China's architecture design seeks unique style

Dozens of architecture designs winning prizes at an international contest in an east China city Saturday were acclaimed for drawing on the cream of both Oriental and Western, ancient and modern construction strong points, blazing a new trail in leading China's civil engineering development. The international architecture design contest poses a major event during the China Weihai International Habitat Festival, held in the coastal city of Weihai in east China's Shandong province from Sept. 16 to 19.

A total of 59 masterpieces selected from among works of some 1,000 candidates were awarded gold, silver and bronze prizes, including designs by famous designers from China, France, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Germany and other countries and regions.

The exhibition hall in memory of late Chinese senior leader Deng Xiaoping, a residential quarter in Shanghai, a railway station in the southernmost Hainan province and a number of other works designed by Chinese architecture designers won honors at the contest for giving expressions to their harmonious human settlement environment.

These designs have reversed the trend of going to the extreme by adopting either the Chinese traditional styles or copying the Western modern designs in the past two decades, said Chen Weibang,vice president of the China Urban Planning Society.

Rapid urbanization process in China over recent years once marginalized the theme of the Eastern cultural awareness in the civil engineering designing, said Zheng Shiling, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, adding that not a few Chinese cities indulged in just imitating the Western architectural designs.

He held that it is worthwhile for China to draw on the designing forms, styles and schools of thought from the Western architectural designs, but more due attention should be given to their rationality and integration of multiple sciences in the designing of the architectures.

A large number of Chinese architecture designs in the contest have made breakthrough and innovations, he said, naming the residential quarter in an ancient town of Shanghai, the international trade center in Weihai and an economically affordable housing projects for the low, middle-income earners in Beijing.

He Jingtang, one of China's top architecture designers, set forth the concept of combining locality, culture with features of the present era in architecture designing and he encouraged the creation of architecture designs with Chinese own cultural hallmarks the basis on assimilating the advanced Western concepts and skills.

China has had a lot of superb architecture designs in the modern era, namely, Dr. Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum built in the 1920s, the China Art Gallery in 1960s, the Beijing Library in the 1980s, the Confucius Research Institute and the Ju'er Alley residential alley in Beijing in the 1990s, according to Zheng Shiling, who was also former dean of the construction and urban planning college under elite Tongji University in Shanghai.

The success of fine Chinese designs in recent years as well asthose winning prizes at the contest lie in the adherence to creating preferable human settlement environment and scientific and harmonious social development, which have all averted errors of seeking quick success and instant benefits prevailing in some cities of the country, said Liu Feng, a research fellow with the Development Research Center of the State Council. Experts warned against acts of going in for grandiose urban development projects in some Chinese cities.

Source: Xinhua