Absurdity, Allegory and China

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 first photo [...]

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Warning: imagined full-frontal content below
In my last post I wrote about the pornographic flap over the CCTV Headquarters complex, the project that continues to knot a lot of knickers. And there is no sign that it’s about to let up. It has become the piñata that won’t stop giving: whack it again and it keeps [...]

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An old joke: first day in prison a young inmate sits silently in the cafeteria spooning his gruel. The rule for all meals is a firm ‘no talking.’ As everyone quietly slops it in a guy jumps up and yells, “Fifty-six!” and quickly retakes his seat. Everyone breaks into hysterical laughter (gruel spraying through the [...]

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This one almost got by me. (Thanks to MMG for bringing it to my attention.) Rem Koolhaas was featured in the Wall Street Journal last month in a piece entitled The Sky’s No Longer the Limit, concerning architecture and the the end of this latest golden age as major building projects throughout the world have [...]

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I thought I would give a video slideshow a try, so here is my first attempt, a few of my photos from the OMA / Koolhaas CCTV Headquarters project. The music is from Red Unit, Shanghai, a techno CulRev mix entitled The Ideal of Maoism. The music is Open Source. The voice-over is Zhou Enlai [...]

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