China's building boom has produced some audacious projects, and few are as eye-popping as Hadid's performance center for the southern industrial city of Guangzhou. The venue consists of two dynamic fluid-form structures, the larger housing an undulating, gilded 1,800-seat hall and the smaller home to a more intimate 400-seat space. Both buildings are clad in great expanses of steel-framed glass and granite panels-the complexity of which led to challenges during construction and in ongoing maintenance. But the futuristic complex is an emphatic statement on the ambitions of 21st-century China.
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