Beijing

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[czsz]

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Is this the last of the hutongs? It sure is lonely.

To answer your question, I don't think it is enough for a "world city" to be vast. It needs to be cosmopolitan. Few cities in Asia meet this criterion...perhaps only Tokyo, Singapore, and to a lesser extent Hong Kong, do.

[newyorkrules]

Is this the last of the hutongs? It sure is lonely.

To answer your question, I don't think it is enough for a "world city" to be vast. It needs to be cosmopolitan. Few cities in Asia meet this criterion...perhaps only Tokyo, Singapore, and to a lesser extent Hong Kong, do.
but sydney become more and more international after olympic game. so do tokyo in the last century.
this is not hutong, hutong is a path, this is "四合院", a dozen family live together share a same door and yard.

[zupermaus]

Is this the last of the hutongs? It sure is lonely.

It needs to be cosmopolitan. Few cities in Asia meet this criterion...perhaps only Tokyo, Singapore, and to a lesser extent Hong Kong, do.


au contraire my friend the worlds most cosmopolitan cities are in Asia - Indonesia has 388 ethnic groups (all represented in Jakarta), India also with the worlds largest diversities (thousands of seperately developed castes, 700 languages (not dialects), and over 200 ethnic groups, each represented in the major cities). In terms of non natives, places like Kuala Lumpar are minority natives with over 60 percent coming from 15 major ethnic groups from Chinese gypsies to Portuguese, to Arabs, Africans and Filipinos.

And Dubai and other Gulf State cities, count 80 percent non native and foreign born from expats (read: immigrants) across the world.

But hey, sorry to get pedantic I know what you mean.... Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, and Pyongyang are some of the most monocultural in the world. Chinese cities on the other hand are pretty mixed (when before they were much more monocultural), especially now that non cityfolk are now outnumbered by migrants from across the country - often changing the established language of the city to default-Mandarin, including over 180 ethnic groups and minorities. Every major city has also a historic 'muslim-town' centred around a Jamme Masjid, and to a lesser extent Tibetan and Mongolian areas, sometimes referred to as the 'Tatar City's', akin to the Chinatowns we have here.

[Bob]

Just beneath all the glitz is a nasty little communist police state, which thinks nothing of mowing down peaceful demonstrations with tanks. Just remember that. The "new" China is the same as it ever was.

Hu do they think they're kidding?

[newyorkrules]

Just beneath all the glitz is a nasty little communist police state, which thinks nothing of mowing down peaceful demonstrations with tanks. Just remember that. The "new" China is the same as it ever was.

Hu do they think they're kidding?
anyway, i want to move beijing, old and new mixture.:D
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[Meerkat]

Very nice pictures, but during my stay in Beijing the sky was grey / yellow from pollution, and the air had an acrid smell which was choking in the 35 degree heat. I really enjoyed my holiday there, especially the Forbidden city, but the Beijing really needs to get a grip on its pollution problem.

[newyorkrules]

Very nice pictures, but during my stay in Beijing the sky was grey / yellow from pollution, and the air had an acrid smell which was choking in the 35 degree heat. I really enjoyed my holiday there, especially the Forbidden city, but the Beijing really needs to get a grip on its pollution problem.
hehe, autumn is the best season of beijing, the sky looks blue and high, winter is not bad at all, cold and dry.

[newyorkrules]

forbidden city
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beijing, china's 4th skyline. after shanghai, shenzhen, chongqing

[lofter1]

Chinese Unveil Mammoth Arts Center


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/24/arts/24openspan.jpg
Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The new National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing is meant to
establish a cultural core next to Tiananmen Square, a political center.

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/arts/24open.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
By JOSEPH KAHN
December 24, 2007


BEIJING — Compared variously to a floating pearl and a duck egg, the titanium-and-glass half-dome of the National Center for the Performing Arts formally opened its underwater entryway to Chinese officials and dignitaries here over the weekend.


The $400 million complex, a concert hall, opera house and theater under one space age span, is designed to be the center of Chinese culture, just as Tiananmen Square next door was designated this country’s political center.


The complex’s lush, dazzling interior, sophisticated acoustics and mechanical wizardry rival any hall in Europe or the United States, its promoters say. Chen Ping, the center’s director, proclaimed it “a concrete example of China’s rising soft power and comprehensive national strength” during the opening ceremony on Saturday night.


Yet the center, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, has attracted at least as much attention for its cost overruns, safety concerns and provocative aesthetics.


And the hall’s artistic directors, appointed after prolonged bureaucratic squabbling, had to scramble to line up a credible schedule of performances for the premier season, which runs from late December until April, organizers said.


The opening event was an eclectic sampler of Chinese and Western musical classics, with two conductors, two orchestras, four choral groups and a half-dozen soloists, a mélange that showed off the building’s acoustics but underscored its continuing search for an artistic mission.


Li Changchun, a senior Communist Party leader, was the guest of honor at the event, broadcast on national television. At each interlude in the program camera operators hustled to the row in front of Mr. Li to record him clapping.


The center joins a list of monoliths designed by foreign architects — the bird’s-nest Olympic stadium and the cantilevered towers of China Central Television’s new headquarters among them — that have remade the Beijing skyline and projected the soaring ambitions and bulging coffers of the Communist Party leadership.


Mr. Andreu’s creation joins the Shanghai Grand Theater, designed by another Frenchman, Jean-Marie Charpentier, as one of the top performance halls in China.


That field will grow crowded, however, as other cities pour hundreds of millions of dollars into their own cultural showcases. Zaha Hadid, the London architect, is building an opera house for Guangzhou, a provincial capital. The architect Carlos Ott, a Canadian born in Uruguay, has four contracts for performance halls in smaller cities.


Whether this adds up to a cultural renaissance or an edifice contest remains unclear. China has produced first-rate classical musicians, including the pianists Yundi Li, who performed a solo on Saturday night, and Lang Lang. Yet its musical groups, ballets and symphony orchestras have received far less attention than the concert halls. They face financial constraints, political censorship and public indifference.


“China needs a top national performance hall of this kind,” Wu Zuqiang, who heads the center’s arts committee, said in an interview before it opened. “But promoting national culture will take extended efforts, and will require some adjustments in our approach.”


Officials call the complex the largest performing arts center in the world, twice as big as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. It was designed to be conspicuous.


Mr. Andreu said that he envisioned the hall as a tribute to the traditional Chinese image of heaven and earth, round above square. His bubblelike soaring glass dome encloses several performance spaces and is suspended above a shallow pool. Viewed at night, illuminated from within, the dome resembles a spaceship hovering over a calm lake. But on dim days when the haze and dust of Beijing cover the silvery titanium shell, the hall can look no more distinguished than an airport service hangar.


A few years ago a group of Chinese architects organized a vocal petition campaign to protest the design. They said it blended poorly with the Stalinist Great Hall of the People next door and high vermilion walls of the imperial Forbidden City across the street.


Their effort received a boost in 2004 when the roof of a new terminal building at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport near Paris, which Mr. Andreu also designed, collapsed. Some critics of the design said that the complex’s entryway, a subterranean glass-enclosed corridor extending 250 feet under the artificial lake, posed safety risks in the event of structural problems or a terrorist attack.


The project faced stoppages and reviews, and was several years late and many tens of millions of dollars over budget.


In Chinese media interviews, Mr. Andreu has spoken of the “enormous stress” surrounding construction, including the cleaning bills after dust and sandstorms buffeted the dome’s exterior. But he defended his hypermodern approach.


“Your people do not look back,” he told the state-run People’s Daily newspaper. “They have a history and are proud of it. But they live and look ahead.”


Criticism has faded somewhat since the complex began a soft opening in October and invited guests had their first glimpses of the elaborate interior.


The dome’s inside is paneled with long spans of Brazilian mahogany, giving the expanse an unexpectedly warm feel. The floors are paved with soft white, yellow and gray marble from 22 Chinese provinces, selected so that their grains form continuous lines.


The walls of the theater, the smallest of the performance spaces, are covered in thick padded silk, divided in strips of red, purple and tangerine. The ceiling of the cool-white concert hall consists of undulating waves of acoustic panels that resemble abstract art.


For its opening season the center has relied heavily on foreign talent. The first big concert open to the public is scheduled for New Year’s Eve, when Seiji Ozawa is to conduct the Chinese National Symphony Orchestra. Lang Lang, the soprano Kathleen Battle, and the Russian violinist Vadim Repin are to perform solos.


Later in the season Lorin Maazel will bring the New York Philharmonic to town, and Kurt Masur will conduct the London Philharmonic.


For ballet the center’s managers turned to the Russian Kirov, which plans to stage such dance classics as “Prince Igor,” “Swan Lake,” Balanchine’s “Jewels” and “Le Corsaire” in succession.


Cameron Mackintosh, the British impresario, has created a Mandarin version of “Les Misérables” for the hall, though the timing of that performance has not been announced.


The center also will be host to a long list of Chinese performance groups. Competing symphony orchestras in Beijing and Shanghai plan multiple appearances. The Shanghai Opera House will stage “Othello,” and the National Ballet of China will perform “Romeo and Juliet.” A dance ensemble of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force plans to revive “Sister Jiang,” a classic ballet of early Socialism.


In a recent interview with the Chinese magazine Oriental Outlook, Wang Zhengming, the center’s deputy director, said the national center is under pressure to feature Chinese works but said his choices are limited.


“It’s troublesome because opera and ballet are really imported art forms,” he said. “We’re better in ballet, but our most famous works are the red classics from 40 years ago. Opera is a bigger problem because the most popular classics and new works are all from overseas.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

National Center for the Performing Arts gets ready for New Year concert

National Grand Theater (http://en.beijing2008.cn/news/olympiccities/beijing/n214215689.shtml)

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The amazing National Grand Theatre

BEIJING, Dec. 14) -- Beijing's newly completed futuristic National Center for the Performing Arts, formerly known as the National Grand Theater, will hold its New Year concerts from December 31 to January 1. Seiji Ozawa, a renowned conductor, Kathleen Battle, a singer with a lovely soprano voice, and Chinese pianist Lang Lang will be appearing. Standing-room only tickets will be sold for the event.

During these performances, a piece of music created by Chinese musician Ye Xiaogang will be played. Chen Zuohuang, Music Director of the National Center for the Performing Arts, says that this is a new attempt to create a New Year concert with Chinese characteristics.

Two days after they went on sale, tickets for the concert were completely sold out. The vice-president of the National Center for the Performing Arts remarked that standing-room only tickets will be on sale from 9:30 am on January 1, 2008 for as little as 30 yuan (approximately 4 US dollars). Each person can buy two tickets with a valid personal ID.

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Workers cleaning the glass wall of the National Grand Theater, next to
the Great Hall of the People near Tian'anmen Square in Beijing

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[lofter1]

beijing2008 (http://en.beijing2008.cn/news/dynamics/headlines/n214160631.shtml)

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china digital times (http://chinadigitaltimes.net/tag/online+public+opinion)

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ebeijing.gov (http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/Recommendations/t784015.htm)

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prc

[MidtownGuy]

Wow!

[pianoman11686]

That sure is one big egg.

[lofter1]

And it's brilliant that with all the technology involved in the Grand Theater building that the guys tie a rope around their waists and grab some buckets of water in order to wash the glass :D

[ablarc]

There'll always be a China.

[newyorkrules]

And it's brilliant that with all the technology involved in the Grand Theater building that the guys tie a rope around their waists and grab some buckets of water in order to wash the glass :D
looks more cool at night.:D

[zupermaus]

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The Forbidden City is the worlds biggest palace with 8000 rooms.
Its amazing to think Xian once had palaces 6.5, 5x, and 3.5x bigger than the Forbidden City.
The city was then known as Changan and was the biggest and one of the most cosmopolitan cities
yet seen in the world, the Eastern counterpart to Rome and her Empire, and the square gridded
blueprint for subsequent dynastic capitals across Asia such as Edo, Nara, Seoul, Beijing, Nanjing etc.

[Bob]

Check out that interior...this immediately reminded me of the since-demolished interior of the Center Theater, Rockefeller Center. Striking resemblance. Sorry, I don't have a digital picture of the Center Theater, but it's available elsewhere on the internets <grin>.

[lofter1]

Forbidden Cities

Beijing’s great new architecture
is a mixed blessing for the city.

The Sky Line

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/30/p323/080630_goldbergerweb01_p323.jpg
The new CCTV building, known by some locals
as Big Shorts, “is a dazzling reinvention of
the skyscraper, using size not to dominate
but to embrace the viewer,” Goldberger writes.

The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/skyline/2008/06/30/080630crsk_skyline_goldberger)
by Paul Goldberger
June 30, 2008

PHOTOGRAPH: IWAN BAAN

The city planner Edmund Bacon once described Beijing as “possibly the greatest single work of man on the face of the earth.” When he was there, in the nineteen-thirties, you could still see that the city, from the walls surrounding it to the emperor’s Forbidden City at its heart, was conceived as a totality—a work of monumental geometry, symmetrical and precise. Even the hutongs, the warrenlike neighborhoods of small courtyard houses set along alleyways, which made up the bulk of the city’s urban fabric, were as essential to Beijing as the temples and the imperial compound, which has the same intricate mixture of courtyards and lanes. Bejing was all of a piece.

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“People talk about the new buildings and, whether they approve or not, recognize
that such daring constructions would not get built anywhere else,”

It couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t. Mao Zedong tried to change Beijing into an industrial and governmental center, putting up factories and ponderous administrative buildings. But now Mao’s Beijing is nearly as much a part of the past as the Forbidden City. The factories are being pushed to the outskirts, and in their place the city has developed a skyline. It isn’t like the height-obsessed skyline of Shanghai, or the tight, congested skyline of Hong Kong. In Beijing, the towers are sprinkled all over the place. Most of them are mediocre, and some are ridiculous—a few have pagodalike crowns, to satisfy a former mayor who insisted that new buildings appear Chinese—but a handful are among the most compelling buildings going up anywhere in the world. In Beijing, the latest trend is architecture that will force the world to pay attention, and the result is a striking, unmistakably twenty-first-century city, combining explosive, relentless development with a fondness for the avant-garde. Beijing is as ruthlessly unsentimental today as it was in Mao’s time, with little patience for history if it gets in the way of development, and yet the city doesn’t feel as if it were defined solely by growth, like Shanghai, or like the kind of entirely manufactured environment that you see in Dubai. When I visited Beijing recently, the architect Ole Scheeren said to me, “I think Beijing is incredibly strong in its ability to completely override its own history and yet not surrender its identity.”

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“Mao’s Beijing is nearly as much a part of the past as the Forbidden City,” Goldberger writes. “The factories
are being pushed to the outskirts, and in their place the city has developed a skyline.”

Scheeren is the co-architect, with Rem Koolhaas, of the most eagerly awaited building in Beijing, the headquarters of the Chinese television network CCTV, a monumental construction that has become world-famous long in advance of its completion, scheduled for late this year. A vast structure of steel and glass, it is a dazzling reinvention of the skyscraper, using size not to dominate but to embrace the viewer. The building will contain more office space than any other building in China and nearly as much as the Pentagon, but, as skyscrapers go, it is on the short side, with just fifty-one floors. Looking from a distance like a gigantic arch, it is a continuous loop, a kind of square doughnut. Two vertical sections, which contain offices, lean precariously inward, connected by two horizontal sections containing production facilities, one running along the ground, the other a kind of bridge in the sky. When you get closer, you see that each horizontal section is made up of two pieces that converge in a right angle. The top section, thirteen stories deep, is dramatically cantilevered out over open space, five hundred and thirty feet in the air, and it seems to reach over you like a benign robot. The novelty of the form—some Beijingers have taken to calling it Big Shorts—takes time to comprehend; the building seems to change as you pass it. “It comes across sometimes as big and sometimes as small, and from some angles it is strong and from others weak,” Scheeren said. “It no longer portrays a single image.”

You might think that, like a good deal of Koolhaas’s work, the building is as much showmanship as architecture, but it evinces a quiet, monumental grandeur. Some of that is due to the color of the glass, which is a soft gray, almost perfectly echoing the overcast Beijing sky. Around the glass, the diagonal grid of the building’s steel framework is visible, the lines getting denser in the cantilever, where the structural stresses are more extreme. Scheeren told me, “I had the fantasy that the façade would disappear against the gray sky and you would be left with only the black grid.”

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/30/p323/080630_goldbergerweb04_p323.jpg
When completed, the CCTV headquarters will contain
more office space than any other building in China.

Like the CCTV building, a new development designed by the New York architect Steven Holl—a cluster of linked apartment buildings—displays a boldness that would be unlikely to escape compromise in a Western city. And, like the CCTV building, its most notable feature is a bridge—or, rather, bridges—high in the air. Holl has built eight squarish towers and one round one (which will contain a hotel), each about twenty stories tall. The residential towers have identical aluminum façades in a grid pattern, with square windows set back and edged in bright colors that Holl says he took from Buddhist temples. Holl placed the towers in a ring around the property, connecting them with glass-enclosed bridges at various heights—a kind of public, or semi-public, street in the sky running all the way around the complex. Some bridges start on one floor and end on another, so that you walk up or down a ramp—a hill in the sky. Each bridge contains some facility that the tenants share—a gym, a café, a bookstore. The most eye-catching has a swimming pool, which feels as if it were floating in the air, seventeen stories above Beijing.

The idea of the street high above the city is intended to counteract the sense of isolation that high-rise living usually brings, and to create an incentive for residents to walk around the complex. “In Beijing, to go anywhere means taxis and traffic jams and pollution,” Hideki Hirahara, the project architect in Holl’s Beijing office, told me as we walked around the site, where construction crews were just beginning to enclose the steel bridges. “We wanted to create all city functions inside the project.”

The bridges are spectacular, inside and out, and one can imagine that there will be an allure to walking in the air from tower to tower that having a cup of coffee on the ground can’t match. But there’s a hitch. This clever prototype for a city without streets is also an admission that the traditional street-based city doesn’t have much of a future here. As an attempt to bring avant-garde ideas to high-rise housing, the development is impressive, but at another level it’s not unlike the gated apartment compounds that now fill much of Beijing’s rapidly developing outskirts. The twenty-first-century equivalent of the ancient hutongs is a kind of skyscraper suburbia. You drive there, and then you get back in your car every time you go outside—exactly the model that planners in the United States have been trying to get away from in recent decades.

In this context, it’s not surprising that another example of big-ticket Western architecture in Beijing—the National Center for the Performing Arts, by the French architect Paul Andreu—is about as disconnected from the street as possible. It’s an ovoid of reflective glass set in an artificial lake and designed to look as if it were floating on water; there isn’t even a door, lest the purity of its shape be disturbed. You descend to a sunken plaza beside the pool, walk through a tunnel under the water, and ride up an escalator to find yourself inside the ovoid. There’s excitement in being under a huge, curving roof that shelters three different halls, but, in general, the entrance, striving for high drama, comes off as silly and cumbersome. The Chinese refer to the building as the Egg.

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/30/p646/080630_goldbergerweb02_p646.jpg
Beijingers call their city Tan Da Bing, which means Spreading Pancake. The population is around
seventeen million, and the city gains nearly three hundred thousand people each year.

Locals call Beijing Tan Da Bing, which means Spreading Pancake. Since 1991, it has gained, on average, nearly three hundred thousand people a year, and by the end of last year it had a population of around seventeen million. Old Beijing—designed for pedestrians and imperial processions but not much in between—has turned out to be a bad framework on which to construct a modern city. It has too few conventional streets, and they are spaced far apart. There aren’t many traditional city blocks. In the days when Beijing was famous for swarms of cyclists, its unsuitability for automobiles didn’t matter; now that the Chinese have cars, Beijing has gone in one generation from emanating an ancient spirit to feeling like Houston. When I visited three years ago, I thought that its problem was a compulsion to repeat the mistakes of American cities. Now the picture is much less clear. Crowding, pollution, and sprawl still define the city, but the new architecture, far from replicating an American mistake, surpasses what most American cities would be willing, or able, to do. This has an effect on the city’s mood: people talk about the new buildings and, whether they approve or not, recognize that such daring constructions would not get built anywhere else.

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/30/p646/080630_goldbergerweb03_p646.jpg
“Crowding, pollution, and sprawl still define the city, but the new architecture,
far from replicating an American mistake, surpasses what most American cities
would be willing, or able, to do,” Goldberger writes.

Beijing is also beginning, slowly, to talk about historic preservation. Wang Jun, a thirty-nine-year-old journalist who was born in southwest China, has become Beijing’s Jane Jacobs, an outspoken advocate of old neighborhoods and traditional streets. “When I started to work, it was the period of Beijing’s most intensive dismantling,” he told me. “I did a lot of investigating, and the city officials were very unhappy, which drove me to more investigating, which made the city officials even more unhappy.” Now, Wang says, city officials invite him to meetings they once refused to let him attend, and the city has begun to put money into renovating some hutongs that would have been demolished a few years ago.

There are urbanists who think that Wang Jun’s position smacks of nostalgia, and that the challenge facing Beijing is to develop a new urban form. “In China, bigness has become the only tool to keep pace with the fast developments,” Neville Mars, a Dutch architect in Beijing, said to me. “The European model of urbanization is outdated, and China proves it. Beijing is a scattered city—how can we patch it back together? The Chinese appear to be in control, but it is really moving too fast for anyone.”

Still, developers have lately begun to grasp the appeal that older buildings have, at least for the rapidly growing professional class. SOHO China, a marketing company that established itself with huge modern residential and commercial complexes in Beijing, is now at work on a retail complex, at Qianmen, just south of Tiananmen Square, that will be built around preserved and reconstructed sections of a hutong—a kind of Beijing version of Boston’s Fanueil Hall. Zhang Xin, who, with her husband, Pan Shiyi, controls SOHO, told me, “So much has been destroyed. Now what excites me is keeping what is left.” But often what’s left isn’t much, and most of the new complex will have to be built from scratch. Zhang said, “Chinese people don’t like anything old—they want everything new. If someone came from the moon, they would think this is a newer country than America.” She paused. “Maybe that is what Mao wanted,” she said. ♦

Copyright © 2008 CondéNet.

[pianoman11686]

The new, new city.

[Alonzo-ny]

Someone should start a thread about that.

[zupermaus]

more pix:


Beijing:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Gugun_panorama-2005-1.jpg

http://english.cri.cn/mmsource/images/2008/04/19/4086qianmen1.jpg http://www.chinatouching.com/wp-content/photos/Beijing_Hutong_14.jpg

hutong lanes
http://www.miquelmartin.org/pictures/albums/album28/s_DSC_8407_Hutongs_from_the_Drum_tower_Beijing.jpg

Beijing is largely modern, despite thousands of hutongs:

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20070627_099ddae713af3cd99ca8PqLBU0PlVPy2.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20070627_bbd5441b95a8b974ab3dAu8Ol4IHrMdF.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20070627_106722be27ff9f58a616qiZm08iLh2Ro.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20070627_7ae84d5b9d3a4cdcfdd6cp61qI5lXuK0.jpg

Beijing Linked hybrid and Grand Theater
http://www.archidose.org/Blog/AE003c.jpg http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/news/gallery/2007/sep/25/internationalnews/GD4776381@A-night-view-shows-th-9596.jpg

http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/gg113/foglio6/22-1.jpg

http://i263.photobucket.com/albums/ii151/520foglio2008/21234.jpg

http://www.beijingupdates.com/forum/UploadFile/2008-5/200853011483520366.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.cn/forum/attachments/20070626_abf215e8503a2afc75adn5n5z1wvcU91.jpg

[lofter1]

Dusting Off a Serene Jewel Box

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/forbid.600.jpg
David Gray/Reuters
The Juanqinzhai is the first part of the Palace of Tranquillity
and Longevity, inside the Forbidden City, to be restored.

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/arts/design/01forb.html?ref=arts)
By ANDREW JACOBS
January 1, 2009

BEIJING — Like any sensible adult, the Emperor Qianlong planned ahead for his retirement. A compulsive poet who oversaw the unprecedented expansion of China’s borders, Qianlong began creating a refuge in 1771, at 61, for his golden years.

Unlike his predecessors, who ruled until death or disability, Qianlong, the fifth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, vowed to abdicate at 85 and settle down in comparatively modest quarters carved out of the Forbidden City, the imperial behemoth with 8,700 rooms that anchors the Chinese capital.

Employing the finest craftsmen of the day he spent five years building a fanciful collection of pocket gardens, banquet rooms, prayer halls and a single-seat opera house. The Palace of Tranquillity and Longevity, as it is known, would be a place to meditate, write poetry and enjoy the reviving company of his many concubines.

But like many men with abundant power and large egos, Qianlong refused to take a final bow. Even after handing the throne to his son, he kept a firm hand on his empire and remained in the Forbidden City’s sprawling royal quarters. He died, at 89, without ever having spent a night in his retirement home.

Emperors came and went, insurrections raged, but somehow Qianlong’s two-acre jewel box remained untouched. In 1924, when China’s civilian rulers tossed the last emperor out of the Forbidden City, the gates to Qianlong’s miniature palace were chained shut and largely forgotten.

For decades stories circulated among art historians of a mothballed Qing Dynasty retreat, its embroidered thrones thick with dust. Word eventually reached the World Monuments Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving imperiled historic sites across the globe. Since 1965 the fund has restored scores of Eastern European synagogues and South American cathedrals — even Ernest Shackleton’s expedition hut in Antarctica — but a Chinese palace interior was something entirely new.

“We had serious misgivings, especially given the deterioration, and we wondered if it would be possible,” said Bonnie Burnham, the organization’s president.

Six years and $3 million later the first building to be restored, Juanqinzhai, or Studio of Exhaustion From Diligent Service, has just been completed. It was an ambitious endeavor, made all the more complex by the delicate dance that takes place whenever Chinese and Westerners are forced to reconcile divergent sensibilities.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times

In a country where historic preservation usually entails razing a structure and replacing it with a brightly painted replica, Juanqinzhai is something of a milestone. The pavilion’s slavishly faithful restoration is an archetype that both Chinese and American conservators hope to replicate over the next eight years, as the remaining 26 buildings are refurbished. The $15 million effort will be financed by the Americans, with much of the work carried out by employees of the Palace Museum, which runs the Forbidden City.

The Americans contribute their well-practiced conservation techniques; the Chinese, their deep understanding of Qianlong’s architectural tastes and decorative predilections. The supporting cast includes aging artisans whose rarefied skills somehow survived the Culture Revolution, when traditional craftsmanship was considered bourgeois and worthy of punishment.

Zheng Xinmiao, the director of the Palace Museum, described the collaborative process as “charting uncharted waters.” “It gave us precious experience in both theory and practice,” he said during the ribbon cutting in November.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide7.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times
A silk panel on a wall inside Juanqinzhai.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide5.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times

Juanqinzhai, which is to open to the public in the coming months, brings to life a level of detail rarely seen in historic Chinese buildings. Conceived as a pleasure pavilion, it is a simple rectangular box dolled up inside with translucent embroidered screens, jade-inlaid wall hangings and a distinctively Chinese form of carved decoration that involves layering bamboo skin atop dark zitan wood (above). The pavilion is strewn with upholstered thrones — anywhere an emperor sat was a throne — and cloisonné tablets bearing Qianlong-inspired couplets.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide3.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide4.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times

The pavilion’s tour de force is the private theater (below), which provided the emperor with a cozy perch to view chaqu, a form of opera invented by a commoner that became all the rage in 18th-century Beijing. Qianlong, who supposedly composed 40,000 poems, became a chaqu aficionado, spending long hours writing stanzas about dreamy landscapes, flower picking and the glories of a stiff drink.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide2.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide6.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times

For art historians Juanqinzhai’s most beguiling elements are the panoramic murals of the pavilion painted on silk. Wisteria cascades from the ceiling and magpies soar over the tiled roofs of the palace. The blend of traditional Chinese painting with the Western use of perspective and optical illusion is a testament to Qianlong’s embrace of Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian artist and missionary who lived in Beijing at the time. The emperor was a voracious collector and art patron who encouraged his court painters to study Castiglione’s work.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide1.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times

Derided in the past for his family’s “barbarian” origins in Manchuria, not part of China at the time, Qianlong has been enjoying something of a renaissance in recent years. In this new official narrative he represents an era of military strength and material wealth before China succumbed to corruption, foreign domination and, as many Chinese see it, national humiliation. Despite the Qing Dynasty’s non-Chinese beginnings, Qianlong has been transformed into an idealized Chinese ruler, said Geremie R. Barmé, professor of Asian history at the Australian National University.

Mr. Barmé, the author of “The Forbidden City,” a cultural history published in 2008 by Harvard University Press, takes a jaundiced view of the Qianlong revival and in particular a spate of recent architectural restorations in Beijing that embrace the “Qianlong style.” He said that many historic buildings, including Juanqinzhai, were associated with more than one emperor and that preservation efforts should reveal that truth.

“I think the results are lovely,” he said, “but after a while it gets tiresome to see everything restored back to this presumed last great moment in Chinese history.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/01/arts/slide8.jpg
Photo: Doug Kanter for The New York Times
Outside Juanqinzhai, a street in the Forbidden City.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

I was over in England last winter and had the good luck of seeing the installation-in-process at Harewood House (http://www.harewood.org/china/cgi/news/news.cgi?t=template.htm&a=2) near Leeds. It was a re-installation of Chinoiserie specifically created in the late 1700s for a room in the main house. The main design motif was hand-printed wall paper which displayed various aspects of rural Chinese life -- and which had been rolled up in the Harewood attic for 200 years. It looked fantastic up on the walls -- and only needed some minor adjustments to fit the room in which it was hung.

RESTORED CHINESE WALLPAPER GOES ON SHOW AT HAREWOOD HOUSE

24 Hour Museum (http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART55763.html) / NEWS
By Richard Moss

Rare hand-painted Chinese wallpaper discovered in a carpenter’s loft has been restored and re-hung in a bedroom at Harewood House in Yorkshire together with furniture of the period.

The remarkable discovery was made in 1988, when the carpenter’s workshop on the estate was being cleared. Beneath the rubble were extraordinary rolls of wallpaper made in China in the 18th century, which had travelled across the world to Harewood to be hung in 1769.

239 years later, the paper has been expertly restored by one of the country’s foremost historic wallpaper conservators, Allyson McDermott, who also oversaw its re-hang in the East Bedroom of the historic house, as part of the China at Harewood exhibition.

***

The East Bedroom prior to restoration:


http://www.harewood.org/china/cgi/gallery/images/image23-1.jpg

The East Bedroom - after restoration and hanging of the wallpaper:

http://www.harewood.org/china/cgi/gallery/images/image31-1.jpg

Detail of the wallpaper showing the dyeing of silk:


http://www.harewood.org/china/cgi/gallery/images/image10-1.jpg


Detail of the wallpaper showing men making ceramics:


http://www.harewood.org/china/cgi/gallery/images/image14-1.jpg


Detail of the wallpaper showing tea being delivered:


http://www.harewood.org/china/cgi/gallery/images/image22-1.jpg


The East Bedroom - after restoration and hanging of the wallpaper:

http://www.harewood.org/china/cgi/gallery/images/image32-1.jpg

All images © Harewood House

[zupermaus]

^thanx, it seems so incongruous, English Country House with Chinoiserie, but it fits remarkably.

[lofter1]

lt's about the history of ocean exploration and shipping and commerce -- and showing off ones' accomplishments.

[zupermaus]

At the same time In Guangdong province many rich Chinese traders and merchants who had been abroad did the same,
showing off their worldliness and travels by bringing in Occidentalism into their fortified villas, watchtowers and mansions
during the 1600s right to the 1920s:

These buildings are called Diaolou, there are 1,833 surviving across the province


http://community.travelchinaguide.com/photo/4090/40903182823294.jpg http://a.abcnews.com/images/International/rt_kaiping_070628_ssh.jpg

http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/8180/diaolou1rs7.jpg


http://www.generasian.ca/images/Tian_lou_diaolou.jpg http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-06/28/xin_31060428103112409627.jpg

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/08XJ18v9rXgLM/610x.jpg

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/04KffcR3uI4Is/610x.jpg


http://lh3.ggpht.com/_nnJp4f732pA/R8iVjOFu3aI/AAAAAAAAAec/0e-69jaN5NA/s640/2008-02-29%2014-30-07.jpg http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-06/28/xin_310604281031578182269.jpg

http://images.china.cn/images1/200707/400127.jpg http://images.china.cn/images1/200707/400134.jpg

[Shadly]

Wicked construction fire in the heart of Beijing.

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-210127

[scumonkey]

YOWZA!:eek:

[zupermaus]

Beijing South has just opened last year, joining the other massive termini of Beijing Central and Beijing West.


The glass ceiling is outfitted with 3,246 solar panels to generate electricity. The structure spreads out like a ray or trilobite and covers 320,000 sq meters (3,444,450 sq. feet), more than the Beijing National Stadium's 258,000 m2. Its 24 platforms have the capacity to dispatch 30,000 passengers per hour or 241,920,000 a year. The 251,000 m2 (2,750,000 sq. ft) waiting area can accommodate 10,000 passengers.

www.wikimedia.org, www.chinadaily.com.cn
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/BeijingSouthRailwayStation.jpg http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20080612/0013729e4ad909bad5081b.jpg

u/c one of the world's largest indoor spaces:


http://images.beijing2008.cn/20080123/Img214238142.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zp_eKXDTiU0/SJuTadlCMnI/AAAAAAAACWI/3LwBeW9QVNg/s320/beijing+south+railway+station+2.jpg
http://images.beijing2008.cn, http://1.bp.blogspot.com

http://t.dfnres.com/p/cnr/i/200808/BeijingSouthJingjinICE/BeijingSouth01.jpg http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3240/2738109208_6bb107c92d.jpg
http://t.dfnres.com and www.flickr.com


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/20080802105531_-_%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E5%8D%97%E7%AB%99.jpg/800px-20080802105531_-_%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E5%8D%97%E7%AB%99.jpg
www.wikimedia.org
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/20080802074839_-_%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E5%8D%97%E7%AB%99.jpg/800px-20080802074839_-_%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E5%8D%97%E7%AB%99.jpg
www.wikimedia.org


all following pix: www.e-architect.co.uk
http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_south_railway_station_farrells080908_3.jpg


http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_south_railway_station_farrells080908_7.jpg



http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_south_railway_station_farrells080908_6.jpg


http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_south_railway_station_farrells080908_2.jpg


http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_south_railway_station_farrells080908_1.jpg


http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_south_railway_station_farrells080908_5.jpg


www.worldarchitecturenews.com
http://static.worldarchitecturenews.com/news_images/10180_6_beijing%20south%208big.jpg

www.e-architect.co.uk
http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_south_railway_station_farrells080908_4.jpg

[zupermaus]

Some more Beijing Stations


another pic of Beijing West terminal, 1996:

http://www.ciuc.org.cn/pics/20088281142555403.jpg
www.ciuc.org.cn

[zupermaus]

Beijing Station, 1959

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ce/Beijing_Railway_Station_at_Night.jpg
www.wikimedia.org

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/231/502012089_bb40df4535.jpg http://pro.corbis.com/images/42-17151566.jpg?size=67&uid=%7B886B9E11-C2C8-4C22-AC45-69C7900C4BF4%7D
www.flickr.com, http://pro.corbis.com
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2352/2238388230_c749fa3342.jpg?v=0 http://u.cctv.com/uploads/userup/0807/23104551R02.jpg
www.flickr.com, http://u.cctv.com
http://u.cctv.com/uploads/userup/0807/231046331063.jpg
http://u.cctv.com

Xizhimen/ Beijing North Station, connected to and built over an old 1980s subway, and now one of the largest metro stations in the world

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3278/2705646911_58f65a023d.jpg
www.flickr.com

u/c:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d8/Xizhimen.Building.JPG/800px-Xizhimen.Building.JPG
www.wikimedia.org

http://en.beijingology.com/images/e/e4/M13XizhimenInterchange.jpg
http://en.beijingology.com

[scumonkey]

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb276/scumonkey/hamed.jpg

[lofter1]

LOL ^

The Beijing South Station is SPECTACULAR

[zupermaus]

1083 ft Beijing WTC finished in 1 1/2 years:

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/2509/20092722203093355mr4.jpg

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4858/20092720272539481gk1.jpg

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/6410/20092720263119566lh3.jpg

http://bbs.classic023.com/attachments/month_0901/20090102_4e461eee7e563be1bc0728nosxWy5Cv4.jpg

http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/937/20081223212553948141a15ji9.jpg

http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/6674/rotationofresizeofcimg4pj0.jpg

http://img55.imageshack.us/img55/4605/2009110351187594720a702us6.jpg

close up of the crown
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3258/2928669598_dcee85519b_b.jpg

view from the top

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3198/2966625776_5f12782deb_b.jpg

[zupermaus]

scary Beijing panorama of the new suburbs from 2004 (outdated now). In 2005 it had as many buildings under construction as 3 Manhattan's.

http://img71.exs.cx/img71/2393/Beijingpano_2.jpg

[zupermaus]

Worlds largest airport and 2nd largest building, designed to hold 150 jets at any one time and already nearing its 62 million capacity. Next year work will start on a 100 million capacity airport:

http://www.instablogsgallery.com/gallery/2007/10/04/beijing-airport-1_48.jpg

http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/3770/259bc6ec7e61c6e254b33d3uu5.jpg

http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/4443/25991de0b2529fd3c7343bdzt2.jpg

http://pic.feeyo.com/pic/20080306/200803061148494612.jpg

http://pic.feeyo.com/pic/20080306/200803061157103005.jpg

http://pic.feeyo.com/pic/20080402/200804021025387074.jpg

http://pic.feeyo.com/pic/20080306/200803061138578541.jpg

[zupermaus]

Steven Holl - Linked Hybrid

new office towers for Beijing

http://www.sens-interdit.fr/images/beijing_city_in_city_maquette.jpg

http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/2/99/29928abf03430f3e1b746be557c6a126-orig http://www.plataformaarquitectura.cl/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/1088890946_dsc07988-w-project-horizo.jpg


http://www.fastcompany.com/files/feature-151-steven-holl2LG.jpg http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/steven-holl-architects-lin.jpg


http://www.mimoa.eu/images/8140_l.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3268/2606489419_3ab5b69489_o.jpg

[zupermaus]

Beijing Olympic Green Convention Centre, RMJM 2006

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_convention_centre_rmjm190607.jpg

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_convention_centre_rmjm250708_4.jpg

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_convention_centre_rmjm250708_5.jpg

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_convention_centre_rmjm250708_2.jpg

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_convention_centre_rmjm250708_hgesch_1.jpg

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_convention_centre_rmjm250708_hgesch_2.jpg

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_convention_centre_rmjm250708_hgesch_3.jpg

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/beijing/jpgs/beijing_convention_centre_rmjm250708_hgesch_4.jpg

[Luca]

Amazing. Thanks for sharing these incredible buildings, Zupermaus!! :)


These buildings are called Diaolou, there are 1,833 surviving across the province


http://community.travelchinaguide.com/photo/4090/40903182823294.jpg




http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-06/28/xin_31060428103112409627.jpg






http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-06/28/xin_310604281031578182269.jpg

[nick-taylor]

I was in Beijing around Xmas time, and managed to take a few pictures. Unfortunately my laptop has hit the buffers, and only just got it back (3,000 photos from Tokyo-Hong Kong-Guilin-Beijing together), so I am still working on getting them together.

One thing I will point out is just how let down I was, and that it is such a soul destroying place. The architecture is poor compared to Shanghai, the transport network (while growing) is a complete mess, the attitude of its citizens probably ranks as some of the worst I've seen (the only time I saw people a bit less uptight was in a club by some stadium/gymnasium - but then most of those I suspect weren't Beijingers). It could have just been my experience, but the place felt so dead. I even joked with my friend (BBC) that they should relocate the capital of China to Hong Kong - because it is a likable place!

[lofter1]

I noticed while scrolling through the slew of images above that, of the faces & bodies seen, there's not one which shows much interest or curiosity regarding the rather spectacular surroundings.

[zupermaus]

well, Beijing has a reputation among the rest of the Chinese as a dour, grandiose place for bureaucrats, and is not popular among Chinese - its very different from the renao ("happy noise") of traditional streetlife as seen in the other megacities. Beijing men have a reputation for being gruff and serious, the women for being surly, though that's just a stereotype (Shanghaiers are seen as effeminate men ruled over by money digging women ;), the Cantonese of Hong Kong as being loud, aggressive and funny). In short Beijing is becoming a modern setpiece of wide avenues and symmetrical buildings, functionalism and power - but its left something behind. The hutongs are very, very different.

[zupermaus]

The rebuilding of the Qianmen area hutongs:

http://images.beijing2008.cn/20080409/Img214298394.jpg http://english.cri.cn/mmsource/images/2008/04/19/4086qianmen1.jpg

http://english.people.com.cn/200705/22/images/xin_57050422062435528709.jpg http://news.xinhuanet.com/photo/2008-07/19/xin_262070519072675080332.jpg

http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/oly_07_21/oly24.jpg

http://i2.sinaimg.cn/dy/c/p/2008-08-07/U1565P1T1D16078577F23DT20080807152750.jpg


Dazhalan area restoration:

http://i355.photobucket.com/albums/r454/velon_2008/P1010255.jpg

http://i355.photobucket.com/albums/r454/velon_2008/P1010210.jpg

http://i355.photobucket.com/albums/r454/velon_2008/P1010220.jpg

http://i355.photobucket.com/albums/r454/velon_2008/P1010223.jpg

http://i355.photobucket.com/albums/r454/velon_2008/P1010225.jpg

http://i355.photobucket.com/albums/r454/velon_2008/P1010238.jpg

http://i355.photobucket.com/albums/r454/velon_2008/P1010197.jpg

http://img1.qq.com/news/pics/11983/11983709.jpg http://img1.qq.com/news/pics/11983/11983712.jpg
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http://img1.qq.com/news/pics/11983/11983713.jpg