DEL.ICIO.USChina’s rise is by design
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Asia’s rapid growth has also become important to the financial health of architecture firms as credit has tightened and property values have fallen in the United States. The current business climate in the United States is similar to a real-estate recession in Georgia in the early- and mid-1990s that left companies in financial disarray.
“You can’t borrow money and a lot of housing stock is sitting empty,” Portman, who splits his time between Atlanta and Shanghai, said during a trip to Beijing.
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Benjamin Wood is one of several Georgia architects profiting from China’s construction boom.
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Lell Barnes, a vice president at John Portman & Associates, stands behind an architectural model in the firm’s Shanghai office.
In the 1990s “we almost bit the dust,” he said.
Founded in 1953 in Atlanta by John Portman, Jack Portman’s father, the firm’s deep roots in Asia have softened the current downturn. John Portman & Associates opened its Shanghai office in 1993 and currently has offices there and in Seoul, South Korea, and Mumbai, India. More than 70 percent of the company’s work is in Asia, Portman said.
As business has slowed in the United States, those offices have passed work to architects and designers in Atlanta, a strategy executives hope will keep employees busy until the U.S. economy improves.
While the company is privately owned and does not release financial information, the international business is profitable.
“Right now, particularly, we have to turn away a lot of work,” Portman said. “It’s important that we’re balanced geographically.”
A surge of construction in Asia has given architects a chance to design on a scale rarely possible in the mature U.S. market.
Wood, who joined the Air Force after graduating from Roswell High School and later studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was recently commissioned to plan a Shanghai suburb with 10,000 housing units.
“The great benefits of working in China aren’t just monetary,” Wood said in his Shanghai studio. “The benefit is that you get to do work you’d never get in the United States.”
Wood made his name by recreating a sliver of China’s past. In 1998, a Hong Kong property developer asked him to design a shopping complex in downtown Shanghai.
Drawing inspiration from Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a retail zone modeled on historic buildings, he renovated a dilapidated neighborhood to create graceful gray-brick buildings lining cobblestone streets.
The development — called Xintiandi, which translates as “New Heaven and Earth” — quickly became popular with locals and tourists.
When Wood opened his firm in 2003, contracts flooded in from developers across China interested in renovating sections of historic architecture. One current project is renovating the downtown of Foshan, a southern Chinese city with 5.8 million people.
John Portman & Associates has also designed on a massive scale. Several years ago, the firm created a master plan for a 692-acre resort and leisure zone surrounding a Formula One racetrack in Shanghai.
Its largest ongoing project is the Incheon 151 Tower, a 151-story skyscraper under construction near Seoul. The development, which is owned by the firm and a consortium of Korean companies, will cover an area as large as New York City’s Central Park and contain three times as much indoor space as Atlanta’s Peachtree Center, including offices, condominiums, retail units and a hotel.
The massive scale of many projects in Asia is the biggest difference with architecture in the United States, said Lell Barnes, a Shanghai-based vice president with the firm.
“In the U.S., it’s hard to find a shopping mall that’s more than two stories tall,” Barnes said. “Here there are some that are 12 stories tall.”
