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

Vector Architects   China   Una sucesión de verandas, umbrales, atrios al aire libre y estanques, rematada en una iridiscente torre de pavés, imbrica los distintos usos e invita a los huéspedes a explorar estancias de escala y materialidad cambiantes... La oferta de alojamiento

Vector Architects   China   With a certain air of the industrial vestiges that can be found in the region, the spa is organized in two ‘towers’ interconnected by footbridges, which separate the served from the servant spaces. The ritual of bathing is marked by an ascending sequ

Vector Architects   China   Protected by concrete shading panels, thirty-six classrooms are raised along the plot’s perimeter to free up the ground level, at the landscaped center of which begins a chain of ramps for vertical circulation. From an elevated running track encircli

MVRDV Huayi Design   China   MVRDV – in collaboration with Huavi Design – has won the competition to design the Shenzhen Pingshan Sports Park in the east of Shenzhen, which is to include an arena for badminton tournaments and other athletic championships as well as the new Chine

Foster + Partners   China   The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has officially opened new offices in Shanghai’s Xuhui Riverside district. Designed from the inside out, the building is modular and lightweight, seeking to give an image of openness and transparency. It features a

TAO | Trace Architecture Office   China   The Beijing firm TAO | Trace Architecture Office has renovated the historic Weishan Chongzheng Academy, founded over 500 years ago, transforming the building into a bookstore for Librairie Avant-Garde, with reading rooms, a small theater, exhibition

TAOA | Tao Lei Architect Studio   China   Wrapped with a corrugated skin of punched aluminum, Daminghu 100 in Jinan is the result of transforming an old office and hotel building into a culture and arts center. Located on the south shore of DaMing Lake, it blends into the natural and histori

Wiki World Advanced Architecture Lab [AaL]   China   This cabin is located in Jiangxia District, in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, and is part of a plan to build a series of unique homes embedded in nature. It is a simple cabin, resembling a container in an intense blue color, hidden in the forest and loc

UAD   China   The Architectural Design & Research Institute of Zhejiang University (UAD) has built a series of public spaces for Wanghu Village, in the mountainous zone of Zhejiang Province in China. In the context of rural revitalization, the objective was to pre

Galaxy Arch   China   In the industrial park of the Chinese city of Suzhou, around Jinji Lake, stand five public pavilion, five of which are newly buildt and the rest are renovated. An outcome of a 2022 competition, the two-floor wooden cabin – a work of the firm Shanghái

van Bergen Kolpa Architects   China   The Dutch firm founded by Jago van Bergan and Evert Kolpa was commissioned to design this innovation center for urban production of fruit and vegetables in Beijing. Built for the horticultural company AgriGarden and the Chinese Academy of Agricultura

MAD Architects   China   This is the permanent venue of the ZGC Forum, an annual conference, in the Zhongguancun area of Beijing’s Haidian district. Known as China’s Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun is a major technology center inhabited by many firms and institutions devoted to

UAD   China   Located at the northwest corner of the Shaoxing University campus, these public sports facilities address the scarcity of land by stacking playing fields vertically, with a football pitch at the top. Designed by The Architectural Design & Researc

MAD Architects   China   Construction of the Cloud 9 Sports Center has now begun in Shijiazhuang, the capital of China’s northwestern province of Hebei, for completion in 2025. Designed by Ma Yansong/MAD Architects, the building encompasses 2,918 square meters undergound and

Vector Architects   China   In the heart of the city of Jingdezhen, known for its porcelain production, stands this hotel designed with the idea of preserving the constructions of an old industrial complex, including the existing camphor trees. The entire program is organized a

Foster + Partners   China   This recently opened Apple store is in the heart of Shanghai’s Jing’an District. Generating a public space for encounters, a new circular plaza connects different walkways through several curving levels featuring vegetation and tiered seating from wh

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

The photography series by Manuel Álvarez Diestro is a look at the growth of new Chinese cities from the windows of bullet trains moving 350 km per hour. China’s railway network links up 550 cities. From Beijing to Shanghai, Tianjin, or Xian, later fr

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