Absurdity, Allegory and China

The Master of Bigness by Martin Filler in the May 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books is well worth a look for two good reasons. One is the publication itself, the NYRB, which is always worth a look. Two, it’s a very good piece on Rem Koolhaas and his architectural team at [...]

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A few months back (October 14, 2011) Rem Koolhaas, brand architect behind OMA, the architectural firm that has been involved with the design and building of the iconic CCTV Headquarters Building on the East Third Ring Road, was the subject of an article in Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek: Pritzker Star Koolhaas Frets Over EU, Tops Giant Beijing [...]

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It has been awhile since I’ve blogged, though not because I’ve not wanted to. I just haven’t wanted too enough. Inertia is … addictive. The force that changed my direction was, as it has so often been, the CCTV HQ Building. On the evening of December 20, 2010, the folks at the CCTV Headquarters Building [...]

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I had written a long blog entry to go with these photos, explaining the National Holiday air quality issue, but I lost it. It happens. Though I’m not one who usually lets things go, there’s not much I can do about this one, so I’ve come to terms with the fact that it has been [...]

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Here are a few photos from an early morning walk I took this morning. And, no, there are no CCTV photos. At least not yet.

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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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