Maybe the most important?
China’s Fog Weighs Heavily on Shoulders of Its Premier Architect
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Wu Liangyong, 92, China’s most influential architect and urban planner, at his home in Beijing.
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For 70 years, Mr. Wu has ridden out the country’s political storms, including one that killed his mentor, to establish himself as the most influential architect, urban planner and éminence grise of China’s cities. But looking out the window of his apartment in the city’s northern suburbs, he can only shake his head at the dim building emerging from the haze.
“Our environment is unfit for daily life, and the responsibility is very heavy on our shoulders,” he said. “The problem will be solved sooner or later; it’s just a question of the price we will pay.”…
In the public sphere, Mr. Wu represents a traditionalist view of architecture that has been regaining sway in recent years. Most prominently, he criticized many of Beijing’s showpiece structures built for the 2008 Olympics, especially Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for China Central Television. Mr. Wu said he still believes this was a mistake, and recently Mr. Xi has endorsed this, too, calling for an end to “weird” architecture.
“For Koolhaas, it’s understandable. He wanted to build a masterpiece in Beijing,” Mr. Wu said. “But for Beijing, it was a tragedy. Old cities have to be respected more.” …
Mr. Wu said his role makes him feel personally responsible for problems in Chinese cities. When the Cultural Revolution ended, Mr. Wu said, Chinese officials rushed to embrace foreign models, sometimes without considering their suitability for an industrializing country with more than 1 billion inhabitants. Mistakes included promoting automobile ownership over public transportation, and building enormously wide streets and huge buildings.
“We knew about the ‘London Fog,’ but didn’t know it would come upon us so quickly,” he said of the famous London pollution of the mid-20th century. “China still can have a very good future, but we have to face the problems now.”
The solution, he says, is to promote a deeper understanding of China’s own cultures, which is also a priority of Mr. Xi. For millenniums, Chinese have designed cities and buildings according to human scale, Mr. Wu said. These ideas should underlie China’s new cities.
“I still have the confidence that if we understand the principles, we can easily solve the problems,” he said. “But if you don’t know the principles, it’s like the smog outside.”
