Demolishing Dalian: China’s ‘Russian’ City Is Erasing Its Heritage—in Pictures

Francesca Perry
Guardian
Founded by the Russians, Dalian boasts a wealth of architectural history. But now its treasured buildings are marked for demolition—and the government is being sued. One student went to capture the area before it disappears

Chinese Architect’s Nature-Infused Buildings Take World By Storm

Kavita Daswani
South China Morning Post
Ma Yansong blurs the lines between lanscaping and architecture, inspired by his Chinese culture....

Supertall 101

Roman Mars
99% Invisible
Starting in the late 1990s, the government of Taipei began looking into how they could turn global attention to their city, the capital of the small island of Taiwan.The initial idea was to create two 66-story...

China: No More Weird Buildings

Matt Rivers and Chung Fun
CNN
New guidelines will forbid the construction of "bizarre" and "odd-shaped" buildings that are devoid of character or cultural heritage.

Earthbound China

03.02.15

Village Acupuncture

Andrew Stokols
On a bamboo-covered mountaintop the mud-walled houses of Diaotan village are just barely visible through the thick fog that often shrouds this remote hamlet in China’s Zhejiang province. Worn but sturdy earthen walls still enclose the largest...

China is Building Phoenix Towers, the World’s Tallest Twin Skyscrapers

News.com.au
Chinese builders have ambitious designs on erecting the world’s tallest skyscraper, soaring more than more 3,000 feet into the heavens.

Elaborate Lattice Work in Confucius Lane

Sue Ann
Shanghai Street Stories
In my few years of photographing old houses around Shanghai, I have never been this buoyant over lattice woodwork in its original setting.

China’s Aggressive Museum Growth Brings Architectural Wonders

Sam Gaskin
CNN
By the end of 2013, two years before deadline, China already exceeded its goal, tallying a total of 4,000 museums.

From Outsiders to Innkeepers in China’s Sleepy Countryside

Mike Ives
New York Times
More hotel rooms are being built in China than anywhere else in the world, and a small number of foreign entrepreneurs in rural China are operating boutique hotels in restored properties that have historic charm.

World’s Tallest Building, Sky City, Will Break Ground Next Month

Design Boom
Developed by the Broad Group, this ambitious 220-story building will be constructed by prefabricated pieces which will be put together on-site. Its completion is estimated to tak seven months.

Books

04.23.13

Original Copies

Bianca Bosker
A 108-meter high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square in Hangzhou. A Chengdu residential complex for 200,000 recreates Dorchester, England. An ersatz Queen’s Guard patrols Shanghai’s Thames Town, where pubs and statues of Winston Churchill abound. Gleaming replicas of the White House dot Chinese cities from Fuyang to Shenzhen. These examples are but a sampling of China’s most popular and startling architectural movement: the construction of monumental themed communities that replicate towns and cities in the West.Original Copies presents the first definitive chronicle of this remarkable phenomenon in which entire townships appear to have been airlifted from their historic and geographic foundations in Europe and the Americas, and spot-welded to Chinese cities. These copycat constructions are not theme parks but thriving communities where Chinese families raise children, cook dinners, and simulate the experiences of a pseudo-Orange County or Oxford.In recounting the untold and evolving story of China’s predilection for replicating the greatest architectural hits of the West, Bianca Bosker explores what this unprecedented experiment in “duplitecture” implies for the social, political, architectural, and commercial landscape of contemporary China. With her lively, authoritative narrative, the author shows us how, in subtle but important ways, these homes and public spaces shape the behavior of their residents, as they reflect the achievements, dreams, and anxieties of those who inhabit them, as well as those of their developers and designers. — University of Hawai‘i Press{chop}{node, 3673, 4}

Earthbound China

04.11.13

Moving House: Preserving Huizhou’s Vernacular Architecture

Leah Thompson & Sun Yunfan
In 1996, art historian Nancy Berliner, working with the Peabody Essex Museum, purchased a vacant Qing dynasty merchant’s house from the Huizhou region of China and, piece by piece, moved it to the United States to be meticulously reconstructed at...

Earthbound China

04.11.13

There Goes the Neighborhood

Sun Yunfan & Leah Thompson
When, in 1996, art historian Nancy Berliner purchased a late Qing dynasty merchants’ house from Huangcun, a village in Anhui province, it was just one ordinary house among thousands like it in the picturesque Huizhou region of China. It took...

Books

03.22.13

Pressures and Distortions

Edited by Ned Kaufman
Pressures and Distortions looks at the design, building, and interpretation of cities from the point of view of their residents.The cities chronicled in depth include examples from China (Shanghai and Shenzhen), Latin America (Bogotá and Mexico City), and Indonesia (Banda Aceh). Shorter sections cover Lima and Rio de Janeiro. The authors show how residents respond creatively to environmental disaster, poverty, housing shortages, and surging urban population. They also show how governments, international relief agencies, architects, and planners can shape better urban environments. Throughout, residents present their experiences in their own words and through careful documentation of their living environments.Pressures and Distortions began in 2008 with the Research Program’s international call for proposals. A competitive process selected four teams, with researchers based in Mexico, Colombia, China, Australia, France, and the US. Each team received a research grant from Rafael Viñoly Architects and worked independently.With over 400 pages, Pressures and Distortions contains more than 500 original full-color photographs, plans, and drawings, as well as a DVD with over 100 video and audio recordings from the streets of Bogotá. —Rafael Viñoly Architects PC

Caixin Media

12.28.12

Uncertain Future for Architectural Treasures

Nestled between mountains and a winding river in a scenic corner of Shanxi province is Zhongyang County, the home of an exquisite Confucian temple built during the Ming dynasty.The colorful wooden temple graced this idyllic valley for hundreds of...

An Architect’s Vision: Bare Elegance in China

Jane Perlez
New York Times
Wang Shu, the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker prize, arrives at his studio here most mornings and sits at a desk with sheets of soft brown paper, a cup for mixing black ink with water, and a brush. He reads seventh-century poetry and...

Beijing's Olympic Ruins

Mark Byrnes
Atlantic
While being awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics allowed Beijing to construct new architectural icons and receive international accolades, its current reality is a collection of unused sports facilities with few if any plans for reuse.

Chinese Architect Blasts Demolition Culture

Mure Dickie
Financial Times
The Chinese winner of architecture’s most prestigious award has criticised the wanton demolition that has left many of the nation’s cities fragmented and almost unrecognisable to their citizens. The comments from Wang Shu, who will on Friday receive...

Caixin Media

03.27.12

Wang Shu, Wary of the New

At a time when China was bursting with an urge to cover buildings in shimmering silver and gray, Wang Shu, the first Chinese winner of the Pritzker Prize, was an architect who felt that changing tastes didn’t have to mean changing one’s sense of...