Art should serve the people, Xi Jinping says, and China's weird and wonderful buildings - including a mobile phone building, an excessivley blinged-up hotel, and a penis tower - are evidently not good examples of "morally inspiring art". Duh. — shanghaiist
Is it possible Xi Jinping is using a diplomatic language to break loose from imported architecture? The so called elite star architecture now going to have third tier copies? Don't forget the elite post modernism was finally trickled down to strip mall architecture finally in early 90's.
This whole thing started with this link I got from my friend and continued with a conversation below.
Eliminate all weird architecture in China, Xi Jinping declares
Ben Lepley- Not sure what this means for MAD >:l
Orhan Ayyuce- Maybe he sees architecture as the poster child of socio-cultural threat?
BL- Or a threat of power from investors who cant be controlled by state owned banks? Or both.
OA- Are you back in China?
BL- No, in Tucson still. Clean air here. but I keep in contact with those who are still there. I'm not sure if this statement from Xi was off the cuff, or an actual decision, but it could be big. If you want to know more I can introduce you to one of my old MAD co-workers who is still there. He is much more imbedded in whats happening than me.
OA- I think it hints to a policy/thinking change. Is the construction industry in China really going down?
BL- In some cities, like Ordos for example it has stopped. Beijing has slowed a lot. Due to policy change (halt on housing). But other cities like Zheng Zhou and Nanjing are still chugging along. I hear 3'rd tier cities are still developing a lot. I just checked on my old project in Nanjing, seems to have just broken ground, and it is a super crazy mountain like project.
OA- Regarding third tier, does that mean we are to see more third tier copies of star arch architecture? I don't know.. In early nineties we finally start to see strip mall versions of elite post modernism.
BL- Haha. Quite possibly. There is that copy of the Zaha project. It will go really bad then and put everything in the right perspective perhaps. My friend from Zaha visited the building, he said is wasn't half bad, and was a bit more rational then their own.
OA- Zaha copy is still elite wait until third tier does its number.
BL- Haha. I wonder if Xi was referring to CcTV and Zaha, or just that ugly cellphone building style, which is super 3'rd tier.
OA- Cellphone bldg is great. billboard and a building. Does the job. Hahaha...
BL- Already super out of date. I suppose a smart phone would look like an ordinary glass building.
OA- They should make a glass facade building where people can leave messages from their phone in the plaza area where they are sitting.
BL- I could see that at Dodger Stadium for sure. This one explains more specifically.
Xi Jinping Isn’t a Fan of Weird Architecture in China
OA- Looks like the saturation point for iconic concepts has arrived.
28 Comments
It's weird that I agree.
I think somebody's listening to Wang Shu.
Though the issues raised here probably apply everywhere.
Perhaps he means no more crappy iconic starchitecture wannabe graphic design nonsense that looks rad on magazine covers but horrific in reality.
There a current of generosity and modesty in Chinese culture that is not evident in these buildings.
Code book for designing unusual buildings in China.
It's not the end of weird architecture, it's more the decline in construction as a whole. Way too many empty and unfinished projects throughout the country...
Sorry avant-gardists. The sand box is now closing.
it is a signal for 'wrap and finish whatever on the boards and get out time.'
China has been careening toward the Wall of Terminal Wierdness for a long time now. I think that what China has been doing to their built environment is horrific. I imagine that they will wake up in thirty years, look around at their cities, and say, "What the hell have we done to our culture?". Perhaps they are waking up sooner rather than later.
isnt that what they said about all the terracotta in chicago? The steel in NY? We are a civilization of self-loathing in unbelievable proportions and revel in schadenfreude like no other. Entire websites devoted to it are mistaken for news on regular basis.
Honest guess, in 30 years people will be clamouring to preserve a good chunk of it.
As a personal observation its the people not the buildings that matter. Architects are not really important enough to get this much attention. The real story is about something else.
China has taken self-loathing to a whole new level. They have tossed their culture out and replaced it with a vapid internationalist futurism. My bet is that they will regret it.
all trends pass eventually. in the long run the chinese will look at western avant-garde imports in the same way americans can look at 19th century neo-gothic universities and italianate brownstones as cute and reflective of a time when the local culture was developed by importing foreign models.
in general these kind of eccentric buildings are a very small part of the built environment in china. most people still live in apartments within housing blocks that follow a strictly modernist ideal of regularity and efficiency imported through soviet russia. and most public buildings like schools, gov't bureaus are grand and vaguely rationalist, kind of like something out of mussolini's italy. i think without appreciating that context it's hard to read the relevance of irreverent and strange public buildings.
Dubai will still take...
Give me your tired, your poor projects, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Forget Ordos?
http://www.metalocus.es/content/en/blog/ecumen%C3%B3polis-session-17th-fictitious-citiesordos-100
^(dubai scene) makes me think of the opening scene of The Crimson Permanent Assurance.
And really that would be a nice resolution to the whole problem of globalization.
"isnt that what they said about all the terracotta in chicago? The steel in NY? "
????
^"chinese will look at western avant-garde imports in the same way americans can look at 19th century neo-gothic universities"
No no no no no
Our architecture communicates, whether we recognize it or not.
Sounds to me like a Chinese politician is trying to stigmatize western culture. What other "weird" styles might he be opposed to?
Its disappointing that so many bloggers seem to agree him.
Midlander, what culture did the European settlers of New Amsterdam bring with them?
Dutch.
That's right, so how do you equate western avant-guard imports with Italianate brownstones?
"in the long run the chinese will look at western avant-garde imports in the same way americans can look at 19th century neo-gothic universities and italianate brownstones as cute and reflective of a time when the local culture was developed by importing foreign models."
This does bring up an interesting question that seems to cause a lot of angst, and that's provenance. "Importing foreign models" in 19th century America was made possible by increased travel in conjunction with the development of stereotype printing techniques. That these books came from similar cultures made them all the more accessible. Today with mass migrations and the internet, who's to say what's legitimate to import or export regardless of cultural probity?
Speaking of foreign and cute, how about the international style. Good marketing or what!?!
Thayer - my comparison was that both avant-garde contemporary practice and Italianate brownstones (among other imports from Europe) were being built as a somewhat pretentious show of sophistication without any real relevance to the context of the city or its society. In both cases a relatively new society (Industrialized America or Globalized China) found a need to distinguish itself from it's immediate predecessor, but local architecture failed to develop a compelling response. During that time of change foreign imports were taken in and appreciated in a fairly superficial way, without much interest in the theory (which wasn't much in most cases).
Eventually Chinese architectural culture will develop enough self-confidence to express something about Chinese society itself, in the same way the both Art Deco and International Modernism ala Mies-SOM came to express the culture of American capitalism. The more recent trend towards flimsy Colonialist styles in US vernacular also expresses something, though most of us are uncomfortable with that message.
To be clear - I'm viewing the predecessor to America's Italianate / Gothic imports to be the English colonial architecture still visible across New England and parts of the South. The Dutch of course had their own colonial architecture, but it was largely supplanted by English once the Dutch capitulated. Here's a great illustration of New Amsterdam from that period - you can see it's not quite the same as what we consider Colonial architecture now. Most of it presumably destroyed by fires or rebuilt as the city grew.
In addition to Neo-Gothic or Italianate, Americans enthusiastically imported Classicalism. But that was less superficial, as there was an explicit understanding that it came originally from democratic Greek states, whose societies Americans hoped to emulate.
Foreign import isn't new to China BTW. Since 1949 very little "Chinese" architecture has been built. Most of it was Soviet-influenced Modernism. There isn't much appreciation for that period, though some arts communities make good use of the industrial spaces.
Not sure this link will work outside China but here's a try:
A list of popular stupid buildings in China sent around here by colleagues.
OMA gets a couple, and a few others by less recognized Western architects, but also plenty by local architects.
Popular nicknames for some that aren't obvious:
#1 Big Pants
#2 Longjohn underwear
The cartoon below #2 is CCTV hitting on the Suzhou hotel and getting rebuffed
#3 is a sexual innuendo aimed at the cartoon above.
#4 Riding boots
#5 the Bikini Top
#12 Toilet Seat
#13 The bottle opener, the syringe (like a turkey baster), and the whisk: 3 kitchen tools of Shanghai. (Seems like a stretch to me)
#17 Copper coin, by the same architect as Taipei 101. Taipei gets the whole tower, Shenyang gets just the medallion.
Thayer - my comparison was that both avant-garde contemporary practice and Italianate brownstones (among other imports from Europe) were being built as a somewhat pretentious show of sophistication without any real relevance to the context of the city or its society.
I understand your comparison, but I think it's a bit off. Italianate Brownstones where a common style in European cultures of the time. The brownstone is a common northern European housing type brought over by the Northern Europeans who settles America first. Italianate was a variant of classicism, which arguably has been part of the west's architectural repertoire since the Renaissance and definatly part of the Dutch and English architectural vocabulary. In both cases, relevant "to the context of the city and its society" and hardly a comparison to Avant Guard abstract minimalist work in 21st century China. As for rich people, or anyone wanting to show their sophistication, that's what we do as humans, communicate anyway we can, so maybe gauche but nothing new or strange.
"Eventually Chinese architectural culture will develop enough self-confidence to express something about Chinese society itself, in the same way the both Art Deco and International Modernism ala Mies-SOM came to express the culture of American capitalism. "
Where the English or French self confident when they assimilated Italian classicism during their assent as a world power? I think their importing these starchitects is actually their way of showing self confidence, that they are in the big leagues now, but surely that will provoce a jingoist reaction, especially as they wholesale destroy their historic fabric the way we did. And International Modernism wasn't developed by Americans to express something about Chinese society itself, it was developed in Post WWI northern Europe and came over on the same boat as that Italianate pattern book. What we did with it is make it into this representation of all that is modern, until developers realized they could squeeze every last rentable inch behind those 1/2" class panels while telling us it was new and improved. How do those soulless canyons glass look through the lens of time?
I know what your saying about the Chinese and how goofy they sometimes look with all these sculptural buildings bedazzling their skylines while they repress their people and half still live in shit conditions. But what is Chinese architecture? If they build stuff that looked Chinese, you'd say it was kitch nostangic crap, yet whey they go modernist, it's being a fake sophisticate?
"In addition to Neo-Gothic or Italianate, Americans enthusiastically imported Classicalism. But that was less superficial, as there was an explicit understanding that it came originally from democratic Greek states, whose societies Americans hoped to emulate."
You're falling into the Nicholas Pevsner school of architectural determism when the reality is much more muddy and interesting. The Europeans litterally brought Classicism with them as they did the ideas of the enlightmenemt. That's how we got our Constitution and that's how SanFrancisco or NewYork classicism is distinclty American vs. Italian. Infact there is plenty of classicism in Colonial China that today everybody loves without freaking out about it's provenance. We need to chill about this lineage thing and simply let art evolve without all these false constraints.
Thayer, I think we're largely in agreement on this. My view is that these 'strange imports' are a natural part of Modern China developing its own architectural language and not something imposed upon them by the West. In the long run people will stop seeing them as strange and start seeing them as an interesting part of modern China's development.
The destruction of China's traditional urban fabric has been a long process and is not primarily about architecture; it's the natural outcome of their current economic system which makes urban land the most important (and sometimes only) resource of local governments but gives residents little input regarding its distribution. And the destruction of Chinese monuments has a long history going back not only to the Cultural Revolution, but also the changeovers between imperial dynasties - a mark of the change of political powers. Both of these processes would happen independent of modernist planning.
The development of Classicism in and out of Europe is a fascinating topic - no time to get into discussing it more now. One interesting point is that it was associated with the Enlightenment in England or France - but as Russia and Prussia showed, it was also appropriated by non-liberal states who often resisted Enlightenment politics.
Good discussion - thanks.
This is weird http://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/oct/22/venice-china-dalian-copy-canals-palaces-gondoliers
Likewise midlander. Thank you, all though I wish I had read my response at least once to make it sound like english was my first language.
Xi Jinping is a traditionalist like Prince Charles.
and the Dubai version too, Orhan
"Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled background, of becoming mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare." Jacques Lacan , Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
That is a very interesting tool, here, provided by Lacan, that reverts the assumed passive osmosity of the Chinese practice of mimetic architecture....assumptions that sometimes border on material subject to sinophobia. The audacity of mimicking -or indeed re-realizing- a whole world -one signifying privilege and power- is not a sign of passivity and unconscious consumption but a deliberate ploy of power. By (re-)breaking the binds of the seeming unrepeatability that surrounds this most unique of place, a transgression difficult to imagine, there is a display of force---firstly upon the Western mind wherein Venice occupies a significant space of imagination.
In fact, the Chinese are complete and total agents here. Copying is, to some extent, an insidious way of changing the original, by relating the copy to it by force of semblance. And below this semblance is the very determined and deliberating face of power.
Maybe there is a bar in Chinese version of Dubai's version of Venice canals called Baudrillard Inn?
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