Still, the sense of freedom in the new Chinese architecture is breathtaking, and suggests that it’s a culture that’s opening to personal and political freedoms. If there’s a rule to the new architecture then it’s “Anything goes.” Chinese designers don’t seem to be burdened by the principles of traditional architecture or modernism. This is an exuberant, excessive architecture, that can incorporate extreme forms, materials and scales. A tower structured like a stack of staggered dinner plates? An office building shaped like a piece of calamari? A school designed like one of Le Corbusier’s villas, only twenty times larger? None of them seems out of place in contemporary China.
     If there’s anything that characterizes that new architecture it’s the immense ambition and scale. Some of the structures highlighted in the exhibit, like a steel and glass office complex in Beijing and a cylindrical housing project in Guangzhou, seem too large to have been designed and built all at once. And many seem terribly impersonal in their monotonous, repetitive forms. People might be impressed with these mega-structures today, but will they want to stay and build their lives here? It’s hard to know what the new landscape will be. China is still in the middle of an extraordinary growth spurt; we’ll have to wait and see.