Results tagged “architecture”

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Months after a building in Minhang literally fell over during construction, the infamous complex has finally been given safety certification by government officials. Of course, living in a newly constructed complex that's already seen a building fall down doesn't inspire much confidence, but it hasn't seemed to deter would-be residents: many of the people who bought flats in the collapsed building decided to take unoccupied flats in the building next door, even though there's a chance of structural damage from the accident. Then again, after a building falls down, you would imagine government inspectors would really inspect the complex. We're just sad we missed the tour.

One of the weirdest controversies we've been reading about has been whether or not the Beijing CCTV is “profane.” We're not sure when rumors that the headquarters of China's media mammoth was a “monument to pornography” surfaced, but it seems like it's now serious enough for Rem Koolhaas himself to categorically deny that he ever meant the building to look like genitalia. “I'm extremely sad that the best intentions, the best work of so many people, literally thousands of people, from the architects to the company to the workers, is compromised by this rumor, which as I said has no truth whatsoever,” he told CCTV. What are that chances that this will be enough to convince errant netizens that they shouldn't blow up the building since it shames the Chinese people? Source:Danwei

Japan's Mori Building Co., which currently has the bragging rights for the biggest building on the Lujiazui block, is jumping back into construction in the city. According to Reuters, CEO Minoru Mori said his company had been "asked (by Shanghai city) to come up with redevelopment ideas for the post-Shanghai Expo site and airport expansion plans there." He is also proposing a shopping complex next to the Shanghai World Financial Center, which he hopes to turn into Shanghai's version of Harajuku's Omotesando Hills. Oh geez. Knowing the government, if he builds a Omotesando Hills, they're gonna build an even bigger one next to it and before we know it, Pudong really will have sunk into the river.

     

Just as 56minus1 alerted us to protest banners at Huaihai Zhong Lu earlier this week, we recalled seeing the same protest, in the form of wall graffiti along Fuxing Zhong Lu near Hengshan Lu over the weekend.

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One of the winners of this year's Sony World Photography Award at Cannes used Shanghai for his inspiration. Michael van der Bogaard, based in Cologne, Germany, got first place in the Architecture category for a series about Shanghai's less glorious lanes and alleys.

The China Daily has issued a damning verdict on the construction of the new 632 meter Shanghai Tower — soon to be China's tallest skyscraper. It says that with the new tower, "blind worship and race for skyscrapers has reached a new high" and that the 121 storey tower will be a "milestone in turning Shanghai into a less pleasant concrete jungle". The opinion piece (God knows who it was written by as no byline was supplied) then sought to substantiate with a litany of reasons why the Shanghai Tower would be a bad idea: (1) Shanghai is sinking, and a new skyscraper isn't going to help; (2) Traffic in Lujiazui is congested enough and a new building is going to make rush hours all the more "nightmarish"; (3) The "urban heat island effect" is going to make Shanghai feel even more like a sauna in summers; (4) Skyscrapers are vulnerable to attacks and disasters; (5) The economic risk of building the Shanghai Tower will be shared by various state-owned enterprises and the money could be "better spent elsewhere"; (6) Shanghai should instead save its old buildings from demolition; (7) Shanghai's public transportation sucks. Why not spend more money there? (8) It also has the fastest graying population in China and should build more facilities to cater to the elderly. In conclusion, China Daily judged super skyscrapers like the Shanghai Tower to be "not a priority for Shanghai" and that it "could cause more harm than add to its glamor". Such words of wisdom.

Construction started Saturday on the Shanghai Tower, Shanghai's next "tallest building". At 632m tall and with 138 floors, it checks in with a price tag of $2.2 billion USD, and will take six years to build. By comparison, its next-door neighbor, the Jinmao Tower, is 421m tall, while the still-brand-spankin' new World Financial Center is tops out at "only" 492m. The Shanghai Tower will, obviously, be the tallest building in China when it is completed.

While searching the web for Tianma Shan, we stumbled upon this helpful site by Robin Zhang, "the software designer of JetPhoto." Clicking around a bit, we found this neat panorama of the University of Shanghai (沪江大学) in the 1920s. We also found these current photos of the old University of Shanghai buildings, which are now part of the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology [official site | map] in Yangpu District on the Huangpu River. We found this all kind of interesting — we had never heard of the University of Shanghai, which was founded in 1906. We probably should have, since we have a friend who recently graduated from USST. Here's what she said:

A giant device specially designed for opening sealed bottles otherwise known as the Shanghai World Financial Center has been named the world's "Best Tall Building" this year by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. The last time this device made the news was in January when a certain city blog broke the news that a horde of misbehaving monkeys had scaled the giant bottle opener illegally. The monkeys managed to flee the country before police caught up with them.

Shanghai-based blogger Elaine Chow plunks down 150 kuai and writes, "It took one last elevator to bring me up those three final levels. This time, as I stepped out of the elevator and into the walkway, it was hard not to gasp." Read it all here. And read all of Elaine's Gizmodo posts here.

The counterfeit appears from 00:14 onwards.

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Photo from Julien & Gwladys

    

Forget your banking cube farm in the WFC, Shanghai's coolest office space is Leafy Shade in Hong Kou district.

NBC's US$1 billion deal to become America's official Olympic media for the Beijing 2008 Games was part of a record breaking $2.3 billion deal that included the the 2004 Summer Olympics ($793m) and the 2006 Winter Games ($613m). In what they've called the single most ambitious media project in history, NBC has sent the largest media contingent of about 3,000 to produce a whopping 3,600 hours of coverage. While we were in Beijing last week, we were fortunate enough to catch sight of Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira and Al Roker of The Today Show which broadcasts live from their open air studio on the Olympic Green. This marks the sixth Olympics that the show has travelled to and every evening here at 7pm, the studio attracts an enthusiastic crowd of (mostly) Americans waving flags and banners hoping to say hi to friends and family just waking up back home.

In this latest video from Sexy Beijing (h/t to Danwei), Ai Weiwei, the Chinese architect who designed the Bird's Nest stadium gives his thoughts on Beijing's architectural development over the years and impresses us with his self-deprecatory candour. This was the same man that last week provided much fodder for international media with his declaration that he would not be attending the opening ceremony of the Olympics — a decision he explains in this commentary written for The Guardian.

Peter Kirby of Daedalum Films explores the tulou, the earthen roundhouses in Fujian Province which have just made it to the UNESCO World Heritage list and meets some of the people who live in them.

Could today's Beijing be what New York City was at the turn of the 20th Century? According to this article in Vanity Fair, there are certainly many similarities to draw upon. Kurt Andersen starts off noting the correspondences between population growth and development of city infrastructure. In 1904 New York's first subway line opened. Likewise, Beijing's new subway system is spreading out at a breathtaking pace (a point which subway fanatic and Beijingologist, David Feng, is unlikely to let us forget).

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It's finally coming! The "big one" eagerly predicted by Shanghaiist in 2006 — China's tallest building will begin construction this year in Shanghai. At 580m, the Shanghai Center will top a triangle of impressive towers with the 420-meter-high Jin Mao Tower and the 492-meter-high Shanghai World Financial Center in the Lujiazui district of Pudong. The building will be designed by Gensler, a U.S. firm, in conjunction with the Shanghai-based Architectural Design & Research Institute of Tongji University. It will be designed to look like a coiled dragon, the architects said. At its completion, the building will be 118 stories high and 79m taller than China's former tallest building, the Taipei 101, currently the world's tallest building.

With Rem Koolhaas's eagerly-awaited CCTV headquarters nearing completion in Beijing, many are considering the role of architecture in China's quest for status as a world power. Great buildings have always played a role in a regime's strength and prestige, and for the last decade China's central government has been hellbent on constructing impressive city skylines. Shanghai's own horizon has progressed at a breakneck pace, with its latest undertaking, Xintiandi II, (dubbed Xintiandi's "big sister" by Shanghai Daily), scheduled for completion within the next 7-10 years. Neville Mars, a Dutch architect in Beijing interviewed by the New Yorker, believes that the central government's approach towards architecture is dangerous:

The Chinese appear to be in control, but it is really moving too fast for anyone.

See any familiar buildings in the picture?

American urban design and architecture firm Chan Krieger Sieniewicz was chosen by the town to revamp its former international concession port area. The Huangpu River and the heart of the city will be “reconciled.”

Once upon a time, way back in the days when the Song dynasty discovered oil in Hangzhou* and moved south, a nearby fishing community called Hutu (also sometimes called Hudu) found itself strategically situated and soon became home to several the bigwigs from up north. After a short time, the fishers became traders and the traders became pajama-wearin' xiao long bao-guzzlin' urbanites. All was peaceful for a time in Shanghai, as Hutu became known, but just a short ways away on the East China Sea evil Japanese pirates hatched nefarious plots of rape and pillage. And so in 1553 Ming officials decreed an enormous wall 5 kilometers in length and eight meters high to be built around the city. The wall had a 20 meter wide moat, soldier outposts, four gates, and six sluice ways. The people rejoiced and the pirates sailed back to Japan in search of ladders.

In the latest episode of the Hard Hat Show, host Mia Li visits the 600 year old Xiefangde Temple, which was to have been disassembled and rebuilt elsewhere, but has now been ruined beyond salvation to make way for a new apartment complex.

The former Garden Bridge was closed to all traffic on February 29th and workers have been hard at work preparing the bridge for tomorrow's trip. At approximately 9:30 in the morning when the tide is at its lowest point, a barge will be positioned under the bridge. Four hours later, the boat will have risen enough to lift the bridge off its foundations and shuttle the structure across the Huangpu to Pudong's Minsheng Dock. Once there, it will undergo 9 months of repairs and maintenance work before being returned to its original position at the mouth of the Suzhou Creek.

                     

We passed by the Huxi Mosque on Changde Lu the other day, walked around and loved it. Here's some history of the mosque that we found on ChinaCulture.org:

The Huxi Mosque is one of the famous mosques in Shanghai City. It was originally called Yaoshuinong Mosque and located at Xikang Road, and moved to Changde Road in April 1992. In 1914, Moslem paupers from Hubei, Shandong, Henan, and Anhui provinces lived together in the area near Xikang Road. For their religious needs, they rented a small room as the temporary worship place. In 1921, with the efforts of some religious people, they raised money and began the construction of the mosque. The construction was completed in 1922. There were three worship halls, three wing halls and one wing room. After the repair in 1935, the worship halls could accommodate 200 people. The mosque resumed religious activities in 1979.

Continue reading "Photos: Shanghai Huxi Mosque 沪西清真寺"

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