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way that many Western societies have not experienced since postwar devel-
opment” (emphasis added).
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In the epic drama that is China's urbanization
policy in the past two decades, international architecture and engineering
fi rms based in the United States and Europe are dominant players, and their
largely uncritical embrace of this “new freedom to experiment” depends on
an authoritarian state structure. Arup's desire to build green, and build big,
allows the fi rm to psychologically screen out the unsavory by-products of its
projects. h ese include the forced relocation of local populations and the
longer-term social and economic transitions that Arup's projects trigger.
Arup's privileging of engineering solutions is not surprising. Its infl u-
ence is arguably “bigger than any single architect,” having engineered “a
signifi cant sampling of the greatest—and greenest—buildings of their time.”
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In 1946, Ove Arup, a Danish designer, engineer, and philosopher, founded
the fi rm, which played a key role in the building of (according to one critic)
seven of the ten greatest buildings of all time.
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Arup's contemporary practice
focuses on the increasing signifi cance of the “environmental agenda in
architecture.”
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Arup is increasingly focused on environmentalism as a tech-
nological problem that can be overcome through its laserlike focus on engi-
neering calculations. As its founder Ove Arup said, “h e engineer uses the
law of economy and the tools of mathematical calculation to engage with the
universal and in this appeals to the intellect. By contrast, the architect, by
his arrangement of forms gives us the measure of an order which we feel and
thereby aff ects our senses and emotions.”
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h e “evolving relationship”
between architects and engineers collapses the Cartesian divide between
the intellect and the senses, the mind and the body, although some argue
that ecological architecture is a return of modernism itself rather than its
evolution. As the designer of the Beijing Olympics' Water Cube argues, “the
era of architects as the sole authors of the building is coming to a close. . . .
[T]he creative powers of engineering are just as important in contributing to
a work of architecture.”
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