This aerial photo taken on August 2, 2008 shows the new skyline in downtown Beijing
© AFP/File Goh Chai Hin BEIJING (AFP) - Thirty years ago the city was a poverty stricken backwater studded by a few dull Stalinist monuments grafted onto an ancient and decaying imperial capital.
The transformation has taken place at dizzying speed in the years leading up the Olympics with around 10,000 sites under construction, many of which will still be unfinished when the Games start on Friday.
"The Olympics is a world event and world-class architecture has been delivered for that event," said Rory McGowan, the director of the Beijing office of international design engineers Arup.
Arup has been involved in several of these world class structures, including the new CCTV Tower and China's National Stadium, centrepiece of the Games.
A pedestrian walks past a billboard in front of the ongoing construction of the new China World Trade Center
© AFP/File Teh Eng KoonThe CCTV tower, headquarters of China's state television station, is in fact two towers leaning inward and locked together in a high-altitude embrace.
It is a symbol of cutting-edge work under way here and all over China.
"Beijing is pointing architecture in a new direction," said Ole Scheeren, the German partner in Rem Koolhaas's Office of Metropolitan Architecture.
He co-designed the tower, a structure of a complexity he believes has never been attempted before.
Further north stands the new National Stadium at the centre of the Olympic Green, where many of the Beijing Olympic venues are grouped close together.
The stadium was dubbed the Bird's Nest because its threads of interlocking steel beams resemble a nest of twigs, but the Chinese also see in it the cracked glazed pattern of ancient Chinese pottery.
Next to it stands the National Aquatic Centre, the coolest of Beijing's new projects designed by Australian firm PTW with the help of Arup to look like bubbles of water moving over a blue box.
Just to the east of Tiananmen Square looms the free-standing titanium-tinted dome of China's new centre for the performing arts by French architect Paul Andreu, rising from its own moat with the entrance hidden below ground.
Norman Foster's Beijing airport terminal three -- the biggest building site in the world until its recent completion -- is another structure of astonishing scope.
"No city in the world in recent times has had so much world-class work done," said Scheeren in a recent interview.
Beijing is now welcoming a new kind of traveller as a result.
This aerial photo shows the CCTV headquarters building (C) in Beijing
© AFP/File Goh Chai Hin"Architecture tourism to Beijing is starting," said Arup's McGowan. "People are coming here purely to see the new stuff."
He said that apart from the several jewels in Beijing's crown, the run-of-the-mill work is a match for any city.
Beijing's planners have broken with the style of commercial development, dominant in Asia for decades, that has produced a rash of tower-block clones across the continent.
"Beijing has taken a different position, showing an interest in the matter of culture and architecture that exceeds the boundaries of commercial and speculative development," Scheeren said.
But the cost of creating the new Beijing has been high and its construction has not always been popular.
"What's happening inside the second ring road (the old city) is pretty disgraceful," said McGowan. "They are just paying lip-service to conservation."
Tan Xuxiang, deputy director of Beijing municipal planning commission, agreed there were problems.
"We have demolished too much, too fast and we regret that so much has been torn down," Tan said.
Nevertheless, Tan highlighted that 30 percent of the old city had been saved, and rejected criticism from some locals that the foreign-inspired new buildings did not fit in with the local culture.
"It is always like that. Think of the Eiffel Tower when it was built in Paris. It caused a lot of controversy," he said.
"As long as these buildings stand on Chinese soil they are part of China and people will learn to love them in time."
©AFP