Magazine

As is the case for many other building typologies in China today, schools are often realised with standardised building modules designed independent of any location or topography. Hongling High School in the Futian district of Shenzhen is no exception. While it tends to be assumed that the... Eduard Kögel

China Merchants Group was founded in 1872 and will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2025. To mark the occasion, a new China Merchants History Museum tells the story of the (state-owned) enterprise. This specially commissioned museum is located in the Shekou district of Shenzhen and was... Eduard Kögel

The city of Jingdezhen in the province of Jiangxi is renowned beyond China since historical times for its porcelain production. More recently, the Imperial Kiln... Eduard Kögel

The exhibition ‘POETIC IMAGINATIONS. Interweaving Architecture with Traditional Values’ by Beijing’s  Eduard Kögel

Since 2017, when the architects from urbanus identified Nantou as the focus for the Shenzhen – Hong Kong Biennale, several buildings have been... Eduard Kögel

In China, everyone knows the saying “In heaven there is paradise, on earth there is Suzhou and Hangzhou”. In Suzhou, the many historic gardens and the old city centre with its whitewashed buildings and grey roofs along the canals have been protected for fifty years. New high-rise districts... Eduard Kögel

The 19th Asian Games opened on September 23 and run through October 8, 2023, in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province. The Games, originally scheduled for 2022, were postponed for a year because of China’s Covid-19 policy. Of the more than fifty competition venues for the Games, only twelve... Eduard Kögel

Hainan Island, located in the South China Sea, has a tropical climate all year round. Since 1988, the island has been an independent province and the largest special economic zone in the People’s Republic. The capital Haikou is located at the northern end of the island with a population of... Eduard Kögel

In recent decades, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone has developed into the fastest growing metropolis in the world. As a result, new ways of natural resource management are needed. Doreen Heng Liu and her  Eduard Kögel

On June 25, Álvaro Siza will celebrate his 90th birthday. The Portuguese architect is still active, designing and constructing projects in various locations around the world. An exhibition titled Two Towers is on display in Berlin until early July, showcasing two of his projects that... Eduard Kögel

The Upper Cloister is a modern-day interpretation of an ancient temple-complex, where the urban middle class from Beijing can find rest and relaxation within a grandiose natural and cultural landscape with a view of The Great Wall. It is located halfway between the Chinese capital and Chengde,... Eduard Kögel

On 10 December 2022, the 9th Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale for Urbanism/Architecture (UABB) curated by Lu Andong, Prince Gong, and Aric Chen, opened at the newly converted Kingway Brewery, in the Luohu District in Shenzhen. The conversion of the brewery... Eduard Kögel

The exhibition COMMON LANDSCAPE. Re-Cultivating Industrial Sites by Shanghai’s Atelier Deshaus will open at Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin on March 31, 2023. The exhibition’s curator, Eduard Kögel, spoke with founding partner Liu Yichun about the firm’s architecture in advance of... Eduard Kögel

In recent years, new residential quarters, office buildings and businesses have been built on the Pudong side of Shanghai. Now the Culture Community Complex follows, with three large buildings: the Pudong Library planned by Nihon Sekkei, already completed in 2010 at the northern end of the... Eduard Kögel

At the beginning of October, Xu Tiantian and Tei Carpenter were in Berlin at ANCB, The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory, for a workshop with their students from Yale University School of... Eduard Kögel

The first phase of the new China Academy of Art (CAA) Liangzhu Campus in Hangzhou has been inaugurated and the second phase of the complex, designed by Atelier... Eduard Kögel

Eduard Kögel reviews Walter Koditek's HONG KONG MODERN, Architecture of the 1950s–1970s, which documents more than 300 buildings and ensembles and, per DOM Publishers, "gives an unprecedented comprehensive overview on the architecture of that transformative period" in Hong Kong. Eduard Kögel

Beijing-based designers of 3andwich Design/He Wei Studio recently completed a tourist infrastructure building in the Tengger Desert in the Ningxia Autonomous Region in northwest... Eduard Kögel

Under the direction of Ma Yansong, the office MAD Architects has realised its first social housing project. MAD Architects, known for spectacular forms and spaces in their projects, in... Eduard Kögel

In April 2021, Xu Tiantian and her office DnA_Design and Architecture were invited by the local authority of Jinyun County to develop ideas for the conversion of former quarries. Those... Eduard Kögel

The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 opens at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York on February 20, 2022. Eduard Kögel spoke with MoMA chief curator Martino Stierli ahead of the opening about the theme of the exhibition and... Eduard Kögel

The XXIV Winter Olympics will take place in China in February 2022. The various sporting competitions will be held at a location in Beijing and in Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, located 75 km and 100 km northwest of the capital. While snowboarding has been an Olympic discipline since 1998, the big... Eduard Kögel

Songyang has a new poetry museum. The Beijing-based architect Xu Tiantian received the commission for this. With her office DnA_Design and Architecture, she has already completed many small interventions in... Eduard Kögel

On September 18, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York opened the exhibition Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China, which will be on display until July 4, 2022. This is the first time in the history of the museum that it has turned its attention to contemporary... Eduard Kögel

Public space in China developed completely differently than it did in European cities of the twentieth century. In imperial China there was no open public space that had been fought for and defended by the citizens. Cities were shaped by streets and alleys, markets and temple courtyards, as... Eduard Kögel

In the 1960s, Astra Zarina was the only female architect among many male colleagues who designed more than 1,000 flats in the Märkisches Viertel housing estate in Berlin. Yet she went unnoticed. Why is that? Eduard Kögel

The youngest mega-city in China is Shenzhen. Since its designation as a special economic zone 40 years ago not only have many immigrants found a new home here, but also an innovative atmosphere has established itself. This is reflected in the Shenzhen College of International Education... Eduard Kögel

The Shanghai office Scenic Architecture was commissioned to design a rowing club for young people at an inner-city wetland park in Shanghai. The park is located in the Pudong district planned by Arte Charpentier in 1999 and ends an urban development axis that begins in the Lujiazui financial... Eduard Kögel

Atelier Zhang Lei (AZL Architects) in Nanjing recently completed a new hotel project, just 300 meters north of the Eduard Kögel

The city of Yangshuo in Guangxi Province lays about 65 kilometres south of Guilin and is surrounded by a dramatic landscape of towering karst mountains, which as a tourist attraction have been a highlight of domestic and foreign visitor programs for decades. The karst landscape has been on the... Eduard Kögel

Studio Zhu-Pei designed the new Imperial Kiln Museum that unpretentiously tells the stories from the porcelain-manufacturing town of Jingdezhen in terms of shape and material, and in so doing comments on the future-potentials of the past far beyond this one town. Eduard Kögel

Fighting rural poverty is one of the major goals of the Beijing government. Investments should increase the attractiveness and the economic prosperity of rural areas so as to generate viable alternative perspectives for local people to leaving their home village. CU Office has been working on... Eduard Kögel

Hong Kong is considered a city of extreme density due to the large number of high-rise buildings. This brings advantages; for public transport provision, for example. A limited buildable area causes high site values, that in turn necessitate this high building density. Some negatives of this... Eduard Kögel

Designed by Studio Zhu Pei from Beijing, the District Arts and Culture Centre is adjacent to the old city of Shouxian, in the southeast Chinese province of Anhui. Eduard Kögel

Taiyuan is the largest city in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi, where about a quarter of Chinese coal is mined. There are over three million inhabitants in Taiyuan city centre and the city has long been known for its high levels of air pollution. In recent years, air quality has... Eduard Kögel

Today, officially about 31 million of the 1.4 billion inhabitants of the People’s Republic of China are counted as Christians. With the economic opening-up of China in the early 1980s, the communist party used capitalist principles to marginalize the radical socialism of Mao Zedong, and in the... Eduard Kögel