Building Beijing: Venezuelan architect brothers have the inside track on China's construction boom. (Latin America).

Beijing is booming. Construction sites work around the clock. Skyscrapers are pushing up everywhere like needles into the sky. On the streets, bicycles squeeze their way between BMWs. In bustling eastern Beijing, near a bus station and a market, stands the one-room studio of 8&8 Architects, run by Venezuelan brothers Victor and Antonio Ochoa.

The Ochoas first came to China in the late 1960s when their father, a Venezuelan Maoist, worked for Xinhua, China's official news agency In the years that followed the family crisscrossed between China and Venezuela. Victor, the eldest of the two, was the pioneer, learning Mandarin Chinese and studying at Tsinghua University. He enrolled at Tsinghua in 1976, a year of upheaval marked by Mao's death and the struggle fir power that would lead to the market-embracing Chinese communism of today

Driving to a restaurant through pulsating traffic amid a mass of glittering evening lights, Antonio muses about the changes he's seen since joining his brother in the early 1990s. "Beijing would just shut down at 7 p.m. every night. People used to work a six-day week, but then the authorities made Saturday a holiday, mainly to try and kick-start some consumer spending," Antonio says. "At first people didn't know what to do. They'd still go into work on Saturday and sit about playing cards."

Now, the boom is rolling and everyone wants in. That, says Victor, has changed architecture, too. "In China we have not had good buildings for the last 50 years:' he says. "Now, at last, we can afford them, [and] everyone wants them."

Until 1985. Victor says, the Communist aesthetic "was pretty deadly for architecture." Few architects were trained and China financed only basic and badly designed buildings that could be reproduced many times over, slab after prefabricated slab. Architecture was about square meters, bricks and mortar and mathematics. Architecture, Victor says, should also be about psychology, culture and the soul, "They saw me as different, maybe someone to be tolerated," he says.

More than two decades on, that attitude is still there. "I met Victor in 1978 and have known him for over 20 years. He thinks differently and has a different approach to architecture," says Fan Haoyi, a Chinese partner in 8&8 Architects. "For all his years in China, I have to say, he is not really Chinese.

Feng shui. The economic boom, however, has opened things up. Builders are now more receptive to Ochoa's ideas. There are still obstacles, of course. "The developer doesn't give you a free hand. He usually wants a gold and glass tower, and he wants it to look expensive," says Victor. An oddity in Beijing's booming skyline is that many of the big towers are much thicker than their equivalents in New York. They have a lot more floor space, but this is not necessarily well arranged. Apartment buildings all face south, since buyers want good feng shui and sunlight, so developers cram as many as 20 long, awkwardly shaped apartments on each floor.

And then there is the bureaucracy. To get a building erected, as many as 23 separate stamps of approval, known as "chops," are required.

Antonio works on apartment projects in eastern Beijing, catering to China's rising middle class: graphic artists, software developers, self-employed professionals and others who needed compact and well-designed spaces in which to live and work.

Accordingly, Antonio's designs combine small home office and living spaces in duplexes with a small internal courtyard on every fourth floor. Zhang Xin, the developer of the duplexes, values what she sees as Antonio's Latin sensibility. "[It] calls to mind a Parisian streetside cafe. where one can sit and watch the flow of humanity. The mood is tranquil, leisurely and unrestrained," she says.

Chinese sculptors decorated the courtyards. The project has been wildly successful, selling out in record time. As Beijing booms, it appears, a bit of tranquilidad goes a long way.