Absurdity, Allegory and China

The last two mornings have seen capital sunrises in the capital city, and below are a few photos of Beijing architecture from both mornings, shortly after sunrise. (Click on each photo for a larger version that opens in a lightbox.)

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The CCTV Building project has been rife with rumors since before the first hole was dug, and the latest one (via niubi at Twitter) was spotted on Weibao, a Chinese microblogging service. The rough translation (and I stress “rough”) is “Heard that my foolish masters’ big underpants scorched little brother [TVCC] must be demolished tomorrow, [...]

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“Architecture is surely our greatest physical symbol of the idea of community, our surest way to express in concrete form our belief in the notion of common ground. The way a community builds tells you , sometimes, all you need to know about it’s values.” — Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matter I am not about [...]

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At the end of June Vanity Fair, in a web exclusive, published Vanity Fair’s World Architecture Survey: the Complete Results. We asked the world’s leading architects, critics, and deans of architecture schools two questions: what are the five most important buildings, bridges, or monuments constructed since 1980, and what is the greatest work of architecture [...]

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It usually takes me a bit of time to go through my photos after a trip to my favorite site in Beijing, the CCTV Bldg. project (or what I sometimes refer to as metaphor central) on the East Third Ring Road. In the last few days I have finally gotten around to looking through what [...]

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There is a perennial incompleteness that haunts mainland Chinese cities, second and third tier cities as well as the nation’s capital. In the foreground of the above photo you can see scaffolding, green construction mesh,  and the top of a tent where migrant workers live in the very heart of the Central Business District, across [...]

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Here are some photos of the CCTV in color, all taken in the late afternoon/early evening, April 23, 2010

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Photos of the continuing project. (click for bigger pic)

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I am trying to imagine how I would feel if I went to New York and was confronted with billboards that said, “Civilized Brooklyn.” Or if I were walking through Paris and ran into large public displays that said “Civilized Belleville.” Of course I would wonder, “Why is this being addressed at all?” A weekend [...]

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Curious article in the Shanghai Daily today (h/t @niubi on Twitter), reporting on a Beijing News article regarding repairs to the TVCC building, the burned and lesser brother/neighbor of the iconic CCTV Bldg. This has been expected since Rem Koolhaas stated in a WSJ piece The Sky’s No Longer the Limit back in May 2009 [...]

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