Make Mine Something Else

There was no opportunity in the Guardian piece to make the point, but: Doesn't Pangu Plaza look like it could only serve as the hidden-in-plain-sight lair of the nefarious Mandarin? And on that tip, has there been a more unappealing concept/design package since Spiderman 2099?

Pangu Plaza is shaped like a dragon; it's seven football fields long; it's made of stone and television screens; and it's home to offices, a shopping mall, a "courtyard in the sky", and a seven-star hotel.

After crossing out persistent rumors that Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Henry Kissinger have made it their home-away-from-home (or straight-up home, in the case of Gates), the International Herald Tribune finds developers pitching the place this way:

[T]he owners of Pangu Plaza do acknowledge that "someone very, very important" resides in the building; that Buffett considered renting a courtyard space (all of which are on the top floor of the lower-rise buildings) and that Kissinger was a guest during the Olympics.

"We have had a lot of very important guests," said Cai Xiaomin, a spokeswoman for Beijing Pangu Investment, the Chinese developer.

It's hard to blame the developers for an article whose intent was to fish out quotes about what immensely wealthy and powerful clients the building attracts. Still, in an obvious showy sense but also as an unintended critique of explosive growth in Beijing, Pangu Plaza captures some sense of what's happening in this moment in China better than the Bird's Nest or CCTV Tower—truly, noteworthy buildings that Western architects might have built anywhere.

The Olympic news peg is going to fade from view as quickly as the blue skies in Beijing but I hope to explore some related growth/architecture issues in greater depth. In the meantime you shouldn't deprive yourself of reading James Fallow's coverage, if you haven't been following his Beijing-bureau dispatches for the Atlantic. Start here and work backward.

Posted by Kriston at August 25, 2008 11:42 AM