Robert Whitlock thought they had nailed it. A principal at architecture giant Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), Whitlock had been working on an exciting new project — the Beijing headquarters of CITIC, China’s powerful, state-owned conglomerate — and everyone seemed pleased with the design. The building was to be 528-meters tall — the largest building in China’s capital city — and the KPF architects had used the curvature of a zun, a ritual carafe from Bronze age China, for inspiration.
“If you think about this as a private commercial venture,” Whitlock reflected in a video for the Skyscraper Museum in February 2021, “the planners, the mayor, and I’m sure the premier, found intriguing the idea that the tower was meant to represent a vessel that was communal and for everyone in the city.”
The design was elegant and unique, with a tapered waist and the bottom wall folding out slightly, like the hem of a dress. The result, Whitlock said, allowed the building to
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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
