This morning around 9 o’clock, a five-storey apartment building in Fenghua, Zhejiang province collapsed because it was old. (We’re not sure what the technical term might be.) Details are scarce, but CCTV News reported around noon that up to five people had been rescued, though an untold number remained buried.

The building had four units, one and a half of which simply crumbled. Here’s a picture via Shanghai Daily:

UPDATE, 4/5, 1:30 am: One dead. Via Sinosphere:

So far, six people have been pulled out of the rubble and sent to hospital, where one woman died, the city government said on Fenghua Announces, its official Weibo account.

UPDATE, 4/7, 2:39 pm: Via China Daily:

A building that collapsed in Fenghua, Zhejiang province, on Friday morning killing a woman, was registered as “unsafe” in December but no remedial measures were taken.

The woman was among seven people trapped after the five-story residential building crumbled to the ground at 8:45 am. All were pulled from the debris by the evening, but Chen Yuexiang, 68, died at a hospital.

UPDATE, 4/9, 1 pm: Two have been arrested, according to Shanghai Daily:

Two people have been detained by police and a third released on bail in connection with a fatal building collapse in eastern province Zhejiang.

A statement yesterday by Fenghua City local government did not identify those involved nor give details on why they had been held.

The New York Times launched a China blog called Sinosphere, and here they are writing about People’s Daily’s new building in Beijing:

Is it a chamber pot? Is it a penguin? Is it a … phallus?

A… penguin?

In an interview earlier this year, the architect, Zhou Qi, said he knew of some of the comparisons being drawn between his building and other objects.

“People say it’s like a chamber pot, or a penguin. So what. There are always these voices. I don’t mind a bit,” he told the news Web site news.xinmin.cn.

“When new things come out people always view them negatively, this is a broad social attitude. But I’m confident that when it’s finished and people see it, they will embrace it,” he said.

That’s a penis.

New People’s Daily Building in Beijing Draws Risqué Comparisons (Sinosphere)

UPDATE:

.@AdamMinter this still my favorite pd hq joke, perhaps too risqué pic.twitter.com/vMFyw0BwDT

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) October 15, 2013

(Also see: Offbeat China)

I’m not an expert on architecture, but building houses on stilts on top of houses seems like a tricky proposition. The lesson here may be that we shouldn’t underestimate the strength of 10 concrete pillars? I’m not sure.

Hug China explains (edited with permission):

Two houses supported simply by pillars appear on the roof of a three-storey building in Dongguan, called by netizens as “castle in the air” or “sky houses.” Chengguan call them illegal constructions.

These Dongguan, Guangdong province constructions were spotted and publicized just earlier this month. They’ve been around for a few years though, much to chengguan’s chagrin. “Chengguan will deal with them according to law,” reports Hug China.

We wonder: their law, or the one that lets other illegal structures on rooftops stand for years and years? We don’t know who to root for anymore.

Sky houses supported simply by pillars appear on rooftop of three-storey building in Dongguan (Hug China)

UPDATE, 9/12, 5:51 pm: We found video:

This is definitely now a thing. First the high-rise villa in Beijing, then the temple in Shenzhen, and now this: a courtyard atop an office building in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province. An entire siheyuan! Whatever happened to rich Chinese simply investing in art?

“Chinese regulations state that the structure and layout of buildings cannot be changed without government approval,” reports Sina. “It’s unclear whether the city’s urban construction authorities have launched an investigation of the structure yet.”

A couple of screenshots:

(H/T Alicia)

A microblogger recently noticed a temple built upon the roof of a housing complex in Shenzhen, AFP reports, because why wouldn’t there be a temple there? It seems like Zhang Biqin of Beijing isn’t the only person into that sort of thing.

The temple sits on top of a 21-storey apartment. The suspected owners haven’t been identified, and media have not been able to get them on the record to ask ,WTF?

SCMP, calling it “China’s newest bizarre rooftop structure,” reports the structure has been around since at least 2010, and like Beijing’s rooftop villa, the residents underneath it don’t seem to like it.

One of Nanshan district’s property owners, referred to only as Chen, toldShenzhen News reporters that the temple had possibly been constructed by the director of Nanshan district’s Residential Property Management Office – a man surnamed Xiong.

“We once had a meeting [regarding the temple] and required it to be demolished,” Chen reportedly said. “We put up notifications. But [Xiong] installed a security door and refused to let demolition people near [the structure]. The [problem] has still yet to be resolved.”

The Nanfang heard similar complaints:

Carl Ji, a Shenzhen resident, told The Nanfang today: “This kind of construction work is illegal. Shenzhen’s government should demolish it as soon as possible to set an example. Who is this guy that he thinks he can build his own temple on a public area? He’s just interested in his own private interests. It is arrogant.”

The 21st storey apartment on which the Shenzhen temple has been built is said to be worth 15 million yuan (US$2.5 million). The building’s tenants are all “either high-ranking officials or very rich people,” according to the report by Yangcheng Evening News today.

Of course there’s video offering a stunning bird’s-eye view of the structure. Why wouldn’t there be? (Apologies for the static — you’ll want to watch this on mute.)

POSTSCRIPT: I heard from a friend in state media that a directive has come down from up top that Zhang Biqin’s illegal rooftop villa in Haidian district is officially off-limits for publication. No reason given. More details if they become available.

The dude who built this may be a charlatan and asshole who’s ignored sensible maintenance requests for four years and is about to get chai’ed, but Zhang Biqin deserves at least a little credit: his “high-rise villa” in Beijing’s Haidian district makes for some pretty stunning visuals.

Check out this video, made by FlyCam, which gives us a bird’s-eye view of Beijing’s most illegal sunroof. Some screenshots follow.

UPDATE, 8/18, 8:36 pm: One more view:

This is cool and all at first glance, but let’s call a spade a spade: it’s illegal, and not so cool if you’re living underneath this rooftop villa, i.e. inside the 26-floor apartment building.

Somehow, the rich bastard who built this — a medical practitioner (quack?) with a private business (definitely quack) known as “Professor Zhang” — has accomplished the nearly impossible: made us root for chengguan.

Check out the above video about this construction in Beijing’s Haidian district. When Zhang moved into his penthouse duplex in 2007, Room 2605, there was a deck upstairs, and after getting the proper permits, he began renovating it into something… bigger. In December 2008, local authorities notified him that he had to stop, because his project was causing water and gas leaks. Did Zhang listen? Did he stop to think about others? Did he use a bit of rational thinking?

Nope, he expanded it to 800 square meters, and added rocks, a swimming pool, and private lifts.

“I think he just has money and do whatever he wants to do,” apartment owner Lee Xiaoming told Al-Jazeera. “One day, more people feel uncomfortable about it, we will stay together and get him to clean it up. And that’s all we can do.”

All the relevant chai (demolish) notices have been posted. If Zhang doesn’t turn up soon, authorities will go in and tear it down themselves.

“A culture of impunity for the wealthy and well-connected,” Al-Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett says. That’s Zhang. That’s the worst of your entitled expat friends. That’s fu’erdai like the yayaya girl. Don’t root for this.

UPDATE, 1:10 pm: Via SCMP:

Local newspapers have identified the owner as Zhang Biqing, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and former member of a district People’s Political Consultative Conference who owns a national chain of acupunture clinics.

…When confronted earlier by reporters from local newspaper Beijing Morning News, Zhang, who sometimes identified himself as a professor, had said, “Since I dare to live here, I am not worried about complaints.

“Famous people come to my place and sing. How can you stop them?” the newspaper quoted him as saying about the noise at night.

We managed to ignore all the reports this week about the start of construction on Sky City, a planned 838-meter structure in Changsha, Hunan province that, if completed, would be the tallest building in the world. If. It was supposed to be done in March. It was supposed to be done in three months. It was supposed to be a trailblazer for prefab technology. It was always supposed to be something grander than it ever could be. Just take a look at the picture above, variations of which have been sent to reporters everywhere. It’s a castle in the clouds, a dream that will never be realized.

All work has been stopped, reports AFP, “because [builders] did not complete the required procedures for seeking approval to start construction,” the Xiaoxiang Morning Post newspaper said. The largest building in the world isn’t allowed off the ground because of paperwork? Right. Either someone didn’t get paid off, or this is the city’s way of saving face as it cuts its losses.

For what it’s worth, the company behind the project, Broad Group, had a spokesperson say that it had the required permits. What it never had, however, was the support it needed.

The People’s Daily, the official paper of China’s ruling Communist Party, has criticised the project, calling it “blind worship for ultra-high skyscrapers” on Sina Weibo.

Global Times wasn’t much kinder, either, in a story titled, “Questions asked over quick construction of world’s tallest building”:

In addition, BSB faces questions over whether its steel framework is safe and stable enough to build the 838-meter ultrahigh building.

Experts from Hubei Housing and Urban-Rural Development Department held a review meeting over BSB’s steel framework in October last year, and said that they believe that this type of steel framework can only be used for buildings lower than 100 meters tall.

If you intend to build the highest structure in the world without Beijing’s support, you’re dreaming.

Finally, here’s a Quartz article for your consideration:

Broad seems confident it can pull this off. “We are the pioneers, the pioneers of men,” sings a chorus in hardhats on Broad’s website. “We are the geniuses, the geniuses of technology.”

Not everyone is so sure. It’s not clear that Broad Group can afford its $1.47 billion price tag, say Chinese critics, and constructing in such haste compromises safety. On top of that, there’s no actual need for Sky City.

Maybe Sky City will be finished sometime in the future. For the present, however, we’re going to go back to forgetting anyone ever thought it could exist.

The biggest building in the world recently opened in Chengdu, China. The New Century Global Center’s colossal undulating roof, which I’d been eyeing from my apartment window these past few months, is visible from any high point in the city. I hadn’t known what it was until last week, when relatives informed me through a flurry of news articles that it was part of a 1.7 million square-meter complex that is nearly the size of Monaco, and has an artificial sun.

So I saddled up my scooter and took my camera for a ride down south, halfway to the airport, where Renmin South Road stretches into an empty boulevard. One building out-sized the next until finally I reached the climax of the strip-mall crescendo. I circled half the building before finding an entrance.

From about 300 meters away, the new Global Center fades under a midday mist. Photo also in black and white below — the pollution allows about as much visibility in color as in monochrome.

Five fatigues-clad men watched me from their surveillance booth as I parked my bike nearby. “Do I need to take an ID number?” I asked.

“No,” one said, “but you can’t park there. Your bike will get stolen.”

“Then where should I park?”

He pointed to a spot about ten meters away, his official surveillance area.

“You mean to say that if you saw a thief take my bike, you wouldn’t do anything?”

“That’s right,” he smiled proudly, and his friends giggled.

I started to unlock my bike. “Aren’t you supposed to act on the people’s behalf?” (“为人民服务,” a slogan in all police stations, city halls, and military zones.)

They chuckled some more while I moved my bike to the anti-thievery zone. As I walked away, a manager chased me down to give me an ID number.

~

In Medieval times, European cathedrals were built to inspire awe. For a peasant cresting a hill and seeing a cathedral for the first time, it would have been an eye-opening, postively beatific moment.

I admit I felt a little of that while walking under the tin eaves of this building, but the awe was tinged with discomfort rather than admiration. Blank stares from behind service counters followed me as I entered two different doors that led to empty, unfinished offices. After realizing that more than half the building was unoccupied, I trekked to the front of the building to start my walk-through.

I’ve included a series of photos to share the prominent features of this complex — the elements that seem to define it. I’ve never enjoyed going to the mall, even in the US, but the Global Center left me particularly depressed. Rather than displaying China’s new wealth, it was a hollow projection of what commercial developers think wealth should be: big, gaudy, and gold:

It’s a pseudo-Victorian, faux-antique, ultra-Western look. It is this style that has come to define modern China, a knock-off of actual taste. Within this colossal structure, there was not a single trace of Chinese tradition.

Here’s the entrance hall:

If Hogwarts were to sell its castle to commercial developers, its entrance would be like this, with escalators illuminated with indigo lights and strapped to reflective metal sheets criss-crossing from floor to ceiling. Here, the mall is full of people, with benches crowded with grandparents who have brought their grandchildren to toddle around the marble floor. It’s a public park: a space to sit and watch.

Down a side wing stands a four-story bell tower (of sorts): ionic columns supporting a clock that is set to the wrong time. A closer look revealed that this structure is plastered with a cheap, grainy cement made to look like real stone. It is already chipping in several places.

Nearby, a double-door set stands inexplicably in the middle of the corridor:

While Donald and Daphne Duck greet shoppers at an electronics store, banners display sexy foreign women nearing orgasm as they bite cake and sip margaritas. 吃 says one banner, 喝 says another — “EAT” and “DRINK.” Do not forget to consume.

And now, some stores, including faux antique cafes and empty boutiques. A sparkling white cafe is decorated with more plastic shiny things that hang. A foreign woman’s face, this one cartoonish, casts a bashful glance on a wide column, reminiscent of the Starbucks mermaid. Faux-antique chairs and tables sit mostly empty in this massive cafe.

Expensive boutique clothing stores are guarded by uniformed workers. One store sells only black and white clothing. All are empty.

Finally, everyone who has heard of the Global Center know that it has an indoor beach. The Waterpark is currently open to the public, but its facilities are inaccessible. The beach has no sand, and the rumored “artificial sun” was nowhere to be seen, save for the massive glass ceiling that reflected the painful glare of the pure white sky. Pollution was visible within this massive room, obscuring the view of the unopened water slides at one end.

Finally outside again, the nebulous Sichuan sun glowered overhead as I hustled across the shadeless, endless parking lot. The bike lot was littered with pot holes and encased in a rusted iron fence — the Victorian touch had not yet spread to the mall’s far-flung properties. The five men in fatigues giggled again when they saw me approaching. Rather than being annoyed this time, I felt a touch of humanity, as if they were saying, “Welcome back to the real world, did you have a good time in there?”

The experience hung as heavy as the approaching thunderstorm clouds on my ride home. The New Century Global Center remains mostly empty, save for the front corridors, which are hollow in their own right. Questions abound: why create such a place? To what avail? Who will open businesses here, and who will visit? It’s a historic building that China has erected — the largest in the world by volume, engulfing the light of the sun — but it was done quietly, without fanfare, seemingly overnight. Is it a monument to hubris, or humility? Perhaps that’s a question for historians to answer — if this building isn’t, before long, relegated to the darker annals of history.

It’s finally happening. “Sky City,” by the Chinese firm Broad Sustainable Construction (BSB), will be 838 meters (2,749 feet) tall upon completion, making it taller than the Burj Khalifa by 10 meters. Whether it takes 90 days to complete — as BSB has advertised — or longer, it will nonetheless be a huge accomplishment, and another feather in China’s architectural cap. (We should note that Sky City was supposed to be complete by March, making it way behind schedule.)

Amanda R. of Two Americans in Changsha wrote about this last Wednesday:

I am excited for this. I am looking forward to it and hope it does happen. However, to think that this is somehow going to cure urban sprawl in China is a bit of a dream. The Sky City is being built about 45 minutes away from Changsha. It’s far more likely that the sprawl will actually spread as people move closer and closer to Sky City from Changsha. Sky City is going to offer thousands of job opportunities for people who won’t live in the building (housekeepers, nannies, tutors, plumbers, decorators, and so on), plus grocery stores, restaurants, and shops will be built in the surrounding area as well. It is fairly typical when large buildings/schools/factories/military bases are built in China that lower class neighborhoods quickly follow.

Quartz’s Lily Kuo reports that the building will essentially be its own city, bringing us a step closer to the sort of urban utopia that science fiction writers enjoyed imagining back in the day:

BSB likes to market the project as the “next step in urbanization.” It will house about 30,000 people in a 202-floor building that will also include offices, a hotel, a school, and a hospital—not to mention 92 elevators, a six-mile-ramp between floors, and 17 helipads.

So what does it mean that the building appears to be the only skyscraper within many, mnay miles, built in an isolated village? Cool? Eerie? Disturbing? Would you want to actually live there?

For more, check out the following promotional video. Also see this Treehugger article.

There’s phallic — the Washington Monument, skyscrapers, ice cream drumsticks — and then there’s penis. Behold the above, purportedly the new headquarters of People’s Daily. As Hug China explains:

Pictures of the People’s Daily new headquarters that is under furnishing at the moment have gone viral on Chinese social media. One of the picture taken by a netizen from a special angle on April 11 when the top part of the building was framed with construction racks makes the construction look like a colossal human male genital.

Of course, it’s all a matter of camera angle, as many have pointed out. But why be a spoilsport? The People’s Daily is a colossal dick.

Netizens, naturally, are having a bit of fun with this. Here’s the Penis Building, via Weibo, juxtaposed with the CCTV Tower off Beijing’s Third Ring Road in the central business district:

The CCTV tower is nicknamed Big Underpants. What nicknames do we have for the People’s Daily? Suggestions welcome.

Take a look: via Design Boom, here’s how construction is going on Zaha Hadid’s Wangjing SOHO, a follow-up to Galaxy SOHO, which opened in Beijing last November:

This construction update comes amid ongoing controversy, as Beijing builders continue to race against a copycat building in Chongqing. It’s hard to imagine someone pirating an architectural design as large and ambitious as Hadid’s — not because China lacks the architects to do so, but because to attempt such a thing requires an amount of shamelessness that is truly astonishing — but according to Der Spiegel, that’s exactly what happened:

What’s worse, Hadid said in an interview, she is now being forced to race these pirates to complete her original project first.

The project being pirated is the Wangjing SOHO, a complex of three towers that resemble curved sails, sculpted in stone and etched with wave-like aluminum bands, that appear to swim across the surface of the Earth when viewed from the air.

Zhang Xin, the billionaire property developer who heads SOHO China and commissioned Hadid to design the complex, lashed out against the pirates during the Galaxy opening: “Even as we build one of Zaha’s projects, it is being replicated in Chongqing,” a megacity near the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. At this point in time, she added, the pirates of Chongqing are building faster than SOHO. The original is set for completion in 2014.

Hadid, if she chooses, can take solace in that the copycats are paying her the highest compliment. Now if only they’ll give her the proper credit.

Here’s what the finished Wangjing SOHO is supposed to look like:

wangjing SOHO by zaha hadid construction in beijing (designboom)

While checking out coverage of the “invisible console” unveiling of the Playstation 4 in New York, I was struck by a familiar sight. No, not Diablo III. During the gameplay footage of Killzone 4, I recognized a certain oft-blighted building here in Beijing. Amidst the the civil unrest between the Helghest and Vektan loomed the unmistakeable curves and orbs of the Zaha Hadid-designed Galaxy SOHO.

Why? In a bid to convince the often pride-motivated Chinese government to end its June 2000 ban on video game consoles, perhaps Sony ordered a launch title to feature a building from the capital city. Or maybe, with the civil strife and sectarian violence of Killzone 4 eliciting the long repressed memories of the pre-July 14th revolution in the Baghdad of her childhood, Hadid is compelled to design for the game a building evoking life under the rule of an authoritarian regime.

More likely, it’s just a case of designers in one field taking inspiration from designers in another.

That being said, you’d think if you were given the blank slate of a future world to create architecture not bound by present conventions, construction capabilities or even physics, you wouldn’t resort to copying an empty office building in downtown Beijing.

(Images Gizmodo [from 55-second mark of video below], People’s Daily)

The proposed 19-story, 5-star waterfall quarry hotel near Tianmashan Mountain in Songjiang district, Shanghai, is apparently happening, maybe. First proposed six and a half years ago, when the firm Atkins won the rights to design something called the InterContinental Shimao Wonderland, the project caused major buzz in international media — though it’s been little more than buzz. But construction has finally begun, apparently, at least according to Web Urbanist, which states, “though its initial estimated opening date of May 2009 has long past, photos show progress at the quarry.”

As of this moment, that link is broken. The project that always seemed a bit too good to be true perhaps remains simply untrue.

If, however, this 380-room hotel from the future is ever to be finished, here’s what it should look like:

Dream big, Atkins. Don’t let practicality get in the way, and remember — you have competition in Changsha and Chengdu.

Subterranean Quarry Hotel to Extend 328 Feet Underground (Web Urbanist, H/T Alicia)

Sculptural concrete museums. That’s what these Tianjin buildings are, according to Fast Company’s Co.Design website, specifically “the exact inverse of each other, like a key and a lock, or a pair of interlocking puzzle pieces.”

The designer is international award-winning architect Steven Holl, who’s no stranger to Chinese projects. Last month he completed what Co.Design’s Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan called “the definitive building of his career,” the Chengdu supercomplex “Sliced Porosity Block,” with landscaping inspired by an 8th-century poem by Du Fu.

The Tianjin structures, the Ecology and Planning Museums, are part of a project called Tianjin Ecocity, planned jointly with Singapore. Co.Design again:

The government bills it as “the world’s largest ecocity,” a low-carbon urban experiment that China hopes to replicate across the country. Like Masdar before it, Tianjin Ecocity will be filled with “green spaces” and “social harmony,” according to the developers (to their credit, there are also plenty of legit benchmarks in place for testing whether the Ecocity is environmentally viable model for the rest of China).

Green spaces, social harmony, and the future. Our eventual alien overlords will be proud.

Steven Holl’s Mirror-Image Museums Are Inspired By Yin Yang (Co.Design, H/T Alicia)