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Why Is China Stealing Cities, Towns, and Buildings?
A lot of Chinese people look up to the West as an ideal, so the construction of these towns could be seen as a way of accelerating their progress; a quick way of achieving through emulation.
— psmag.com
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5 Comments
Best quote.... "now architects speak the language of computers and “use three buttons—copy, paste, and delete.”
Why did the Romans copy the Greeks? Why did Americans copy the Europeans? Why do any of us copy? To have some of the perceived prestiege rub off, to learn something, cause we want to. My guess is when an ultra modern design get's ripped off, it's much harder to detect and if it is, it's understood to be "of our time" bla bla bla so it's given more of a pass.
It's common sport to slam the Chinese for this and ask "why" as if it where so aggregious a crime as to baffle the imagination, but haven't we seen this movie before?
What's disturbing about this to me is not that they are copying something they admire, per se, but that they are not allowing a local building tradition to develop organically, over time. They are turning their back on their own culture.
Ironically, this seems to be perfectly in tune with all of the freaky avant garde modern architecture they are building. It turns its back on any authentic Chinese building tradition in the same way.
i think that they will wake up thirty years from now, and look at these monstrous synthetic cities they have build, and think "What the hell have we done?"
I think you're right EKE. Like many countries after WWII hopeing to be seen as cutting edge and modern, they tore down their heritage recklessly. Unfortunatley they don't know what they have until it's gone as we in America can attest to. There are signs that the Chinese are starting to look at what they have and how to build upon the rest. There was recently an episode on CBS Sunday Morning about this very thing. Looks promising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWd-7vi8ljs
yeah.. when the Chinese copy, its disturbing, sick, worrying, thieves, blah blah.
When Japanese or anyone else do it, its brilliant, cute, beautiful, aweseome etc xDD
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hokkaido-sweden-hills
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