Larry Speck

This is a whole chunk of the city housing 2500 people in over 700 apartments.  It is incredibly ambitious in its notions about public space in residential environments.  The complex is essentially a gated community with its back to the surrounding city and its focus on a central garden.  Though there are "public" venues in the central space, they are oriented to the same exclusive crowd as the…

A stone's throw from Tiananmen Square, this huge abstract intervention seems to have landed awkwardly in the middle of a bustling city. It defies interaction either with neighboring buildings or pedestrians passing by.  The building sets the arts housed inside clearly apart from the life of the city.  Though bold and striking in form from the exterior, it is cold and vacuous in much of the…

The bright green exterior of Opposite House actually seems right at home in the tree-lined Beijing neighborhood where it is located.  The jaw-dropping part of the building is the interior which has dramatic spaces, dazzling light and rich, tactile materials

CCTV's daring shape definitely grabs attention from anywhere nearby.  But the best quality of its shape is the way it morphs and changes as you move around it in the city.  In that regard, it reminds me of the Pennzoil Building in Houston by Philip Johnson when it was first completed in the mid-1970s.  It, too, was minimalist urban sculpture that employed simple geometries to create dynamic…

Beijing's Olympic Green was an amazing accomplishment for which the people of the city still feel a great deal of pride.  Especially at night in the summer, the place is mobbed with locals just walking around with their families, taking photos, flying kites and watching little demonstrations.  For western eyes it is very strange to just have these two big objects set in a sea of undifferentiated…

Nestled in the valleys of a beautiful site on the outskirts of Beijing is a group of contemporary houses and a clubhouse designed by 12 outstanding Asian architects.  Each house is an individualistic object and they bear little relationship to each other.  Although there are some nice moments in many of the houses, this project seems to be symptomatic of something wrong with architecture today.…