Beijing update

Christopher Hawthorne visits Beijing prior to the Olympics and sees great architecture that isn’t too hot viewed close up, and misses the hectares of hutongs that have been cleared for this grand exercise in state building – totalitarian style.

The powerful strangeness of the city’s new icons is exaggerated by the way they are placed on huge, freshly cleared pieces of land, creating an urban-planning version of the condition cultural critic George W.S. Trow called “the context of no context.”
LA Times 03.08.08

While we’re on the topic, here’s a worrying still of Pierre de Meuron from a new movie about Herzog and de Meuron and Ai Wei Wei’s Bird’s Nest. Don’t jump.

And here is a link to the film’s trailer

Posted by Peter on 03.08.08 in urban planning