Foster+Partners, Beijing International Airport

I first visited the country in 1978, invited by the Chinese Communist Party. It was a moment of transition, Mao having died two years before and with Deng Xiaoping in the process of consolidating his power. In a snowy Beijing we walked through the Forbidden City, verified that its metro system was less ostentatious than Moscow’s, and heard Chinese leaders opining on international politics before moving on to Shanghai, where the huge bamboo scaffolds of high-rise constructions could only leave us awe-struck. We admired the China of Edgar Snow’s books, Joris Ivens’s documentaries, and even Joseph Needham’s histories of science, and the following year, at Hermann Blume, I published two books that summed up the concerns of those times, Ciudad y territorio en China, translated from the Italian original, and Ciencia y pueblo en China, from the English.

But it took three decades for me to return, and that was in 2010, for the Expo of Shanghai, in a trip extended to include Beijing so we could visit the architectural works carried out for the Olympic Games two years before. Just a year later, I was back in the Chinese capital to sit on the jury for the new building of the National Art Museum of China, where, incidentally, I was the only European. I would recount these experiences in El País and Arquitectura Viva, through over a dozen articles and about the same number of monographic issues of the magazine, published in the past twenty years. Three of the dossiers were on Vector, a Beijing office we have paid special attention to, and it was on their invitation that in June we got to visit the six cities portrayed here in the manner of small impressionist watercolors...[+]