A win for Team China

BEIJING — Enough landscapers to fill a green army have been swarming over this city in recent weeks, sticking rows of saplings in traffic medians and rolling out fresh sod seemingly by the mile. If they've been visibly laboring -- there is no deadline more solid than an Olympic deadline, after all, and it gets pretty sticky in Beijing this time of year -- there is also something symbolically relaxed about the work they're doing.

It is the definition of a cosmetic touch-up -- window dressing for a city that by the end of last year had wrapped up much of the construction of its Olympic facilities, which include 12 new venues, 11 existing ones updated for the Games and an additional eight temporary facilities for sports such as motocross, fencing and beach volleyball. Unlike Athens, which became a symbol of civic procrastination in 2004, Beijing made sure its architectural house was in order with nearly a year to spare.

But that sense of calm pervading much of the capital when I arrived in late June masked a complex reality about the way that effort came together. China's preparations provoked an intense and unusually open debate here about the relationship between architecture and nationalism.

It also raised questions about overspending -- Wen Jiabao, China's premier, and other leading politicians made pointed calls in the middle of planning for a "frugal" Games -- along with worry that too many plum stadium commissions were going to Western architects. Ultimately, though they're not so keen to admit it now to foreign reporters lest they dull the cosmopolitan sheen of these Games, Olympic organizers tilted the balance of architectural power decidedly in the direction of local firms and modest budgets.

When Kobe Bryant and the rest of the U.S. basketball team take the court for the first time Sunday, against Yao Ming and China, they'll do so in an arena, on the far western side of the city, that is a good deal less flashy than planned. The commission first went to a German firm that proposed a sort of arena-as-JumboTron, with video screens covering the exterior. But before construction could begin, the job was handed over to the Beijing Architecture Research Institute, a group of government architects about as avant-garde as its name would imply. It produced a boxy arena clad in strips of aluminum alloy that resemble stalks of wheat blowing gently in the wind: hardly innovative but quite handsome all the same.