Luxury hotel chain Starwood Hotels unveiled the upcoming opening of The Castle Hotel in Dalian, a major seaport city in China’s northeastern Liaoning province. This makes it one of the various examples of European-inspired architecture sprouting across China in recent years.

Starwood Hotels announced in a press release of the opening of The Castle Hotel later this year, when it is done with its final stages of interior renovation. — jingdaily.com

Ai’s studio, called 258 Fake, has become China’s equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Factory. And Ai himself has increasingly taken on Warholian overtones: there is now little distinction between Ai the artist who creates artworks, and Ai the dissident who gets beaten by the cops. (In 2009, police pummelled his face, causing a cerebral haemorrhage.) Both are merged in an ongoing performance in which the man has become the art, and the art is the man. — aeon.co

Beijing has the worst smog levels among the world's capital cities - so bad that playing sports outdoor is often banned - but it could get a stunning new set of lungs in the form of a covered botanical garden, retail and office complex under a giant transparent roof.

Called Bubbles, the architectural concept might seem an unlikely candidate for a high-rise city of 21 million people. But its designers believe it offers something that every urban environment needs. — South China Morning Post

Chinese companies have been known to build major real-estate projects very quickly. Now, one company is taking it to a new extreme.

Suzhou-based construction-materials firm Winsun New Materials says it has built 10 200-square-meter homes using a gigantic 3-D printer that it spent 20 million yuan ($3.2 million) and 12 years developing. — blogs.wsj.com

Cities like Yingkou in China’s northeast rust belt were among the earliest cities in the country to be overbuilt. [...] Yingkou, along with other cities, sold vast tracts of lands to developers to build apartments for the workers who – they hoped – would populate the new factories, malls and industrial parks to come. [...]

But investments have been slow to materialize, and newcomers are scarce in Yingkou, a city of 2.4 million with a population that hasn’t grown much in the past few years. — blogs.wsj.com

The video reveals Hong Kongers’ anxieties over political and social issues, such as their increasingly crowded and materialist city and the growing numbers of mainlanders since the city's transfer from the United Kingdom to China in 1997. It sends the opposite message of a very common view among mainlanders, that without China's economic support, Hong Kong would have been dead long ago. — globalvoicesonline.org

The collapse of a five-story building in the city of Fenghua trapped at least six people, one of whom has died so far, according to state media (in Chinese). The apartment building was built in 1994—part of a nationwide boom in the 1980s and ‘90s that packed the Chinese real estate market with substandard, shoddily built buildings. Authorities are warning that the poor quality of buildings from the those decades could represent huge dangers in coming years. — qz.com

A Shanghai building company has erected a small village of pitched-roof, 3-D printed structures—in about a day. WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co is behind the series of humble buildings, which each cost less than $5,000 each. The homes were created through the use of a 490- by 33- by 20-foot 3-D printer that fabricates the basic components required for assembly. — blog.archpaper.com

Architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, writes about China's building boom in his story, "Designed in Chicago, made in China." [...]

"Chinese developers lack the expertise to do great skyscrapers," he says. "During the Cultural Revolution their architectural profession was decimated. It really became more about purely engineering. So if you're a Chinese developer, you go to Chicago." — Public Radio International

... when it comes to buildings that have cultural significance – like museums and arts centers, those buildings have also been dominated by foreign architects like Zaha Hadid or Norman Foster, who designed the Beijing Airport for example. But I think with the Pritzker Prize winner being a Chinese, Wang Shu, in 2012, you ‘ll find that when a building is important culturally and needs to relate to more to the Chinese culture, more and more that work will be done by Chinese architects. — forbes.com

China’s economic boom has enriched many of the country’s largest real estate entrepreneurs.[...]

Yet China’s building surge in recent years has also helped overseas architects to prosper in the world’s most populous nation. One U.S. firm to find success is Altoon Partners of Los Angeles. Although relatively small compared with the largest global architecture firms, Altoon was “unfazed by the muscle of (its) competitors” when it entered the market, and has focused tightly on its strengths[...] — forbes.com

Imagine close to the entire population of the U.S. picking up and moving somewhere else.

That’s the scale of China’s urbanization campaign: 250 million farmers moving to the city over the next 15 years. [...]

In Southwest China, the city of Chongqing is being used as a test case for transitioning rural Chinese to change their residency status to urban residents. The government is persuading millions of farmers there to move to the city. — marketplace.org