The metal kingdom

For almost a century, the soot-stained grounds of Capital Steel were the industrial pride of a country that, under Mao, saw smokestacks as marvels of modernization. Then its billowing clouds of exhaust on the western fringe of Beijing became a source of embarrassment as China prepared to host the 2008 Olympics. The vast campus, more than twice the size of Vancouver's Stanley Park, was shut down.

But it was not demolished, the blast furnaces and cooling towers left as silent memorials to an economic model that for years produced wealth and pollution in equal measure.

Now, with another Olympics looming, Chinese planners are racing to bring the rusting ruins back to life and imbue them with new meaning.

Iron-ore storage towers have already been transformed into the ultramodern headquarters of the Winter Olympics Organizing Committee. A blast furnace will become a museum. The upper walls of a cooling tower will become the launching point for an enormous big-air snowboarding ramp. Workers' housing will become dorms for figure skaters and curlers. And what was once a small steel city will be refashioned into a sports demonstration zone with hotels, training centres, corporate headquarters and recreational facilities.

Any building deemed structurally safe will be kept as intact as possible but remade in ways that might never have seemed possible in 1919, when the first steel was made on the outskirts of a dusty city utterly unlike the gleaming metropolis Beijing has become.

When it is complete – planners hope to be done in 2019, in time for centenary celebrations – the transformation will rank among the largest industrial gentrification projects in the world (the reinvented former German coal mine Zeche Zollverein, once the largest in Europe, occupies a site less than one-eighth the size), and Capital Steel's Beijing site will become the headquarters for China's winter sport ambitions.

By 2022, when Beijing hosts the Winter Games, the background to some of the world's best athletes will be the 100 smokestacks the planners expect to leave in place. The architectural symbolism is as obvious as it is deliberate. The reconstituted steelworks is intended as a totem to China's efforts to leave behind a dirty old industrial-growth model and build in its stead new pillars for an economy based on creativity, leisure and global competitiveness.

"This place must represent the direction China is taking," said Liu Hua, an assistant general manager at Capital Steel who is overseeing the reconstruction project. (Capital Steel is also known by its Chinese name, Shougang.) "We must respect the historic and cultural value of these industrial relics. But we also need to consider new functions."

What's happening here is also the latest sign of change in China's approach to development. Though bulldozers still level historic neighbourhoods to make way for new forests of identical apartment buildings, a growing preservation movement is taking hold. Places with ecological importance are receiving new protection as parks, while old factories and bomb shelters are finding new life as artist workshops and galleries.

"We have gradually discovered that history does not only mean the imperial dynasties of long ago, but the fifties, sixties and seventies are all part of history, too," said Bo Hongtao, an architect with Chinese firm CCTN, which is working with Capital Steel on the redevelopment project.

The Communist Party under President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has sought to revive symbols of past glory – partly as a tool to bolster the party's public image in the modern era. "They've tried to find ways of saying, 'Not everything we did at the time was bad,'" said Christian Eichinger, an architect in Beijing with KSP Jurgen Engel Architekten International GmbH. "They see the chance to connect their future hopes with their past hopes."

Capital Steel offers a rich tableau for that narrative. It is located in Beijing's Shijingshan District, once the grimy heart of the city's industrial might, where eight major companies were based. In its heyday, Capital Steel functioned as a self-contained city, with canteens, housing, schools, a hospital, a small lake traversed by a traditional stone bridge and even a small mountain crowned by a temple whose earliest relics date back 1,000 years. At its peak, 70,000 people worked here, their products shaping the contours of modern China.

Its symbolic value has long been recognized by Chinese leaders. In 1981, it was chosen to experiment with a more market-based economy, becoming one of the first companies to adopt a system of "enterprise profit retention," which allowed firms and workers to keep more of the fruits of their own labour. That was a key step in the reform and opening-up period that enabled China's decades of breakneck growth – and briefly made Capital Steel the biggest steel maker in the country.

The company remains an industrial giant, though its operations have all been moved away from Beijing. But Capital Steel still controls the site of its old quarters, and its in-house design institute has played a role in drawing up plans for their reinvention. In some cases, engineers who designed the old buildings have offered advice on how to make them into something new.

And the company is again being called on to make history, this time by "playing a political role in the transformation of the capital city's functions," said Liu Jipeng, director of the Capital Finance Institute at the China University of Political Science and Law and an influential voice on change in the country's state-owned enterprises.

Where Beijing once sought industrial development, today "white collars are replacing blue collars, and many workers are being replaced by robots," he said. The revitalized steelworks, in other words, represents a broader trend of the city's economic metamorphosis, "from industry to science and technology, finance, education, service, sports and culture."

That effort has proceeded in fits and starts, and China remains heavily reliant on its old industries; last year, despite pledges to trim capacity, Chinese steel output actually rose.

The Capital Steel site is also a reminder of how complex and costly a grand transformation may turn out to be. If there is a master budget for the steelworks plan, neither Mr. Bo nor Capital Steel's Mr. Liu know of it. But the earliest projects have not been cheap. The transformation of the three cylindrical ore storage silos into the headquarters for the Winter Olympics Organizing Committee cost more than $400-million. Remaking a single blast furnace and adjacent water pond into a museum and parking lot will cost about $100-million.

The difficulties of the reconstruction project have been legion. Decades of renovations have rendered old blueprints so inaccurate that architects have had to make new ones. In some buildings, each floor is a different height and each has different window styles as well. Time has brought leans to walls and thrown floors out of level. The architects were surprised to discover an underground river flowing below one building. One company said it could not use drones to make an aerial survey because the site is so complex that a crash seemed inevitable.

"It's all very troublesome," Mr. Bo said.

He is determined, however, to remain as true as possible to the original buildings, preserving their condition even after decades of use. Rusted surfaces will be power-washed but not scrubbed of all tarnish, he said, pointing disappointedly at the organizing committee headquarters, whose exterior has been covered with gleaming new cement.

"To me, it looks like an old lady who got plastic surgery to look like a twentysomething young girl," he said.

He is determined to remake the steelworks into a place that is not static "like the portrait of a dead person," but rather continues to function as "a component in the city's life."

That offers some consolation to the workers caught in the upheaval of Capital Steel's eviction from Beijing.

"Employees made big sacrifices. Many had to leave their homes and could not see their families for long stretches," said Jiang Yongsheng, who took a job at Capital Steel's No. 2 Wire Factory in 1984 and continues to work in sales for a branch company, although in the city of Tianjin, some 140 kilometres away.

"'Capital Steel families' has become a term to represent the state of 'living separately in two places,'" he said. "'To sacrifice one's own family for the state' has become a genuine reflection of the mission and contribution made by old Capital Steel employees."

But, he said, the transformation of the old factory site into a place for sports and a healthier environment has offered some old workers a sense of recompense. The project "will bring vitality and life to this old enterprise," he said. "As an old Capital Steel employee, I feel very glad and relieved."

The effort has won plaudits from the architectural community as well.

"Recycling buildings and upgrading buildings, in theory at least, is good. It's what you should be doing," said Neville Mars, Shanghai-based principal at MARS Architects and author of The Chinese Dream: A Society Under Construction.

Such plans have seen runaway success elsewhere, including the 798 District in Beijing, a former factory site transformed into a thriving art and commercial centre.

Few other projects, however, had to contend with a landscape sullied by almost a century of heavy industry. How planners have dealt with toxins at a steelworks site that will one day be used by elite athletes is not clear. Mr. Bo said walnut trees will be planted in some places "because the roots of the walnut tree are very capable in balancing the soil."

On the whole, though, he argued, the Capital Steel grounds are "not very polluted. It's mostly just a few places where there was a leak beneath a big pipe that was not well sealed. Other problems are not serious."

Remaking a steel factory is "even more complicated than building something new" – and more expensive, too, acknowledged Mr. Liu, the assistant general manager. Indeed, initial plans called for blanket demolition. But that would have meant losing the old installations and the symbolic value of making them anew under the company's banner.

"I can tell you very confidently that, in the future, this area is likely to be one of the best areas in Beijing," he said.

With reporting by Yu Mei