Beijing Architecture

For some reason, every building in Beijing was about 25 stories or less, and they stretched for miles in every direction. This is so uniform that we still aren't sure if there is a city ordinance or not. I think it has to do with seismic activity, and possibly high winds, as I've seen on some message boards. In any event, you have a city that goes forever, much like a large American city, except that it is very flat. The architecture was amazing, with little of the drabness that infects most American downtowns. In the midst of the new developments, old ugly slums still exist, sometimes next door to the new buildings. Sorry about the quality of some of these pictures, but I hope they express some of the wonder that we felt just driving around the city.

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Daybreak over Beijing:

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A decent overhead shot, from the top of the CCTV tower, easily the tallest structure in Beijing. This is just in one direction, and panning either direction would show more of the same. The gap in the middle is the Forbidden City.

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Another CCTV view:

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This isn't the best lit picture, but the we all found this interesting. Someone dubbed it the Spam building, but I'm not sure who owns it.

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Another rough picture, but look at the building on the right - they love the antennas on top:

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Two turquoise gems. Note the two cranes in the background. This is typical everywhere.

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Many of the buildings are modeled after a pagoda:

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Here's a decent example of a street. Note the ever-present long, rectangular advertisements (which were not to be seen in Shanghai), and yet another KFC.

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Bicycles everywhere, and birds for sale in the parks.

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Again, not a well lit picture (smog!), but a decent looking building, with some imagination.

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Another nice building, with yet more cranes (this time for Olympic arenas):

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If you're going to build 50 apartment buildings, might as well make them all identical. This was far from the only occurrence of this:

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Sorry about the bus window reflection! But, three identical buildings with yet another funny top:

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Two from the new Beijing University complex, which will look incredible when the grass comes in. The complex consists of five or six more buildings in this style:


And even with all this, the toilets were still literally holes in the ground.

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Another new building, this one stretching a city block. I wonder if it has any tenants yet:

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Of course, right next to all of these nice new buildings you find old, run-down residential buildings. This is a decent representation, but I wish I had a picture of one of the really bad ones. They were more common than I would have liked:

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An office building is often called a "Mansion," which was always fun. Almost as much fun as the "Friendly Airport Limousine" at the Tokyo airport, which was a bus.

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How do these buildings get built? Very often it's through government corruption (Marginal Revolution, my favorite blog for now, gives us this NY Times link on Chinese corruption). A vacant and worthless piece of land is purchased by a gov't official, who forces one of the state run banks to loan him money to build on it. Now it's worth some money, so he sells it to someone else. And that person sells it to someone else, and so on. In the end, the bank ends up owning the building through a foreclosure, and it's worth far less than it was for the last person who owned it. Since there was never any intention to actually lease the building to tenants, nobody bothered to see if anyone would want to set up their company there. Of course, nobody does, so it ends up being rented for dirt cheap by a local Chinese company (this is almost seen as a positive, in a way). In time, the city grows up enough to support this new high-rise, and the bank can sell it, although usually not for much money. And then the process starts over again.

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See more here if you'd like, although the quality isn't that great on most of them.