China’s Fog Weighs Heavily on Shoulders of Its Premier Architect

The Saturday Profile

By IAN JOHNSON

BEIJING — It is a winter day in China’s smoggy capital, and Wu Liangyong is wondering what went wrong.

For 70 years, Mr. Wu has ridden out the country’s political storms, including one that killed his mentor, to establish himself as the most influential architect, urban planner and éminence grise of China’s cities. But looking out the window of his apartment in the city’s northern suburbs, he can only shake his head at the dim building emerging from the haze.

“We knew about the ‘London Fog,’ but didn’t know it would come upon us so quickly,” he said of the famous London pollution of the mid-20th century. “China still can have a very good future, but we have to face the problems now.”

The solution, he says, is to promote a deeper understanding of China’s own cultures, which is also a priority of Mr. Xi. For millenniums, Chinese have designed cities and buildings according to human scale, Mr. Wu said. These ideas should underlie China’s new cities.

“I still have the confidence that if we understand the principles, we can easily solve the problems,” he said. “But if you don’t know the principles, it’s like the smog outside.”

The New York Times