In this series, Christof Spieler gives a daily report on his trip to China for a special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall.
Beijing South is an immaculate and well-organized high speed rail station as you’ll ever see. This is the Beijing hub for high speed rail, including the new line to Shanghai. It’s a shiny new building, completed in 2008. It’s a perfect oval in plan, though that’s best appreciated in satellite photos, not in person. Two concourses — one below the rail tracks and one above them — connect to bus terminals, taxi lanes, underground parking and a subway station. Inside, there are ticket offices, waiting areas decorated with palms, and retail — food, books, gifts — catering to travelers.
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In this Hear Our Houston audio tour and contribution to Unexpected City, Musician Pete Gordon takes us on a looped walk around Midtown where he has owned and operated The Continental Club for ten years. 3700 Main used to be a general store in the 1920s and is now a thriving music venue and bar run by Pete, who loves preserving the old architecture while importing some of Austin’s quirkiness after the original Continental Club. I personally recommend stopping by on a Monday night to hear the masterful contemporary tango composer and piano man Glover Gill. Sink into a Southern pace and the pats of Pete’s cowboy boots while he recalls the area’s evolution over the past ten years, marvels at his favorite buildings, and hopes for preservation of historic architecture moving forward. Listen by clicking on the link below:
Midtown by Pete Gordon
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In this series, Christof Spieler gives a daily report on his trip to China for a special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall.
Right next to the office towers of the CBD is another world of back alleys, lined with older, smaller buildings, some six stories tall, some only one. These are not the historic Hutongs — this land was not even part of the city 50 years ago. But they retain some of the same spirit. The roads are narrow. Gates open onto walled courtyards. The stores are small. The buildings feel lived in. Cars, bikes, mopeds, and pedestrians mix freely. There’s a remarkable urban life here, sometimes directly across the street from the granite drives and manicured lawns of office towers.
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In this series, Christof Spieler gives a daily report on his trip to China for a special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall.
At times, Chinese urban planning circa 2000 seems like American urban planning circa 1970. This is Jianwai SOHO, completed 2005, with 7.5 million square feet of retail and residential on 42 acres in Beijing’s CBD area. One level is reserved for pedestrians and retail; access roads, parking, loading docks are placed below, and 2,110 residential units occupy a series of matching towers above. It’s like Embarcadero Center in San Francisco or Peachtree Center in Atlanta, only bigger. (That analogy seems all the more relevant since John Portman & Associates, who designed both of those complexes, have done multiple major projects in China, including a 3-tower complex next door to Jianwai Soho.)
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In this series, Christof Spieler gives a daily report on his trip to China for a special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall.
The first impression of central Beijing, emerging from the subway station at Chongwenmen, is one of massive scale. Here, the street (an arterial, not a freeway) has frontage roads. At Tian’amen Square (above) Chairman Mao looks out over 18 lanes of traffic at grade; pedestrians must go down the stairs to cross underneath. Westheimer looks like a side street by comparison. At this size, streets become major obstacles. Crossing on foot takes some courage, especially since pedestrians are expected to yield to cars, bikes, mopeds, and buses. At major intersections, orange-vested traffic wardens try (to varying degrees of success) to keep order. I get a sense that the city has been reshaped to fit cars — and, judging from the speed of traffic, that the attempt has not entirely succeeded.
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Shenzhen Central Business District, photo from Wikipedia
Mind-blowing statistics about China’s urban growth abound. Here’s one. Shenzhen grew from a small town of about 300,000 to over 14 million in just 30 years, making its sister city, Houston, look like a stone on the side of the highway. How can we make sense of numbers like that? Several great books, including Thomas Campanella’s The Concrete Dragon, have brought in-depth analysis to the destruction of China’s classical and vernacular architectures, and the resistance that destruction engendered. In glossy design magazines, we see skyscrapers and highways jammed with traffic, evoking both contempt and envy. China is outdoing the United States at our own excesses.
More recently, the Chinese government and firms working there have argued that new projects engage traditional styles and preservation in innovative ways, and that pedestrian-friendly place-making take precedence. Most publications, however, only provide a cursory look at China from above. Reviews focus on the most expensive, highest profile, star-architect-designed projects. What is happening beyond the frame of the Bird’s Nest beauty shots?
Cite and OffCite are sending Christof Spieler, one of Houston’s brightest minds, to China to report on the ground. Spieler is an award-winning engineer, Rice School of Architecture lecturer, and METRO Board Member. Over the next two weeks, Spieler will be traveling from Beijing to Hong Kong, riding the world’s fastest high-speed rail along the way. Stay tuned to OffCite for a series of posts by Spieler as records his thoughts.
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In this Hear Our Houston audio tour and contribution to Unexpected City, writers Diana and Steven Wolfe stroll from their first Houston residence, a house in the Heights at 920 Ridge where they lived together thirteen years ago. Turning left onto Julian Street, they pass under the oaks and crepe myrtles to Bayland Street, where “if you look down to your right the streets just become this whole cathedral of overhanging oaks that are like protective Heights spirits, and they make it feel beautifully warm and welcoming.”
Listen by clicking on the link below:
Oaks and Crepe Myrtles in the Heights (mp3, 12 MB) by Steven and Diana Wolfe
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Cover image cropped from Monu issue #14.
Houston has always had a tricky relationship with historic preservation. Unlike numerous other global cities, Houston often allows its older structures to grow over with weeds or be demolished, eventually making way for new development. Traditional preservationism would imply that this approach is morally wrong: not to preserve architectural history is to lose it forever.
Yet both the new issue of MONU: Magazine on Urbanism and a recent show called Cronocaos, curated by Rem Koolhaas at the New Museum in New York, question our common approach to preservation. Should old buildings be preserved in a pristine state forever, or should they be allowed to remain an active part of a city, even if they continue to deteriorate from use? Has historic preservation done more damage to cities than good, by airbrushing and sanitizing them for tourists and the wealthy, while making them less accessible and useful to citizens? The image portrayed by Koolhaas is of preservationists cleaning facades, scrubbing interiors, and then putting up metaphorical velvet ropes that prevent users from getting too close to the architecture—”please do not touch. Even clean hands can harm the art….etc.” Even the term preservation implies an object sealed off from the effects of time, petrified, as it were.
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In this Hear Our Houston audio tour and contribution to Unexpected City, writers Kelly Moore and Addie Tsai take a walk from an apartment to the labyrinth at St. Thomas, with a stop at the reflecting pool by the Rothko Chapel. Moore, who uses a wheelchair, contributed the cover story to the current issue of Cite (84, Spring 2011), available at bookstores now. Listen by clicking on the link below:
A Walk With Wheels (mp3, 5.3 MB) by Kelly Moore and Addie Tsai
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Microcosm, photos by Stephanie Toppin
In this Hear Our Houston audio tour and contribution to Unexpected City, Visual Artist Stephanie Toppin echoes Bob Stein, the dean of the School of Social Sciences of Rice University: “Hillcroft is disorganized but not necessarily unorganized development. It is what Houston is all about. When you go from one end of Hillcroft to the other end, you cross every ethnic and racial group in our city. As a result, I want to say it is a microcosm.”
In Toppin’s words: “This one mile stretch of Hillcroft provides everything you need but wins you over through your stomach. Your destination is Bayland Park, always bustling with a game of soccer, families relaxing after a long day, and children unphased by the summer sun. I grew up here for my elementary school life and my mother always chanted that perhaps we would not have money for some things but we would never, ever go hungry. There was always food, ‘our food,’ as well as the education of sampling tastes from many different cultures. ” Listen by clicking on the link below:
Microcosm: A Stroll Down Hillcroft (mp3, 13.9 MB) by Stephanie Toppin
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