Cork-born architect Don Murphy has won a competition to design a Hilton hotel in the desert terrain of a remote Chinese region
FOR GENERATIONS the supposed burial place of Genghis Khan, marked by a mausoleum at Ordos on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, has been a place of pilgrimage. But now Ordos – one of the world’s most remote places – is set to become a major tourist attraction with the planned development of a Las Vegas-style cultural development in the desert.
Part of the development will be a €50 million strangely shaped luxury hotel and leisure complex – looking remarkably like a UFO – designed by Cork-born architect Don Murphy.
Murphy is based in Amsterdam and is creative director of VMX, an architectural bureau he co-founded. He was coping with the current financial slump and “clients wanting the cost of everything reduced” when out of the blue he was invited to enter an international competition to design a cutting-edge hotel and leisure project for Ordos. The competition was organised by the architects of the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, Herzog de Meuron of Switzerland, and “master planner”, Chinese artist Ali Weiwei.
Other architects were also invited to submit plans for another phase of the project known as “Ordos 100” – 100 futuristic private villas. The invites for the design competition were addressed to “Mr/Ms Architect” in e-mails from Weiwei’s company Fake Designs. Some believed it was a hoax.
The multi-billion-dollar Ordos development is the brainchild of entrepreneur Cia Jiang, who made his fortune in cashmere, coal and more recently producing organic milk for the Chinese market.
This unassuming 40-year-old billionaire – whose construction project would probably impress even Genghis Khan himself – likes to ride around on his Harley Davidson motorbike, and has the backing of a local government awash with natural resource earnings. His project includes a “creative culture” metropolis with museums, theatres, a concert hall, residential and commercial development, as well as the Murphy-designed hotel.
The hyperspeed approach to urbanisation in Ordos is a testament to Inner Mongolia’s stature as China’s second biggest economy after Shanghai, driven to a large extent by its coal resources.
It’s all “still a bit of a dream”, admits Murphy (43), whose hotel design is to be leased to the Hilton group. Building is due to start soon and he will travel back and forth to the location, an hour’s flight from Beijing, every six weeks or so until its completion. “When this started we didn’t take it all that seriously. It was more a flight of fancy, an escape from the doom and gloom of this awful recession,” he recalls. “Where was Ordos, and what were they doing, we asked ourselves.”
Murphy, who comes from a Cork family involved for generations in construction and allied businesses – his uncle Tony Murphy went into the Irish horseracing history books as mastermind of the Gay Future betting coup back in the 1970s in Cork – finally made it to Ordos earlier this year.
He said the amount of development going on was “astonishing”. Even though foundations were barely dug in places there was already a fantastic infrastructure including roads and lighting.
“What a contrast with Ireland and all those housing developments that went up during the property boom, without the necessary infrastructure,” he says.
Don Murphy’s design – UFO meets giant doughnut – has had a mixed reaction, but plenty of attention on architectural websites. The worst criticism compared it to “some sort of viral infection on the beautiful Mongolian landscape”.
“We wanted it to look like a flower from above, symbolic of an oasis,” Murphy says. The hotel design is a large circular building offering all the rooms a view of the surrounding landscape. All facilities – the sports centre, swimming pool, restaurants and so on – are in the middle of the circle protected by glass against the harsh winds.
“We gave the building various references in its shape and design reflecting important elements of the Mongolian culture, such as the sun, the moon and the yurt, the traditional form of housing for the local population. Its colours will mirror the natural colours of grass, sand and water outside.”
The shape is pretty useful too when looking for it on Google Earth amid the desert terrain of Inner Mongolia’s steppe lands.
“Google Earth is by far the most popular medium to discover new worlds,” adds the Irish architect who knows something about attracting attention. He is the winner of prestigious design prizes in Holland. He designed Amsterdam’s “bike hotel”, a steel structure which houses thousands of bicycles and which has become one of the most photographed sites in the city. The Ordos project is his first hotel and Murphy and his team report that the circular 32,000sq m building is one of their most interesting assignments.
A view of the Mongolian landscape, stretching as far as the eye can see, with nearby architectural “flights of fancy” creating interest, may yet make the long journey to Ordos worthwhile.