A Chinese Utopia?
Review by Pierre Shaw [ Oct 2016] Shenzhen is the city of miraculous conception, born from nothing and yet emerging now as one of the planet’s most ferociously rapid urban developing city. From humble border town beginnings just 35 years ago, Shenzhen has thrown itself onto the world stage projecting its population from 300,000 to 12 – 15 million (no-one seems to know the exact figures). It is yet another step in China’s march...
Mad, bad and dangerous
The media reports that more than a quarter of architecture students in the UK have reported mental health issues. This reply points the finger at where the real lunacy lies. In May 2016, the National Union of Students (NUS) issued a report that concerns about debt are affecting the mental health of 36 per cent of students. A 2015 report by Universities UK titled “Student mental well-being in Higher Education” says that “every year one...
Pledges for a new narrative
We are a group of architects, designers, planners, artists & creatives brought together in the aftermath of the EU referendum. PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE: www.newnarratives.org.uk BREXIT has created profound uncertainty. But do we see it as a moment of crisis or of opportunity? We choose the latter. As a result, we are positive about democracy and the freedom that it reflects, and see a world of possibilities if the UK takes steps...
Brexit
Brexit is is not a triumphalist moment but one for constructing a better future, one in which we have the autonomy to make decisions outside the technocratic framework of the EU. For those who are fearful, it is understandable – and there is inevitably going to be business difficulties in the months ahead. But let’s not forget that things were far from rosy before the referendum. For those who have experienced home-grown recessions or...
Church on the Beach
Austin Williams | 7 April 2016 From Nantes to Naples, Bruge to Budapest, many key European cities have churches at their centre. Regardless of denomination, the centrality of these churches has tended to convey a certain historic gravitas, dignity and authority to the civic sphere. Originally built as bastions of power, tradition and religious dogma, churches have survived, in many instances, as the genius loci of urban space. Recall...
Home is where the Art is
‘Re:Home’ is Cressida Brown’s revisit and revision to her 2006 play, ‘Home’. This new version is set and performed in-situ at Waltham Forest’s infamous, and now demolished, Beaumont Estate high rise tower blocks.
Libraries are for reading not knitting
By Elisabetta Gasparoni | 23 February 2016 The Carnegie Trust has created four databases to showcase library-run projects that contribute to public wellbeing. The databases accompany the trust’s leaflet, ‘Speaking Volumes’, which outlines how public libraries impact on four policy areas – the economy, education, culture and society – and how libraries contribute to the wellbeing of individuals and communities. The trust has given...
Wang Shu. Who?
Wang used his reclusive decade to reinvent himself as ‘a scholar, a craftsman, and an architect, in that order’. He emerged as a self-professed member of the literati: Chinese intellectuals who used painting and poetry to display their erudition and superior cultivated status.
“Style: In defence of Post-Modernism”
by Patrick Lynch | 20 February 2016 In this witty and robust defence, Adam Nathaniel Furman makes a case for thinking about postmodernism as a style and as a way life – or rather, as the expression of the diversity of ways of living that emerged in the 1960s in affluent western societies: Civil Rights, Gay Rights, etc. He convincingly elides these social phenomena with the various strands of architectural thinking that one finds...
The Great Mall of China
‘Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China’ . – by Nick Jewell — After three and a half decades of double-digit growth, China finally appears to be slowing. Even though the modest figures it now reports would be the envy of many Western economies, neo-liberal commentators are gleefully lining up to augur the death of the ‘Chinese Dream’. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but the economic slowdown may just...
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