Ma and Gillen sit a few feet apart, at identical workstations, but the rolls of blueprints that make a sort of miniature skyline on the American’s desk show the role he has taken on. Hired as a designer, Gillen now oversees the building of Ma’s architectural concoctions. “I am the executioner,” he says with a grin. “I just try to get things done without making either my boss or the client unhappy.”

The client, in the case of the Harbin Wood Sculpture Museum, is the local government, which occupies a glass building with a red Chinese flag next door to the construction site. “The top-down system can make things very simple,” Gillen says. “The leader says, ‘I want it; you make it,’ and it’s done.” Never mind that the projected ticket sales for the museum’s exhibitions, which are anchored by the collected works of a locally renowned wood sculptor, could never match the building’s extravagant price tag.

Such an issue might stop a project in the United States. But in China, the primary concerns are prestige and development for its own sake, and the leaders would move heaven — and lots of earth — to get the museum built. “These projects are the Louis Vuitton bags of architecture,” says one foreign architect, who has worked on several marquee buildings in China. “Every city in China wants one now.”

With all the excitement over architectural possibilities in China, there is a reluctance to address the obvious question: What happens if the social, cultural and economic environment cannot support these cutting-edge designs after they are built? This is already a problem, both for prestige projects and massive urban developments. MAD, for example, has built the voluptuously curved Ordos Museum in a new planned city in Inner Mongolia. But the real estate bubble popped in Ordos last year. The museum now sits forlornly in an empty development, a symbol of architectural achievement as well as the folly of ambition. “These are like the Fields of Dreams,” Gillen says. “Build it, and they will come.” Sometimes, though, they don’t come.

In Harbin, I met two Chinese men in thick coats wandering around the Wood Sculpture Museum. They were trying to decide if it looked more like a whale or a shimmering serpent. “It certainly is unusual,” said one, who identified himself as Mr. Wang and who bought an apartment in one of the high-rises behind the museum two years ago. Did he like the design? “Well, yes,” he said, “because it’s already made my property nearly double in value!”

Gillen is not paid to worry about the museum’s future or its development value — just to ensure that it is built. And that often requires handling shifting demands that would be almost unimaginable back home. When the pit for the wood-sculpture museum’s foundation had already been dug, for instance, the government made a startling request to double the area to 66,000 square feet. The demand meant drafting a new set of designs and digging the foundation several yards larger to create a new underground gallery space. “In the U.S., the contract would’ve been ripped up and renegotiated,” Gillen said. But MAD complied with the request without complaint. It was another lesson in the Chinese art of making guanxi, or cultivating relationships. Who knows what commissions a cooperative attitude might lead to in the future?

Walking through the museum’s cathedral-like interior, with rays of morning sunshine streaming through the skylights, Gillen snapped photos of imperfections: a shattered pane of curved glass, a poorly placed water pipe. He was keenly aware of the shoddy workmanship that has plagued other modern buildings in China. It is one price of excessive speed. “I want to build a monument that lasts,” he says. Even so, he couldn’t get over the pace of progress. “This is a complex project, but we’ve gone from design to nearly finished construction in just two years!” Gillen said. “I’m not saying this system is better than ours back home. But sometimes it seems like the U.S. is sitting on the couch sipping coffee while China is Carl Lewis running as hard as it can.”