Julia Lovell

Richard Rogers, Toyo Ito, Dominique Perrault

Ask foreign starchitects what has drawn them to China and you tend to get vague exhalations about how China is opening up politically, economically, culturally; about how it is travelling in the right direction. “Architects want to be in the forefront, to be contemporary,” Ben van Berkel remarks. “And if you want to be that, you have to be aware of China. China, at the same time, wants to collaborate, to get better in every aspect of its culture … We should learn from China. It’s not just an economic quickness there, there’s also a drive, an ambition. There’s energy and intelligence.”31 China, Koolhaas has observed, is a “parallel universe” compared with the “backward-looking US”.32 “As a professor at Harvard, I have spent more than ten years carefully studying the direction in which China is developing. I’m convinced that it’ll be positive in the end.”33 (This is a prediction that no Harvard Sinologist — with a lifetime of studying China — would venture to make.) “In China, there’s a debate about progress that isn’t happening elsewhere,” David Gianotten remarks. “I don’t want to compare China with the West. Judgements are irrelevant here … We should embrace the Chinese context, what’s going on; the openness is very exciting.”