Art, Photo & Misc.
Reiner Riedler, “Window of the World, China”, from Fake Holidays, 2004.
China, Shenzhen, Themepark Window of the World, Wedding couple in front of Egyptian Pyramides.
Clothes hang outside a bus which has been converted into a dwelling for Lu Changshan and his wife, near newly-constructed residential buildings in Hefei, Anhui province, on November 12, 2012. Lu, 39, and his 36-year-old wife Zhang Dingmei have been living in a bus for more than three years selling cement and sand as their livelihood. In order to constantly watch over their construction materials and save on rent, they chose to live in the bus. They have moved three times during the past three years to be next to newly-constructed residential buildings where they could have more customers, local media reported. (Reuters/Stringer)
(via promieniowanie)
A Chinese couple who refused to move out of their home to make way for a main road now find they are living in the middle of a roundabout.
Their five-storey house with ragged edges rises incongruously from a huge circle in the middle of a new main road, with freshly laid black pavement swerving around it.
Duck farmer Luo Baogen and his wife are the only residents left from a neighbourhood of once-connected homes that was demolished to make way for the road.
Fischer von Erlach, Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture (1721).
WANG SHU, 2012 PRITZKER PRIZE
Ningbo Historic Museum, Ningbo, China, 2003-2008. (Iwan Baan)
“The architecture of the 2012 Pritzker Prize Laureate Wang Shu, opens new horizons while at the same time resonates with place and memory. His buildings have the unique ability to evoke the past, without making direct references to history. Born in 1963 and educated in China, Wang Shu’s architecture is exemplary in its strong sense of cultural continuity and re-invigorated tradition. In works undertaken by the office he founded with his partner and wife Lu Wenyu, Amateur Architecture Studio, the past is literally given new life as the relationship between past and present is explored. The question of the proper relation of present to past is particularly timely, for the recent process of urbanization in China invites debate as to whether architecture should be anchored in tradition or should look only toward the future. As with any great architecture, Wang Shu´s work is able to transcend that debate, producing an architecture that is timeless, deeply rooted in its context and yet universal”. (Jury Citation)
Project No. 1 of 2004, 2004.
“The chairs are modelled to be reminiscent of Chinese ideograms, and sometimes the chairs do end up resembling the logograms they were based on. The artist’s manipulations to the objects call to mind Ezra Pound’s Ideogrammic Method, injecting substance and three-dimensionality to illustrate a symbolic idea.”
From “Chairs by Designer Shao Fan” at Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
From Yangtze, The Long River.
“More people live along the Yangtze’s banks than in the whole of the United States: that is one in every eighteen people on the planet. (…) This extraordinary and vast river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese. It caught my imagination and carried me on my journey”
