Economy

West has designs on China's future

By Andrew Moody (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-07 10:50

Mark Latham, head of office services for international real estate consultants C.B. Richard and Ellis, based in Shanghai, said China's banks and State-owned enterprises are behind the demand for new buildings.

"They want to build the iconic buildings and badge them with their own identities so they get their own corporate identity on the skyline," he said.

"The premium end office space used to be dominated by the multinational occupiers but the Chinese companies are now much more active."

It is not that China's major cities have completely escaped the economic crisis. Office rents fell by 23.8 percent in Shanghai from the second quarter of 2008 to the fourth quarter of last year and the vacancy rate increased by 8.6 percent. Billions of yuan continue to get diverted into both new commercial and residential development.

Paul Katz, president of Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF), the New York-based international firm of architects, said it was not as if everyone could relax and just throw up a building in China anyhow.

"You can't just slap it up," he said. "In the inner cities the planning process is quite considered. The review panels will consider everything very carefully."

KPF, which has had a presence in the country since the early 1990s, now gets some 30 percent of its work from China. Its international diversity has helped it during the recent downturn.

"In the United States commercial work has become pretty much non-existent but it wasn't a significant amount of work. We work on a lot of university projects but even a lot of endowments have been reduced," added Katz.

Despite new landmark buildings dotted along the skyline, much of China's architecture over recent years does not have a great international reputation.

Many of the country's cities still have many poorly designed concrete residential and commercial buildings, much of it decaying, even though it may have been built in the last two decades.

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"General contractors 10 years ago only knew how to build one building and that was basically a concrete one. They didn't know how to do much of anything else, " said Winey at Gensler.

"If you look at the quality 10 years ago, it was absolutely terrible. There have been major strides made even in the last five years. It isn't quite to international standards but it is getting much better. It has been dealing with international firms that have improved things from both a technical and engineering perspective."

There is a sense among architects that Chinese developers have gained a lot of experience and have a clearer idea of how they want buildings to perform.