CityPlaceN1
Senior Member
The recent earthquake revealed how shoddy much of the new construction is in China. Brand new buildings fell like pancakes. I wonder if these trophy projects suffer from the same issues.
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Beijing unveils Bird's Nest
- Thread starter wyliepoon
- Start date
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Olivo Barbieri's silent film Site Specific_SHANGHAI 04 is a helicopter fly-by of hundreds of ghastly new Shanghai's high rises ( avoiding the Big Hair spectacle towers ), part of Shanghai Kaleidoscope at the ROM - a pretty sobering look at what economic change hath wrought to that city. The "relentless drive towards modernity" that Alvin talks of is critiqued in this and other works of contemporary art in the exhibition. Barbieri's film ends with a stirring singing of The East is Red.
The east is red, the sun is rising.
China has brought forth a Mao Zedong.
He amasses fortune for the people,
Hurrah, he is the people's great savior.
Chairman Mao loves the people,
He is our guide,
To build a new China,
Hurrah, he leads us forward!
The Communist Party is like the sun,
Wherever it shines, it is bright.
Wherever there is a Communist Party,
Hurrah, there the people are liberated!
The east is red, the sun is rising.
China has brought forth a Mao Zedong.
He amasses fortune for the people,
Hurrah, he is the people's great savior.
Chairman Mao loves the people,
He is our guide,
To build a new China,
Hurrah, he leads us forward!
The Communist Party is like the sun,
Wherever it shines, it is bright.
Wherever there is a Communist Party,
Hurrah, there the people are liberated!
ganjavih
Senior Member
The buildings are only shoddy if they are meant to house unimportant people.
adma
Superstar
...in unimportant places.
wyliepoon
Senior Member
Government-built buildings were particularly hard hit, especially schools, which goes to show that corruption plays a significant part of the construction industry there, especially in less-developed areas like Sichuan.
However I won't expect the Olympic projects to suffer the same problems. These are "technology transfer" projects designed and managed by Westerners so that China would be able to learn building technology from them. I don't see how anybody would want to stake his/her reputation in China by running a shoddy construction project there.
*****
re: Site Specific_SHANGHAI 04
I love that film. When I first watched it at ICC I stayed to watch it again and again, because the aerials were so fascinating.
However the use of The East is Red as the closing music was a bit ironic, even inappropriate, to me. Shanghai's skyscraper boom is largely a result of trying to emulate the development of its archrival, Hong Kong, which, until recently, was one of the most anti-Mao, anti-communist places in the world (many of its residents were originally refugees from communist China). If not for the development of high-rises in capitalist Hong Kong, and if not for the reforms of Deng Xiaopeng (who at one time was labeled as an enemy of Mao), Shanghai would still be a sea of low-rise commie blocks instead of the high-rise city that it is today.
wyliepoon
Senior Member
By the way, the ROM will be hosting a discussion on Shanghai on July 29...
http://www.canadianarchitect.com/issues/ISArticle.asp?id=86904&issue=07142008&ref=rss
http://www.canadianarchitect.com/issues/ISArticle.asp?id=86904&issue=07142008&ref=rss
rpgr
Active Member
As a CBC I can't help but to think that the buildings were built to look 'purdy' but will last only half the time a normal building would!
alklay
Senior Member
August 5, 2008
Architecture Review New York Times
Olympic Stadium With a Design to Remember
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
BEIJING
Given the astounding expectations piled upon the National Stadium, I’m surprised it hasn’t collapsed under the strain.
More than 90,000 spectators will stream through its gates on Friday for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games; billions are expected to watch the fireworks on television. At the center of it all is this dazzling stadium, which is said to embody everything from China’s muscle-flexing nationalism to a newfound cultural sophistication.
Expect to be overwhelmed. Designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the stadium lives up to its aspiration as a global landmark. Its elliptical latticework shell, which has earned it the nickname the Bird’s Nest, has an intoxicating beauty that lingers in the imagination. Its allure is only likely to deepen once the enormous crowds disperse and the Olympic Games fade into memory.
Great architecture can never be fully conveyed through a television screen, of course, and it saddens me that so many Americans will experience the building only via satellite. In a site for mass gatherings, Herzog and de Meuron have carved out psychological space for the individual, and rethought the relationship between the solitary human and the crowd, the everyday and the heroic. However the structure attests to China’s nationalistic ambitions, it is also an aesthetic triumph that should cement the nation’s reputation as a place where bold, creative gambles are unfolding every day.
Until now, the number of memorable Olympic stadiums could be counted on one hand. There is Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Stadium, by Werner March, with its imposing ring of stone columns, a symbol of fascism’s absolute disregard for the individual. In an intentional counterpoint, Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto designed transparent tentlike roof canopies for the 1972 Olympic Stadium in Munich, daring in their structural innovation. And there is the elegant ring of slender Y-shaped columns supporting Pier Luigi Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport, which was a minor venue at the 1960 Games in Rome.
Herzog and de Meuron were chosen for the Beijing project partly on the strength of their design for the 2005 Allianz Arena in Munich. Clad in puffy, translucent panels made of a high-tech plastic, that arena’s doughnut-shaped form seems to swell from pressure within. (Herzog compares it to a boiling pot.)
During sports events, it glows with energy: the hue of its translucent skin shifts from game to game with the colors of the teams. Inside, the steep pitch of the seats creates the impression that the 70,000 spectators are coiled tightly around the field. It’s a masterly way to choreograph the focused hysteria of a soccer match.
But in Beijing, the architects were clearly striving for something more heroic. The centerpiece of a vast Olympic park in the northern reaches of Beijing, the stadium is raised on a mound of earth to give it a more monumental presence. Its matrix of crisscrossing columns and beams was conceived as a gargantuan work of public sculpture.
Viewed from a distance, the contrast between its bent steel columns and its bulging elliptical form gives the stadium a surreal, moody appearance, as if it were straining to contain the forces that are pushing and pulling it this way and that. Philosophically, it suggests the tensions just beneath the surface of a society in constant turmoil.
Working with the engineering firm Arup Sport, the architects designed a series of cantilevered trusses to support the roof, which shades the seats. A secondary pattern of irregular crisscrossing beams is woven through this frame, creating the illusion of a gigantic web of rubber bands straining to hold the building in place.
But the stadium’s exterior also sends other messages. Herzog and de Meuron came of age when architects had begun striving to break down the purity of late Modernism, which they saw as a kind of authoritarianism. By turning to asymmetrical forms and mysteriously translucent materials, they challenged that rigid, aesthetic ethos.
Here, those values reveal themselves slowly as you circle the building. There is no crushing monumental axis leading into the stadium as there was in Berlin. From close up, the tilting beams suggest rather a dark and enchanted forest in a fairy tale.
Visitors filter into the Bird’s Nest from all sides. Upon reaching the ground-level concourse, they either spill down into the lower-level seats or climb slender stairways through the matrix of beams to the upper concourses.
The crisscrossing columns create a Piranesian world of dark corners and odd leftover spaces — an effect that intensifies as you ascend through the structure. Light filters through the translucent roof panels, and a network of drainpipes suspended from the roof adds a tough, utilitarian feel. The feverish play of light and shadows is reminiscent of the set for a German Expressionist film. From your seat, you gaze out at the surrounding skyline, where rows of generic housing towers seem to extend to eternity.
The stadium can, in fact, be read as an attack on the mind-numbing conformity of such architecture. By creating a hierarchy of intimate spaces, Herzog and de Meuron allow for unexpected moments of privacy and solitude. Their aim is to break down what the writer Elias Canetti, in his renowned study of crowds, described as “the closed ring from which nothing can escape.”
This vision of the stadium as a gigantic social organism, rather than as a machine for mass hypnosis, is underscored by the architects’ plans for the building’s future. A vast shopping mall, demanded by the developer who collaborated on the project with the government, is buried beneath the stadium so that it will not disturb the serenity of the surrounding park. To reach it, shoppers will descend into the ground on broad ramps. By contrast, the architects want the stadium’s ground-level concourse to remain open to the park, allowing pedestrians to wander through the crisscrossing columns and gaze into the empty pit of the stadium.
If the stadium ends up being as porous as the architects planned, the result will be the kind of recycled space haunted by memory. Think of the abandoned shell of the Roman Colosseum, parts of which were variously used as housing and workshops before Roman officials began serious restoration work in the early 19th century.
Architectural history is littered with brilliant projects that were ultimately debased by clients who didn’t understand them — or understood them only too well. The Chinese government has already threatened to build a fence around the stadium after the Games. And the developer is considering a plan to create a boutique hotel on the stadium’s upper-level concourse. If that goes forward, the stadium could gradually be swamped by consumerism.
Nonetheless, amid the endless debate over the ethics of building in China, Herzog and de Meuron’s achievement is undeniable. Rather than offering us a reflection of China’s contemporary zeitgeist, they set out to create a sphere of resistance, and to gently redirect society’s course.
The National Stadium reaffirms architecture’s civilizing role in a nation that, despite its outward confidence, is struggling to forge a new identity out of a maelstrom of inner conflict.
Architecture Review New York Times
Olympic Stadium With a Design to Remember
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
BEIJING
Given the astounding expectations piled upon the National Stadium, I’m surprised it hasn’t collapsed under the strain.
More than 90,000 spectators will stream through its gates on Friday for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games; billions are expected to watch the fireworks on television. At the center of it all is this dazzling stadium, which is said to embody everything from China’s muscle-flexing nationalism to a newfound cultural sophistication.
Expect to be overwhelmed. Designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the stadium lives up to its aspiration as a global landmark. Its elliptical latticework shell, which has earned it the nickname the Bird’s Nest, has an intoxicating beauty that lingers in the imagination. Its allure is only likely to deepen once the enormous crowds disperse and the Olympic Games fade into memory.
Great architecture can never be fully conveyed through a television screen, of course, and it saddens me that so many Americans will experience the building only via satellite. In a site for mass gatherings, Herzog and de Meuron have carved out psychological space for the individual, and rethought the relationship between the solitary human and the crowd, the everyday and the heroic. However the structure attests to China’s nationalistic ambitions, it is also an aesthetic triumph that should cement the nation’s reputation as a place where bold, creative gambles are unfolding every day.
Until now, the number of memorable Olympic stadiums could be counted on one hand. There is Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Stadium, by Werner March, with its imposing ring of stone columns, a symbol of fascism’s absolute disregard for the individual. In an intentional counterpoint, Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto designed transparent tentlike roof canopies for the 1972 Olympic Stadium in Munich, daring in their structural innovation. And there is the elegant ring of slender Y-shaped columns supporting Pier Luigi Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport, which was a minor venue at the 1960 Games in Rome.
Herzog and de Meuron were chosen for the Beijing project partly on the strength of their design for the 2005 Allianz Arena in Munich. Clad in puffy, translucent panels made of a high-tech plastic, that arena’s doughnut-shaped form seems to swell from pressure within. (Herzog compares it to a boiling pot.)
During sports events, it glows with energy: the hue of its translucent skin shifts from game to game with the colors of the teams. Inside, the steep pitch of the seats creates the impression that the 70,000 spectators are coiled tightly around the field. It’s a masterly way to choreograph the focused hysteria of a soccer match.
But in Beijing, the architects were clearly striving for something more heroic. The centerpiece of a vast Olympic park in the northern reaches of Beijing, the stadium is raised on a mound of earth to give it a more monumental presence. Its matrix of crisscrossing columns and beams was conceived as a gargantuan work of public sculpture.
Viewed from a distance, the contrast between its bent steel columns and its bulging elliptical form gives the stadium a surreal, moody appearance, as if it were straining to contain the forces that are pushing and pulling it this way and that. Philosophically, it suggests the tensions just beneath the surface of a society in constant turmoil.
Working with the engineering firm Arup Sport, the architects designed a series of cantilevered trusses to support the roof, which shades the seats. A secondary pattern of irregular crisscrossing beams is woven through this frame, creating the illusion of a gigantic web of rubber bands straining to hold the building in place.
But the stadium’s exterior also sends other messages. Herzog and de Meuron came of age when architects had begun striving to break down the purity of late Modernism, which they saw as a kind of authoritarianism. By turning to asymmetrical forms and mysteriously translucent materials, they challenged that rigid, aesthetic ethos.
Here, those values reveal themselves slowly as you circle the building. There is no crushing monumental axis leading into the stadium as there was in Berlin. From close up, the tilting beams suggest rather a dark and enchanted forest in a fairy tale.
Visitors filter into the Bird’s Nest from all sides. Upon reaching the ground-level concourse, they either spill down into the lower-level seats or climb slender stairways through the matrix of beams to the upper concourses.
The crisscrossing columns create a Piranesian world of dark corners and odd leftover spaces — an effect that intensifies as you ascend through the structure. Light filters through the translucent roof panels, and a network of drainpipes suspended from the roof adds a tough, utilitarian feel. The feverish play of light and shadows is reminiscent of the set for a German Expressionist film. From your seat, you gaze out at the surrounding skyline, where rows of generic housing towers seem to extend to eternity.
The stadium can, in fact, be read as an attack on the mind-numbing conformity of such architecture. By creating a hierarchy of intimate spaces, Herzog and de Meuron allow for unexpected moments of privacy and solitude. Their aim is to break down what the writer Elias Canetti, in his renowned study of crowds, described as “the closed ring from which nothing can escape.”
This vision of the stadium as a gigantic social organism, rather than as a machine for mass hypnosis, is underscored by the architects’ plans for the building’s future. A vast shopping mall, demanded by the developer who collaborated on the project with the government, is buried beneath the stadium so that it will not disturb the serenity of the surrounding park. To reach it, shoppers will descend into the ground on broad ramps. By contrast, the architects want the stadium’s ground-level concourse to remain open to the park, allowing pedestrians to wander through the crisscrossing columns and gaze into the empty pit of the stadium.
If the stadium ends up being as porous as the architects planned, the result will be the kind of recycled space haunted by memory. Think of the abandoned shell of the Roman Colosseum, parts of which were variously used as housing and workshops before Roman officials began serious restoration work in the early 19th century.
Architectural history is littered with brilliant projects that were ultimately debased by clients who didn’t understand them — or understood them only too well. The Chinese government has already threatened to build a fence around the stadium after the Games. And the developer is considering a plan to create a boutique hotel on the stadium’s upper-level concourse. If that goes forward, the stadium could gradually be swamped by consumerism.
Nonetheless, amid the endless debate over the ethics of building in China, Herzog and de Meuron’s achievement is undeniable. Rather than offering us a reflection of China’s contemporary zeitgeist, they set out to create a sphere of resistance, and to gently redirect society’s course.
The National Stadium reaffirms architecture’s civilizing role in a nation that, despite its outward confidence, is struggling to forge a new identity out of a maelstrom of inner conflict.
dt_toronto_geek
Superstar
And if it rains...
...China can deploy it's weather modification system
China readies artillery to avert rain at Olympics, but some think idea's all wet
As opening day for the 2008 Summer Olympics draws near, thousands of Chinese villagers are in training. Loading up artillery shells and readying rocket launchers, they await a call to arms.
The villagers aren't part of some civilian security corps. They're part of China's weather modification program. Their mission: to shoot dust into threatening clouds in advance of the opening ceremony Friday in Beijing.
Rain will not be allowed to dampen this Olympic flame.
China is home to one of the oldest, largest and most costly weather modification programs in the world.
In a presentation to climate scientists in Japan, Dr. Zhanyu Yao of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences recently described the scale of his nation's weather-changing effort: China has 37,000 people, 7,000 artillery guns and 4,700 rocket launchers in place, working in tandem with provincial leaders, meteorologists and radar stations throughout the country. It spends about $63 million a year on the program and claims a benefit worth $1.71 billion a year.
The weather modifiers slake thirsty crops, ward off damaging hail and weaken lightning storms through strategic cloud seeding, spraying dry ice, liquid nitrogen or silver iodide depending on the circumstances, he said.
The technology has been studied worldwide since the 1950s, from Russia to Saudi Arabia, and despite the difficulty of proving its effectiveness, it's still employed, with some controversy, in western states such as North Dakota and California. The debate is always whether cloud seeding made the weather, or the whims of Mother Nature did. Daniel Breed, a project scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, believes the technology can work in certain situations, but not with great precision.
"You can increase precipitation from one individual storm by as much as 50 percent," Breed said. It's also possible to affect the size of hailstones and break up fog banks, he said.
So why hasn't Florida used it to fill up parched Lake Okeechobee or put out forest fires?
Local meteorologists say the technology is ill-suited to Florida's warmer clouds. Plus, it's expensive and fraught with liability potential.
It works best in places where the clouds lack a necessary ingredient for rain or snow: tiny particles that water molecules can grab onto.
"You can't just go out and seed clear skies and make it rain. You have to seed specific clouds at a specific time in their life," said Geoff Shaughnessy, a senior meteorologist with the South Florida Water Management District. "Most of the places where this works, there's a lack of condensation nuclei. Here I would think there's no shortage of aerosols, just from the salt spray and dust from Africa and pollution."
For the Beijing Olympics, where villagers with mobile rocket launchers sit ready to shoot shells heavenward at a moment's notice, the goal isn't to increase rain, but to prevent it.
That has meteorologists and weather modifiers in the United States chuckling. The thought of being asked to seed clouds to prevent rain on Super Bowl Sunday, for example, makes them snort.
"Clouds, pesky critters that they are, you just can't steer them where you want," said Hans Ahlness, vice president of operations at Weather Modification Inc.
His Fargo, N.D., company is working on an $8.8 million research effort to increase Wyoming's snow pack. It's an attractive prospect for utility companies that rely on hydroelectric power.
He says his planes can help pull extra rain from a nimbus cloud, on the order of 10 percent more, but they can't make a cloud appear out of thin air, nor can they stop the rain.
Breed, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, believes the Chinese scientists are in the unfortunate position of trying to placate their politicians.
"They are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place," Breed said. "Their scientists privately acknowledge that there really isn't any proof that they can do this kind of stuff."
So what are the chances that it will rain in Beijing on Friday?
China's official meteorologists say there's a 50 percent chance of precipitation. The Games begin as the region's rainy season winds down.
Recalling the fate of China's former food and drug administrator, who was executed for corruption amid product safety scandals, Ahlness, at Weather Modification Inc., said his sympathies were with the Chinese scientists charged with holding the umbrella.
"I don't think I'd want to run their weather modification program," Ahlness said. "I hope they have clear weather just so they don't have to try anything."
...China can deploy it's weather modification system
China readies artillery to avert rain at Olympics, but some think idea's all wet
As opening day for the 2008 Summer Olympics draws near, thousands of Chinese villagers are in training. Loading up artillery shells and readying rocket launchers, they await a call to arms.
The villagers aren't part of some civilian security corps. They're part of China's weather modification program. Their mission: to shoot dust into threatening clouds in advance of the opening ceremony Friday in Beijing.
Rain will not be allowed to dampen this Olympic flame.
China is home to one of the oldest, largest and most costly weather modification programs in the world.
In a presentation to climate scientists in Japan, Dr. Zhanyu Yao of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences recently described the scale of his nation's weather-changing effort: China has 37,000 people, 7,000 artillery guns and 4,700 rocket launchers in place, working in tandem with provincial leaders, meteorologists and radar stations throughout the country. It spends about $63 million a year on the program and claims a benefit worth $1.71 billion a year.
The weather modifiers slake thirsty crops, ward off damaging hail and weaken lightning storms through strategic cloud seeding, spraying dry ice, liquid nitrogen or silver iodide depending on the circumstances, he said.
The technology has been studied worldwide since the 1950s, from Russia to Saudi Arabia, and despite the difficulty of proving its effectiveness, it's still employed, with some controversy, in western states such as North Dakota and California. The debate is always whether cloud seeding made the weather, or the whims of Mother Nature did. Daniel Breed, a project scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, believes the technology can work in certain situations, but not with great precision.
"You can increase precipitation from one individual storm by as much as 50 percent," Breed said. It's also possible to affect the size of hailstones and break up fog banks, he said.
So why hasn't Florida used it to fill up parched Lake Okeechobee or put out forest fires?
Local meteorologists say the technology is ill-suited to Florida's warmer clouds. Plus, it's expensive and fraught with liability potential.
It works best in places where the clouds lack a necessary ingredient for rain or snow: tiny particles that water molecules can grab onto.
"You can't just go out and seed clear skies and make it rain. You have to seed specific clouds at a specific time in their life," said Geoff Shaughnessy, a senior meteorologist with the South Florida Water Management District. "Most of the places where this works, there's a lack of condensation nuclei. Here I would think there's no shortage of aerosols, just from the salt spray and dust from Africa and pollution."
For the Beijing Olympics, where villagers with mobile rocket launchers sit ready to shoot shells heavenward at a moment's notice, the goal isn't to increase rain, but to prevent it.
That has meteorologists and weather modifiers in the United States chuckling. The thought of being asked to seed clouds to prevent rain on Super Bowl Sunday, for example, makes them snort.
"Clouds, pesky critters that they are, you just can't steer them where you want," said Hans Ahlness, vice president of operations at Weather Modification Inc.
His Fargo, N.D., company is working on an $8.8 million research effort to increase Wyoming's snow pack. It's an attractive prospect for utility companies that rely on hydroelectric power.
He says his planes can help pull extra rain from a nimbus cloud, on the order of 10 percent more, but they can't make a cloud appear out of thin air, nor can they stop the rain.
Breed, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, believes the Chinese scientists are in the unfortunate position of trying to placate their politicians.
"They are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place," Breed said. "Their scientists privately acknowledge that there really isn't any proof that they can do this kind of stuff."
So what are the chances that it will rain in Beijing on Friday?
China's official meteorologists say there's a 50 percent chance of precipitation. The Games begin as the region's rainy season winds down.
Recalling the fate of China's former food and drug administrator, who was executed for corruption amid product safety scandals, Ahlness, at Weather Modification Inc., said his sympathies were with the Chinese scientists charged with holding the umbrella.
"I don't think I'd want to run their weather modification program," Ahlness said. "I hope they have clear weather just so they don't have to try anything."