[Beijing] started expanding the system in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and has kept pushing forward ever since. In 2001 it had 33 miles of track. Today it has 231.

Meanwhile, when you hear the completion dates for big U.S. transit projects you often have to calculate your age to figure out if you’ll still be alive. — salon.com

Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) is known as China’s “Father of Modern Architecture,” but he expressed strong sentiments throughout his career when it came to preserving the country’s heritage and identity. In the 1950s, when Beijing was selected as the nation's capital, he lobbied to keep its ancient buildings intact and urged the government to build an entirely new city instead. The ruling party disagreed, and ancient Beijing has become a distant memory. — artinfo.com

In pre-industrial days, copying used to be a positive act. It was seen as a skill. Artists were looked upon as handworkers. Copying became a negative notion with the cult of the individual artist and the arrival of mass production, which made replication extremely cheap and easy. Copyright and intellectual property laws were created to protect the original. In those days, the amount of new products reaching the market was relatively small. — rennyramakers.com

If we’re going to find jobs in the U.S. and the rest of the world, they’re going to have to be found in exactly the area where China is finding them — tertiary industry, or services.

How do you create service-industry jobs? By investing in cities and inter-city infrastructure like smart grids and high-speed rail. Services flourish where people are close together and can interact easily with the maximum number of people. If we want to create jobs in America, we should look to services... — blogs.reuters.com

Looming over the sprawling Chinese city of Shenzhen, this building is the tallest skyscraper ever designed by a British architect. — guardian.co.uk

Evidently an impressive transformation is taking place – creating a truly modern metropolis. However Mr Hopkinson alludes to an almost cancerous growth on the outskirts of the nation’s capital city, and states that new builds fail to represent Chinese culture and imagination. Building projects on the outskirts of the city are viewed on an individual basis, without context and appear to result in “grids of square buildings of equal height, in a square plot, with uniform facades”. — blogs.independent.co.uk

The Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has won an international competition to design Greenland Group Suzhou Center, a 358-meter supertall landmark tower, in Wujiang, China. This is SOM Chicago’s sixth project with the Greenland Group. — bustler.net

What can you accomplish in 360 hours?
The Chinese sustainable building company, Broad Group, has yet attempted another impossible feat, building a 30-story tall hotel prototype in 360 hours, after building a 15-story building in a week earlier in 2011. — youtube.com

A farmer carries a shovel over his shoulder as he walks to tend his crops in a field that includes an abandoned building, that was to be part of an amusement park called 'Wonderland', on the outskirts of Beijing December 5, 2011. Construction work at the park, which was promoted by developers as 'the largest amusement park in Asia', stopped around 1998 after funds were withdrawn due to disagreements over property prices with the local government and farmers. — reuters.com

Just west of Chaoyang Park, dog walkers, joggers and local residents have been following the strangely curvaceous metal structure slowly writhing into existence. Hong Kong's Phoenix Media has chosen Beijing to create their mainland headquarters, using an architectural design which boldly expresses its intentions to move away from tradition toward the open ideals of the future. — english.cri.cn

Yaohua Wang, of Los Angeles firm Yaohua Wang Architecture, has sent us visualizations of proposed Nanjing Lab, a vegetation laboratory in Nanjing, China. The project was comissioned by the Nanjing Xiaguan district goverment and is currently within the schematic design phase. — bustler.net

The controversial artist has already received more than 6,000 yuan ($958,000) from more than 22,200 people.

While many have sent money via post and the internet, other have resorted to rather unconventional methods -- folding bank notes into paper planes and throwing them into Ai's garden at night. — cnn.com

Experts in the building industry don’t expect the slump to end anytime soon—especially for the big marquee commissions for which Gehry is known. “The U.S. domestic market is not in the position right now to fund [major] projects in the private or public sector,” says Clark Manus, president at the American Institute of Architects and chief executive officer at San Francisco-based Heller Manus Architects. “This is the new normal.” — businessweek.com

The 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize Ceremony will be held in Beijing, China on May 25, 2012, it was disclosed today In a joint announcement by Guo Jinlong, the Mayor of Beijing, China and Thomas J. Pritzker, Chairman of The Hyatt Foundation. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

“If you take a percentage and you work with western salaries, you can’t make it work,” Gehry said. “So it almost forces you to open an office in China and work with local people.” — Frank Gehry, via bloomberg.com