While the nicknames are amusing, urban planning is no game. Cities are our destiny. Paralleling China’s urban rise, half of the world’s 7.14 billion people now live in cities. By 2050, the World Health Organization predicts, 7 of every 10 people around the globe will dwell in urban areas.

There are many such nicknames, not all of them endearing: “The Big Shorts” (for the Dutch firm OMA’s CCTV Tower in Beijing); “The Bottle Opener” (for the Shanghai World Financial Center, by New York architects KPF) and “The Girl With the Thin Waist” (for the Canton Tower, a Guangzhou television tower by the Dutch firm IBA).

In the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, an almost completed, nearly 1,000-foot-tall tower by the global firm RMJM resembles an enormous pair of jeans. Irked Chinese bloggers have nicknamed the tower, which its architects consider a monumental gateway to a new business district, “The Giant Pants.”

The Gate to the East skyscraper under construction in Suzhou, China. Chinese bloggers have nicknamed the tower “The Giant Pants.”

Long gone are the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, when gray Mao suits were de rigueur and cities were deemed decadent dens of the bourgeoisie. China has entered a new Gilded Age in which Chinese leaders view cities as engines of economic growth and Western architects as the latest luxury brand. Frequently, the no-holds-barred opulence leads to excess.

“We never talk about money. Never in the seven years I’ve been here. They just say it needs to be more luxurious,” said Rick Fawell, who heads the Shanghai and Beijing offices of Chicago-based VOA Associates.

Other Chicago architects and planners second these denunciations, though they acknowledge that China has thrown them an economic lifeline and allowed them to design projects whose scope, cost and ambition are rarely equaled in the United States.

“They buy themselves a trophy,” said Jahn, whose elegant Leatop Plaza, its roof sliced on a diagonal, fronts on a grandly scaled but forlorn park in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

But Chicago’s architects and urban planners routinely find themselves powerless to direct the larger forces propelling China’s growth. Their completed projects are often tinged with irony: energy-saving buildings plunked into a landscape that is anything but green; context-sensitive designs that strive to uplift their surroundings but wind up as isolated as chess pieces spread across a board.

Chicago stars like Helmut Jahn have their own striking Chinese towers. And the Chicago office of Gensler, a global firm headquartered in San Francisco, contributed 10 architects to the team that designed the twisting 2,073-foot-tall Shanghai Tower, which, when completed next year, will become the world’s second-tallest building after the SOM-designed Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

The Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where Adrian Smith once worked, designed the Jin Mao Tower, which reigned for nearly a decade as China’s tallest skyscraper and remains one of its most iconic. SOM ‘s Chicago office also shaped the tallest building in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing and was involved in the design of the tallest towers in Beijing and Tianjin, a major northern Chinese city.

Some of the most visible symbols of this urbanization were conceived in Chicago.

The scope and pace of China’s urbanization are staggering. The country has increased its urban population by about half a billion since 1980, and experts predict that the world’s most populous nation will add as many as 300 million people, most of them rural migrants, to its cities by 2030. As a result, a billion people — nearly 1 of every 8 on Earth — could live in Chinese cities.

China has undergone rapid urbanization since 1980, when just 1 of every 5 people lived in urban areas. In 2010, nearly half of China's population lived in cities. By 2050, nearly 4 of every 5 Chinese may be city dwellers.

“The spatial design of the cities has been done in a one-size-fits-all kind of manner — the megablocks and the celebration of iconic architecture as opposed to livable space,” said Jonathan Woetzel, a Shanghai-based director of the McKinsey Global Institute. The growth “was done in a hurry and was done in a way to maximize the amount of (land) you could sell for development.”

It takes time and vision to build great cities. But the strategies China has pursued mix the megalomania of Soviet-style public squares, the gigantism of American skyscrapers, and a one-dimensional Chinese focus on boosting the economy rather than the quality of life.

It is a tale of hypersized, hyperfast urbanization that has simultaneously lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and spawned dystopian living conditions: pea-soup skies, sterile new business districts and monotonous housing blocks.

As China, the boom country of the 21st century, builds its urban dreams, it is turning to the boom city of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Chicago. Yet this is not a simple, happy story of East meets West.

The smog attack, which burned throats, forced flight cancellations and prompted a run on face masks, marked the latest twist in a little-noticed global exchange that has remade the face of Chinese cities and revitalized recession-battered American architectural practices.

But the wave of air pollution that struck China’s largest city in December played an unanticipated trick on the 1,380-foot-tall Jin Mao Tower and the rest of the gigantic Shanghai skyscrapers that symbolize China’s headlong rush into modernity: It made them disappear.

The Shanghai World Financial Center, from left, Jin Mao Tower and Shanghai Tower soar above the rest of the Pudong skyline in Shanghai.

When Chicago architect Adrian Smith designed Shanghai’s first skyscraper to crack the 1,000-foot barrier, he envisioned a glistening tower inspired by ancient pagodas — a silvery shaft topped by an exultant spire that would scrape the sky, not be hidden by it.

China exemplifies this trend. It is no longer useful to frame its story as a tale of dazzling buildings designed by star architects. Like Chicago more than a century ago, China is a laboratory where architects, urban planners, government officials and developers are concocting the urban future — both for better and for worse.

The natural affinity between Chicago and China can be expressed in two words: “big” and “fast.”

In the years after the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago grew at lightning speed. Its population soared from nearly 300,000 in 1870 to 2 million in 1910, finally peaking at 3.6 million in 1950.

Shenzhen 2010 Population: 10.2 million Note: Population includes surrounding suburbs and other continuous urban areas. Source: World Urbanization Prospects 2011 revision from the UN

That is pretty impressive until you hear the story of the Chinese city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Propelled by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s decision to spark growth by creating a special economic zone to lure factories and other businesses, Shenzhen went from a sleepy border town of 58,000 in 1980 to a sprawling urban area of more than 10 million today.

This is what is known as “Chinese speed.” And it is far from isolated.

Before 1980, fewer than 2 of every 10 Chinese lived in cities. In 2012, for the first time, more than half of China’s people — 710 million — were classified as urban.

Their numbers are sure to increase as China loosens restrictions that have prevented millions of migrant workers from establishing permanent residence in cities. Rural residents who move permanently to cities, the thinking goes, will earn and spend more than they would on the farm, raising domestic demand for consumer goods.

But there’s much more to urbanization than raising gross domestic product.

Where will the new urbanites live — in the already congested megacities of Shanghai and Beijing or smaller cities? Who will build and pay for new roads, subways, apartments, office towers and social services? How will China provide the energy to power the buildings where the new city dwellers will live and work — with more polluting coal-fired power plants or a cleaner alternative?

These are urgent questions in China. In December, the country’s top leaders, including Premier Li Keqiang, discussed them in a two-day, closed-door conference on urbanization. China’s urban push has so many pervasive downsides that the language has bent to accommodate it.

A child wears a face mask in Nanjing, China. Smog can reach dangerous levels in Chinese cities. A child wears a face mask in Nanjing, China. Smog can reach dangerous levels in Chinese cities.

Shoddy construction — like an unoccupied 13-story Shanghai apartment block that fell over, nearly intact, in 2009 — has inspired the term “tofu-dreg project,” a reference to the residue from making tofu.

Then there are “ghost cities,” new housing projects that remain virtually unoccupied because no one wants to live there or can afford to.

The most telling phrase, “PM 2.5,” refers to particulate matter 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, tiny airborne particles that can cause serious health problems when ingested. Scientific studies have linked repeated exposure to the particles with reduced lung function and a rise in death rates caused by lung cancer and heart disease.

China’s air pollution is so bad — and PM 2.5 is so much a part of everyday conversation — that English-language newspapers use the term in headlines. On Dec. 10, after smog woes spread from Beijing to 100 cities in eastern China, the Shanghai Daily splashed a life-size picture of a face mask on its front page, accompanied by the headline: “Can we get rid of this today?”

The pollution affects every echelon of society. Worried parents check the PM 2.5 level before letting their children play outside. Foreign companies fret that they won’t be able to recruit employees to work in China. Chicago architect Smith, who designed the Jin Mao Tower in 1993, said the air has perceptibly dulled the skyscraper’s once-silvery facade of stainless steel, aluminum and glass.

" If you’re building this 21st-century economy, and you have these severe environmental challenges, who wants to be there? Do you want to raise a family there? " Phil Enquist, urban planner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Northern China’s coal-burning power plants typically get the blame for the pollution. But urban planning practices that favor driving, not walking, also play a role. Beijing, once a city of bicycles, is now a city of more than 5 million cars. Car use has also skyrocketed in Shanghai.

When Beijing-based architect Chris Groesbeck of VOA Associates returns to his Naperville home from China, the blue skies seem so novel that he takes pictures of them.

“It’s like coming out of a cave,” he said.

One building in Chicago represents the burgeoning China trade: 224 S. Michigan Ave., a 17-story office building sheathed in white terra cotta. It’s there that legendary architect and planner Daniel Burnham had his offices and led the writing of the 1909 Plan of Chicago, which spurred the construction of such marquee public works as Navy Pier and brought order to Chicago’s urban chaos.

Ringing the building’s sky-lit atrium today are the offices of three Chicago firms with big footprints in China: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, purveyors of sophisticated corporate skyscrapers; VOA Associates, specialists in luxury hotels and hospitals; and Goettsch Partners, whose portfolio ranges from workaday office buildings to high-rise hotels.

Seen together, the three offices form a kind of architectural export factory. It reverses the usual trend of American companies outsourcing production of their wares to China. The cluster also explodes the outdated notion that Chicago architects do most of their work in Chicago.

“We typically think of Chicago in an insular way. In reality, Chicago is a hub in a global profession,” said Chicago native Jonathan Solomon, associate dean of architecture at Syracuse University and former acting head of the University of Hong Kong’s architecture school.

Goettsch Partners’ portfolio used to be evenly divided among the U.S., China and the Middle East. Last year, nearly 60 percent of the firm’s billings were in China.

Legendary architect and planner Daniel Burnham had his offices at 224 S. Michigan Ave. in Chicago. Ringing the building’s sky-lit atrium today are the offices of three Chicago firms with big footprints in China. Legendary architect and planner Daniel Burnham had his offices at 224 S. Michigan Ave. in Chicago. Ringing the building’s sky-lit atrium today are the offices of three Chicago firms with big footprints in China.

“We’re like buffalo hunters — we go where the buffalo are,” said Jim Goettsch, Goettsch Partners’ chairman.

At Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, about 1 of every 7 employees — 48 out of 374 — are Chinese speakers, including a half-dozen translators. Forty-three percent of the office’s 2013 billings were in China. A slowing Chinese economy could force the Chicago firms to lay off architects, but leaders of the firms insist that new projects continue to arise there.

“China is saving a lot of architects’ jobs in the U.S.,” said Silas Chiow, the Shanghai-based director of SOM China.

Even though Chinese architect Wang Shu won the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize , his field’s highest honor, the Chinese need to go overseas for architectural talent. The Cultural Revolution, the late 1960s movement that forced millions of people from the cities to the country, decimated the ranks of the nation’s architects, as well as their creativity.

“The ideology of the Cultural Revolution largely removed the association of art within architecture. For decades, architecture was viewed as function and economy more than aesthetics. It became this kind of machine to contain us,” said Harvard University Graduate School of Design professor Bing Wang, author of “The Architectural Profession of Modern China: Emerging from the Past.”

Hiring foreign architects, like those from Chicago, is a way for the Chinese to catch up and learn from the experts, particularly when it comes to skyscrapers — which, as every good Chicagoan knows, were invented in Chicago.

" We’re like buffalo hunters — we go where the buffalo are. " Jim Goettsch, chairman, Goettsch Partners. Last year, nearly 60 percent of Goettsch’s billings were in China.

This heritage gives Chicago architects a leg up on their competitors as they compete for lucrative high-rise jobs. “I always felt that because we were from Chicago, that made it possible,” Goettsch said of his firm’s move into the China market. “If we were from Minneapolis, it wouldn’t have been the same.”

Skyscrapers designed at 224 S. Michigan have transformed the silhouette of China’s cities from horizontal to vertical. By 2020, according to the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, 12 of the 20 tallest buildings in the world could be in China.

China has become what Chicago used to be: a laboratory for the latest high-rise innovations.

But like other foreign firms working in China, Chicago architects regularly endure a frustrating struggle to realize their ambitions. In Chicago, they prepare everything from concept drawings to construction documents. And they can supervise their work as it’s being built. If a contractor wants to make a change, a Loop job site is a short walk away.

The rules change in China, where some construction workers have only rudimentary skills, the foreigners must partner with local firms that prepare the final blueprints, and a 14-hour time difference means that objectionable changes can be made while an architect in Chicago is asleep. All that necessitates ceding control, a hard thing for architects from the city that takes to heart Mies van der Rohe ‘s aphorism: “God is in the details.”

Suzhou 2010 Population: 3.2 million Note: Population includes surrounding suburbs and other continuous urban areas. Source: World Urbanization Prospects 2011 revision from the UN

God was definitely not in the details when Goettsch Partners principal Scott Seyer traveled to the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou in December to see a freshly completed office building he had designed.

The handsome high-rise, the 21-story headquarters of Soochow Securities, is one of nine projects the Goettsch firm has completed in Suzhou. Its floor plan, shaped like a rounded triangle, wraps around a soaring atrium partly inspired by the one at 224 S. Michigan Ave. Seyer was excited as he neared the building. He hadn’t seen it in eight months.

Then he arrived. Seyer had designed benches that would brim with plants to warm up the atrium’s stone floor and create a lively gathering space. They weren’t there. In their place were a few potted palms around the perimeter. At the atrium’s center was a tiny and temporary picket fence surrounding Christmas decorations.

“Sometimes things change,” the architect said. “It’s inevitable,” he added later, “that you’re not going to be able to have the same control from 7,000 miles as from seven blocks.”

Construction challenges in Suzhou

In the grand scheme of things, a botched detail doesn’t mean much. But Chicago architects trying to address the broader problem of China’s air pollution face even tougher struggles, as shown by the saga of the ecology-driven Pearl River Tower, which Smith and his partner Gordon Gill designed while both were working at SOM. They left in 2006 to start their own firm.

When the design was unveiled at a 2006 Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago exhibition, it was billed as a “net zero energy” skyscraper that would produce as much energy as it consumed. The green design was ironic. The building was to be the headquarters of the China Tobacco Guangdong Industrial Corp., a major cigarette-maker.

The 71-story tower, which opened last year in the big southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, has curving exterior walls that funnel the wind through four openings in its facade. The openings house spinning turbines. Inside are such green features as chilled radiant ceilings, which eliminate inefficient air ducts. The word Gill uses to describe the tower is “performance,” as though the skyscraper were a race car.

Pearl River Tower

A better metaphor would involve ghosts, as in “ghost building.”

Just four of the tower’s 71 floors are occupied, according to its developers. The tobacco company will not be moving into the tower for at least five years, the managing director of the company that developed it said in an interview. The reason: The new Chinese leadership, which is pursuing an anti-corruption campaign, wants to limit the construction of plush administrative offices for state-owned firms.

With so few tenants, it’s impossible to fully assess whether the boldly sculpted tower is a harbinger of a greener future. Even the environmental elements that are in place seem more about showmanship than sustainability. The turbines, for example, are expected to generate less than 3 percent of the building’s energy.

The project incorporates 11 of the 18 energy-saving technologies recommended by the architects, said the managing director, Ye Zhiming. As a result, the Pearl River Tower will use 50 to 60 percent less energy than a typical office building of comparable size. Yet it is not close to its original goal.

“Net zero, to me, is an ideal or a goal,” Ye said. “When you put it into real life, a goal has to change.”

Shanghai 2010 Population: 19.6 million Note: Population includes surrounding suburbs and other continuous urban areas. Source: World Urbanization Prospects 2011 revision from the UN

For all their dazzling skylines, the new Chinese cities lack the character you find in Chicago and other pedestrian-friendly American cities. The best place to observe this phenomenon is a skyscraper-studded peninsula across the Huangpu River from the Bund, Shanghai’s celebrated row of 1910s and 1920s high-rises. It’s part of a district called Pudong.

A quarter-century ago, when China declared it a special economic zone, the peninsula consisted of little more than squatters’ shacks and warehouses.

Today Pudong boasts the world’s only trio of supertall skyscrapers: the Jin Mao Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Shanghai Tower. The ungainly Oriental Pearl TV Tower completes the supertall row.