breakneck speed

"Today, architects are often involved in gigantic projects going at breakneck speed, whether they like or not."
maki must be talking about projects in asia...

wouldn't call our yakitori tower a gigantic project (recent changes made it dip just below 100 meters), but designing speed flirts with breakneck. whether we like it or not. competition won in december - yet construction drawings due mid april, six weeks earlier than initially planned. engineers and specialists even contractors have joined in - lots of hungry mouths to feed with a continuous flow of updated plans. right now I'm working on the joint details of the glass facade. 't is ne keer wat anders...



still yakitori dynamics are no match for the regular surprizes from our projects in china. the civic center we designed (at breakneck speed) over the summer for a new town near wuxi, is currently under construction.

the construction drawings for every chinese building have to be produced in china. therefore, as a foreign firm, we can only develop our chinese projects up to schematic design, which we have to hand over to one of the official 'design institutes', remnants of china's strictly centralized planning machine. riken yamamoto and koolhaas shortcut this regulation (to maintain control over their chinese projects) by setting up shop in beijing. as we were expecting some bureaucratic delay from the drawing institute, picture our astonishment when the stack of construction drawings for wuxi arrived barely two weeks after our submission.

for the shanghai headquarters of our chinese developer/client, we haven't finished schematic design yet. our latest submission included a model, rough plans, area calculations, some shady perspectives. only days later they sent us the creations of their in-house renderers... click to enlarge - it's worth it.


view on an interior courtyard


flyover from southwest

those images are product of the full-force-ahead chinese workforce (in my mind a huge assembly line with thousand of uniformed renderers), definitely, but also of the romantic chinese, masters of illusion (look at their gardens and decorated temples). a good match with japanese austere detailing + building efficiency and european conceptual design approach? in theory, yes.

"The Chinese Architect is the most important, influential, and powerful architect on earth. The average lifetime construction volume of the Chinese Architect in housing alone is approximately three dozen thirty-story highrise buildings. The Chinese Architect designs the largest volume, in the shortest time, for the lowest fee. There is one-tenth the number of architects in China than in the United States, designing five times the project volume in one-fifth the time, earning one-tenth the design fee. This implies an efficiency of 2500 times that of an American architect."
from Great Leap Forward (Koolhaas + Harvard Design School Project on the City)

back to work. let's close the gap.