前幾年我在西雅圖建築公司上班的一個大陸同事，曾經跟我說，現在中國建築業景氣好到「爛蘿蔔都能佔個大坑」，用台灣的說法，就是，「很遜的建築師隨便都能夠賺大錢」。因為搞建築的在中國市場淘金容易，我這位同事的建築師先生，原本在西雅圖的另一家知名建築師事務已經當到總經理，也毅然辭職，自己開公司專攻大陸市場，想必這樣賺的錢比當總經理更多。
隨著大陸經濟的起飛，大陸建築業已經熱了十多年，暑假這趟到泉州，在跟一位華僑大學建築系教授聊天中，我才知道，原來現在大陸升大學考試（對岸稱「高考」）填志願最紅的科系就是建築。在華人社會，什麼行業最能賺錢，什麼科系就紅，這一點也不令人詫異，只是，我沒料到建築系已經紅到可以成為第一志願，而且聽說已經是第一志願好多年了。許多會考試的小孩，管他對設計有沒有才能和興趣，先上了建築系再說，往後要真無法也不想做建築也沒關係，建築的學歷反正很好看，要找其他不直接相關的工作也輕而易舉。經濟的發展不但讓建築業的景氣，空間相關的都市計畫以及景觀業，也一起水漲船高，市場需求越來越大。
現在大陸的情況與美國真是鮮明的對比。搞設計的同行人，常常自我我挖苦說是不想賺錢才會從事設計，並經常互相警告如果沒有極度的熱情，不要搞設計，因為薪水不高，得依靠興趣支持繼續做下去的動力。換言之，能不能賺錢或賺多少錢，對我們做設計這行的人來說，不是重點，設計本身帶來的成就感才是吸引人之處，只是有時遇到挫折，心灰意冷，皮夾空空時，難免偶而會羨慕一下雖然不怎麼好玩，但能賺錢的行業。
當然，許多搞設計的人也不是沒有賺錢的頭腦。大陸的經濟發展飛速，許多西方建築師也趕快來中國建築市場瓜分一杯羹。對於西方人來說，中國還真是個發展設計理想的好舞台，尤其是已經成名的建築巨星、或小有名氣的建築新星，這個年代東方人極度崇洋，西方的名建築師設計的就是好的、說的就是對的。一心要除舊佈新的中國，毫不保留敞開雙臂地擁抱西方建築師和其所創造的現代建築式樣；西方建築也毫不猶豫的把在中國的基地當作空白畫布，盡情揮灑對建築型式的理想。中國的城市在近來的改造下，越來越有「現代化」的樣子，看起來和西方城市越來越沒有兩樣了，這樣一片現代化、新建設的城市景象，中國人驕傲的說，現在跟以前真的不一樣了！看看，北京為了要舉行2008的奧運，上海為了要舉行2010的世界博覽會，找了多少有名的洋建築師來幫忙做設計，明星建築師跟中國城市互利互惠，大家一起增加知名度。
北京奧運規劃模擬。圖片來源：http://www.sasaki.com/what/portfolio.cgi?fid=204
眾人往往以建築建設的進展等同於發展和進步，但建築充其量不過是發展的皮相呈現，在建築的炫目光芒下，建築皮相背後的城市問題變的模糊了。建築這幾年來在大陸爆紅，城市該長什麼樣子，似乎搶去了其他議題的光彩，但建築皮相只是城市發展的一個極小部分，不是一切。曾是柏克萊教授的建築歷史學家Spiro Kostof在他的著作The City Shaped一書中開宗明義的說：”Cities are amalgams of buildings and people.”（城市是建築物和人的綜合體）。但我們仔細想想，城市真的只是人和建築所組成的嗎？城市真的那麼簡單嗎？在建築領域中，就是這樣對都市過度簡化的認知，人們一直把城市等同於建築，或是把城市問題等同於空間問題。
儘管有少部分的建築學者和執業者努力深化建築本身的意涵，探究建築空間與社會文化的互動，但今天的建築業仍只是一個製造形式的行業，當形式和美學躍升為城市發展關注的重點，城市的其他面向就被忽略了，北京的奧運是一個有趣的例子。北京藉著辦綠色奧運的構想爭取到2008的主辦權，然而，各個建築明星競相較勁的北京舞台，仍然是一個污染嚴重的骯髒城市，空氣的污染並沒有因為建造嶄新酷炫建築而得到解決。報導說，有些國家決定讓他們的運動選手最後一刻才飛抵北京，主要是不想讓空氣污染影響選手的比賽表現，此外，美國的顧問還建議美國奧運代表隊乾脆在比賽期間不要住在北京，可以考慮住在空氣相對比較好的城市像是南韓。（請參考文末轉貼的一則報導）。多麼諷刺！
今天在大陸，人人想要賺錢，學生想要考進建築系，但是建築系給的教育是什麼？這些在大陸唸建築的想必都是聰明會考試的學生，將來肯定會對社會產生影響，成為社會的中堅份子，這些大部分被建築形式和發展進步所霸佔的腦袋，未來會帶領中國走向怎麼樣的局面？
看看台灣。在台灣經常是第一志願的法律系，培養出一堆油嘴滑舌、用超弄文字來決定是非的法律人政客，看看這群法律人用法律腦袋治理下的台灣！當然，說他們的行事取決於教育背景，我承認這樣的邏輯也許太過簡單，但我相信這中間絕對有相當程度的關連。坦白說，我不敢想像，當只有建築思考的腦袋成為國家治理腦袋，會是怎麼樣的情況。我自己曾受過設計教育，我瞭解設計教育的偏頗和缺失，而且坦白說，很慶幸至少我所受的高等教育內容不是只有設計，否則我無法想像我看世界的觀點會是如何偏頗。任何一個國家，被同樣腦袋（不管是什麼腦袋）的一群人治理，都不會是人民之福。
建築這幾年在中國爆紅，對建築從業者來說可能是上天賜的福氣，可以好好賺上一筆，但對整體國家發展卻不見得是好事，發展只會專注在骨肉身軀，而忽略了心靈上的調整。這篇文章不在於批評建築的本質，任何領域和學門都有其選擇關注的焦點無可厚非，但任何一個行業在社會發展的過程中被特別重視，都不是個好現象。然而，市場機制自由運作下，這似乎是不可避免的結果，今天，在大陸輪到建築領域被社會賦予重擔，我們只能企望，投身在建築相關領域的大家（包括我自己），多多努力充實自己，在表相建築形式之外，看到更多的其他面向！
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以下轉貼 Wired Magazine 的一篇報導，原文網址：
Smog and Mirrors: 's Plan for a Green Olympics
Spencer Reiss 07.24.07 | 2:00 AM
Double-digit economic growth is something you can actually see in the capital city of the People's Capitalist Republic of . Every 24 hours, another thousand new Buicks, cute little homegrown Cherys, and buff black Audis swarm onto the 10-lane parking lots that ring the city. Every other belching truck hauls steel or concrete, every other city block boasts another 50-story investment scheme. Imperial avenues, bizarchitecture skyscrapers, distant mountains — all dematerialize in the stinking haze.
The air isn't always so awful: Sometimes the wind sweeps through, revealing a blue canopy overhead. But on a bad day — come August, say, when temperatures approach 100 degrees — the atmosphere around Beijing becomes a photochemical bouillabaisse of coal smog, steel-mill spume, and tailpipe crud, mingled with concrete dust and baked in the oven formed by the surrounding hills.
Just the place for the summer Olympics.
won its bid for the 2008 games in part by vowing to put on a "Green Olympics" — a symphony of clean tech and energy efficiency that would do Greenpeace proud. In the six years since, officials have been battling to make at least some of that happen. They've shuttered the worst of Chairman Mao's beloved old blast furnaces, torn up streets to build subway lines, upgraded sewage treatment plants. They've planted tens of millions of trees, pulverizing a nearby mountain for fresh soil.
Lovely stuff, long overdue. And, this being the Olympics, there's also plenty of showboating. The new national stadium — dubbed the Bird's Nest — is rigged with an intricate rainwater-capture system to feed the infield grass. The bubbly blue National Aquatics Center — better known as the Water Cube — is wrapped in a high-efficiency thermal polymer skin. The Olympic Village is being outfitted with solar-powered showers. A fleet of electric buses is on the way, along with 3,000 lithium-ion garbage trucks. Even grim old Tiananmen Square, 5 miles due south, now boasts energy-efficient streetlights. (No word about the Energy Star rating of the Great Helmsman himself, still wowing crowds in his refrigerated glass crypt.)
All of which might count for something had 's economy not chosen the same moment to go on a skyscraping, steel-milling, coal-fired binge. With barely 365 days left on Tiananmen Square's digital Olympic countdown clock, city officials are battling to avoid a spectacularly public mud bath.
The Olympics are 's coming-out party, payback for smug Westerners and a victory lap for the Godzilla of the global economy. The stone-cold suits who run China Inc. don't want the celebration spoiled by smogged-out skylines or marathoners in face masks.
Beijing's bad air — and the rest of what the International Olympic Committee termed the city's "environmental challenge" — was on the table from the start of the city's Olympic bid in 2000. Chinese officials promised to pour $12.2 billion into cleaning up. They pledged to reduce atmospheric concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide to meet the requirements of the World Health Organization. Particulate matter — dust and grit — would "reach the level of major cities in developed countries." An official "Olympic Action Plan," released in 2002, laid out a layer cake of city wide improvements — including more than 400 miles of new expressway — liberally plastered with green icing: "pollution- free burning, geothermal-operated pumps, solar energy power generating, solar energy heating, fuel cells, and nanometer materials." Beijing 2008, the document proclaimed, would be an "ecological city."
Olympics or not, 's capital — population 15 million with a bullet — clearly needed an environmental overhaul. Officials have been using the games as a pretext to renovate or replace thousands of Mao-vintage backyard foundries and coal furnaces. They're retrofitting the city's big power plants with scrubbers — standard-issue in the and Europe since the 1980s but still a novelty in . They cajoled the city's most infamous polluter, the Shougang Group, into closing or relocating its most noxious steel mills.
But the impact of 's economic eruption couldn't be so neatly finessed — especially at ground zero, Beijing. Two million new cars overwhelmed the city's expressways before the lane paint dried. Countless new air conditioners kept power plants cranking — and the hotter and smoggier the air, the harder they cranked. Neighboring cities cheerfully rolled out the welcome mat for the capital's filthiest factories, then spewed record amounts of coal smoke into the region's skies to keep them humming.
And so, the dream of a green city has quietly given way to a simpler approach: hitting the Off button. Detailed plans have yet to emerge; even in a one-party state, politicians can't run roughshod over public opinion or business interests. One certainty is a ban on excavation at the city's 3,000-plus non-Olympic construction sites — the source of up to one-third of the capital's airborne dust, by local estimates. There's also talk of closing factories in and around Beijing for as much as two months before and during the games.
Another likely option: keeping some of those new cars in their garages. Last November, in what was widely seen as a dry run for 2008, officials used a three-day summit of African heads of state to test strategies. They restricted access to certain routes and limited the use of both private and government vehicles, taking an estimated 800,000 cars and trucks off the road in and around Beijing. A NASA satellite recorded nitrogen oxide reductions of up to 40 percent. As the post-Mao leader Deng Xiaoping might have said: "Who cares whether the cat is green as long as it catches mice?"
Just one problem: The Olympics are scheduled for August. That's when the winds change direction, blowing in foul air from the heavily industrialized Hebei province and trapping it against the surrounding mountains. A recent study by US and Chinese researchers, using the most advanced atmospheric models, found that up to 70 percent of Beijing's summer particulate pollution originates outside the city. In other words, you could shut down the city, close the highways, turn off the power, and still have a seriously bad air day.
That message struck a chord with the International Olympic Committee. In April, a visiting IOC inspection team pointedly asked for further details on the antipollution campaign. They also requested "contingency plans" should all efforts fall short by opening day. City officials referred vaguely to "hard measures" — reportedly including forced, last-minute vacations not only for factory workers but also for the capital's resident army of civil servants. Whether they can strong-arm upwind provinces — including much of 's industrial heartland — into blowing off a couple weeks' worth of GDP to clear the air over rival Beijing is an open question.
And there's always the Hail Mary play: cloud seeding. Should air quality threaten to steal the show, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau promises to have its fleet of cloud-seeding aircraft warmed up on the runways, ready to bomb the sky with silver iodide and set off air-scrubbing showers over competition areas.
And if even these last-ditch efforts fail? "What can you do?" shrugged Hein Verbruggen, leader of the inspection team. "Let's be open here. We can't say tomorrow, 'OK, We'll go somewhere else.'"
Randy Wilber is an air pollution connoisseur. Senior sport physiologist for the US Olympic Committee, he has made five trips to Beijing since March 2006, lugging an air-quality monitor to all 31 Olympic venues. The city's atmosphere, he says tactfully, is "significantly worse" than that of Los Angeles, the standard for big-city pollution. Then there's the heat. In August, Wilber recorded daytime temperatures consistently in the 90s, with relative humidity approaching 95 percent. "For endurance events," he says, "that's borderline hazardous." His overall assessment: "Not good."
Most researchers focus on pollution's long-term consequences — heart disease and cancer. For Wilber and the 600 high- performance humans he advises, it's the immediate impact that matters. His hit list includes the full array of Beijing's atmospheric condiments. Colorless and odorless carbon monoxide is a "biochemical competitor," preventing oxygen from binding to hemoglobin so it can be carried to muscles. Nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter cause exercise-induced asthma and "airway hyper-responsiveness," either of which can suddenly strike athletes with no history of susceptibility. Ozone has similar effects and is tricky to predict because its formation depends on sunlight and heat. Sulfur dioxide burns the eyes, with implications for sports like shooting and archery. All these effects are aggravated by high respiration rates.
"Our athletes spend years preparing," he says. "Medals are decided by hundredths of a second. You bet they take this seriously."
Many of them are getting an early taste, as Beijing hosts a dozen international sporting events this summer, trial runs for next year's games. Wilber will be carting around a pneumotachometer — a breathing device connected to a laptop computer — to check his charges for pollution-induced health problems. And he has extra incentive to find them. The most common asthma treatments contain so-called beta-2 agonists — stimulants banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency as performance enhancers. Their use requires a formal diagnosis, followed by approval from the IOC; one unauthorized whiff and your hard-earned medal could vanish. In recent years, Wilber says, about 27 percent of US Olympic athletes have been officially diagnosed with exercise-induced respiratory problems. Not surprisingly, he expects that figure to increase in Beijing.
Either way, Wilber and his team at the USOC's Performance Services Division are recommending an unusual addition to athletes' bag of competitive tricks: activated-charcoal face masks, both on the field and off. They've also put out a handy booklet of 2008 Olympic survival tips, such as using over-the-counter ibuprofen or indomethacin to partially block pollution's lung-searing effects. And they're urging US teams to find living sites elsewhere in the region — , for example — and to wait until the last moment before flying into Beijing. American swimmers and track-and-field athletes followed that strategy before the 2004 Athens Games, setting up bases on Majorca and Crete, respectively, to avoid dirty urban air. "I don't think it's a coincidence that they won more medals than other teams," Wilber says.
Will it work? "We hope for the best," he replies. "And we prepare for the worst."
Two miles south of the Olympic park, what looks like an industrial moon base is shoehorned into a dusty old Beijing neighborhood. It's the Beijing Taiyanggong CCGT Trigeneration Project, a 780-megawatt, natural gas fired power plant green enough to be worth $100 million in Kyoto-authorized carbon credits. The twin turbines, GE's latest and greatest, will keep the lights on at the Bird's Nest and elsewhere, replacing some 80 old coal furnaces. "Clean energy is the future," says Ding Haijun, GE's point man in . "Having this plant here for the Olympics makes us very proud as Chinese."
Two Chinas are colliding at next year's Olympics — a gritty GDP machine and the 21st-century Cinderella it wants to be. The Taiyanggong facility makes a lovely pumpkin carriage, but it's just one power plant among the PRC's thousands.
Jiang Kejun works on statistical models at Beijing's Energy Research Institute, an arm of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission. Like a lot of people in , he's more than a little stunned after a decade of breakneck GDP growth. "Change is happening so fast," he says. "Our 2000 forecast of energy demand has been completely transformed. And, of course, everyone wants an American lifestyle. So on things like air pollution, we have to keep running faster just to stay in one place." On a cloudless April afternoon, he can't see more than a mile out of his 14th-floor office window.
Once upon a time, staging the Olympics in Beijing would have been much easier: Build some big stadiums, fill them with loyal party members, keep the foreign guests well fed, and declare victory. But successful cleanups in other developed cities have raised expectations. wants to take its place as a world leader, not just the new heavyweight champ of carbon emissions. Scenes of marathoners in gas masks, beamed around the world, would be a PR disaster that no amount of glossy Bird's Nest blimp shots could offset. "Brand ," a report published by London's Foreign Policy Centre, suggests that the whole idea of using the Olympics to gild 's image is risky. "The only single events that remake national images," it notes, "tend to be bad ones."
Back at the Olympic Green, another palpable emblem of the new rises from the dust: the four sleek, bladelike buildings of Digital Beijing, IT hub for the 2008 games. Across the street, an escarpment of future luxury apartments looms over the Water Cube like some kind of, well, Great Wall. The city's business elite is buzzing with rumors that Bill Gates — a demigod in — has reserved a penthouse for the games. Will he be better off watching them on television? That depends on which way the wind blows.
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