When construction began on Guangzhou Opera House in 2005, the site was surrounded by farmland. As the building rose, so did the city around it. Guangzhou, in the sprawling industrial Pearl River Delta, had outgrown its traditional centre (based around the old city of Canton) and was expanding into Pearl River New City. It has since grown so fast and so far that, standing on top of any of the new Central Business District’s skyscrapers, the dense grey grid of the city spreads out on all sides as far as the eye can see until it is subsumed in the beige mist of pollution and cement dust from which it is still forming.
Incredibly, nothing in this huge new section of skyscraper city is more than five years old. It culminates in a cluster of arts buildings at the river’s edge that are all nearing completion – a library, a museum and Zaha Hadid’s extraordinary Rmb1.38bn (£130m) opera house. This was officially opened last month, although it has been hosting performances since a soft opening in May last year.
For decades architects have speculated on how the city of the future might look. They needn’t fret any more. This juxtaposition of high art and high rise is it. Hadid, one of today’s most distinctive designers (she is succinctly captured in the official press release as “a formidable architect of Great Britain”), has produced a building that seems to suck the surrounding landscape into a vortex of movement and swirling space. The opera house appears both as alien object in a landscape of incomprehensible vastness (and often overwhelming banality), and as an extrusion of the peculiar nature of this landscape.