| Come to think of it, our own 2010 games are
| around the corner, no? What are architects-cum-planners
| doing about that already (besides biting one another,
| that is)?
http://www.smh.com.au/olympics/articles/2004/08/30/1093852178020.html
Let 5 million flowers bloom
August 31, 2004
Heat is still coming off the Athens Olympics, but already eyes are
turning to Beijing where architects are experimenting with bold new
design. Hamish McDonald reports.
China has a novel idea for offsetting the austere look of Beijing during
the 2008 Olympics. It will send flower and grass seeds into space for
mutation by cosmic rays to produce a riot of blossoms and greenery. "We
are preparing for space breeding but which seeds and in which spacecraft
is not yet certain," said Zhang Lannian, who is looking after the
horticultural side of Beijing's Olympic effort.
China's space program, which produced its first manned mission last
October, has already taken the seeds of lotus plants and vegetables into
orbit. When planted back on Earth they resulted in extra-large plants,
flowers and fruit.
Zhang is meanwhile taking Mao Zedong's adage "Let a Hundred Flowers
Bloom" to heart. In a huge nursery near Beijing's Fragrant Hills, his
team is preparing 5 million pots of flowers for experimental planting
around the city over the next two years, using 600 varieties from around
the world including traditional Chinese roses and chrysanthemums.
They are looking for variants that bloom strongly around August, a time
of oppressive heat in Beijing when there are few flowers. "We want to
create an explosion of blossoms, a colourful city, a festival
atmosphere," says Zhang.
The flower project is just one aspect of a city makeover costing as much
as $A100 billion when new expressways, subway lines and modern buildings
are added to the new sports venues. Like the games in Tokyo (1964) and
Seoul (1988), the Beijing Olympics will be projected as a sign of
China's emergence as a fully modern country.
"For China, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games represent the icing on the
cake of international recognition and acceptance," says John Bowan, a
former Australian diplomat who handled international relations for the
Sydney Games organisers and who helped China's winning bid for the 2008
Games, in a new paper for Sydney's Lowy Institute.
Nothing is being spared and deadlines are early, with the city
government ordering all non-Games construction to be completed in 2006
to let the dust settle and shake down the new transport and digital
communications systems well before visitors arrive. The Olympic venues
will be finished in 2007.
If the Athens construction program was a cliffhanger, the risk with
Beijing is that it will be completed too early and people will become
blase about the city's new look by the time the Olympics are held.
The building program contains architecture of stunning boldness, notably
the main Olympic stadium, which is being designed by Swiss architects
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and is wrapped in crisscrossed
steel girders like a giant string parcel or a bird's nest of interwoven
twigs.
"It's the most important project in China so far," declares Zhou Rong, a
professor of architecture at Beijing's Tsinghua University. Another
eye-catcher is the new aquatic centre, designed by the Australian
partnership PTW, whose rectangular external glass walls are segmented in
hexagons like a collection of soap bubbles.
A new national theatre, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, is
nearing completion close to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square,
with its smooth, elliptical external shell of titanium and glass already
getting it called the "duck egg".
The British architect Sir Norman Foster has been commissioned to design
a new terminal that will double the capacity of Beijing's airport. The
sinuous building with a red main building and trailing yellow-green
appendages has been designed to recall a Chinese dragon.
While some 300,000 residents are being shifted to new housing to make
way for the Olympic projects — several protests have been suppressed by
police — Zhou said most of Beijing's 13 million people supported the
Games and liked the bold new projects. "They want to establish some
connection with the modern world, and can do this through projects like
the Olympic stadium," he says. "They may not appreciate the design but
they think it sets some standard as a modern building, as a symbol of a
modern society. They will accept it as that."
As for his colleagues' grumbles about so many projects being awarded to
foreign designers or changing the character of Beijing, he is
dismissive. "They won't have any impact on old Beijing — they are quite
far away from the centre of the old city," he says. "Some people,
especially the Chinese architects, are responsible themselves for
destroying ancient Chinese buildings and the urban fabric. Now maybe
they want to put the blame on the foreign architects for the loss of
Beijing’s old character."
What can go wrong? At the technical level, structural engineers are said
to be wrestling with the problems produced by one or two of the
innovative designs. The Chinese Government's efforts to slow the economy
and set an example of moderate spending are also setting new limits on
Olympic spending — a retractable roof might now be removed from the
Herzog-de Meuron stadium design, according to reports this week.
The hardest technical fix, though, will be improving Beijing's
notoriously bad air quality. The Government has been working for years
to reduce the dust particles by planting millions of trees to Beijing's
west to stabilise the creeping inland desert. Heavy industry is being
modernised or removed altogether to lower the mix of toxic gases. But
the city has 2 million cars and 1000 more are being acquired by its
citizens every day. So far Beijing reports "good" air quality on only 57
per cent of days a year.
The wild-card problems come from China's authoritarian political system
and its hothouse human ecosystem of 1.3 billion people. Could another
SARS-type epidemic strike out of the blue in 2008? Would communist
officials try to hush it up and hoodwink the world, as they did
initially in last year's outbreak of the deadly pneumonia in Beijing?
Scandal is another hallmark of the new People's Republic. The recent
revelation by China's auditor-general that Government sports officials
diverted $A22 million from funds meant for Olympic promotions might be
the tip of the iceberg.
Political protests will happen. However, hopes expressed by the
International Olympic Committee when accepting Beijing's bid that it
would lead to improvements in China's human rights are unlikely to be
realised. "Improvements to human rights since the winning of the bid
have so far been essentially formal and marginal," says Bowan in his
Lowy Institute paper.
Groups representing pro-independence Tibetans and Uighurs (the Muslim
people of Xinjiang) called on spectators to remain silent on Sunday
evening when the Olympic flag was handed over from Athens to Beijing.
The relay taking the Olympic torch to Beijing in 2008 will pass through
both Xinjiang and Tibet. Other protests mounted in Athens were by the
banned Falun Gong religious movement and by Japanese and South Korean
activists critical of China's repatriation of North Korean refugees.
Transparency will not extend far outside the stadiums in 2008. The
manual of "Olympic Security English" issued to Beijing police includes a
dialogue where an officer stops a reporter covering a Falun Gong
activity. "You're a sports reporter," the policeman says. "You should
only cover the Games."
The worst-case scenario is a war. The year 2008 will be a period of
tension as Taiwan's current president tries to deliver on his promise of
a new constitution before he steps down in May that year. A senior
Chinese military scholar, Major- General Peng Guangqian, recently said
that an Olympic boycott would be part of the "bearable prices" for going
to war if the island declares its independence.