GN Architects   China   The elderly of Chaishan Island still fondly remember that its rugged coast – now only visited by the occasional ferry – was up to not long ago a thriving port, where arriving sailors were welcomed under the trees that stood at the entrance into the v

Heatherwick Studio   China   A new district, designed by Heatherwick Studio, has opened in Xi’an, honoring the Chinese city’s legacy of craftsmanship and ceramics. The Xi’an Centre Culture Business District (CCBD) is south of the historic core, between the ruins of the Temple of

Liu Jiakun   China   Erected after the devastating earthquake that struck Wenchuan – a county in China’s Sichuan province – in 2008, this memorial honors Hu Huishan, a 15-year-old high-schooler who perished in the cataclysm. The pavilion’s shape recalls the emergency ten

Liu Jiakun   China   Located at the foot of some old caverns used for the storage of liquors, a new facility makes it possible to immerse oneself in the mountainous site and get close to them. Thought out to establish a connection with both the slope and the views of the

Liu Jiakun   China   The declining environs of two temples have been revitalized through the insertion of new community programs, which punctuate a picturesque succession of courtyards and covered galleries. A museum, a hotel, a café, and a bookstore fit themselves into

Liu Jiakun   China   The paving stones that were used in the Forbidden City in Beijing came from a manufacturing plant whose centenary history is presented by premises that explore the poetics of baked brick. The museum features a marshy park, fenced in like traditional

Liu Jiakun   China   The facilities of the oldest Chinese distillery still in operation are surrounded by new production buildings with pitched roofs, where traditional fermenting and liquor-making practices are perpetuated. A courtyard connects the various volumes, whos

Liu Jiakun   China   New additions to the Jianchuan museums, which house the country’s largest private collection, are three interconnected pavilions harboring the memory of the Cultural Revolution. Like temples in bustling areas, the galleries showing historical items a

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   China   The Jinji Lake Pavilion designed by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group – has opened. This is one of the eleven permanent pavilions forming a 13-kilometer promenade around Suzhou’s waterfront. The 1,200-square-meter building presents four interconnected parts

Delugan Meissl   China   The Austrian firm Delugan Meissl has transformed an old industrial facility in disuse, located in Shanghai’s Pudong district, into a greenhouse with curving glass pavilions reaching a height of 35 meters. This unique space, the Expo Cultural Park Gre

Snøhetta   China   If in the impressive Bibliotheca Alexandrina Snøhetta proved that roofs can become facades, in the symbolic Norwegian National Opera and Ballet they demonstrated that roofs can also be plazas, and almost twenty-five years later the echoes of both des

MUDA-Architects   China   The Lujiatan Wetland Park Commercial Service Center, designed by MUDA-Architects under the direction of Lu Yun, is situated in Wenjiang District, Chendu City. The environs of the Jinma and Minjiang inspired the fluid and rhythmic forms of the complex

One Plus Partnership   China   Just as Chillida paid tribute to the sea with geometrical shapes carved in alabaster, a moviehouse in Haikou alludes to the island’s coastal nature with similar abstraction and a heavy material presence: ceramic waves that form floors and ceiling vau

Donghua Chen Studio   China   In a limited span of time, during summer vacation, the Nanhai Primary School in Shenzhen, China, was renovated. A series of operations were carried out to make the most of all useful floor area, activate residual spaces, and install solar protection.

gmp Architekten   China   In the eastern part of the city of Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, a recently completed station becomes part of the country’s high-speed rail network. With a gross floor area of approximately 100,000 square meters, it provides eight platfo

SHISUO Design Office   China   On an underused plot on one side of the Lu Xun Memorial Museum stands this pavilion that hosts a variety of cultural activities. The local firm SHISUO Design office – established by Sanif and Shangshan in 2023 – had to work on a limited budget and a

Open Architecture   China   The design for this 50-meter-tall cultural hub with a cone shape took into account how the sun changes course during the year. Located in China’s northeastern city of Yantai, the Sun Tower was conceived as a giant sundial composed of two connected la

PL-T Architecture   China   In the small Tibetan village of Quzkika, in Markam County, this enological complex with a gross built area of 8,334 square meters is embedded into terraces. At the foot of Dameiyong Snow Mountain, near Lancang River, the winery blends into the natura

Kengo Kuma   China   Located in the south of the Chinese province of Jiangsu, the city of Yixing is known as the ‘ceramic capital’ and renowned for its production of pottery using purple clay. A work of Kengo Kuma, this museum presents shapes inspired by Shushan Mountain

TAO | Trace Architecture Office   China   In 2021, the company Librairie Avant-Garde commissioned the Beijing-based firm TAO | Trace Architecture Office to build a series of bookstores, including that of the Academia Chongzheng in Weishan and the recently completed one in Yangpo. Atop the Ga

Selgascano   China   The Spanish firm Selgascano has won the competition to build a cultural center in Beijing that will redefine the cityscape of Beijing’s Xicheng district. At ground level, a grand public exhibition space with transparent facades invites the community

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   China   Fudan university is part of a wide network of universities and their respective buildings located in Shanghai and its environs. It is also a very special university with an extensive history and a very unique character. Aside from the main campus, th

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   China   Considered to be one of the most prominent and sought-after Chinese artists of the 20th century, Zhang Daqian was a close friend of Pablo Picasso, whom he met in Paris in 1956. This encounter marked the start of an intense artistic exchange and also

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If the launch of the artificial satellite Sputnik on 4 October 1957 set off the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, that of the generative artificial intelligence DeepSeek’s R1 model on 27 January 2025 sparked the cyberspace ra

In the arena between traditionalism and the imported architecture spreading all over China, Gong Dong (Beijing, 1972) had the wisdom to find virtue in the middle way, balancing his local training with a fruitful sojourn in America. The ideas and form

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Marco Bellocchio released China Is Near in 1967, a satire of bourgeois decadence which mixed Catholic morals, electoral opportunism, and Maoist revolutionary dreams. The ironic proximity of China referred to its ideological influence on the young rad

The Guardian   Nicola Davis   Uncrewed Chang’e-6 lander is carrying rock and soil samples in ‘very important achievement’ after lunar liftoff China’s uncrewed Chang’e-6 probe is on its way back to Earth carrying the first samples from the far side of the moon, in a major achievem

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   Welcome to Aranya, in Beidaihe Qinhuangdao, a surreal gated community that has turned this remote stretch of coastline into an unlikely mecca for China’s fashionable gen Z. The area was once home to a failed property development but, over the last fe

Jesús Díaz   AutoFlight’s five-seater Prosperity eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft completed a significant milestone by autonomously flying the 50km (31 miles) route from Shenzhen to Zhuhai. The flight from Shenzhen to Zhuhai across the Pear

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   His stunning $1bn restoration project in Shanghai is a hit with the city’s influencers. But not everyone is impressed. The revered architect talks about the highs, lows and many risks of building for China... The Guardian. ‘I didn’t feel like I

The dystopias that J.G. Ballard imagined could well have been set in the Shanghai where he was born. With its babelic chaos, vertiginous pace, and constant mutation, the economic capital of the Asian giant is one of the world’s new frontiers, a metro

Luis Fernández-Galiano   After the worst part of the pandemic, the Ukraine war shook the world tracing an ominous geopolitical scenario, which only science advances seem to alleviate.  

In 1949, years after he was given his first camera, Fan Ho (Shanghai, 1931) emigrated to Hong Kong with this family, like so many others escaping the consequences of the Chinese War. This demographic shift worsened living standards dramatically and p

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The China of Xi Jinping, reelected for a new mandate in time with the centenary of the Communist Party, challenges the West with its own set of values. 

Few architects can claim to have materialized their most ambitious ideas at a young age, but Ma Yansong (Beijing, 1975), by the time he had passed his 40s, was already at the helm of a practice based in three countries and boasting a long list of com

Alberto Ballesteros   Ancient Mandarin had no word for ‘architect.’ Builders were craftsmen, skilled but unschooled folk who did not mix with erudites and elites. So in China it took time for Western-style architectural practice to take root, through the decaffeinated mod

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Lack of global governance is blocking the adoption of measures that would curb the effects of the planet’s already advanced process of climate change. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Ukrainian crisis has to be tackled with perspective. This is precisely what Daniel Yergin does in The New Map, subtitled ‘Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations’ because the confrontation between nations is explained from the angle of its ener

South China Morning Post   Xinlu Liang   China Evergrande Group, the world’s most indebted developer, was ordered to demolish 39 buildings on Ocean Flower Island, a project comprising three man-made islands developed by the company in China’s southern Hainan province, within 10 days. The or

The Chinese architect Zhu Pei, born in 1962 and trained at Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley, set up his practice in Beijing in 2005, and from there he has produced an extraordinary corpus of cultural works that have made him one of the leading fig

The Economist   From the outside, it resembles an army base, an expanse the size of 45 football pitches filled with rows of austere, grey, three-storey buildings. The facility (pictured) on the outskirts of the southern city of Guangzhou is China’s first purpose-bui

The Economist   Can it be done without harming the wider economy? October 6th 1979 was a beautiful Saturday in Washington. It was not the kind of day that augured wrenching change in economic policy. But on that date Paul Volcker, then chairman of America’s central

CNN   A maglev bullet train that can reach speeds of 600 kilometers per hour (373 miles per hour) has made its debut in Qingdao, China. Developed by the state-owned China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation, it's considered the world's fastest train. "Maglev

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The contest between the United States and China traces the outlines of the second Cold War. Both Xi Jinping’s assertive expansionism and Joe Biden’s determined policy of containment paint an oft-repeated historical fresco, that of a power on the rise

South China Morning Post   Sandy Li   Buildings taller than 500 metres (1,640 feet) will no longer be approved, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Towers over 250 metres must be limited, while buildings taller than 100 metres must match the scale and fire

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Millenary China celebrates a centenary. Founded in Shanghai on 1 July 1921, the Chinese Communist Party reaches the anniversary after having led a historic transformation that has turned the country into a political, economic, and technological super

Li Xiangning   Zúrich  2023  
Park Books   - 280 Pages 

Catherine Shaw (ed.)   Reinventing cultural architecture

Vladimir Belogolovsky   San Francisco  2021  
ORO Editions Publishers   - 250 Pages 

Daniel Yergin   Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

Fu Xinian   Twelve essays