Billionaire Babylon

This Thursday, "OrdosNow" will be on exhibit at CannonDesign. The show details the progress of a massive architectural undertaking in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. It's all coming from one man, entrepreneur Cai Jiang, who has commissioned 100 of the world's greatest architects to build a small city-within-a-city covering an area of 155 square kilometers. The project includes a cultural center, shopping malls, art museums and "Ordos: 100", a villa compound which comprises 100 Villas designed by 100 emerging architects. The exhibition, opening tonight, features images and the ABS plastic scale models of the ongoing plans to construct an entire city -- idiosyncratic and futurist structures on Mongolian terrain that shares more features with Mars than Earth.



Although somewhat less well-known than other major Chinese metropolises, Ordos is currently ranked as the second richest city in China, surpassing Beijing to be runner up to Shanghai. The city boasts a rapidly expanding population of 1.5 million, but what Ordos lacks is culture infrastructure, and that's where Cai Jiang comes in.

Cai Jiang has one of China's largest art collections, and he has been at the forefront of Ordos' rapid development. In August 2007, he opened the Ordos Art Museum, an institution charged with the task of housing Cai's own private collection. Local government approved of the initiative and tapped him to continue cultural development in the surrounding desert. Due to Cai's personal interest in the arts, he sought the services of China's most famous artist and architect, Ai Wei Wei to lead the charge. Ai Wei Wei, along with Herzog and de Meuron, made the final selection of 100 emerging architects from 27 countries. Engineering and interior design firm CannonDesign was brought in early on, and has worked to develop three buildings: an opera house, a restaurant, and Villa Number One.



For their part in the project, Cannon's designs reflect new innovations in concrete techniques. The firm has been utilizing the latest, state-of-the-art digital design methods to simulate the real world conditions of the Mongolian desert, working with the environment for the improved sustainability of their projects. Variables such as wind speed, angle of sunlight, and air pressure have all be digitized and cataloged to take into account how a building will actually perform once built. Simulations of the local area conditions has allowed the firm to model a villa which will be naturally cooled in the summer, and naturally heated in the winter.





For the opera house (pictured above) they've dressed a set of concrete boxes with a flowing perforated metal skin created by a computer algorithm.

Ambitiously innovative projects all too often fail to get off the ground due to their scale and complexity, and already Ordos is showing signs of lost momentum. Construction on site has been stalled for the last four months due to Mr. Cai being out of the country, and with winter setting in, things won't get rolling again until next spring. For the exhibition "OrdosNow" at CannonDesign, however, visitors can get a peak at the initial plans to one of the biggest architectural projects ever conceived.

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OrdosNow will be on Exhibit at Cannon Studio Nov 12 - Dec 12, for map and directions see http://www.ordosnow.com.