This is I think the most important passage.
"It’s the flip side of China’s Modernist embrace: tabula rasa planning of the sort that also tainted the Modernist movement in Europe and the United States in the postwar years. China’s architectural experiment thus brims with both promise and misery. Everything, it seems, is possible here, from utopian triumphs of the imagination to soul-sapping expressions of a disregard for individual lives."
those ugly buildings do help to sustain the economy at the beginning of 21st century though. not much has changed since mao's regime. i don't know. gov't might feel that there is still a need to repress the function of public space as place for political assemblies because of the collective psyche formed by rapid capitalization and mass cultures. anarchy is a possible outcome in the script, and fear of the mass, in china's case, of not having a successful olympic was evident from people's reaction to a duke student, miss wang. one comment on a internet debate said something like 'i will chop you up in thousand pieces'. even considering the high officials from communist eras are still in power, and human rights are secondary importance, in developing countries, emotion still reigns over reason, and families relate to bollywood films more than hollywood films, which i think is reasonable. cogitating on the reality that liberal educations in soft sciences are much easier to catch up with than hard sciences, it is just not going to be a fair game to insist upon the supremacy of technology on developing countries. hence, the issue of sustainable develpment especially with natural environments is more essential in developing countries, which is a fantasy to reality. what is going to happen in dubai in a couple of decades down the road (more so than china since she is a big country.) without maintaining the traditional structures and surveiled and protected public spaces? architecturally and with in relation to urban planning and design however, why is it that after decades of evolving, most buildings are uglier than unite or seagram? also in regards to democratic public space, if spaces for large scale assemblies are discouraged, are there places for small gatherings which could help to maintain traditional family/friend/neighbor interactions other than for unplanned or choreographed encounters with strangers, or simply, are we going to decry at the sight of repeated failure of modern experiments in cities presently getting built from zero?
Everytime I read the Ny times architecture critic it sounds more like Cheerleading for OMA, etc, rather than any sort of real commentary. There was some incredible nonsense in this column
Jul 15, 08 9:42 am ·
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3 Comments
This is I think the most important passage.
"It’s the flip side of China’s Modernist embrace: tabula rasa planning of the sort that also tainted the Modernist movement in Europe and the United States in the postwar years. China’s architectural experiment thus brims with both promise and misery. Everything, it seems, is possible here, from utopian triumphs of the imagination to soul-sapping expressions of a disregard for individual lives."
those ugly buildings do help to sustain the economy at the beginning of 21st century though. not much has changed since mao's regime. i don't know. gov't might feel that there is still a need to repress the function of public space as place for political assemblies because of the collective psyche formed by rapid capitalization and mass cultures. anarchy is a possible outcome in the script, and fear of the mass, in china's case, of not having a successful olympic was evident from people's reaction to a duke student, miss wang. one comment on a internet debate said something like 'i will chop you up in thousand pieces'. even considering the high officials from communist eras are still in power, and human rights are secondary importance, in developing countries, emotion still reigns over reason, and families relate to bollywood films more than hollywood films, which i think is reasonable. cogitating on the reality that liberal educations in soft sciences are much easier to catch up with than hard sciences, it is just not going to be a fair game to insist upon the supremacy of technology on developing countries. hence, the issue of sustainable develpment especially with natural environments is more essential in developing countries, which is a fantasy to reality. what is going to happen in dubai in a couple of decades down the road (more so than china since she is a big country.) without maintaining the traditional structures and surveiled and protected public spaces? architecturally and with in relation to urban planning and design however, why is it that after decades of evolving, most buildings are uglier than unite or seagram? also in regards to democratic public space, if spaces for large scale assemblies are discouraged, are there places for small gatherings which could help to maintain traditional family/friend/neighbor interactions other than for unplanned or choreographed encounters with strangers, or simply, are we going to decry at the sight of repeated failure of modern experiments in cities presently getting built from zero?
Everytime I read the Ny times architecture critic it sounds more like Cheerleading for OMA, etc, rather than any sort of real commentary. There was some incredible nonsense in this column
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