Not quite a century ago, Shanghai was known as “the Paris of the East.” (Or it became one of the cities to enjoy that reputation, at any rate.) Today, you can catch a high-speed train in Shanghai and, just an hour later, arrive in a place that has made a much more literal bid for that title: Tianducheng, a district modeled directly on the French capital, complete with not entirely unconvincing faux-Haussmannian apartment buildings and boulevards. Struggling to attract residents in the years after its construction on farmland at the outskirts of Hangzhou in 2007, Tianducheng soon came to be regarded as one of China’s over-ambitious ghost towns.
Bizarre as it may seem to those unfamiliar with recent trends in Chinese city-building, Tianducheng actually belongs to a kind of imitative tradition. “On the outskirts of Beijing, a replica of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is outfitted with cowboys and a Route 66,” writes National Geographic’s Gulnaz Khan.
“Red telephone booths, pubs, and statues of Winston Churchill pepper the corridors of Shanghai’s Thames Town. The city of Fuzhou is constructing a replica of Stratford-upon-Avon in tribute to Shakespeare.” To get a sense of how Tianducheng fares today, have a look at “I Explored China’s Failed $1 Billion Copy of Paris,” the new video from Youtube travel channel Yes Theory.
The group of friends making this trip includes one Frenchman, who admits to a certain sense of familiarity in the built environment of Tianducheng, and even seems genuinely stunned by his first glimpse of its one-third-scale version of the Eiffel Tower. (It surely pleases visiting Parisians to see that the developers haven’t also built their own Tour Montparnasse.) But apart from Chinese couples in search of a wedding-photo spot, this ersatz Eiffel Tower doesn’t seem to draw many visitors, or at least not during the day. As Yes Theory’s travelers discover, the neighborhood doesn’t come alive until the evening, when such locals as have settled in Tianducheng come out and enjoy their unusual cityscape. The street life of this Champs-Élysées is a far cry indeed from the real one — but in its way, it also looks like a lot more fun.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
New Yorkers have a variety of sayings about how they want nothing to do with nature, just as nature wants nothing to do with them. As a counterpoint, one might adduce Central Park, whose 843 acres of trees, grass, and water have occupied the middle of Manhattan for a century and a half now. Yet that “most famous city park in the world,” as veteran New York architect Michael Wyetzner puts it in the Architectural Digest video above, is both nature and not. Though Central Park may feel as if it has existed since time immemorial, organically thriving in its space long before the towers that surround it, few large urban spaces had ever been so deliberately conceived.
In the video, Wyetzner (previously featured here on Open Culture for his explanations of New York apartments, subway stations, and bridges, as well as individual works of architecture like Penn Station and the Chrysler Building) shows us several spots in Central Park that reveal the choices that went into its design and construction.
Many were already present in landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s original plan, which they submitted to an open design competition in 1857. Of all the entries, only theirs refused to let the park be cut apart by transverse roads, opting instead to round automobile traffic underground and preserve a continuous experience of “nature” for visitors. (If only more recent urban parks could have kept its example in mind.)
Central Park would be welcome even if it were just a big of expanse of trees, grass, and water. But it also contains many distinctive built structures, such as the much-photographed mall leading to Bethesda Terrace, the “second-oldest cast-iron bridge in the United States,” the dairy that once provided fresh milk to New York’s children, and Belvedere Castle. That last is built at three-quarters scale, “which makes it appear further away than it actually is, and gives it this sort of magical fairy-tale quality,” the same trick that the builders of Disneyland would employ intensively about a century later. But the priorities of Walt Disney and his collaborators differed from the designers of Central Park, who, as Vaux once said, put “nature first, second, and third — architecture after a while.” If a mutually beneficial deal could be struck between those two phenomena anywhere, surely that place is New York City.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3:32pm (or thereabouts).” This oft-quoted pronouncement by cultural and architectural theorist Charles Jencks refers to the demolition of the Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments. The fate of that short-lived public housing complex, better and more infamously known as Pruitt-Igoe, still holds rhetorical value in America in arguments against the supposed social-engineering ambitions made concrete (often literally) in large-scale postwar modernist buildings. Though the true story is more complicated, the fact remains that, whenever we pinpoint it, modern architecture was widely regarded as “dead.” What would come after it?
Why, postmodernism, of course. Jencks did more than his part to define modernism’s anything-goes successor movement with The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, in which he tells the tale of Pruitt-Igoe, which was then relatively recent history.
The first edition came out in 1977, early days indeed in the life of postmodernism, which in a video from Historic England architectural historian Elain Harwood calls “the style of the nineteen-eighties.” Its riots of deliberately incongruous shape and color, as well as its heaped-up unsubtle cultural and historical references, suited that unbridled decade as perfectly as did the elegantly garish furniture of the Memphis group.
In recent years, however, the buildings left behind by postmodernism have got more than a few of us asking questions — questions like, “Are they intentionally weird and tacky, or just designed with no taste?” That’s how Youtuber Betty Chen puts it in the ARTiculations video just above, before launching into an investigation of postmodern architecture’s origin, purpose, and place in the built environment today. In her telling, the style was born in the early nineteen-sixties, when architect Robert Venturi designed a rule-breaking house for his mother in Philadelphia, deciding “to distort the pure order of the modernist box by reintroducing disproportional arrangements of classical elements such as four-pane windows, arches, the pediment, and the decorative dado.”
An important theorist of postmodernism as well as a practitioner (usually working in both roles with his wife and collaborator Denise Scott Brown), Venturi converted arch-modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s declaration that “less is more” into what would become, in effect, postmodernism’s brief manifesto: “Less is a bore.” Venturi described himself as choosing “messy vitality over obvious unity,” and the same could be said of a range of his colleagues in the eighties and nineties: Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, and Charles Moore in America; Also Rossi, Ricardo Bofill, and Bernard Tschumi in Europe; Minoru Takeyama, Kengo Kuma, and Arata Isozaki in Japan.
Postmodern architecture flowered especially in Britain: “The irreverence came from America, the classicism from Europe,” says Harwood. “What British architects did was weave those two elements together.” As one of those architects, Sir Terry Farrell, tells Historic England, “the preceding era had been earnest and anonymous”; after international modernism, the time had come to re-introduce personality, and in a flamboyant manner. His colleague Piers Gough remembers feeling, in the mid-sixties, a certain envy for pop art — “they were doing color, they were doing popular imagery, they had prettier girlfriends” — that inspired them to “ransack popular imagery in architecture.” This project posed certain practical difficulties of its own: “You can design a building to look like a soup can, but the problem really comes when you put the windows in it.”
Renovations to many an aging postmodern building have proven difficult to justify, given that “irreverence and exaggeration are out,” as Brock Keeling writes in a recent Bloomberg piece. “Significant postmodern buildings like the Abrams House in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego have already been demolished,” and others are endangered: “Fans of the James R. Thompson Center — Helmut Jahn’s 1985 civic building, noted for its sliced-off dome facade and 17-story atrium with blue-and-salmon trim — fear it will deboned in preparation for Google’s new Chicago headquarters.” The true architectural postmodernism enthusiast also appreciates much humbler works, such as Jeffrey Daniels’ Los Angeles Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise that unintentionally evokes of both a chicken and a chicken bucket. Long may it stand.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We’ve featured a variety of buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright here on Open Culture, from his personal home and studio Taliesin and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, to a gas station and a doghouse. But if any single structure explains his enduring reputation as a genius of American architecture, and perhaps the genius of American architecture, it must be the house called Fallingwater.
Designed in 1935 for Pittsburgh department-store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann and his wife Liliane, it sits atop an active waterfall — not below it as Kaufmann had originally requested, to name just one of the disagreements that arose between client and architect throughout the process.
In the event, Wright had his way as far as the positioning of the house on the site, as with much else about the project — and so much the better for its stature in the history of architecture, which has only risen since completion 85 years ago.
Inspired by the Kaufmann’s love of the outdoors, as well as his own appreciation for Japanese architecture, Wright employed techniques to integrate Fallingwater’s spaces with one another, as well as with the surrounding nature. Time magazine wasted no time, as it were, declaring the result Wright’s “most beautiful job”; more recently, it’s received high praise from no less a master Japanese architect than Tadao Ando.
When he visited Fallingwater, Ando experienced first-hand a use of space similar to that which he knew from the built environment of his homeland, and also how the house lets in the sounds of nature. Though such a pilgrimage can greatly expand one’s appreciation of the house, rare is the viewer who fails to be enraptured by pictures alone.
Nearly as astute in the realm of publicity as in that of architecture, Wright would have known that Fallingwater had to photograph well, a quality vividly on display in this archive of 137 high-resolution images at the Library of Congress. From it, you can download color and black-and-white photos of the house’s exterior and interior as well as its plans, which — so the story goes — Wright originally drew up in just two hours after months of inaction. Fallingwater thus stands as not just concrete proof of once-brazen architectural notions, but also vindication for procrastinators everywhere.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Many Americans receive their introduction to the style known as Brutalism in college. This owes less to courses in twentieth-century architecture than to university campuses themselves, which tend to have been expanded or even wholly constructed in the decades immediately following the Second World War. As Vox’s Dean Peterson explains in the new video above, its veterans returned home eager to receive the tertiary education to which the G.I. Bill entitled them, which “necessitated that universities build new facilities to handle ballooning admissions. And with so many new buildings being needed, what did architects of the day turn to? Brutalism.”
“Not just a style of architecture but an entire aesthetic ethos,” Brutalism had developed through inspiration from the work of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. While other architects had employed concrete before him, he was the one to make the bold choice of leaving it exposed on the surface in its raw form: béton brut, to use the term that gave the movement its name.
To qualify under the rubric of this “new Brutalism,” as architectural historian Reyner Banham (later to become famous for his ultra-modern view of Los Angeles) referred to it, a structure should demonstrate “memorability as an image,” “clear exhibition of structure,” and “valuation of materials ‘as found’ ” — in contrast to the nineteen-fifties’ proliferation of seemingly featureless glass-sheathed skyscrapers designed by modernists like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his many imitators.
“Brutalist buildings strove for honesty in their materials and structure,” says Peterson. “They showed you how they were constructed.” Though acclaimed in their day as built statements of a break from the staid past into a wholly reimagined future, many campus Brutalist buildings in the United States subsequently fell into disrepair, owing to the economic downturn of the seventies and the resultant lapses into “deferred maintenance” — which, deferred long enough, shades into planned demolition. Such has been the case with Evans Hall, the statistics, economics, and mathematics building at University of California, Berkeley, which, since its construction in 1971, played an important part in the history of computer science, not least as the node through which the whole of the west coast connected to ARPANET, the military-built precursor to the internet.
Today, objections to Evans Hall’s Brutalist aesthetics, as well as to its location in front of the San Francisco Bay and its poor earthquake-safety rating (that last being fairly common among UC Berkeley’s structures), have led to its being emptied out with an eye toward replacement. Though it may be too late for Evans Hall, much of America’s Brutalist heritage can still be rehabilitated. “Be patient,” says architecture professor Timothy Rohan (author of a study of American Brutalist Paul Rudolph). “Just because you find something unfashionable at the moment doesn’t mean you should eradicate it.” This is not, perhaps, advice particularly well-suited to college students, but given the likelihood of their exposure to Brutalism not just on campus but also on Instagram, they may turn out to be its best hope yet.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“If you’re in Venice, you might not enjoy it so much if you follow a tour-guide route that gets you to the main attractions.” So says Youtuber Manuel Bravo — whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on Pompeii, the Duomo di Firenze, and the Great Pyramids of Giza — in “Venice Explained” just above. “But if you get off that road, the charm of Venice is that it’s such a tangled mess that nobody ventures out there” — out, that is, into the “wonderful little neighborhoods with little squares with cisterns and little cafés.” Diminutive though that may sound, Venice comes off in Bravo’s analysis as an entire, unique urban realm unto itself.
“Historically, Venice is really detached from Italy proper,” Bravo says. “It was not a Roman town. It does not have the detritus of Roman ruins scattered around. It does not have remnants of a Roman town plan with cardo and decumanus. It does not even have, well, land.”
Indeed, Venice is famous for having been built in the Adriatic Sea, on a “new fortified ground plane” made of strong trees imported from Croatia. As its political and economic importance grew, so did its “incomparable medieval urban landscape that has remained practically unchanged.” This built environment is full of architectural styles and details seen nowhere else, to which Bravo draws our attention through the course of the video.
Though he recommends departing from the tourist-beaten paths, he doesn’t ignore such world-famous Venetian structures as the Ca d’Oro, “perhaps the most beautiful building in Venice”; the Doge’s Palace with its “antigravity” architecture; and — in detail — the Basilica and Piazza San Marco, “one of the most memorable spatial complexes in the history of urban planning.” No first visit would be complete without some time spent at each of these sites. But “Venice is a city of light,” and in order properly to enjoy it, we must “see it at different times of the day and experience all the nuances that it offers”: good advice in this “most visually seductive of all the cities in the world,” but also worth bearing in mind as a means of appreciating even the less majestic places in which most of us usually find ourselves.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Today it would be viewed as cultural appropriation writ large, but when Louis XIV ordered the construction of a 5‑building pleasure pavilion inspired by the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing (a 7th Wonder of the World few French citizens had viewed in person) as an escape from Versailles, and an exotic love nest in which to romp with the Marquise de Montespan, he ignited a craze that spread throughout the West.
Chinoiserie was an aristocratic European fantasy of luxurious Eastern design, what Dung Ngo, founder of AUGUST: A Journal of Travel + Design, describes as “a Western thing that has nothing to do with actual Asian culture:”
Chinoiserie is a little bit like chop suey. It was wholesale invented in the West, based on certain perceptions of Asian culture at the time. It’s very watered down.
And also way over the top, to judge by the rapturous descriptions of the interiors and gardens of Louis XIV’s Trianon de Porcelaine, which stood for less than 20 years.
The blue-and-white Delft tiles meant to mimic Chinese porcelain swiftly fell into disrepair and Madame de Montespan’s successor, her children’s former governess, the Marquise de Maintenon, urged Louis to tear the place down because it was “too cold.”
Her lover did as requested, but elsewhere, the West’s imagination had been captured in a big way.
The burgeoning tea trade between China and the West provided access to Chinese porcelain, textiles, furnishings, and lacquerware, inspiring Western imitations that blur the boundaries between Chinoiserie and Rococo styles
This blend is in evidence in Frederick the Great’s Chinese House in the gardens of Sanssouci (below).
Dr Samuel Wittwer, Director of Palaces and Collections at the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, describes how the gilded figure atop the roof “is a mixture of the Greek God Hermes and the Chinese philosopher Confucius:”
His European face is more than just a symbol of intellectual union between Asia and Europe…The figure on the roof has an umbrella, an Asian symbol of social dignity, which he holds in an eastern direction. So the famous ex oriente lux, the good and wise Confucian light from the far east, is blocked by the umbrella. Further down, we notice that the foundations of the building seem to be made of feathers and the Chinese heads over the windows, resting on cushions like trophies, turn into a monkey band in the interior. The frescoes in the cupola mainly depict monkeys and parrots. As we know, these particular animals are great imitators without understanding.
Frederick’s enthusiasm for chinoiserie led him to engage architect Carl von Gontard to follow up the Chinese House with a pagoda-shaped structure he named the Dragon House (below) after the sixteen creatures adorning its roof.
Dragons also decorate the roof of the Great Pagoda in London’s Kew Gardens, though the gilded wooden originals either succumbed to the elements or were sold off to settle George IV’s gambling debts in the late 18th century.
There are even more dragons to be found on the Chinese Pavilion at Drottningholm, Sweden, an architectural confection constructed by King Adolf Fredrik as a birthday surprise for his queen, Louisa. The queen was met by the entire court, cosplaying in Chinese (or more likely, Chinese-inspired) garments.
Not to be outdone, Russia’s Catherine the Great resolved to “capture by caprice” by building a Chinese Village outside of St. Petersburg.
Architect Charles Cameron drew up plans for a series of pavilions surrounding a never-realized octagonal-domed observatory. Instead, eight fewer pavilions than Cameron originally envisioned surround a pagoda based on one in Kew Gardens.
Having survived the Nazi occupation and the Soviet era, the Chinese Village is once again a fantasy plaything for the wealthy. A St. Petersburg real estate developer modernized one of the pavilions to serve as a two-bedroom “weekend cottage.”
Given that no record of the original interiors exists, designer Kirill Istomin wasn’t hamstrung by a mandate to stick close to history, but he and his client still went with “numerous chinoiserie touches” as per a feature in Elle Decor:
Panels of antique wallpapers were framed in gilded bamboo for the master bedroom, and vintage Chinese lanterns, purchased in Paris, hang in the dining and living rooms. The star pieces, however, are a set of 18th-century porcelain teapots, which came from the estate of the late New York socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor.
If asked to name the best-known tower in London, one could, perhaps, make a fair case for the likes of the Shard or the Gherkin. But whatever their current prominence on the skyline, those works of twenty-first-century starchitecture have yet to develop much value as symbols of the city. If sheer age were the deciding factor, then the Tower of London, the oldest intact building in the capital, would take the top spot, but for how many people outside England does its name call a clear image to mind? No, to find London’s most beloved vertical icon, we must look to the Victorian era, the only historical period that could have given rise to Big Ben.
We must first clarify that Big Ben is not a tower. The building you’re thinking of has been called the Elizabeth Tower since Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, but before that its name was the Clock Tower. That was apt enough, since tower’s defining feature has always been the clock at the top — or rather, the four clocks at the top, one for each face.
You can see how they work in the animated video from Youtuber Jared Owen above, which provides a detailed visual and verbal explanation of both the structure’s context and its content, including a tour of the mechanisms that have kept it running nearly without interruption for more than a century and a half.
Only by looking into the tower’s belfry can you see Big Ben, which, as Owens says, is actually the name of the largest of its bells. Its announcement of each hour on the hour — as well as the ringing of the other, smaller bells — is activated by a system of gear trains ultimately driven by gravity, harnessed by the swinging of a large pendulum (to which occasional speed adjustments have always been made with the reliable method of placing pennies on top of it). Owens doesn’t clarify whether or not this is the same pendulum Roger Miller sang about back in the sixties, but at least now we know that, technically speaking, we should interpret the following lyrics as not “the tower, Big Ben” but “the tower; Big Ben.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
