A long time in the making, I finally got around to running a computational intelligibility analysis on the plan of Suzhou's Garden of the Master of Nets, in an attempt to suss out what exactly makes this - and other chinese gardens -  so spatially compelling. Originally posted on the LMN Tech... View full entry

I was recently invited to write a piece for the AA's "colour research cluster," Saturated Space - "a forum for the sharing, exploration, and celebration of colour in Architecture." For my essay, I took on nocturnal lighting in Shanghai. "In Shanghai, light and colour give designers, planners, and... View full entry

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... View full entry

  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... View full entry

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... View full entry

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

  [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... View full entry

[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... View full entry

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... View full entry

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

(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... View full entry

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... View full entry

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... View full entry