According to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, an NGO based in Geneva, 1.5 million people were forcefully displaced by Olympics related construction. These people were primarily displaced for city ‘beautification’, improvements to city infrastructure and to create space for the newly designed and constructed Olympic venues.

All that beautiful design had to go somewhere.

And it is a beautiful design; make no doubt about that. The Bird’s Nest, or formally the National Stadium, and the Water Cube, or National Aquatics Center, have graced the pages of Vanity Fair, and now our television screens, as the Olympics in Beijing get underway. The lesser photographed, though no less impressive, National Centre for the Performing Arts and the CCTV Building make up the heart of this new “renaissance” of Chinese architecture.

Undoubtedly, you’ve seen them: the National Stadium with its twisted girders, wound together like twigs; the Aquatics Center’s walls of bubble-like plastic, light shining through; and the Performing Arts Center, which scarcely even looks like a building. It is more a giant silver bubble floating in the middle of the lake, only accessible through walkways under the water. (It might be noted it was designed by the same firm – French architect Paul Andreu– that designed the critically praised Charles de Gaulle airport terminal, which crumbled, fell and left 4 people dead. Let us not hope for a similar disaster in the name of art.)

And the 1.5 million people?

If there has been any discussion of the ethics of building in China, it has been merely in the form of excessive hand wringing.

The architectural community has either ignored or written off the question of how one can ethically build in this country, at the same time as they marvel over a ‘renaissance’ that has been achieved primarily at the hands of outside designers taking advantage of this opportunity.

In August, a Vanity Fair article titled “From Mao to Wow” fairly succinctly summed up the attitude of the architectural community and of the world at large: who cares. Who cares what’s going on behind the scenes, look at the pretty buildings!

And, in reality, the issue of the Chinese government disregard for human rights is not even a question but more a statement of fact. The fact is that the Chinese government did displace 1.5 million people in preparation for the games. The fact is that leading up to the Olympics Chinese activists were thrown in jail, detained and violently silenced. The fact is that a brutal crackdown on Tibetan protesters in March left dozens dead in Lhasa.

The Chinese are not alone in these types of repressions. The LA Olympics featured the jailing of thousands of young men. The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta led to hundreds of homeless people being thrown in jail and public housing demolished. Most brutally, the Mexico City games started off with the violent and deliberate killings of students just 10 days before the Opening Ceremonies.

But to use these past atrocities as an excuse to ignore current ones is lazy and wrong.

And the totalitarianism of the Chinese state cannot so blithely be ignored when it is that very totalitarian government that makes possible buildings of this magnitude and sheer awesome-ness. Rem Koolhass, who designed the CCTV building for China, says that it’s the Chinese state that attracts him to build there.

“There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost no body that we know of today could ever afford or contemplate,” Koolhaas said.

Maybe it’s because in a democratic state the people would have forced the Chinese government to spend the $43 billion it spent on Olympics preparation on feeding and housing the overwhelmingly poor majority of Chinese citizens instead.

If critics do examine the issue at all there is a suggestion that somehow the architecture itself is the feeblest of protests because art should have some function other than mere beauty. One would hope.

They cite the “shaky nature” of the CCTV building, with its odd shape, as supposedly demonstrating the shaky nature of the Chinese state. The openness of the Stadium, with entrances all around and in between the twisted columns, will help bring about openness in society and promote equality. Really.

A New York Times critique waves away the question, saying, “Amid the endless debate over ethics of building in China, Herzog and de Meruron’s achievement is undeniable. Rather than offering us a reflection of China’s contemporary zeitgeist, they set out to create a sphere of resistance, and to gently redirect society’s course”.

It is going to be difficult, though, to redirect society’s course when the government erects a fence around the stadium to keep people out after the games, builds a high-end hotel inside the upper levels, and the architect sits in his office in Switzerland asking them not to, please.

Because, ultimately, it is the Chinese government that has the power here, for all the talk about art and architecture. Are these buildings, then, just symbols of China’s power? Beautiful symbols, but still, for all the talk of ethics and intentions, nothing more? In the 1936 Olympics, the Nazi party erected, as symbols of their power, massive buildings, full of giant columns, white marble and classics of fascist architecture. The updated version may be metal and glass, but the goal is old and the same.

These buildings, whoever they are built by, whatever the goals of the architects, will stand as empty testaments to the power and strength of the China long after the Olympics have ended.

>Written by d/visible contributor Kelly Dunleavy.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under In-depth, Culture, Architecture, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.