A brief 200 mile journey in Southern China

Kirsten Bauer
June 2004

Once at a Masters presentation at RMIT, an architect presented an image of a chicken head on a plate, not once but at least 3 times. This architect was conducting a competition project in China as part of their landscape masters and the chicken head was the remains of dinner.

For a while I could not relate to this person’s fascination with a chicken head as their project motto. After travelling to China this year, I think I have gained a personal insight into the symbolic powers of this dinner morsel. For one, it shows that it is a generous thing to be absorbed into another culture and to join together at the dinning table, and second, to see that what is strange to us is normal to another.

The trips to China are also just morsels in regard to the larger cultural Chinese banquet, and they highlight only some of the forms of China’s own massive urban development and their multiple emerging 200 mile cities.

The morsels of China I did swallow (sorry one cannot get past the Chinese food to describe the broader electric (eclectic?) and overwhelming diversity of urbanity that exists) in China are restricted to three shirt trips. Two trips to the city of Kunming, in the south-west, in which Aspect with LH Partners - Architects, participated in a design competition for a new community, in which we won equal first place. The third trip was to the city of Shenzhen with Rush Wright Associates to bid for a job for a large residential community for a large Mirvac style Chinese developer.

There is not enough room here to debate the many ethical, cultural and environmental problems of working in China and other similar urban progress areas. These were ever present and while admiring the design of a development, one stood amidst the ruins of a viable ecology. What the following photos do comment upon is a few things that bring “awe” and “aghast” to the visitor and a few digestible morsels of extreme urbanity. Irony is a key factor.

Viewing looking across the rooftops of Kunming, a sea of solar panels.

While Australia ponders the large scale urban use of solar panels, solar panels are a familiar sight in many Chinese cities, forming a whole new concept of the roof garden.

A 200 mile billboard in Kunming.

Chinese cities are dominated by long horizontal billboards, which to western eyes speak to the length, scale and speed of urbanisation in China.

Residential development in Kunming

One glances from a window of a display “townhouse” and finds the American picket fence and European garden.

Freeway to Quandong City. North of Shenzhen

Natural obstacles take on another meaning. The freeway alignment forgives little in nature and the pre-existing landscape. The freeway cut takes on a mythological status with us westerners, as extreme cut after cut is experienced and the road stays on an even keel, as if topography is water, to move through, rather than to ride over.

The incredible determination of highways and roads to cut trough topography stays with me still, making Australia’s highway system seem delicate, well sighted and even passive in comparison.

Earthworks and retention north of Shenzhen.

The desire for land seeks out the most incredible sites and creates the most extreme landform contortions. Sublime at first glance, then awe at the engineering and then aghast at both the destruction but more perhaps because of your own disbelief and lack of comprehension of the events that drove this.

Typical freeway cutting earth retention system. Like a decorative bandaid that lays the supports the “greening” (grassing) of the wall.

AILA professionals hard at work at lunch in Shenzhen.
From left, Alan Li, Michael Wright, Zoe Metherell, Chris Razzell and taking the shot, Kirsten Bauer. After lunch is a typical whirlwind tour of the city and site, post landing 6.00 am.

 

Michael and Chris sing “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton in a relaxed “communist” China. The diversity of skills Australian landscape architects could offer China?

One of the many “grand” civic buildings in Shenzhen. The roof structure in it self spanning many city blocks. The building reaching a scale of the 200 mile city. While presented as the new “world image” of China, the roof is a megastructure to symbols, a roof to be seen, but not to be used.

 

A typical urban street and streetlife.

While many architectural and landscape designs seek out western values, these streets demonstrate the vibrant street life of Chinese cities. A richness of intimate scales between the street and building, that offers a range of public and semi-private spaces in the narrowest of spaces. This typology of space is missing in many developments, as some Chinese seek a perceived safe and westernised form of living. The learning from these streets is deep and holds many lessons for the development of new urban areas and new cities.