"No. 1 Village in the World"

Actually, the red text in Chinese is "the Capitol of the United States of America".
Tian'anmen

China Pavilion of Shanghai EXPO 2010 was released a while ago, titled "Crown of the East", designed by a senior Chinese architect He Jingtang, but now there are some interesting discussions about it on abbs, the world biggest architectural forum, of course in China.

The main issue is about: Where is the idea from? Is it representative of China after all? Many posters dig out the Japanese pavilion for EXPO '92, Sevilla, Spain, designed Tadao Ando. So, where are the both inspired from? Is His inspiration from Ando? Or is Ando's from Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.) in China?

What we are interested in that no matter the architect He or the debaters on abbs, swamped in opticality again.

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Comment by Yan known as ID Bendangwuren on ABBS

The competition of the pavilion undoubtly results in a typical Chinese way. As a citizen, maybe we could just think this as clownery and have fun.
For me, the most important focus is not about which real project did Mr He Jingtang copy from. Actually, he might willing to think about what is the tradition of China to be represented as the Government asked for. He also want to escape from the symbolic way of representing Chinese culture. By merging contemporary material and way of constructiong, he did this. (Although the name is Crown of the East, the original idea is to build a morden appearance of Dou Gong (corbel bracket). Ironically, the abstraction of traditional wood structure of China leads to an Japanese sytle inevitably. Wow, maybe Mr He himself didnt aware of that. Isn't true that Japanese people copied Chinese stuffs long long time ago, then made them into more abstract and practical way, which is now widely known as JANPANESE STYLE? Like karate is a typical Japanese kongfu which is copied from Chinese kongfu by simplifing all the looking-good techniques.

Till now, could we say that when we Chinese want to explain our tradition in modern western way (since we are also in modernizing by the western techonology and culture), we suddenly find that our neighbor Japan has already done that in very mature and successful way, plus, this has been known widely as Japanese tradition for the world. Thus, could we still boost this as our tradition by only symbolize the traditional Chinese style? What is the real tradition we had before, and what is we still have now? The issue becomes is the image of old China is the tradition or is the way of represetation means the traditional thinking of China, can we go out of just showing the image of tradition in western way? Neither the way nor the result is known as Chinese tradition. In this sense, do we still have tradition or could we find our new tradition?

It's kind of funny that recently, Chinese government control the public media to show hostility to Japan just the opposite to what they said 20 years ago. The primary goal is to divert domestic social complainment to outside of the country. Thousands of brainwashed Chinese young people expectedly become anti-Japanese generation. It is sacastic that the Chinese pavilion is now in clearly Japanese style. Hard to say what kind of public condemnation could be.

After all, it is still a very bad design. However, from another point of view. The project could be an very good irony. It not only shows the metaphorical meaning of Chinese society (Crown could mean we are still under the imperial power of the biggest communist partry), but also emerge social participation of Chinese sytle critisism, it might be a good chance to make "better city better life" in era of postcommunism.

[via abbs]

    Todao Ando, Japanese pavilion for EXPO '92, Sevilla, Spain

A white-collar worker, in Xiamen厦门, have worked for 8 years, earning much more than the average, however with his saving he only can afford 5 square-meter (50 square-foot) apartment. Thus, a young man, Lv Guohua吕国华, built his own 5 square-meter “luxury house豪宅”. After the construction was complete, this “the spokesman of Chinese housing slave中国房奴第一代言人” spent his first “golden week (week long Chinese National days)”.

“It is so pathetic to spend life in such 5 sqm”, some visitor says. But someone claims, “I feel so happy about him, because I’ve been working for so many year and I don’t even have such 5 sqm.”

It is a 2-story house of 3.2 m high. Mr. Lv could not stand straight at the 2nd floor because it’s only 1.3m high and Lv is 1.73m high. This little house situates in front of a big shopping mall and between 30-story residential towers in Canghai district of City Xiamen, Fujian Province.

[via south daily]

Shanghai's city planners are carrying out an ambitious scheme to relieve population pressure: They are resettling 500,000 people in nine new towns in the suburbs. Each is built in a distinctive style, including an Italian town with canals based on Venice and a German town designed by Albert Speer, the son of Hitler's favorite architect.


Thames Town is one of these new settlements. It features cobbled streets, half-timbered Tudor houses, Edwardian townhouses, and a covered market with a clock tower and weather vane on top. Thames Town looks like an English country town. And that was the whole idea, to re-create Middle England in the Middle Kingdom.


Paul Rice, of the British company Atkins, was the lead architect for Thames Town. He says the developers of the community wanted a complete, functioning English town, with its own schools, shops, and residential and recreational areas.


Shanghai has a tradition of English, French and German architecture in the concession settlements of central Shanghai, Rice notes.


And the clients saw nothing strange about re-creating those types of settlements on the outskirts of Shanghai.


But when it comes down to it, in China, it's always about the bottom line.
Developer James Ho says the main consideration in building Thames Town was a commercial one.


"Beautiful buildings are always welcomed by customers. … If the building's style is different from others, it will have its own market. It will be easy to make money, to add profit," he says.
Thames Town even has its own church, complete with stained-glass windows and a towering spire. It's mainly being used now as a backdrop for wedding photographs.


Recently, a young couple, Yang Jinghui and Zi Haiying, posed for wedding photographs on the lawn in front of Thames Town church.

They say they love Thames Town, but although they have good jobs working for large Western companies, they don't think they'll ever be able to afford to live here.

One of the lucky few is a Mrs. Lu, who lives in a quarter-million-dollar villa.

"I like it because it's like a foreign country here," she says.

In fact, some have denounced the satellite town scheme as a form of self-colonization. Another criticism is that Thames Town is yet another example of China's copycat fever — a pale imitation at best.

In particular, two buildings have sparked controversy. There's a squarish, white, three-story building with a sign that reads "Rock Point Inn." It's next to a smaller, white building called "Cob Gate Fish Bar."

The problem is that these establishments do actually exist, and they've been copied wholesale from the British town of Lyme Regis. Their discovery in Thames Town sparked near hysteria in the British press, which carried interviews with the landlady of the pub and fish 'n' chips shop in colorfully titled pieces such as "Chinese Takeaway" and "How the Chinese Stole My Chippy."
Paul Rice from the architect Atkins denies any wrongdoing. He says the client saw the names of the buildings as "decorative," and that when tenants move into the buildings, they will change the names.

But even as Thames Town was declared open in a lavish ceremony, it seems far from achieving its original objective. With its empty streets and unrented shops, it's more like a ghost town. And with homes priced out of the market for many, Shanghai's plans for its satellite towns are placing gimmicky foreign settlements above the real needs of its own people.



---by Louisa Lim

"This controversial 326 metre high elevator takes you up the side of one of the many enormous cliffs in zhangjiajie, china - the lower 1/3 running from a cavern through the rock, the top 2/3 rising outside to the summit - and is the highest and heaviest outdoor elevator in the world. the elevator has an uncertain future due to the potential harm caused to the surrounding landscape."
--deputydog

[via deputydog]