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| "Lonely Planed Mandarin Phrasebook". Image via amazon.com |
If you think about China, what comes first to your mind? Which icons represent the Country in our western collective imagination? The "Lonely Planet Mandarin Phrasebook" summarizes our idea of "Chineseness"with: a rickshaw, a bike,
taijiquan, the
Forbidden City and...
Rem Koolhaas' CCTV headquarters. The CCTV building (
blessed by fire in 2009) can be considered iconic architecture in one of its purest forms.
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| Skyscraper-pastiche in the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. Image by jesabele |
In fact, China (not differently from Dubai) seems now very fond of iconic buildings, collecting patchwork- or collage-skylines. As one can easily imagine, the results are often both interesting and dreadful. In Shanghai some examples of this skyscraper-bulimia can be: "
the Batman", "
the Chinese pot", "
the bottle-opener" and "
the upside-down duck" (a sort of
Venturian reinterpretation).
