April 4, 2012
9,600,000 square feet. 2,350 retails spaces. Spraying fountains, amusement park rides, video game arcades, replicas of international monuments, including the Arc de Triomph, the bell tower of St. Mark’s in Venice, and a 1.3-mile canal with gondolas. This is the New South China Mall in Dongguan, China, a sprawling, colorful complex that has been poised as the one-stop consumption center of the future since its opening in 2005. But in the words and images of photographer Matthew Niederhauser, the mall is an “unabatedly empty temple to consumerism.” Of its 2,350 retail spaces, only 47 are occupied, and the top floors remain unfinished, sitting in settled dust, inhabited almost exclusively by an eerie coterie of dismembered mannequins. Read on.
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February 28, 2011
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey finally agrees to spend $3.4 billion on Santiago Calatrava‘s proposed World Trade Center Transit Hub. [via New York Times]
Architect Michael Hansmeyer generates the “World’s Most Complex Architecture” using laser cutters and algorithms invented by Pixar; one result is a standing column derived from between 8 and 16 million polygonal faces. [via Co.Design]
Zaha Hadid‘s Guangzhou Opera House opens in China; construction on the nation’s largest opera house started way back in 2003. [via Design Boom]
2010 proved a record setting year for ice-melt in Greenland, GOOD Blog reports via City College’s Cryospheric Processes Laboratory. [via GOOD]
Mohamed Elshahed writes in Design Observer about the role of public space in democracy and how Tahrir Square set a stage for the January 25th Revolution. [via Design Observer]
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June 24, 2010
In “Our Cities Ourselves,” opening today at the Center for Architecture in New York, 10 architects humanize the transportation and urban design in cities around the world. The clunky name does have a point: the architects are handpicked to focus on cities they should be familiar with: their own (or at least where they lived at some point). British architect David Adjaye applies his knowledge and experience of Tanzania, his birthplace, to reroute the railway of Dar es Salam, using the waterfront promenade as public space. As the Adjaye’s text explains, “Derailing the Colonial City” is more about linking (the nearby Mnazi Mmoja Park, the new Bus Rapid Transit) than creating new buildings. Call me crazy, but I’m going to trust the personal experience of Adjaye over someone who isn’t as familiar with the area. Should I?
Michael Sorkin Studio’s creates a park next to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, gleefully doing away with sections of the FDR (or relocating them). Proposals in Buenos Aires, Ahmadabad and Budapest show a surprisingly light touch, until you read the fine print. Okay, so maybe entire transportation systems are being rerouted, buried or lifted up, but the changes might be essential to city growth.
Every proposal has similar people-loving conclusions: separate the automobile from humans, or at least give people more space to walk. One of the few more dramatic solutions is proposed by Urbanus in Guangzhou, China, “From Highway to High Line” (hmm, I wonder where they got their inspiration from), where an elevated walkway floats above Renmin Road. Why not create more High Lines in every city?
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