evolutions

tokyo's architecture crowd - reprazent - at the opening of the SOM Evolutions exhibit last night... dominated by men, uniformly pinned up business cards, and suits.
ultimate master fuhimiko maki is the man with the white hair on the right (in a spotlight he designed). left of maki is rizing star kengo kuma. both without name tag, kuma even without suit.
find wally...

more pictures below, featuring mc kobayashi, david childs and his freedom tower, and wally. all credits to katosan, photographer of the evening until he got knocked out by a tiny salmon toast (buckwheat allergy).

achikochi

to keep you warm with updates from japan: check out achikochi, blog by vincent van den storme, belgian legal alien in yokohama for seven years now. an informative playground full of links and articles, short stories, sharp pictures - rod you'll love the 'now and then's - and a gigantic list of japan blogs.

what else?
helped kobayashi setting up an SOM exhibit around the corner in maki's hillside terrace today, unloading a container of presentation models and boards, shipped all the way from wall street new york. worth a lunch with the two corporate architects that came along with the boxes - funny how SOM keeps paying for my lunches, even back in tokyo...

and then those earthquakes... yesterday the building shook at least five or six times over a span of two hours. every single time, this feeling of complete helplessness, this fear of death I'll never get used to. before and after, my japanese buddies claim they do, but whenever we're shaking (like a polaroid picture) I can see the fear in their eyes too. today we heard almost 20 people died in niigata, 250km to the north. japan's strongest earthquake since kobe, ten years ago.



> fabre op ladeuze
> singhsons (from anat)
> save bernd (van de kepsens)
> pong (van francis)
> eminem's mosh (from dida)
> bill hicks in zomergasten (van bie)
> what if the world could vote in the US presidential election?
> transnational statistics (from louis)
> moving south

that's china...

dear all

this chronofile is off limits in china – bounced back by the firewall of the chinese government (the great wall AD 2004). long time no hear... but with a head full of stories and a camera full of images, I hope we can catch up soon.
it’s been a long trip. and really far away. tokyo looks different, the japanese look and sound different... an essential china chapter to the asian experience... little did I know. hard to catch in a single paragraph (feel the hidden disclaimer).



a long trip, huge contrasts - a powerful mix of urban and rural china.
first two weeks on a bike through inner mongolia, desert radar on. expansive grassy adventures, days feeling like weeks, further away than I had ever been, as lonely as the planet gets I guess… slowly sliding through fragile highlands, sometimes stunningly beautiful, sometimes hardly surviving under the weight of organized overpopulation.
once back in beijing, just time enough to wash the dust out of my dreads and get dressed for a business trip to shanghai, a glamorous destination for a business trip, especially from under the wings of our chinese clients. fancy hotel rooms, buffet breakfasts, french chansons on rooftop bars, de krab met de gulden scharen, waterfront grandeur. even some tourism in jiangsu province, china’s città diffusa. interesting sino-japanese dynamics. topped off by a visit to the construction site in wuxi…
back to beijing for the last week, comfortable home base, capital of Earthly Tranquility. always a pleasure...


from cabbage storage room to 'eyes wide shut' resort

some say china is making its great leap forward. that’s not really how I felt it. instead of leaping, I saw thousands of chinese steadily moving. transporting huge loads of stones, coal, sheep, silk, cellphones, oil, cabbage, coke, reinforced concrete - on their backs, donkey carts, blue trucks, trains, barges, planes. on and off, back and forth, day and night, it never stops…
china is not jumping from a rural society to a postindutrial market economy. all the in betweens considered logical by our history books – nomadic / agrarian / industrial / hi tech / informational / postfordian societies wha’ever – are developing too, at the same time, right next to each other. destruction and construction are sweeping through all these layers, through cities as well as through the countryside, at an incredible pace, at an unprecedented scale, apparently.


simultaneous china - a shepherd herds his flock of sheep around wind energy turbines, high on the mongolian grasslands. the mound in the distance is a rarely visited section of the great wall, made of earth.

and I mean apparently unprecedented.
however fast china is developing nowadays, this trip has shown me that nothing is really new under the chinese sun. only now I can see the past fifty plus years of communism as just one of china’s inward-looking, undemocratic dynasties (of foreign ideology), even a relatively short-lived one...
and the last decade as an accelerated dawn to times of open borders and unlimited opportunities, in which anachronic communist rhetorics and great firewalls are nothing but annoying side phenomena. it’s just a matter of time to see china become the world’s leading economy – again, anything but unprecendented...

all these lines are marked on the face of beijing. and on the faces of the old guys in the hutongs, beijing’s crooked greystone alleys. those faces have seen it all come and go, dynasty after revolution after uprising after decadence after dynasty… they squat on their doorsteps, with their birds and pipes, and smile. and spit. just like they’ve been doing for centuries.



pictures on a screen only give a vague idea of what it all really looks like – again, my powershot lense prooved too weak for close ups (exception below), and too narrow for highland horizons, for the masses in train stations. sure francis will tell me the pictures could have been taken anywhere… anyway, I’ll post some, au fur et à mesure, under the day of the action. hope you like.




>>>
en voor wie (nog altijd) niet is overtuigd - stef kamil carlens in een interview naar aanleiding van zita swoons nieuwe plaat…
“Soms ben ik te veel aan het werken. De voorbije twee jaar was het steeds maar componeren. Je moet ook nog leven. Ik voel dat ik nu grote ervaringen nodig heb, als zuurstof en als inspiratie. Ik zou graag eens rondreizen in Marokko. Of er helemaal alleen op uittrekken met de fiets en een tent. Ik fiets graag. Ik heb twee weken geleden de Mont Ventoux gedaan. Dat is pas een kick: die inspanning, de prachtige natuur, de rust en de goeie lucht.”
en de reste...

a glamorous city

"The town of Wuxi, the regional center close by the northern shore of the lake, is not particularly attractive. Wuxi served as the capital of the Wu Kingdom for over 600 years until the Han Dynasty, when the tin mines were exhausted (Wuxi means "without tin"). It was the construction of the Great Canal, centuries later, that brought importance to local trade and industry, as it did for so many other canal towns. These days Wuxi is surpassed as a lakeside city by Hangzhou, and as a canal town with traditional gardens by Suzhou. In an effort to siphon tourists away from its more famous neighbours, Wuxi boosters have constructed many "instant tourism" sights in the past few years, most notably a slew of theme parks and the world's tallest Buddha, which smack of revenue-minded artificiality. At 88m high, this bronze-plated giant, stands as a monument to cynicism, built for the record books and to extract yuan from tourists at a spot with no religious significance."
Rough Guide to China



only tomoko decided to join me on a trip to see the site - and the first traces of construction? - of the new town I had been working on over the summer. after a three hours train ride west of shanghai, and after walking in circles in wuxi to find the vanke offices, I heard on the lobby phone that the guide, set up for us by mister fu, wasn't coming to the office today... strange. but soon a stand-in english speaking guide was found, in the marketing department. she took us to lunch, and after lunch to the site. from the car window we gazed at dozens of new or barely finished towers sliding by, along with new roads, a new bridge, and the biggest gymnasium in the world (somehow confirming the image sketched by the rough guide).


new highways already in place

the site looked more or less like I had imagined it from kobayashisan's pictures and discriptions - only closer to the lake - probably because there's not that much around the stretch of flat fields, except for brand new highways and some 'informal settlements' of local farmers that still need to be 'replaced'. our marketing girl added a special edge to the experience - she explained the project to us as if she wanted to talk us into buying a couple of units of the glamorous city ( "a glamorous city" is the litteral translation of the chinese kanji representing the name of the new town). she forgot to change the "potential buyer" tape for the "visiting designer" tape. cute - in the car on the way back, she repeated with utmost sincereness, eyes to the horizon, "this is really going to be a glamorous city"... (thanks)



above the construction site of the entrance buidling to the new town, which will function - in a first phase - as the new vanke wuxi offices and as a model house to sell the units of the project. this building - covered by my right arm on the picture below - is designed by fu himself and serves as a gateway to our civic center, of which construction is planned to kick off around february.



compare the advertising board with two pictures of our most recent model. on both pictures below you can find our section (civic center with shops, restaurants, services, parking, gardens, residences in two parallel narrow slabs) and the model house (currently under construction).


view from northwest (model house bottom left)


view from southwest (model house top left)

shanghai

everything you hear about shanghai is true

earthly tranquillity

next time someone asks me about my hobbies, I should remember to answer ‘biking in beijing, in october’. the simple pleasure of going nowhere in particular, like
nani moretti in the opening shot of his caro diario - "mi piace andare in giro colla vespa, guardando le case..."

sometimes I would bike three quarters of one of beijing's a circular ringroads, instead of crossing it, and turning back for a quarter. beijing is like manhattan, only on the first day you need a map. after that, it's just cruising, on the boulevards of big ideas, the wind of progress in the back.



the hutong are the traditional residential neighborhoods in beijing, one storey walled grey brick brick houses leaving a maze of quirky alleways. they fill up the big areas between the ringroads with quintessential china: the old man on his doorstep, the pharmacy stuffed with weird bottles and spices, the charcoal delivery bikes, the pancake makers, the men in their workshops spitting along, the public toilets, a bunch of uniformed schoolchildren.

'hut' in hutong comes from the same root as 'hot' in mongolian cities as xilinhot, hohhot or erenhot, testifying of the mongolian roots of beijing. 'hot' means water, crucial for stationary mongolian settlements on the high and arid grasslands.



hutongs are vanishing at quick pace. at extremely quick pace, since small chinese families without ownership certificates are no match for big corporations with political connections. entire hutong districts are being knocked down as we speak, and replaced by 'cleaner' office headquarters or residential towers. historical preservation and protection are underway but will probably come too late.
and for whom anyway? chen took me to his hutong home - while I was fascinated by their lifestyle (computers with internet next to charcoal fires in a tiny one storey two room brick house with outside bathroom), he and his family are looking forward to move to an apartment building soon... western expats seem to be the strongest advocates (and even buyers where possible) of hutong residences.


the city government is trying to eradicate spitting in beijing by the olympics in 2008...



tien’an men square is a very strange space, ambiguous in nature, attractive and repulsive at the same time. it is probably the only square in china, and the largest in the world.

a square, typology of democracy, in a society that has zero experience with democracy. whereas the european square reminds the rulers of the power of the people - the place of political discussion and the place of free market - the two largest squares in the world (tien'anmen and the red square in moscow) are used to render the opposite effect. with alternating success...





an unusually large square, so large it is almost impossible to conceive it as one space. at a certain point, it was too large apparently, too large to handle for one man. mao's mausoleum - a giant soviet gym - now sits in the middle and breaks it up in four spaces, not really four squares though. unusually inaccessible, too, as it is surrounded by boulevards on its four sides, detached from the rest of the city, and only reachable through underpasses at the corners, secured locks.
all that is solid melts into air...



"Tian'anmen, literally means "Heaven Peace Gate", and is normally translated as "The Gate of Heavenly Peace". However, in Classical Chinese, the word meaning "Heaven", is also used as an epithet for the Emperor; and the word meaning "Peace" more properly means "a state of undisturbed security". Thus "Tian'anmen" - being the main gate to the palace - also suggests "The Gate to Secure the Emperor's Safety", a meaning not present in the English translation."(Wikipedia)

well whatever... after all I found it just great strolling on tien'anmen square during the festivities for the people's republic's 55th anniversary. the sunset, the kites, the crowd, the guards, so cute.





and the duck... was delicious.


beijing, 2005

distorted surface

desertification in chifeng league

even though I had come down from the more fragile highland ecosystem and had returned to the valleys of traditionally inhabited china, still I found some of the most striking evidence of warfare between the chinese authorities and the encroaching soil degradation here, in the mountainous area around chifeng.
not surprizingly, these valleys form the setting for bruce marcot's alarming story I read while planning the trip. even my pretty old aviation maps mention 'distorted surface'.

as mentioned earlier, the desertification situation on the highlands can be described as a battle at the forefront of chinese cultivation: a recently immigrated population of farmers tries to eek a living out of the land on the inner mongolian plateau. the struggle is tough, as the highlands are arid and cold, and yield marginal crops, while the soil is degrading and the sands are encroaching. both colonization (cardboard settlements, croplands, jaded tourist villages) and protection measures (trees and shrubs) are implemented in a linear pattern, lining the main arteries (highways, train tracks) across the highlands.

in the valleys of chifeng league, however, the problem seems to have an extra dimension. almost literally: lines becoming surfaces. in this once fertile area, squeezed in between the highlands and the coastal plains, the desertification problem is more structural. as more considerable short term losses in cropland are to be feared for the government, remediation measures have been equally more vast in comparison to what I saw on the highlands.

both disruption of the surface and remediation occurs on a vaster scale: huge sand dunes in the distance, dried out rivers, erosion of entire hillsides, valleys chockfull of saplings, huge areas of alternating strips of agricultural fields and protective trees. virutally everywhere in chifeng league, signs of china’s environmental warfare are visible.


sand dunes in the distance


dried out river


saplings


'reforested' valley

biking towards chifeng, thinking about national environmental policies for a country as big as china, about protection walls and inward looking dynasties, wondering whether man in fact can be stronger than nature, I realized mile by mile that combatting desertification in china doesn't equal trying to find a fragile balance between the forces of the environment and human occupation.
it means to fence off areas of economical accumulation, if possible steadily expanding them. it means affirmatively fighting the increasingly exhausted environment, unilaterally, wihtout negociation.


a sign announcing a completed tree planting project

even though they are green, the trees are as much part of the network of cultivation as railways, fences, factories. the trees are not intended to replace cleared forests, not even to help grasslands to recover (how would trees manage to do that anyway?), but to protect the human footprint on the grasslands they enclose.


the fence and the line of trees - loyal companions even in the dryest valleys


drought and depletion of fresh water resources by irrigation and overpumping cause more sandy areas as the topography drops (perspective difficult to grasp)

The main causes of the expansion of the desert in Inner Mongolia are overgrazing, deforestation, overcultivation and drought. As rainfall declines, water is being conserved on the upper reaches of the rivers for irrigation and aquifers are depleted by overpumping.
(from my initial article / june 03)



a roadside ad for sand dune entertainment (probably in a combo package with mongolian food) // checkerboard vegetation on an eroded hillside in the distance


a rough estimate: 85 percent of my 2600 kilometers I biked between two rows of trees.

Up to today, the question remains as to whether the area targeted by the wall is just too arid to support trees. And even if the trees take root, they'll soak up massive amounts of groundwater, which could worsen the problem.
According to environmentalists, Beijing has been largely content to issue proclamations about student-supported tree-planting and green Olympics rather than tackle complicated land uses. They want the government to foster positive behaviour – pay farmers to reduce livestock numbers, raise water prices to encourage conservation, and temporarily relocate locals away from arid areas to allow recovery. Ironically, it was the Chinese agricultural policy of the 1960s, actively populating Inner Mongolia with Han Chinese and encouraging nomadic Mongol shepherds to settle down, which started the assault on the ecology of the region.
(from my initial article / june 03)