Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space
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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-7868-3_3
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Grand Theater Urbanism
Charlie Qiuli Xue Editor
Chinese Cities in the 21st century
“In ‘Grand Theater Urbanism’,Professor Charlie Xue and his team document China’s current shift towards a culture of consumption and leisure, symbolized by the construction of multi-use Grand Theaters in major cities.‘Grand Theater Urbanism’reveals the unexpected variety and complexity of this contemporary cultural drive in a series of exemplary chapters with highly detailed, local, case studies.”
—Professor David Grahame Shane,Columbia University, New York
“Jane Jacobs likened city life to a performance. This book goes a stage further and analyses the actual performance spaces within cities in China. In doing so it makes a valuable connection between urban design and the cultural life in cities. This is an important and often forgotten dimension of urbanism and I heartily commend this book to readers.”
—Professor Matthew Carmona,The Bartlett, University College London
Charlie Qiuli Xue
Editor
Grand Theater Urbanism
Chinese Cities in the 21st century
123
1 Development of Theaters and the City in Beijing:
The 1950s and Post-1980s. . . 1 Xiangdong Lu
2 To Be Cultural Capital: Grand Theaters in Shanghai . . . 31 Charlie Qiuli Xue
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space . . . 55 Guanghui Ding
4 City and Cultural Center Shift—Performance Space
in Shenzhen . . . 75 Cong Sun
5 Growth with the City: Theatrical Buildings in Chongqing. . . 105 Dongzhu Chu and Kai Xue
6 The Henan Art Center: From Dilemma to Ambition . . . 127 Lujia Zhang
7 The Shanxi Grand Theater: The“Renaissance”of Chinese
Drama Land. . . 149 Yingbo Xiao and Min Ni
8 A Butterfly by the Lake—Wuxi Grand Theater. . . 179 Lin Li
9 The National Taichung Theater: Experimenting Publicity
of Metropolitan Urbanism . . . 209 Jing Xiao
10 From Colonial to Global—Performing Art Space
in Hong Kong. . . 231 Charlie Qiuli Xue
xxxi
Chapter 3
Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space
Guanghui Ding
3.1 Introduction
In 1931, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Auditorium was erected in Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province in southern China. Nearly 80 years later, in the summer of 2010, the Guangzhou Opera House held itsfirst performance—Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera Turandot, directed by American film- maker Shahar Stroh. Designed by the Iraq-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid, the Guangzhou Opera House was one of the highest-profile theater building projects in China at the time (Cheng2010). Leading international newspapers, such as The Guardian, Financial Times, The New York Times and The Telegraph, reviewed the building (Glancey 2011; Heathcote 2011; Moore2011; Ouroussoff 2011). Prominent architectural magazines such as the Architectural Record and Domusalso reported on the completion of the project (Anonymous2011a; Galilee 2010). Conceived as an urban catalyst for the new cultural district of Guangzhou, the project became a new representation of the city, showcasing both a commitment to cultural prosperity and a vision for global exchange.
In as much as the construction of the Guangzhou Opera House was closely associated with state-driven urban expansion, globally-based architectural creativ- ity, domestically-initiated institutional reform and market-oriented cultural pro- duction, the project became a quintessential example able to illustrate the complexity of architectural practice under China’s socialist market economy. The interplay of politics and experimentation in the Guangzhou Opera House gave rise to a“gated public space”—both a material space with the juxtaposition of inclusive public gatherings and exclusive commercial activities and an immaterial space of freedom yet controlled by the agents of the state and capital. The gated nature of
G. Ding (&)
School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing, China
e-mail:[email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 C. Q. Xue (ed.),Grand Theater Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7868-3_3
55
this public realm was characterized by the tension between the decentralization of authority and the intervention of power, reflecting the intrinsic character of China’s reform and opening-up process. The state intended to use the project as a spatial instrument to achieve economic development, political stability and cultural pros- perity, struggling to address the“three goals”(growth, control and equality) in the course of China’s modernization (Perry and Wong1985).
3.2 Expansion of Urban Territory
Before the erection of the Guangzhou Opera House, the city possessed two main performing venues: the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (Fig.3.1) built in the 1930s, with a predominantly classical Chinese octagonal roof and structured for political gatherings to advocate Sun’s revolutionary ideas by the Nationalist Party, and the Youyi (Friendship) Theater (Fig.3.2) in the 1960s, a medium-sized, multi-purpose modern theater with merits of subtle interaction between architecture and nature and between audiences and artists (Lu2004; Lin1982). The two buildings have become popular venues for a variety of performances, holding more than 200 shows every year.
The level of cultural exchange increased after China’s opening-up in the early 1980s, but various major international plays and operas that had been introduced could not be staged in Guangzhou, due to the layout of the two buildings (Lau 2010). The decision to build a grand theater for various performing arts was not made immediately, however, inasmuch as a number of internal and external factors were involved. In an effort to accommodate music performance and demonstrate cultural prosperity, the state-of-the-art Xinghai Concert Hall was built by local authorities in 1998.1 The iconic part of the building is its roof, a hyperbolic paraboloid reinforced concrete shell with diagonal span to 67.88 m, under which a 1500-seat concert hall was designed with “vineyard terraces”, an arrangement of orchestra initially appeared in Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonic of 1963. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Xinghai Concert Hall located on the Ersha Island in the Pearl River became the most representative destination of the city’s cultural tourism (Fig.3.3).
While visiting South China in 1992, Deng Xiaoping advocated the establishment of a socialist market economy that would enable China to be involved in global capitalism. He particularly encouraged local officials in Guangzhou to energetically develop the economy, urging that Guangzhou should catch up with the so-called Four Asian Dragons within 20 years’rapid development (Vogel 1991). The pri- orities for the mayor Li Ziliu were, by following Hong Kong, to construct both a
1This concert hall was designed by the architect Lin Yongxiang and his colleagues from the South China University of Technology Architectural Design and Research Institute, in collaboration with leading acoustics consultant like Xiang Ruiqi from Beijing Institute of Architectural Design.
commercial andfinancial center and a metro system, without which the city could not be called an “international metropolis” (guojihua dadushi) (Nanfang dush- ibao2011). Building an underground rapid transit system requires huge investment, well beyond the financial means of the local authority. The booming property market of the time enabled Li to consider raising funds by planning a new town and selling land (Rithmire2013).2
Fig. 3.1 Lu Yanzhi, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Auditorium, Guangzhou, 1931. Photo by Charlie Xue
Fig. 3.2 She Junnan, the Youyi (Friendship) Theater, 1965
2In China, all land was state-owned (in urban areas) or collectively-owned (in rural areas).
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space 57
The under-urbanized territory to the south of the Tianhe Sports Center was an ideal site, as the large area of farmland could be converted quickly to satisfy the expansion of urban life. In 1993, the Guangzhou Urban Planning Bureau invited three firms—Thomas Planning Service Inc. from Boston, USA, Leung Peddle Thorp Architects and Planners Ltd. from Hong Kong and the local Guangzhou Urban Planning and Design Survey Research Institute—to deliver planning pro- posals for the Zhujiang (Pearl River) New Town. The final master plan with a hierarchical structure was based on the proposal by American planner, Carol J. Thomas (Huang2005). A noticeable urban axis linking the Tianhe Sports Center in the north with the Pearl River in the south dominated the plan. This 128 m wide landscape axis divided the town into two primary areas, which included 440 residential (east) and commercial (west) blocks, together with a number of cultural facilities such as theater and museum. Small-scale blocks and high-density developments enabled land to be easily sold to private developers for speculation.
Thefinancial crisis that struck many Asian countries in late 1997 however led to a significant drop in property prices, affecting real estate development in Guangzhou. The local authority reviewed the new town’s sluggish development and decided to promote the new town as the Guangzhou Central Business District of the Twenty-first Century (GCBD21). Piper Gaubatz has argued that one of the most common strategies municipal planners use to transform locally oriented cities into internationally oriented cities is the designation of CBDs (Gaubatz2005). The emergence of CBDs exemplified that the state tended to employ the production of urban space as an instrument to achieve capital accommodation (Gottdiener1985).
While preserving the central landscape axis, the revised plan consisted of 269 larger blocks and adjusted a number of the architectural programs (Fig.3.4). More importantly, for thefirst time it was clearly stated that the Guangzhou Opera House should be built in the new town, suggesting that the previously planned convention and exhibition center, along with other administrative and legislative institutions, be Fig. 3.3 Xinghai Concert Hall, 1998. Photo by Zang Peng
Fig. 3.4 The comparison between the 1993 Zhujiang New Town Plan (upper) and the 2001 Revised Plan (down)
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space 59
relocated to the south of the Pearl River (Guangzhou Urban Planning and Design Survey Research Institute2003).
The local authorities began to develop the new town more rapidly in the early 2000s, but it was four years until the revised plan was officially published. The construction of the Guangzhou Opera House was one of the most important steps and became a catalyst for surrounding development. To help understand this bold decision, it is useful to see it in the context of the public debate on theater building, particularly the heated discussion that had surrounded the National Grand Theater project in Beijing. At the turn of the millennium, the central government organized an international architecture competition to design the National Grand Theater.
After two rounds of the competition, the proposal of French architect Paul Andreu, characterized by an ellipsoid dome of titanium and glass surrounded by an artificial lake, was selected for implementation (Xue et al.2010). The project’s location, to the west of the Great Hall of the People, was extremely politically sensitive, and its simple and futuristic form was in sharp contrast to the surrounding buildings, with their strong national ornamentation. The radical aesthetics and issues of structural safety led to national controversies and vigorous public debates.
The Shanghai Grand Theater, designed by French architect Jean-Marie Charpentier, also opened in 1998 (see Chap.1), and hundreds of national and international performances had been staged there. Guangzhou is the third-largest city in China. To compete with its rivals Beijing and Shanghai, it needed a remarkably different image and a distinctive landmark. The opera house project included a public building with a 46,000 m2floor area, with seating for 1800 in the main theater, a 4000 m2 lobby and lounge and 2500 m2 rooms for ancillary and supporting facilities. The construction budget (excluding the land price) was RMB 850 million (about USD 120 million). The Guangzhou Urban Planning Bureau, the competition’s organizer, hoped that the construction of the building would “pro- mote socialist spiritual civilization, meet the growing cultural needs of the people, expand cultural exchanges, improve and perfect the city’s functions and establish Guangzhou’s central position in the Pearl River Delta and even in southern China (Anonymous2002c).”
3.3 Experimenting with Opinion Space
The bureau decided to hold their high-profile international competition in July 2002. Previously the institution had followed the then-mayor Lin Shusen’s instructions that proposals for significant public projects should be generated through design competitions. Yu Ying was appointed by the planning bureau’s leader Wang Menghui to organize the competition for the opera house, due to his involvement in the previous competition for the Guangzhou International Convention and Exhibition Center, which was critically acclaimed by officials, experts and the public (Yu 2009). Yu’s ambition was to create an eye-catching event, manifested in the way he successfully invited a number of internationally
celebrated architects, such as Rem Koolhaas (Holland), Zaha Hadid (Britain), Coop Himmelb(I)au (Austria), Takamatsu Shin (Japan), Cox Architects (Australia), Gerkan, Marg and Partners (Germany), Gonzalez Hasbrouck Architects (USA) and prominent domestic design companies such as the Architectural Design Institute of the South China University of Technology and the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design. This line-up of invited architects was far more impressive than that of any other Chinese design competition.
The nine firms submitted their proposals by November 1, 2002, which were examined initially by the Technical Committee, which consisted of twelve experts from the fields of urban planning, architecture, structural engineering, acoustics, stage technology, equipment and cost management. They provided careful, com- prehensive and detailed written opinions and professional technical advice. The Jury Committee consisting of leading architects and academics then voted on the nine entries to shortlist three excellent proposals. The voting process was observed by staff of the Guangzhou Notary Public Office.
From November 30 to December 16, 2002, the submitted proposals, including drawings and models, were exhibited in the Guangzhou Urban Planning Bureau’s exhibition hall and posted on its official website. The bureau encouraged citizens to visit and vote for their favorite proposals; a democratic gesture allowing people to express their opinions on the city’s construction. It was reported that 2802 people visited the exhibition, and a number of them voted for a particular scheme. Nearly 20,000 people voted through the website.
Alongside the voting, the competition proposals could be found on the Urban Planning Online website, where people also actively expressed their opinions.
Regarding the Himmelb(I)au proposal, which was in the top three of both the physical and the online polls, the comment posted was that“from the point of view of renderings posted on the Internet, proposal No. 2 is extremely good-looking. It should be said that it is the most beautiful and unique building in the world and even the United States has not yet had such a project”(Anonymous2002a). These comments revealed the aesthetic and ideological shock that the Himmelb(I)au proposal provoked in Chinese audiences. This public opinion also reflected the expectations of local people for a brand new structure, able to represent the city’s forward-looking spirit.
The proposals, exhibited in the bureau’s exhibition hall and on their official website, were also closely examined by architectural professionals and students from the Chinese architectural community. A short introduction appeared in the Shanghai Tongji University’s journalShidai jianzhu(Time + Architecture), and the 2002 event was also hotly debated in the ABBS (Architecture Bulletin Board Service), a prominent online forum founded in 1998 and dedicated to discussing various architectural issues.
The proposals submitted for the Guangzhou Opera House, particularly the Himmelb(I)au and the Hadid proposals, were in the main regarded as exceptionally high quality, in comparison with those for the controversial National Grand Theater competition. In part, this was evident in the positive responses from other architects.
On January 28, 2003, the Guangzhou Urban Planning Bureau unveiled their three
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space 61
shortlisted proposals: Coop Himmelb(I)au (proposal No. 2), Zaha Hadid Architects (No. 4) and the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (No. 5).
The Himmelb(I)au proposal, described as jiqing huoyan (vehement flame), consisted of two parts: a simple, cubic, volumetric form containing the stage, fly tower and auditorium and a visually splendid glass shell extending towards the artistic plaza (Fig.3.5). The most striking and innovative aspect of the design was the large-scale glass structure, implying a gesture of openness that would resonate with the city’s strong civic tradition. Under this shell, a series of artificial lakes, towers, pavilions, bridges, ramps, stairs and trees were organized organically, forming a dynamic urban realm. The building itself created a continuous spatial sequence with gradual transition from the public bustling city life to the semi-public artistic activities to the exclusive theatrical ambience. The jury commented that“this proposal was extraordinarily excellent, demonstrating both a conflict and a unity between rationality and emotion, between logic and intuition (Anonymous2002b).” Zaha Hadid’s proposal, called lengjun shuangli (double pebbles) was highly praised by the jury as of brilliance in function, form and feasibility. It integrated two non-rectangular interlocking buildings sitting on an artificial, raising platform (Fig.3.6). The larger“pebble”contained the lobby, main auditorium, proscenium stage and various workshops and supporting facilities, while the smaller housed a multipurpose performance space. The idea to separate the project into two parts was a continuation of Hadid’s 1997 Luxembourg Philharmonic Hall proposal, and possibly influenced by Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House. The gentle slope created a multi-layer continuous public space, ideal for various cultural events and acces- sible to all. Like Hadid’s winning, but never built, project for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, landscape played a crucial role. The Guangzhou proposal included plans to reshape the site by creating an artificially made landscape (Hadid 2013). More interestingly, the project’s smooth envelope presented an extraordinary icon of
Fig. 3.5 Coop Himmelb(I)au’s proposal for the Guangzhou Opera House, 2002. Courtesy of Coop Himmelb(I)au
theater building, in sharp contrast with the surrounding tall buildings. Literally and figuratively, its fluid forms were inspired by pebbles smoothed by erosion in the Pearl River, a compelling rhetoric that enabled the architects to persuasively explain their intentions and the client and the public to recognize the relevance of the design concept to the city and the location.
The shortlist was announced in January 2003, but it seemed that the jury had made a professional decision before the exhibition of the submitted proposals. To some extent, the exhibition became a deliberate test of public opinion and a demonstration of the authorities’ democratic attitude. The competition did nonetheless become the subject of public discourse, increasing public interest in architecture and communicating architectural knowledge in a professional and social sense. The architects of the shortlisted proposals were then requested to revise their schemes following the Jury Committee’s suggestions, before the final decision was made in June. The attitude of the local political elite would have a significant bearing on the final decision. The so-called “three combination” (san jiehe)—experts reviewing (zhuanjia pingshen), public voting (qunzhong toupiao), and leaders deciding (lingdao jueding)—describes the procedure used in the 2000s in China to select proposals for significant government-sponsored public projects.
The winner was not announced until December 28, 2003. It was not a surprise that the Hadid proposal was selected as the implementation scheme, as there were a few indications that it was favored by local officials. The competition director Yu had initially presented the proposals to the then-mayor Lin Shusen, before the jury’s review. He was immediately impressed by the so-called“double pebbles”of Hadid Architects (Yu 2009). Interestingly, Lin’s appreciation of the “double pebbles” Fig. 3.6 Zaha Hadid’s proposal for the Guangzhou Opera House, 2002. Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space 63
proposal was also consistent with the jury’s recommendation. This agreement helped Lin persuade his colleagues of the merits of the Hadid proposal. Thefinal, formally approved and legal decision was made by the municipal committee, and on December 11, 2003, a local newspaper reported that the Hadid proposal had won the competition. Explaining why this proposal was special, the journalist cited the discourse of Zhao Boren—the chair of the competition’s Technical Committee— who argued that the House should be unique and differentiates the Beijing and Shanghai Theaters (Ling2003).
This comment clearly revealed that the distinctive form of the winning Hadid proposal was a crucial factor, as its form would establish a unique identity, even- tually enhancing the image of Guangzhou’s economy and culture nationally and internationally. The Hadid proposal was therefore accepted by local authorities and architectural professionals mainly owing to its spectacular forms, which maintained the potential to attract regional, national and global attention. Guy Debord argued that the spectacle is capital accumulation to the point where it becomes image (Debord1995). This image, for the art historian Clark, is never securely andfinally fixed in place; the spectacle is always an account of the world competing with others and meeting with resistance from different, and sometimes tenacious, forms of social practice (Clark1999). The ability of an architectural spectacle to brand and transform a city had been exemplified by Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum in Spain. Similarly, the city of Guangzhou needed a new image to compete with its rivals, a means of representation to market the city in the world and a radical form to project the future. Hadid’s opera house is likely to be an appropriate instrument to showcase both political vision and cultural ambition.
3.4 Project Construction
The project’s realization was an experiment with construction project management (dai jian zhi) in China. The municipal government commissioned the Guangzhou Municipal Construction Group, a leading state-owned company, in August 2004 as the agency responsible for the project’s construction (Huang and Yan 2004). In October, the Guangzhou Municipal Construction Group and Zaha Hadid Architects selected the Guangzhou Pearl River Foreign Investment Architectural Design Institute as their local partner, as the institute had won and designed the Wuhan Qintai Grand Theater and was experienced in the design of theater buildings (Huang 2012). Zaha Hadid Architects took responsibility for the control of the project’s total effect and schematic design (Fig.3.8). The local architects were responsible for technical drawing and support and for coordinating the various engineering consultants (Zhang 2010). The contributions of various other design firms exemplified the new international divisions of labor and the direct influence on architecture and the built environment.
On January 18, 2005, the construction of the long-awaited Guangzhou Opera House began. Local political leaders, Cantonese opera master Hung Sin-nui, the
Guangzhou British Consulate general Chris Wood and Hadid’s partner, Patrik Schumacher attended the ground-breaking ceremony. In his speech, Lin hailed the Guangzhou Opera House as a twenty-first century theater, maintaining that it will be recorded in the history of Guangzhou urban development (Fig.3.7) (Lin2005).
The selection in 2003 of Guangzhou to host the 2010 Asian Games should be noted as the context in which local officials offered enthusiastic support for the project. They used this event as a reason to speed up the construction of the opera house and the new town. With this kind of event-driven urban expansion, the Hu-Wen administration experimented with Keynesian economics, which empha- sizes heavy investment in infrastructure and the built environment supported by credit from state-owned banks (Warner 2015). The grand theaters built in many provincial cities, from Guangzhou to Hangzhou are tremendously ambitious pro- jects, and epitomize the possibilities and limits of Keynesian theories (Anonymous 2011b).3 The authorities’ endowments for cultural prosperity (including the building of performance venues), whether or not they operate properly in practice, may help engender a sense of solidarity and pride and accumulate political, eco- nomic and cultural capital, resonating with Keynes’advocacy of the state’s role in supporting the arts (Keynes1937). Authorities in second and third-tier cities such as Wenzhou, Wuxi, Yantai and Bengbu have sometimes, however, made imprudent Fig. 3.7 The ground plan of the Guangzhou Opera House. Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
3The possibilities include the state’s investment transformed urban landscape and stimulated economic growth, while the limits refer to the fact that the wasteful investment distorted resource allocation and retained domestic consumption.
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space 65
decisions to build extravagant and inappropriate theaters (the so-called image projects, or,xingxiang gongcheng), in an attempt to construct a positive political image (Anonymous2013).
The construction process of the Guangzhou Opera House also involved a level of experimentation, owing to the structure’s unprecedented complexity. Before the pouring of the concrete, the construction company made a variety of experimental models such as a sloping wall, a sloping balustrade, an inclined column and a triangular groove, in an attempt to deal with the high demands placed on the fair-face concrete surfaces (Zhang2010). The realization of the irregular envelope presented another major difficulty, which as the project’s distinctive characteristic, was generated from the 3D software Rhino. The architects and structural engineers separated the envelope into two layers: an integrated single-layer lattice shell, structurally separated from the auditorium and consisting of various triangular and square units, and granite stone wall hanging.
It was reported that the architects were initially inclined to use metal or as-cast finish concrete to create the fluid forms, but local officials argued that as the proposal expressed a sense of pebbles eroded by water, using stone as the facade material would better convey this intention (Feng and Xu2006). This made sense in its own right, but it overlooked the fact that stone is a fragile material and could not be processed into the desirable shapes as easily as metal or concrete. The officials possessed significant power in this government-funded project, so it was likely that the architects would bow to political pressure. In an effort to create this kind of smoothed aesthetic, one of the solutions was to tessellate the continuous surface into a large number of triangular and polygonal units (about 75,400 pieces) (Duo 2010) (Figs.3.8,3.9).
The local authorities requested that the pace of construction increase, so the closing ceremony of the Ninth China Art Festival could be held in the opera house on 25 May 2010, and to prepare for the Asian Games (Liu2010). Like many major public projects in China, there was a slapdash approach to the construction of the opera house. The curved surfaces of the building’s corners challenged the limits of stone and skills of the builders, and the roof of the office lobby leaked (Fig.3.10).
The inability to produce a perfect envelope was to some extent an illustration of the predicament of architectural practice when profoundly constrained by politics.
Compared with theflawed skin, the interior, particularly the splendid auditorium and its excellent acoustics, was widely commended. A critic commented that“seats are arranged in a slightly asymmetrical pattern, enveloping the stage on three sides, with undulant balconies cascading down in front of the stage”(Ouroussoff2011) (Figure3.11). The streamlined space, both in the lobby and the golden-hued auditorium, was clad with Corian (glassfiber reinforced gypsum panels), which can be modeled into different shapes. Local officials challenged criticism over the poor quality of construction, declaring that the project’s structure was safe and that the appearance of cracks on the wall and ceiling was due to the local climate (Zeng 2010). The increase in the project cost to RMB 1.38 billion (about USD 200 million), but any coverage of criticism or suggestions of corruption was relentlessly censored (Huang2009).
Fig. 3.8 The Guangzhou Opera House in construction, 2007. Courtesy of Raymond Wong
Fig. 3.9 The central axis of Zhujiang New Town. The Guangzhou Opera House is on the left hand side. The Guangdong Museum is opposite the opera house, 2008. Courtesy of Raymond Wong
Fig. 3.10 Theflawed skin of the Guangzhou Opera House
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space 67
3.5 Medium of Cultural Production
The Guangzhou Opera House is both a product of and an incubator for cultural production. The term“culture”refers to both the project’s material and symbolic forms and the content and programs the building was designed to contain (King 1990). The building itself was derived from the state’s ambition to construct, regardless of cost, a distinctive identity representing the city in the world. It also reflected local political and cultural elites’perception of the international climate of architecture. The many examples of global and national cities that built architectural spectacle for urban competitiveness undoubtedly helped motivate the client to erect something different. As a physical object, the opera house revealed the extent to which global, national design intelligence and local building craftsmanship could interact in a specific political and economic circumstance.
Occupying a crucial point in the city’s new axis with overwhelming monu- mentality, the Guangzhou Opera House, with itsfluid forms and theatrical spaces, compellingly demonstrated theflamboyance of architectural spectacle, a goal that politicians, cultural elites and architects, among others, collaboratively pursued.
Thisflamboyance was widely disseminated through the publicizing of the project in international newspapers and professional magazines. In this sense, the state playing key role in directing the global flow of culture not only imported inter- national design ideas but also employed the project as a tool to export the city’s image to the world and to attract tourists, exemplifying the implication of global- ization as an interactive, not a one way process of communication (King1997).
The opera house is also a medium carrying out new approach of cultural management and a platform upon which national and global performing arts are staged, consumed and produced. For one thing, compared with many grand theaters that receive a state subsidy in China, the Guangzhou Opera House experimented with what they called“zero-establishment staffing and zero-subsidy (ling bianzhi, ling butie).”Clearly, this alternative mode of operation, based on market mecha- nism, saves a large amount of taxpayers’ money every year. To recover mainte- nance costs, and even generate some profit, the opera house had to substantially Fig. 3.11 The main auditorium of the Guangzhou Opera House. Right photo by Charlie Xue and Zhang Lujia
increase ticket prices, which sometimes resulted in poor attendance and a waste of artistic resources (Chen and He2011).
The paradox is that only the upper-middle classes who can afford the tickets are able to engage with the building and its performances. Though the opera house’s management invited more than 800 representatives of the builders and professionals that contributed to the project to watch a trial performance before thefirst formal show, such kind of activities, which both pay tribute to the builders and offer an opportunity for low-income people to appreciate musical arts was still an exception, not the rule (Deng 2010). While consuming so-called high culture, emerging affluent people show their privileged status and have access to the city’s artistic palace.
For another, the opera house’s state-of-the-art facilities are able to stage per- formances of ballets, chamber music concerts, musicals, operas, spoken dramas and symphonies, remedying the previous situation in which large-scale opera or ballet, such asSwan Lake,cannot be performed in the city’s other smaller theater stages.
By attracting both international and national performing arts groups, the opera house provided local music enthusiasts with cultural feasts, representing the city’s increasingly energetic and dynamic artistic scene.
3.6 Conclusion
Building a grand theater in contemporary China is first and foremost a political project, as the will of politics played a crucially important role in experimenting with new formal languages, competition organizing, project management and operation. In this circumstance, a grand theater is not only a performing venue but also a demonstration of political ideology, a catalyst for urban expansion and cultural exchange. The diversity of forces shaping the Guangzhou Opera House created a “gated public space,” a juxtaposition of inclusion and exclusion, of freedom and restraint. Characterized by contradiction and tension, this gated public realm presented an array of cultural, social and political ramifications.
Through designing a landscaped platform, the architects redefined and trans- formed the featureless site in a cultural and commercial district into an accessible public plaza. The raised plaza can be used as an outside stage for artistic events, and is reached by a variety of approaches (Fig.3.12). Under the platform, the architects slightly inclined conventionally perpendicular columns, creating spaces with a strong sense of motion (Fig.3.13). These sheltered, open spaces provide local people with leisure facilities. Inside the foyer, however, the public could experience very limited spaces, mainly in the box office, souvenir and coffee shops (Fig.3.14).
While the opera house attempted to display its civic character, it also revealed the truth of class relations, representing spatially the social and political hierarchy and conveying a daunting feeling to the poor and unprivileged who had less chance to appreciate the performing arts, even though their taxes contributed to the building (Yu2011).
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space 69
Aside from physical level, this gated character was also embodied in immaterial dimensions. For one thing, the position that local government actively embraced international design intelligence demonstrated an open attitude during China’s Fig. 3.12 The outdoor platform of the Guangzhou Opera House. Photo by Charlie Xue
Fig. 3.13 The groundfloor space under the platform
Fig. 3.14 The interior of the Guangzhou Opera House. Photo by Charlie Xue
reform and opening process. Masked by the ideology of planning and design, the state’s intervention into both urban expansion and architectural making exposed its intention to manipulate the production of space in such a way as to accumulate economic, political, and social capital. For another, by organizing both on-site and online exhibitions of submitted proposals for the theater, the local authorities encouraged ordinary citizens to express their ideas on project design, creating an increasingly democratic public realm to accommodate diverse opinions and debates. The state, however, maintained the power to control this opinion space and tended to influence the consequence of this space through political intervention.
Similarly, the authorities also encouraged a variety of cultural production and experimentation within the opera house, yet still closely scrutinized those explo- rations and kept them in the politically correct track.
Situating the project of the Guangzhou Opera House within China’s modern- ization process, it has become clear that the implementation of reform and opening-up was a dynamic process of adjusting the location of the “gate,”or the physical, social, political and cultural boundary. Opening the door to the outside world helped implement domestic reform, while deeper reform would improve the degree of openness. The course of game was suffused with the decentralization of authority and the intervention of power. The former implies a decrease of the state’s capacity to control social, cultural and aesthetic affairs; the latter refers to the state’s inclination to use political power to maintain specific order. The Guangzhou Opera House in this regard illustrated explicitly that the creation of public space was meaningful and maintained a gated nature, controlled by the ruling class.
Acknowledgements This chapter is part of a study supported by Research Grant Council, Hong Kong government, project No. CityU 11658816 and by the Fundamental Research Funds for Beijing Universities, Project No. X18237.
My preoccupation with the Guangzhou Opera House originates less from my obsession with theater performance and its building type and more from my interest in the project’s design competition. When I was studying at architectural school in the early 2000s, the debate on the National Theater of China in Beijing dominated the architectural community. To some extent, the French architect Paul Andreu’s winning proposal ended the long-term debate over formal simi- larity (xing si) and spiritual similarity (shen si), both of which were related to attitudes towards tradition. While the debate over the National Theater was confined to professional periodicals and elitefigures, the design competition for the Guangzhou Opera House transcended the public’s perception of architecture in a number of ways. The proposals submitted by leading avant-garde architects from the West surpassed many people’s imagination, and the report and discussion of these proposals online, such as the ABBS, profoundly increased its influence in thefield and beyond. The commitment to creating quality urban public spaces transformed my attitude towards architecture and the city. Fifteen years after the competition and 10 years after its completion, the Guangzhou Opera House deserves critical scholarly evaluation for its singular position in the evolution of architecture in contemporary China and for its significant influence on my own understanding of architecture.
3 Guangzhou Opera House: Building a Gated Public Space 71
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