Behind the Curtain Wall w/ NYC Architect Richard Roth Jr: China World Trade Center

Every month this year, Untapped New York will release a new essay from Jo Holmes about the life and work of the late architect Richard Roth, Jr. of Emery Roth & Sons. Each essay explores a different building or developer from Richard’s career, intertwined with stories of his personal life and snippets of exclusive interviews conducted by Holmes and Untapped New York's Justin Rivers (which can be viewed in our on-demand video archive). Check out the whole series here!

A Culture Shock

In the 1970s, like many businesses at the time, Emery Roth & Sons found themselves struggling. Richard Roth Jr. describes that period as a disaster.

In 1973, having just finished 7 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, the company went from 200 employees to just 18. With little work in New York, Richard searched further afield for opportunities. He ended up with projects all over the world—though not all of them went according to plan. 

By 1980, Emery Roth & Sons had an office in Singapore with around 14 people. One of the firm's clients was Malaysian entrepreneur Robert Kuok and his family. The Kuoks invited the firm to enter a competition to design a World Trade Center for China in Beijing. This first phase would include an office building, a shopping center, and a hotel. To Richard’s surprise, Emery Roth & Sons won. And so began one of the most interesting projects he says he was ever involved in. 

There were some ‘complications.’ For starters, there were no building regulations. “There was no building code for the city of Beijing. They had nothing,” explained Richard. “They’d never really built any tall buildings and asked us to come up with a code. So, I put the New York City building code under my arm, and for a brief period, it became the building code for the city of Beijing.” What’s more, the new complex would face a street that jets flew along once a year as part of a commemoration ceremony, so that also had to be taken into consideration.

A Mystery Visit

Emery Roth & Sons was assigned a Japanese firm, Nikken Sekkei, which had about 10,000 employees, to do the working drawings. A Chinese firm—the incongruously named Beijing Institute of Nuclear Engineering (BINE)—became the associate architect. 

After several months, Richard made arrangements for all parties involved to get together in New York. “Well, the Kuoks showed up. And the Japanese [team] showed up. But the Chinese [architects] couldn't get visas and were stuck in China,” Richard said. After an enjoyable week of entertaining and exchanging gifts, the Kuoks and Nikken Sekkei decided to leave. Then the Chinese architects turned up. “They must have passed each other at JFK!” Richard laughed. 

The BINE people stayed for four weeks, working in a conference room at Emery Roth & Sons' offices. “We weren't allowed in that room. In our own office! And we had no idea what they were doing,” Richard said. What he did find out was that the group of mostly middle-aged architects had, up until recently, been in prison or working on collective farms—they hadn’t been able to practice architecture during the Cultural Revolution. They weren’t allowed to socialize or do any sightseeing in New York.

“They’d brought food with them and had to stay in their hotel rooms when they weren’t at work,” Richard explained. “I would come home at night and talk to my wife about how sad I felt that these architects hadn’t been able to practice for so many years.”

The visitors did manage one night of freedom on the day they arrived, as their ‘supervisor’ got to New York a few hours after them. Before anyone could stop him, one of Richard’s colleagues had taken the visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for dinner 

One of the reasons for bringing everyone together was to consider a new design for the Center. Richard’s team felt they could improve their original scheme, and Nikken Sekkei was on board with the new plans. The Kuoks were too. Until they weren’t.

The Chinese ‘supervisor’ insisted the scheme chosen as the winning design was what had to be built. There was no room for debate. With no desire to upset their client, the Kuoks agreed. “So, we had no choice but to go back to our first design,” Richard sighed.

The five years it took to complete the job saw a huge change in China. It was one of the first projects built in a surge in construction after the Cultural Revolution. Cities mushroomed in size, and Richard could see the influence of Western ideas and lifestyles begin to show. “The first time I was in China, there were no cars. There were buses and there were trucks. But no cars. By the time this building was up, though, everybody had one. And the streets were packed with automobiles they had no idea how to drive!”

A Globe-Trotting Era

The China project came during a period when Richard was travelling around 100,000 miles a year to drum up business. The Beijing Trade Center wasn’t the only international project that presented challenges at this time. There were always local ‘niceties’ to get to grips with.

“We discovered that in Korea, no one paid the final 10 per cent of the bill,” said Richard. “The Japanese [clients] were very precise about paying bills. If we were on time, they were on time. If we were a day late, they paid a day late. If we were a day early, they paid a day early.” 

There were also ongoing political issues that could make or break a deal. “In the early 1970s, I put some brochures in a suitcase and went off to London. I met up with a few clients we’d done work for in the United States, to see what they thought we should be doing in the face of a real estate slowdown,” Richard explained. He won some work, but it didn’t come to anything. There was serious industrial unrest in the UK, resulting in commercial and domestic restrictions on energy use, among other constraints. “You couldn’t even put the lights on,” Richard said. His hopes of opening a London office were dashed.

So, he cast his net wider. “I picked up a number of jobs in Portugal, in Iran, in Nigeria, in Ghana. All of them were cancelled due to coups! None of them got built because the countries I was dealing with had revolutions, and the governments kept on changing.”

The firm designed and built a 30-story apartment building in Iran. “As the building went up, someone realised that the north side of the tower gave a direct view into the breakfast room of the Shah’s palace. The government wanted us to stop building. In the end, we closed up one side of the tower on the higher floors. Though the Shah was long gone by then.” 

A Brave New World

Of course, sometimes things changed in Richard’s favor, though not necessarily for the long term. In the mid-1980s, he saw opportunities in Hungary. “Hungary was leaving its communist dictatorship behind, and I could tell,” Richard said. He’d already hired a Hungarian architect as part of an agreement between the American Institute of Architects and the Hungarian Institute of Architects. So, he put him in charge of an office in Budapest.

“We had the only Western office in a communist country, and it was a fascinating time." The firm picked up a fair amount of work there, both for Hungarians and Americans, including cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder. Then, in 1989, the Hungarian government passed a law that meant you could only be an architect in Hungary if you were Hungarian. “They wouldn't even allow you to put your name on a drawing,” Richard explained. So, he closed down the Budapest office. “The country had gone from communism to some form of government I couldn't figure out.”

While it sounds like things didn’t go well outside the United States, Richard said the business was in fact very successful internationally. “We built many shopping centers in various countries, for example,” he said. The firm did a fair amount of work in Malaysia, in particular. “We did about four buildings in Shah Alam after it became the state capital of Selangor,” Richard explained.

It seems getting paid was quite an insecure operation, though. “The Malaysian [clients] paid their bills in US dollars, but they didn’t use checks. The guy who ran our office in Singapore used to go up to Kuala Lumpur, collect bags full of cash, then take a plane to Johor, then a cab back to Singapore to put it in the bank!”

A French Connection

Emery Roth & Sons went on to win the contract to build the second phase of the China World Trade Center. A contractor involved in phase one was the long-established French company Bouygues. Richard was lucky enough to enjoy their hospitality. “They had one of the best wine cellars you've ever seen in your entire life in their office in Paris. I had a lunch there and it was just one of the best meals I've ever had—with some of the really great French wines,” Richard remembered. But that perk didn’t last. “Bouygues didn’t get to work on phase two, so they didn’t serve me lunch after that...”

The whole China experience was clearly unforgettable. “It was one of those lucky things one gets involved in, and we had a good time. We learned a great deal, and we got to see China at an interesting time in Chinese history.”