Absurdity, Allegory and China

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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Here’s one just because I like it. And it reminds me of my favorite, still-under-construction Chinese television station project. For the rest of this very cool new font, called Priori Acute, from Jonathan Barnbrook’s font family for digital type foundry Emigre, go here. (h/t Core77) Priori Acute is the latest addition to the Priori family. [...]

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Earlier this week while China was (and still is) doing Copenhagen, climate change and carbon chits, Beijing and Tianjin were muffled in a thick toxic fog that held the wintry coal-smoky air low to the ground to mix with the normal, everyday dose of vehicular and factory air pollution. If the air were a hospital [...]

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The CCTV HQ project & site-specific graffiti. December 9, 2009 4:16 PM Larger version here.

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Beijing 3:45 PM, December 9, 2009 Larger version here.

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The first time I walked down the tree-lined lane between Hujialou Xili and Nanli was in the late afternoon of March 24, 2008. The trees were all on the Nanli – the east side – of the lane, though Nanli literally means “south neighborhood”. The short stretch of lane runs north from Chaoyang Lu. The [...]

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