I believe that every country and every city has its own 'construction age', much like every person has his or her adolescence. During this age, people dedicate themselves to large-scale construction projects that set the form of the city or country for years to come. Though in many ways this age has a life of its own, there are some preconditions for its coming: First of all, the society needs to be in a comprehensive transitional period where many fundamental aspects of people's lives are being re-evaluated; secondly people's mindsets must be adjusting accordingly to work with and take advantage of the new changes; thirdly, existing construction and the appearance of the city must be in such a state as to necessitate the changes. Additionally this transition cannot have a negative effect on the city or country; rather it should be a driving force for vigorous economic growth in the society. Unless all of these conditions are met, a society will not have sufficient motivation to enter a large-scale construction age. It is clear to me that modern China is coming into her youth, i.e. her 'construction age'.

What will be the features of China's construction age and what sort of buildings will it inspire? To answer these questions, we must understand the circumstances under which a person or a city steps into its youth. For just as someone who grew up in a time of peace will have a very different experience from someone who experiences his or her youth in the midst of war, every city's construction age reflects the circumstances surrounding its beginning.

For example, Paris had her youth in the mid-nineteenth century during the reign of Napoleon III. It is said that 80% of the city's construction was completed during that period. The consistency of the height of the buildings, their form, and the materials used all correspond to the dominant style of the period and illustrate that period's realities and modes of thinking. The city's construction emphasizes dominant central squares with major avenues leading off of them augmented by beautiful radiating road networks. This style invokes the sense of a powerful central regime and the economic strength of a newly rising bourgeois. The city fashion in the Napoleon III period made Paris the representative city of the nineteenth century, and with the magnificent strength of her youth to build upon, Paris enjoyed her prime in the twentieth century.

A more modern example is New York City, which entered her youthful phase in the decade preceding the 1929 economic depression and achieved an unmatched level of popularity and prestige. In was during this time that large American corporations seized the world's leading economic role from the previously dominant European firms. These newly rich companies competed with each other in proclaiming their existence through the construction of great symbols of their power- unbelievably tall buildings that have come to be called skyscrapers. In every sense, skyscrapers are the symbols of twentieth century capitalism. Throughout the world, the 'youth version' of New York City has been replicated in every major city and has become the model for twentieth century metropolises.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have already come to a close, and now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is China who now welcomes her youth. This is a critical point, since the style that appears now, in China's youth, and the kind of municipal infrastructure that is produced will be a valuable reference for the trends of the twenty-first-century city and its architecture style. Therefore I pay special attention to the architecture in today's China.

When I recently investigated the architecture and interior decoration in Beijing and Shanghai I got the impression of unique, and conflicting tendencies playing across these cities' youthful faces. On the one hand are skyscrapers, which reveal a drive toward modernity and an expression of an individualistic architecture style. During China's switch over to a market economy, it has started a tremendous number of skyscraper projects. No other city in the world comes close to matching the frenzied construction of skyscrapers in these cities, as though China were trying to make up for all the blank space in its history though rapid construction.

The characteristic economic and political centralism of Chinese society only adds to the rush to build skyscrapers. A large multi-cultural nation like China needs to have political and economic centers with serve as symbols of a powerful central authority. Skyscrapers represent the contemporary version of a centralized authority. China's youthful building phase has similar motives to those that led the United States, another large, multi-cultural nation, to build its skyscrapers.

On the other side, in a nation that is working as hard as China to modernize, it is interesting to see that in China's 'youth' the old-fashioned Hutong is still quite popular. If skyscrapers can be seen as a representation of modernism, the quirky and quaint Hutong is an equally strong manifestation of nostalgia and traditionalism. On one hand China's cities have skyscrapers on a grand scale; but on the other hand, many people still enjoy their Hutongs, boating on Hou Hai Lake (a lake located in the middle of an old Beijing neighborhood), listening to the Chinese violin, and musing over things from the remote past.

This duality is also seen in the lives of the people. Many white-collar workers go about their business in modern skyscrapers during the daytime. But when they leave their jobs, they prefer to make their homes in old fashioned, dust-covered houses, where they use cracked antique eating utensils and make sure to take the time to taste old Beijing-style, homemade dishes.

The work of one of my business partners, Beijing Redstone Industrie, represents this dichotomy well. In downtown Beijing they build tall, high-density residence towers, while among the thickets at the foot of the Great Wall, they plan to build traditional 'villages' with materials native to the region. They invited me to design one of the houses and I choose a bamboo theme in light of the important role it plays in both Chinese and Japanese cultures. I made an effort to present the similarities and differences of the two cultures with bamboo buildings so I used bamboo as the sole construction material for the house, with the walls, floors, and furniture all being made of bamboo. I anticipate the bamboo creating some beautiful effects and a memorable, joyful and carefree space, one that could not be created by iron, glass, concrete, aluminum or other modern building materials.

Modernism and postmodernism. Futurism and nostalgia. The dualities appear everywhere in China and is the source of much of the country's vigorous change. But what are the roots of these dualities?

First, they reflect the dual nature of our times. After the Cold War, information technology finally began to integrate individual countries' economies into an immense global system. However, the globalization of capitalism exposed various drawbacks within capitalism itself. New technology has made capital movement extremely fluid, but the current global financial market operates on a scale tens or even hundreds of times larger then individual countries' economies. This new form of capitalism has introduced dramatic ups and downs into people's lives. Modern capitalism has proven to no longer be an effective mechanism under all historical circumstances; in many cases it has eroded the good life formerly enjoyed by ordinary people. With this historical backdrop, many people around the world have started to become skeptical about modern capitalism and are developing critical and suspicious attitudes toward the symbols of that modernity, namely skyscrapers. Concealed in the wild, or in the traditional Hutong of the cities, one can find a compelling contrast to the skyscraper: a setting that helps to relieve people of their heavy emotional burdens in these turbulent times. China greets her youth in this age of duality and its future development will bear their mark.

Second, dualism is a major theme throughout Chinese history and is one of Chinese society's strongest characteristics. Historically, China has been a very unified society, however the ability to step outside of the mainstream of that society, while still participating in it, has also reached an advanced level. In the Chinese Taoist philosophy, all things supplement, complement and rely upon each other, even those things that operate outside of the mainstream of society. It can be said that this complicated combination of social integrity and controlled escapism is the hallmark of Chinese culture and echoes the dualism of contemporary global capitalism.

The bamboo house I designed embodies my vision of China. The bamboo represents the experience of escapism, as in the traditional Chinese story of the seven wise men, which describes seven men who retreat from their public duties into the bamboo forests in order to focus on life's more important things. In the twenty-first century, when the technology of globalization has almost reached its saturation point, we need to develop the skills and architecture to help us counter this trend and find our own retreats. There is much that Chinese culture can teach us about this process.