Harbin: The Latest Architecture and News

Videos

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MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, has released details of their design for Terminal 3 at Harbin Taiping International Airport in Northern China. Referencing the gentle slopes of the surrounding landscape, and the region’s immense snow and ice, MAD’s scheme creates an architectural poetry that settles into its locale in the spirit of a snowflake falling to earth, while simultaneously expressing the surreal, interstellar space of future air travel.

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The world’s largest ice festival has opened to the public in China. The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in Heilongjiang, North-Eastern China draws 18 million visitors, marveling at the festival’s spectacular castles and sculptures. In total, the 2019 edition saw 120,000 cubic meters of ice and 111,000 cubic meters of snow crafted by thousands of artists in temperatures as low as -35C (-31F) using swing saws, chisels, and ice picks.

Having begun as an annual tradition in 1985, the festival has gained accolades such as the Guinness Record for the world’s largest snow sculpture (250 meters long and 8.5 meters high). The 2019 festival sees more than 100 landmarks, and ice sculptures by artists from 12 countries.

The Harbin Festival will be open for one month, closing on February 5th. Below, we have rounded up our favorite images of the festival so far, demonstrating that red hot architecture can be cold as ice.

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Welcome to the latest installment of #donotsettle extra, the series in which Wahyu Pratomo and Kris Provoost accompany some of their #donotsettle videos with in-depth textual analysis of the buildings they visit.

After last month’s visit to OMA’s first building in Shanghai, we stayed in China and headed north—far north. We are happy to take you to a building that has been high on our “to-do list.” Harbin, a provincial capital city in the north-east of China, has previously only been known for the large-scale ice sculptures that appear during the winter months. In the past two years, this has changed, at least for the architecture geeks spread around the world.

Ma Yansong and his team at MAD Architects designed and built the Harbin Opera House in a new part of the city. First announced in 2013, the building was completed at the end of 2015. Since then, an endless stream of breathtaking photos has been shared on the internet. We had to see this project with our own eyes! We ventured out to Harbin and spent a day at the Opera.

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Designed by spatial practice, their proposal for the Harbin High Speed Railway (HSR) west train station Twin Towers. is an iconic project set to include office spaces, residential apartments, retail spaces and a hyper link to a new underground infra-structural hub. With China having the world’s longest High Speed Rail (HSR) network that connects the entire country from north to south and from east to west, the new West Train Station in Harbin will become the northern China gateway connecting to China’s major cities with daily high-speed links to Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangzhou. More images and architects' description after the break.

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