The world's most visionary architects are rebuilding China

The world's most visionary architects are rebuilding China. Inside the aesthetic revolutionBy Susan Jakes Beijing－－－－－－－－－－－－－Nothing less than the most novel building in Beijing would do. Zhang Yongduo, an entrepreneur from the coastal Chinese province of Shandong, had made a fortune in a business that improbably paired spas with seafood restaurants. Now he was extending his chain to the capital, and he wanted a landmark to announce his arrival. Zhang didn't know much about design, so he hired a young U.S.-trained Chinese architect to serve as headhunter, instructing him to find a big name with a big vision. That's how in the spring of 2003 Zhang came to meet Raimund Abraham—one of architecture's great iconoclasts and a man whose designs are so radical that most exist only in the pages of a book titled {un}-Built.Zhang gave the ponytailed 70-year-old New Yorker few instructions. The building would need to accommodate several restaurants, two bathhouses, an art gallery, offices and a massage salon. Zhang said the design should evoke the sea and that it should be "the most radical building in Beijing." A couple of days after their first meeting, Abraham produced a sketch—a meditation on the ocean's violent power in the form of a 12-story block gouged like a cliff at the edge of a raging sea. Zhang was dumbfounded. But after Abraham explained the idea behind the forbidding fa?ade, the client grinned. Construction is set to begin in central Beijing later this year. "There's no way I could get a design like this built in America," Abraham says. "But in China, one starts to feel that anything is possible."When it is completed next year, Abraham's ode to the oceanic will certainly...