Hindustan Times
Building Beijing’s Nariman Point
I remember the thrill a windy day last March, when I first set eyes on what was then the world’s most controversial skyscraper being built. It still draws China’s biggest buzz about a building.
“Today, it is cold. You must wear clothes,’’ the property agent, a chic Chinese girl who had learnt English in a six-month crash course, had said as she telephoned my hotel room before house-hunting on my second morning in Beijing.
While scanning the news wires in the Mumbai newsroom, I used to spot photographs of this 51-steel-storey symbol of power as it was built. The photographs had shown two bulky L-shaped towers linked at a sharp angle on the bottom and top so that the towers shook hands instead of scraping the sky. The world feted the handshake between the leaning towers as an engineering marvel in a seismic zone.
You either love the eccentric design or hate it. The Beijingers call it big shorts. (See photo. What do you think?)
For 18 months in Beijing, I have lived in the neighbourhood of this extraordinary piece of urban architecture built to symbolise modern China ahead of the Beijing Olympics. It is supposed to be the thriving new headquarters and media park of national broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV). But the CCTV towers are still shut and desolate. The rusting hull of a five-star hotel that was destroyed in a January inferno stands in the same complex.
This hulking oddity was the first of 300 high-rises planned for the 4 sq km central business district (CBD) or steel jungle that I call Beijing’s Nariman Point. The big shorts can be spotted even from the 14th century Forbidden City palaces.
But an empty skyscraper exudes no energy and spirit of the city. I no longer feel a thrill when I pass by the completed building blocks several times a day. Sections of the Chinese debate that global firms have made ‘modern’ Beijing’s skyline a playground to experiment with bold and brazen but not necessarily beautiful landmarks.
This month, plans were announced to double the CBD in eight years after the relocation of 10,000 homes. Another building boom to expand the CBD is hard to imagine in today’s Beijing where a 51-storey landmark is empty.
The seven blueprints under consideration, and described in the Chinese media, don’t seem to focus on extraordinary skyscrapers. The focus is on bicycle lanes, elevated roads, more subway stations and lots of parks, squares and boulevards. Beijing city may not wear another pair of big shorts.
Beijingers nicknamed this 51-storey skyscraper as the 'big shorts'. Built ahead of the Olympics in 2008 as a symbol of modern Beijing, it is still unopened even while the capital prepares for another building boom. Photo by Reshma Patil.
The current ultra chic skyscrapers with four-lane roads and boulevards stand over land that, 10 years ago, was cluttered with narrow alleys (hutongs) that remind one of Mumbai’s chawls housing the poorest dwellers.
My apartment tower stands over what was once a refrigerator factory before the old Beijing was bulldozed. The five-star hotel and nightclub where many Indians used to head for Happy Hours (before they were relocated during the recession) was, guess what, a refrigerator factory.
Beijing’s officials sound extremely confident of where the Chinese economy is headed eight years from now as they plan this futuristic building frenzy even while current skyscrapers remain desolate.
Those who have stayed here longer describe days when thousands of migrant workers would swarm over a site to build a high-rise in six months. When I hunted for a house 18 months ago, every apartment that I checked in the CBD overlooked a dusty construction site.
Every morning, I peer out of the window and look straight down at a giant hole in the ground. When I moved in last March, I had worried that a high-rise would grow out of the hole in the ground and block my sunsets and view of the western hills. But there are only dozen-odd workers. For 18 months, the men who could raise five storeys a week have been desultorily moving earth in the deep foundation.
But as I read about China’s infrastructure stimulus-led economy expanding by 8.9 per cent in the last quarter, and see plans for a new building boom in the newspapers, I know my sunset is no longer safe.
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Loading ...Posted by Reshma Patil on Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Filed under China · Tagged Beijing, China, mariman point, Mumbai, skyscraper
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