Draftsmen's Contract; On the ramparts of the Chinese design revolution.(Cover story)

Byline: Cathleen McGuigan (With Jonathan Ansfield and Duncan Hewitt)

Architects in China have rarely had to worry about a lack of work; a few years ago, according to a report by Rem Koolhaas and his students at Harvard, China already had "one tenth the number of architects as in the U.S. designing five times the volume of projects." But the work tends to be grim; most designers toil in government institutes, churning out blueprints for one soulless high-rise after another. Yet amid the mediocrity a surprising new climate for sophisticated architecture is developing, most visible in the cutting-edge commissions for the 2008 Olympics. Those projects, spearheaded mainly by star foreign firms, have helped inspire a design counterculture within China, as more young architects open their own studios and revel in experimentation. "Challenging tradition may be China's tradition," says 31-year-old architect Ma Yansong.

While Shanghai is known as the city of sparkling towers, Beijing has become the epicenter of innovative design. Officials have given enormous license to the Olympic designers. The CCTV broadcast center, by Dutch architect Koolhaas and his partner, Ole Scheeren, is a radical rethinking of the skyscraper as a continuous loop. The new airport by the London firm of Foster & Partners is not just the world's biggest terminal but "the world's biggest anything," as Norman Foster puts it, with more than 1 million square meters of space under one roof. And the Olympic stadium, by Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland, is a 21st-century take on an ancient form. The technology involved in these schemes is awesome: the Olympic aquatic center, designed by the Australian firm PTW, is an immense cube with walls based on the physics of soap bubbles.

Though some avant-garde projects have generated controversy in China, particularly among old-guard academics, many foreign architects have tried to connect to local culture in abstract ways. "How do you register that you are arriving in China, not London or New York?" asks Foster about the airport design. His answer: an immense curving roof, graded with color from bright Chinese red to gold that's been termed "dragonlike." For the Olympic stadium--a bowl of irregular curved steel beams known as "the bird's nest" --Herzog & de Meuron brought in the Beijing artist Ai Weiwei as a consultant. "He knew what kind of meanings this would have in the Chinese mind and soul," says Jacques Herzog.

Infusing radical ideas with a Chinese sensibility is key for young independent Beijing architects. Most have studied or worked abroad and now look for subtle ways to express their culture--through traditional materials, say, or the use of space. "We're always trying to answer the question 'What is contemporary ...