservative late 1990s, Britain thought that Norman Foster was a
subversive renegade. Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director, went for a more
conservative competition entry when he chose Herzog & De Meuron’s Tate
Modern design. He’s making up for that now with the extension.
Some have compared this faintly ziggurat complex of glass façades to a pile of
children’s building blocks. That should be taken as a compliment.
Vital statistics A lot more space and hopefully escalators that don’t
leap confusingly up two floors.
Beauty or beast Some swear that they can see Serota’s ghostly image in
the computer rendering.
Will it change the face of architecture? No, but it will be the most
radical building in London in decades.
The wow factor Loads.
MAXXI, THE MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO, ROME
Zaha Hadid
Not long ago nobody built Zaha Hadid’s buildings. Now from Kirkcaldy to
Cagliari we can’t move for fear of poking our eye out on one of her
buildings’ impossibly cantilevered angles.
Like most of Hadid’s creations, MAXXI has been tricky to construct, which is
one of the reasons it is rather late. It’s usually worth the wait, though, for
the architectural theatrics, here in the form of a plate of intertwining
corridors, whose labyrinthine tangles are less art gallery, more art
installation.
Vital statistics How long is a piece of spaghetti?
Beauty or beast Raunchy. As if Zaha could be anything else.
Will it change the face of architecture? It promises “polyvalent
density” and “the emancipation of the wall”, which translates as walls that
become ceilings that become floors.
The wow factor More the ouch factor.
CCTV, BEIJING
Office for Metropolitan Architecture
Rem Koolhaas is famous for his consciously awkward-looking, “antiiconic”
buildings such as the Public Library in Seattle and the Casa da Musica in
Oporto, Portugal.
CCTV, the headquarters for China’s state broadcaster, has three entwined Ls
interlocking like an Escher painting, leaving a giant, structurally
ambitious cantilevered hole in the middle. It is packed inside with
Koolhaas’s brand of exhilarating jump-cut architecture.
There’s also a kind of Mini-Me building next door, TVCC, with restaurants,
hotels and theatres.
Vital statistics 230 metres tall, 550,000 square metres.
Beauty or beast Think of Jabba the Hutt more than Sophia Loren. This
is, after all, an “antiicon”.
Will it change the face of architecture? Soon we’ll have skylines like
freak shows. Bring it on.
The wow factor More antiwow.
BISHOPSGATE TOWER, LONDON
Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects (KPF)
AKA the Curly Wurly or the Helter Skelter, this is included here less for its
size – it’s just another skyscraper low down on the world scale – than its
potential impact on London’s skyline. Renzo Piano’s Shard of Glass across
the Thames may be taller, but at least Piano has a pair of eyes in his head.
Bishopsgate Tower, by another drone-like megafirm, KPF, is perfectly
indicative of the state of the City. Loadsamoney – bugger all taste. It’s
great that the City boys are spending money on buildings again, but this is
the equivalent of turning up at the boardroom with a gold lamé suit and
platform soles.
Vital statistics Just 288 metres. But, with its curling, drill-bit
shape, infinitely ugly.
Beauty or beast One man’s Vera is another man’s Keira.
Will it change the face of architecture? No, but it will change the
face of London.
The wow factor Sadly, that’s all the City’s after.
GROUND ZERO, NEW YORK
Various, including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Foster & Partners,
Fumihiko Maki, Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, Santiago Calatrava,
Daniel Libeskind
In the end New York got the memorial it wanted: a cast-iron property portfolio
with a couple of plaques attached. Daniel Libeskind’s masterplan always
seemed too theme-parky for the comfort of property developers. Minoru
Yamasaki’s World Trade Centre was an OK piece of corporate architecture
imbued with significance thanks to the events of one day. And its
replacement will turn out to be the same.
Vital statistics 541 metres for Freedom Tower.
Beauty or beast Unremarkable, uncontroversial, but loaded in every
sense.
Will it change the face of architecture? No. Just the world.
The wow factor Discreetly so. At least they dropped the icky symbolism.
