Life goes on in Shanghai, and I remain so far unaffected by unprecedented PM2.5 pollution levels, the 16,000 dead pigs in the river, or the escalating H7N9 pandemic. 

To distract myself from these various apocalyptic scenarios, I've been maintaining a tumblr blog of scanned DVD covers from the local shops. While I started this as a bit of a joke, I've been at it for about six months now, and I'm starting to see trends in the visual language of the bootleg DVD. Oversize fonts, obnoxious colors, anachronistic "action" imagery inserted into period films... overuse of photoshop filters, supplemental imagery from unrelated movies... Paparazzi shots are clipped and overlaid on officially-released posters. These covers become mash-up collages of any and all available imagery. As I continue to populate the blog I begin to recognize the aesthetics of specific bootleg production houses. Many are branded with red eagle, some with an Apple logo. A large proportion feature credits text from "Leaves of Grass" and DVD extras from "Tomb Raider." The double-translations are often hilarious, but I'm more interested in the culture behind this visual language - who makes the call to add helicopters to "Django Unchained?" Or add the Watchmen to "Columbiana" - these are obviously *designed* - what is that process? How long does it take? So many mysteries....

This, obviously, is an ongoing investigation. Many many more, at ChinaDVD.tumblr.com.

Thanks to the efforts of my friend, former classmate, and occasional colleague Zhiguo Chen, I've been published in Chinese! Chen translated my essay "Wang Shu: A New Vernacular?" (Originally published on Archinect and mirrored on my website) and worked to get it published in an issue of "The...

  Congratulations to Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture, recipients of the (just-announced) 2012 Pritzker Prize....  I've been working on an essay on his/their work, but it still needs a few more edits- meanwhile, here are a few photos, and my brief essay on the Ningbo Historic Museum...

Not much to say at this point, other than that the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Architecture Biennale was well worth the trip. It's nowhere near the scale of say, Venice, but the quality of the work is right up there (indeed, many of the same firms participating, and a lot of overlap in the curatorial...

One of the great, if seldom realized, promises of architecture is its capacity to affect change. The best architects seem to have this potential in mind constantly as they structure career-length narratives around the social impact that good design can achieve. While this is often hyperbole, and...

That's all. Happy Year of the Dragon from Shanghai.

[In December, I helped lead a tour of Architecture students through eastern China. The following posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited. Today: Guangzhou.] [Shamian Island] Guangzhou, perhaps more than any other city, represents the diversity of urban form present in...

  [In December, I helped lead a tour of Architecture students through eastern China. The following few posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited. Today: Kaiping.] I don’t have a lot to say about the Kaiping Dialou tower houses: my knowledge is limited to what...

[In December, I helped lead a tour of Architecture students through eastern China. The following few posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited. Today: Shenzhen.] Shenzhen’s short history is well known: In the accepted mythology, China’s Economic Miracle began here...

City of Dreams [Note: Over the past two weeks, I helped lead a tour of Ohio State University architecture students and alumni on a tour up the East China coast, from Hong Kong, to Shanghai, and inland to Beijing. The following few posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we...

Unrelated, aside from the post-colonial subtext...

[Note: Over the past two weeks, I helped lead a tour of Ohio State University architecture students and alumni on a tour up the East China coast, from Hong Kong, to Shanghai, and inland to Beijing. The following few posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited…. First up...

(note: this is cross-posted to evanchakroff.com) As mentioned earlier, most of my free time recently has been devoted to the planning of a two-week architecture tour along the east China coast (and up to Beijing). What started as a Facebook-status "wouldn't-it-be-nice" has turned into a...

China. Two Years in 3 Minutes.

architect: Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio, 2009 photos by the author.   A few months ago, I took a weekend trip from Shanghai down to Ningbo. The recently completed Hangzhou Bay Bridge (briefly the longest on earth, before it was surpassed by another, elsewhere in China) cuts the...

CHINA ARCHITECTURE TOUR: December 6 - 22, 2011 two week whirlwind tour of traditional, colonial, and contemporary architecture in China! (Sorry to post this - essentially an ad - here, but I see no better way to drum up interest and get more people involved...) This coming December I will be...

So, now that Archinect's got a new blog infrastructure, I feel obligated to share some observations on my life and work post-graduation (See previous entries for half-assed observations on life at the KSA). Long story short, in 2009 I moved to Rome. In 2010 I moved to Shanghai. It's a fascinating...