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'un-chinese' like buildings sprouting up in China

15K views 56 replies 22 participants last post by  travelworld123 
#1 ·
on a recent trip to China (actually both times that i went), along major highways and roads, i see many houses and highrises which look very bland and 'fake'.

for example, on a highway going out of shanghai, all along the sides i see 3-4 story houses or mid rise apartments with fairytale castle like designs on its roofs. also the colours of these buildings are very 'fake' like, pale pink, pale blue etc...

it's as if the designers want to copy western 'designs' and they think that disney like castle things look good. also many buildings are built looking like typical american houses, it's sort of annoying me how they are trying to make it look american. this sort of thing takes away culture...
i'm not saying anything bad about america here, i'm purely saying that china should keep with their own architecture which looks nice.

imagine a chinese city where 75+% of buildings look 'chinese. like a modern, skyscraper city but with fulll chinese flavour...
driving along the shanghai expressway with massive skyscrapers with chinese style designs (taipei 101 for eg, or that massive hotel in taipei with the chinese style architecutre - that red massive one, don't know what its called).
 
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#2 ·
An interesting tension here. The idea of worldwide sameness is terrifying.

But I think it's unlikely. Gothic architecture arose in France and spread throughout Europe, with local variations. The result was magnificent architecture in many countries. Similar things can be said about classical revivals, baroque and other styles: they arise in one place, are adopted and modified in a variety of locations. Similarly about 120 years ago western artists adopted African and Asian influences and revolutionized western art.

Why would the Chinese with money want to look like everyone else? Let them build what they want. What is interesting will survive; what isn't will disappear. I don't believe the whole world will look the same; that's just not human nature.
 
#3 ·
The Chinese often love those kitchy styles. I saw the same thing on my trip trough China. I really like the new modern skyscrapers though, they look awesome. Sometimes with traditional chinese architecture mixed with western architecture. But there are a lot of lowrises that are indeed disney-like. But they like it. The like gold (color) on their buildings as well.
 
#4 ·
I think if you look beyond architecture, Chinese cities can be unique in their layout, planning, and general form.

If anything, if the world was going in a direction towards looking all the same, I don't believe you would say it is "western" at all. Cities in Asia, in Russia, etc, have their own thing going that looks modern but hardly American or European.
 
#5 ·
hmm, i'm trying to find some photos but can't see to find any...

i'm also wondering what chinese cities looked like before 'modernization' and all the modern generic buildings have been built. like what they looked like how their own chinese buildings were around. hard to explain... similar to what florence is now - like it was originally.

heres a thread i made before addressing this issue:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1184797&highlight=
 
#8 ·
These type of fairy tale houses are typical for developing countries. People there think its modern to live in such a thing.

Typical american or european suburbs, on the other hand, look quite conservative. You rarely see shiny blue roofs and all that crap.
 
#19 ·
here are a few i have found in my photos, the full on 'fantasy/disneylike' ones i don't seem to have taken any photos of, but these ones are also what i'm talking about:

here is one that i think we were driving towards shanghai back from either suzhou or hangzhou or wuzhen (forgot). throughout this expressway were buildings like this


this one is a screenshot from a video i took


this one, if u look on the right, u can see the building im talking about. this one is taken from an apartment in beijing. i know that this is only one random small highrise, but there are countless buildings like these i've seen.


i was just thinking that imagine those buildings were instead of 'western' sort of design, maybe have chinese design instead. which would be so awesome!

soon i will post some my own photos as well as some i have found on the net about buildings that i think are good that i'm talking about.
 
#16 ·
Like I said: experiment. The market will soon tell you what sells and what doesn't.

But out of curiosity, did the surrounding properties have any ability to comment on the design for the Zaandam "green monster"? I can't imagine it would be permitted in many US cities.
 
#21 ·
johsam: thanks; Holland is certainly one of the world's great centers for architecture so I would expect lots of interesting work. But I'm curious about how crazy someone can get in historic or other consistent neighborhoods. Maybe Zaandam has particularly liberal rules.
 
#27 ·
This same thing is happening in India too...only a heck of a lot worse! It is far cheaper and easier to construct an ugly concrete box and paint it atrociously fluorescent colors than it is to build in vernacular architecture!
 
#31 · (Edited by Moderator)
I understand the rural areas around Hangzhou look like massive urban sprawl developments but are actually farmer's apartments (check out the lack of roads and tilled fields between the houses). They stretch for hundreds of km, in a dense network across the countryside (check it out on Google Earth). They are the richest farmers in China, each owning a multistoried villa.

If you take the train from HK to Shanghai, you will start to see all this before Hangzhou. At first I thought it was a tacky 1990s pomo development, but then when I realised it was neverending to the horizon, and like the largest city on earth I was pretty amazed. It took me years to work out what I was seeing was actually rural (after a thread here on SSC), and why Hangzhou seemed so much bigger than Shanghai. By high speed train it took over 2 hrs of solid sprawl' to reach Shanghai.




Basically from what Ive gathered the Hangzhou council that built these houses enforced design criteria, each area sectioned up into different 'themes', mirroring the foreign concession era districts of colonial Shanghai. Thus you get steep roofed European style houses (think Germany), then turrets and watchtower styles, then onion domes in Russian style etc. The onion domes were the most amazing I have to say, but Ive never been able to find pictures of them.

I think even when you get tacky single piece of architecture it will still be impressive if its mirrored by thousands of similar buildings for mile after mile.


What I saw were houses like this but multiplied like the first picture, it seemed a forest of watchtowers stretching to the horizon:





 
#32 ·
omg spliff fairy, this is EXACTLY what i'm talking about, i just couldn't get the right photos!!!

this is what i saw for miles just these multi story houses.

thanks for the info too! how u know all this? do u live in china?

hmmm yea so they represent the different european concessions... still would be better if it had chinese flavour.

if this was in europe or america or something, like whole suburbs with chinese style buildings, i'm sure there will be complaints saying things like 'theres too much chinese style here' or 'its taking over our european architecture' or something.
but in here, they just built endless amounts of it... idk if they like it or not (the residents) but i just see it as the chinese keep seeing western things 'superior' so they copy many of its elements, whether in architecture/buildings, fashion, style, etc...

it needs it's own! (not saying there isn't) but still!
 
#33 ·
^^I myself think these houses are ok. Not all old stuff are beautiful, especially the old houses of the poor farmers. Many of the new houses were not even 'designed' since the owners built them by themselves, a floor plan will do the trick. Nowadays villages tend to build massive amounts of silimar looking houses, and such houses are generally designed by construction companies. There is no policy or guidance from the city government for such communities. After all, these are farmers' houses and not for commercial purposes.

If possible I would choose to live in a community shown below, but such houses generally cost much much more than 'un-chinese' houses (you may wanna say 'un-traditional-Chinese' since it is weird to say 'un-Chinese'):





 
#36 ·
From an architectural point me might think it's lame and bland but people love living in these kind of neighborhood. That you see this especially in Shangai is not surprising. Shanghai is slightly different since Shanghai has always had a large European influence on its architecture.

In the new terrotories here in Hong Kong some developments as well in Greek style with columns etc.. In Holland we also have lots of new developments that hark back to the old days. E.g. towns built in the style of old castles, or as old canal towns.

In Beijing I saw a lot more buildings inspired on old Chinese styles.

 
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