A stage of display the talent and an overall project management ability are required for native architectural design.

The extension project of Pudong International Airport is cause a extremely strong sensation to architecture design industry because it realized a historical span of Chinese super large public architecture design------domestic design enterprise taking the master design task. The NO.2 airport terminal in the project is the first airport terminal in large scaled airport designed by our own in China.

When everyone is paying their attention to this project, the related principal of Modern Design Group for the master planning said" we should thank our client Shanghai Airport Group for giving us the stage of display the talent on independent creation and overall project management."

Simple words but profound meaning.

It is a sorrow to take foreign design as the only truth.

Form a certain time, domestic designers rarely won in the biding for the key public projects in China. We have to confess that foreign designers and foreign designer offices created a lot of excellent works. Take Shanghai for example, Jingmao Tower and Shanghai Grand Theater are design by foreigners.

However,the popularity of foreign works makes more and more architectural experts worried. Now, a lot of clients choose designs made by foreign designers only when biding. They prefer special, attractive and strange outer appearance to practical, economical and beautiful ones. As a result, these architectures are becoming more and more and more stranger. Let's temporary put aside the problems of harmoniousness with the surroundings and material wasting, an extensive disputation has been caused by the problems on the implementation plan and structure safety. In some large scaled development projects, some project is not suitable for the local development very much because the foreign designers are lacking of enough understanding on the situation, natural and social condition of China and local economic development.

According to the regulations of China, foreign architecture design enterprises can not biding for projects in China independently. So these foreign design enterprises usually will choose to cooperate with some influential enterprises in the local place. Because of the popularity of foreign design, a lot of Chinese companies which are able to design the project by their own have to unite with foreign companies, but they are only in a subsidiary position in the combo.

We are lacking of masters.

It has been five years since we have been entered WTO. With the market is becoming more and more open, fair and justice, our domestic design enterprises is facing with more furious competition with foreign design enterprises. To deal with such competition, what the domestic enterprises need most is to greatly improve themselves.

Through the experiences from some large projects, we can see that we are almost equal to foreign skills, including in design drawing and detail disposing of structure and electric facilities installation. The main weakness is that our design idea is still not creative enough.

See widely thought the world, the scale of some famous architect design company is not so big, but must have a leading designer who makes the company competitive. Turing back to see our own, through have hundreds or even more than one thousands employees, but real masters are rarely seen. In the 80's and 90's of last century, there some great architects like Jiang Huancheng, Xing Tonghe and Wang Dajin in shanghai. After that, it is hard to find new ones.

The lacking of architecture masters is caused by a lot of reasons. Besides short of creation, the ordering according to age but not ability makes a lot of good young designers lost a lot of chances. Second, not enough attention paid from the public opinion to architecture industry. A lot of architecture design enterprises including the bellwether of Shanghai architecture design industry---Shanghai Modern Design Group have realized that the importance of talent and are making efforts in team construction. Whereas, generally speaking, we are still short of talents.

Architecture design is a concentration of brainpower. To the enterprises, in market competition the most important factor is talents. Capital and equipments are in the second place. In recent years, taking on flexible operation mechanism and professional management ideas, mini type offices are increasing fast and competing with large design enterprises in different markets. So it's easy to imagine that foreign design enterprises who are continuously seeking for localization and traditional large domestic architecture enterprises will compete together with rising private design offices in China. The contention will not only on masters but also on the talents who have higher technologies, better speech and presentation and macro-management ability.

In the experts' opinion, the domestic designers have to upgrade their design idea to adapt the market. It is not reasonable always to follow the old routine either to worship all the foreign designs. We should cultivate a kind of idea that combines the advanced international theories with Chinese traditional culture. Domestic design enterprises have to keep on talents seeking.

Whole process management is the trend.

The extension project of Pudong International Airport breaks the pattern that domestic designers work for foreign designer and turns the situation into a contrary condition-15 foreign architect design and consultation company work for Chinese architents.

As the chief contractor, the east China office of Modern Design Group makes a whole process management. It not only includes project design, primary design, construction drawing design and construction cooperation for airport terminal, landscape system etc., but also organizing 33 professional design and consultation companies to take the responsibility of schedule, quality, cost and share contraction management and control.

Project management throughout the whole process is also taken as the trend for future project management in our country. This brand new try is a sort of test to our architects' design skill. The more important is it provides chances to practice the overall controlling ability for our designers. It must be a kind of important weapon to compete with international design companies.

Except for the content which has been mentioned above, architecture design enterprises have to find their own unique characteristics. On the China Project Item Management Service Forum held in Shanghai several days ago, some experts indicated that there was no definite relation between the company occupations of the market and the company nature and company type, etc. but related to its unique design characteristics. Taking one of the largest architecture design office-SOM Company in America for example. SOM is good at multi floor building and public architecture design while the famous Canada DGBK Company is specialized in green architecture design. Unfortunately most domestic architecture design enterprises do not have any special feature of their own. Therefore, in order to remain invincible in the market, the designer enterprises must have their own design characteristic and specialty besides system and mechanism innovation.