KEY POINTS:
Very few architects say in public that they will not build in Beijing.
The only notable dissident is Daniel Libeskind of Ground Zero fame, who has questioned the seemliness of building for an authoritarian and undemocratic regime, under which construction workers endure the most primitive of conditions, with minimal safety provisions and poor wages.
A few more, having experienced the minimal fees offered by most Chinese developers, have quietly refused to work there. But that has not stopped an unprecedented architectural stampede, led by Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Jacques Herzog.
Despite everything, there is a sense that building in Beijing is one of those rare chances architects get to make history, so how can they say no?
This is a capital that has rebuilt itself faster than any other in the history of the world. In two decades it has moved from the Middle Ages, with an overlay of bicycles and Stalinism, to a shimmering surreal vision, two parts Las Vegas, two parts Dubai, and five parts the most brutally unequal capitalist society on earth.
Everybody with any pretensions to an architectural profile has looked at working there, from David Adjaye and Will Alsop at the more radical end of the spectrum, to the large-scale plan factories exporting off-the-shelf designs for ready-made cities.
Whether they wanted to or not, they have created exactly what their Chinese clients were looking for: a new city that looks like the capital of an emergent superpower, in which the factories of the communist era have been swept aside, making way for showy vulgarity, the bizarre, the inept and the occasional masterpiece.
Despite the promises to shut every construction site and dismantle every crane in time to let the dust settle for the Olympics, Beijing still looks like a vast building site. Looming over the Olympic stadium is a high-rise tower that more or less behaves itself for its first 20 floors and then suddenly erupts into a gigantic Elvis quiff, rearing up a further 15 floors and taking a terrifying cantilevered leap into space.
Not far from Tiananmen Square, still presided over by Mao's effigy, you can find an army of labourers putting the finishing touches to what taxi drivers proudly declare is the city's first six-star hotel. It's designed in a florid late 19th-century Belle Epoque style, rising like a huge meringue over the surviving fragments of the hutongs, the traditional courtyard houses that once characterised the entire city which have been demolished to make way for high-rises.
The first piece of genuinely Western-grade modern architecture, Denton Corker Marshall's Australian Embassy, was built remarkably slowly by a construction brigade of the People's Liberation Army. It was finished in 1992. Since then, an entire new city has been built around it.
Context is not something Beijing has done well since the days when the north-south axis that runs through the city was violated by Mao's creation of Tiananmen Square. This was adorned by the erection of a monument to the heroes of the People's War, an act that was followed by the still more damaging placing in the square's exact centre of of Mao's mausoleum. Were it not for the revolutionary statuary it would look like the library for a moderately ambitious Midwestern campus.
Behind the walls of the old legation district, a huge new shopping area is under construction. Its mainly elderly, or migrant, inhabitants have been cleared out to make way for it.
All that is finished in this part of the city is the Grand National Theatre, designed by Paul Andreu, the architect responsible for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. It is a monstrous gesture, a metal egg with the tedious inevitability of symmetry. To make matters worse, it is sunk into the middle of a circular lake - not so much a boiled, as a fried, egg.
Equally troubling is American architect Steve Holl's project by the second ring road.
Holl has designed an apartment complex: a cluster of a dozen towers, linked by two-storey walkways suspended 20 storeys up.
Beijing's architectural evolution has gone from Stalin, who summoned Chinese architects to Moscow for fraternal lessons in authoritarian art deco classicism, to post-modernism, by way of a brief episode in revivalism that saw office blocks topped by giant tiled roofs and lacquered dragons.
Now it is a place where anything can happen.Observer
* Deyan Sudjic is the director of the Design Museum in London.
