An emphasis on excess

In a number of ways, French architect Paul Andreu’s glittering Oriental Arts Center is a convenient symbol of the new China -- and the headlong, almost impossibly ambitious way this country is chasing Western-style modernity.

Made up of three concert halls, the center is expensive ($120 million) and bigger than it really needs to be (about 350,000 square feet, much of it wasted in the corners of a cavernous lobby). And like many of the buildings by prominent foreign architects commissioned recently by the Chinese government, it showily anticipates a need -- in this case, for a large, cutting-edge classical music venue -- more than it fills one.

The building, certainly, already has taken its place among Shanghai’s growing number of architectural curiosity shops: optimistically scaled, dramatically lighted new buildings where locals and tourists alike gather to gawk at the sheer energy with which this city of 16 million is remaking itself.

The center, which hosted its first concert on New Year’s Eve and is now in the midst of so-called soft opening before a full slate of shows begins this spring, is designed to look like an orchid. Andreu has divided its interior space into five petal-shaped sections, sheathed in glass, that bulge (or bloom) dramatically toward the sidewalk. Each of the three biggest petals contains an auditorium: There’s a 333-seat space for chamber music, one for opera that seats 1,020, and a hall for symphonic performance with a capacity of more than 1,950.

The building will serve as home base for the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, which was founded in 1879 and performed for many years in a converted movie palace. Thanks to an early programming coup, the Berlin Philharmonic will visit for two concerts in November. Yet the place seems designed to fulfill a totemic as much as a musical purpose for a country, and a city, determined to become a player on the global cultural stage just as it wants to compete internationally in higher education, and biotechnology, and high-end tourism -- and on and on.

Indeed, Andreu seems to have been chosen for the job, despite his firm’s lack of experience designing cultural facilities, specifically for his ability to practice the sort of bold, intensely graphic architecture that helps China declare its newfound ambition in unmistakable architectural language. As he shows as well in his grandiose Pudong International Airport on the outskirts of Shanghai, which opened five years ago, details and subtlety are not his strong suits. Both designs are more persuasive in two dimensions than three; the Oriental Arts Center, for its part, is as much a neon sign advertising the presence of a big! pricey! new! concert hall on the site than the real thing.

The China Daily, the biggest of the government-run English-language newspapers, recently called Andreu’s building a “gigantic cultural epicenter,” a “dazzling” hall with a “chic and modern” look and “the crowning jewel of Shanghai’s many performing venues.” Like a lot of what passes for architectural criticism in the official Chinese press, such praise is more indicative of government hopes for the project than a clear-eyed appraisal of the finished product.

A larger role

The center has a strong and similarly symbolic urban-planning role to play. It occupies a site on the edge of a big traffic circle in Pudong -- a district of Shanghai that’s seen exponential if carefully calibrated growth during the last five years -- and anchors the southern stretch of Pudong’s main drag, Century Boulevard. While the northern end of Century runs right by the thicket of new towers that crowd the tip of Pudong, across the river from the famous Bund, the area around Andreu’s building still feels a bit drowsy. The arts center and the boulevard (which is eight lanes wide in places) look forward to a volume of foot and car traffic that probably won’t arrive for several years.

Visitors enter through a relatively modest set of doors, placed in the middle of a long, scaffolding-like glass wall that sits against the base of the main building. Broad stone stairs lead to the lobby, a high-ceilinged space with harsh lighting and a lack of carpeting (or, for that matter, any softening material). The hard-edged feel is not helped by the unusual wall coverings. For some unfortunate reason, Andreu has chosen to line the outside walls of each of the performance spaces, facing the lobby, with a series of curved porcelain tiles, each about the size of a serving platter, in various colors. Tiles are grouped together in vertical strings that hang in tight rows from the lobby walls.

Andreu is working on a second performing arts center in the heart of Beijing, a much-talked-about dome-shaped design that’s still under construction. But he has spent nearly all of his career working on airport terminals -- roughly 50, including a section of Charles de Gaulle in Paris that collapsed last spring, killing four people. (There’s no evidence that Andreu’s design was responsible for, or even contributed to, the accident.) It’s almost too obvious a criticism, but the lobby of his arts center brings the impersonal anomie of air travel to mind. Furthering that impression on the night I visited, to see the Shanghai Symphony play a program dedicated to Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, was the fact that the only place to buy a drink during intermission was from a pair of buzzing vending machines.

To make matters worse, at least on that chilly night, there seemed to be no heat in the lobby. This was not unusual for China, where big buildings -- even ones designed like this one, as showcases for foreign visitors -- are warmed or air-conditioned only when necessary. As a result, most patrons walked right by the insistent signs directing them to the coat-check area, preferring to stay bundled up. Apparently, they were missing out: The China Daily correspondent also reported “a superb cloak room with an extraordinarily long counter, another first in the city.”

The spacious main concert hall is warmer, literally and architecturally, with a series of scalloped seating sections faced in blond wood. The handsome seats are covered in burgundy-colored fabric, with numbers in white. From my seat about 20 rows from the podium (price: about $25) the sound was clean and bright, if not remarkably so.

As the long history of the Shanghai Symphony suggests, this is a city that has mixed Western and local influences more comfortably than any in China. After its legendary heyday (at least in terms of European architecture) in the 1920s and ‘30s, Shanghai is now in the midst of a second Western invasion, this one fully sanctioned by the party leadership, with architects and artists along with speculators of all kinds pouring in by the day.

But Andreu’s arts center doesn’t suggest he’s particularly interested in exploring, at least in architectural terms, what it means to put up a building like this, at a time like this, in a part of Shanghai like this. Nor has he advanced the international conversation about performing arts architecture, which has been vital and occasionally intense in recent years in places from the Canary Islands to Ground Zero to downtown L.A. His contribution, instead, has been entirely more pragmatic: helping to fill Shanghai’s -- and the Chinese government’s -- seemingly bottomless appetite for the bold, foreign and shiny-new.