Zaha Hadid Architects   China   Zaha Hadid Architects wins competition for Tower C at Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base, that will be a major business and technology center of the Chinese city, and will include residential and cultural developments as well as generous green zone

Steven Chilton Architects   China   Designed by the London-based studio Steven Chilton Architects (SCA), Sunac Guangzhou Grand Theatre is located in the Huadu district of Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. The concept for the theater is inspired by traditional silk embroidery, t

Vector architects   China   As so many other in the country, Shanxi Province experienced a full speed urban development, which led to the destruction of the spatial context that once inscribed the memory of people’s everyday lives. Changjiang Art Museum, as a cultural and share

MAD Architects   China   The practice established by Ma Yansong in 2004, MAD Architects, which runs offices in Beijing, Los Angeles, Rome, and Jiaxing, was commissioned by the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum to design this venue for its annual summits in Yabuli, in the nort

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   The Huanggang Port Area in the city of Shenzhen’s Futian District services 300,000 people crossing over to Hong Kong daily. The new masterplan, focused around two large public squares, marks out three interconnected parts: the harbor hub including of

Wutopia Lab   China   Compared with the gray stain that China’s megalopoli have become, dehumanized and tediously uniform, the new entrance to a sales center in Huzhou is a garden of radical imagination, and thus a veritable manifesto against the generic city. A forest of

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   China   The firm headed by Benedetta Tagliabue has won the competition for the renovation of Century Square in Shanghai, carrying the day over teams including David Chipperfield Architects. The scheme includes green spaces, a building for holding events that

Roarc Renew   China   On marshland where lotus plants abound, a pair of mid-20th-century granaries that were in disuse have been brought back to life as a 2,448-square-meter art exhibition gallery, thanks to a project carried out by the Shanghai-based firm Roarc Renew, wh

Foster + Partners   China   The firm of Norman Foster has won the competition to design Guangming Hub, a transport-oriented development on the high-speed rail link that connects Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, with three new metro lines incorporated. The latest technologi

Interval Architects   China   The Chinese government’s plan to transform wetlands outside the city of Hengshui into a botanical park included a gallery in which to showcase plants, pottery, and floral art. A work of Interval Architects, the Shanghai-based practice of Oscar Ko and

gmp Architekten   China   In the Chinese province of Jiangsu, in the eastern part of the country, Changzhou is a 2,500 year old city with a dense network of rivers that is becoming the new industrial and technological hub in the prosperous Yangtze River delta area. There in C

The Beijing studio Zhu-Pei has built a museum adjacent to what is left of the thousand-year-old imperial pottery-making complex of the prefectural city of Jingdezhen, a porcelain capital of the world, China’s Sevrès. The building is composed of a ser

On marshland where lotus plants abound, a pair of mid-20th-century granaries that were in disuse have been brought back to life as a 2,448-square-meter art exhibition gallery, thanks to a project carried out by the Shanghai-based firm Roarc Renew, wh

vimeo.com   The installation built by the French architect Aurelien Chen in Rizhao (China) is an abstract recreation of the traditional Chinese landscape. Two hundred perforated and illuminated stainless steel poles interspersed with flat canopies reflect the en

The New Yorker   Peter Hessler   Afew days before my return to classroom teaching at Sichuan University, I was biking across a deserted stretch of campus when I encountered a robot...

The Economist   The innovations pioneered by China’s tattooists are transforming the art of inked flesh everywhere...

Chinese president Xi Jinping a few years ago lambasted the ‘weird architecture’ that international stars were building in his country (see Arquitectura Viva 169), but his denouncement does not seem to have been much heeded. Otherwise there would be n

The partial liberalization of the market for architectural projects in China has in past years led to a hatching of young practices bent on exploring paths other than those of official corporativism or the ‘weird architecture’ of international stardo

Among the thousands of cultural facilities that have enriched China’s tourist infrastructure in the course of the past years, the Wencheng Forest Visitor Center in Xikeng, near the city of Wenzhou, stands out. Carried out by GLA Design, the building

At midnight Wuhan lifted its lockdown after 76 days of coronavirus-imposed confinement. Locals gradually reestablish normalcy as many leave the city, epicenter of the epidemic, to return to their homes. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The virus threat cancels frontiers. The vulnerability of our hyperconnected planet becomes exposed with computer and biological viruses alike. In both cases, the physical or political boundaries of territories and societies seem incapable of containi

After the enormously successful architectural and corporate adventure that Apple was, the British firm Foster + Partners has won the bid to raise headquarters for another giant of our globalized world, Alibaba, a China-based leader in online retail a

Fu Xinian   Twelve essays