Best of #China 2017

Today we celebrate the Chinese New Year, the year of the Rooster, and the nation with the fastest growing cities and the strongest rural traditions, its history and innovation. Here are ten architectures, designs and photo-essays that somehow represent Chinese contemporary identity and its contradictions.

– Designed by ZAO in Beijing, Micro Hutong inherits the intimate scale of the traditional hutong, revitalizing its social condensing capabilities, while enhancing it with spatial improvements.

– Squatting is a basic human instinct, and Robot 3 Studio uses the wormhole theory to revive neglected places in Beijing, giving a psychological shift to a ramen restaurant.

– After launching a kickstarter campaign this summer, Daan Roosegaarde’s project to create a purifying tower for polluted skies becomes real, starting from Beijing.

– With an open addition in glass and bamboo to welcome visitors and children, AaL and Atelier OPA worked on a project to save from demolishment the last historic house of a small village in China.

– Arch Studio designed a maple wood and recycled paper table that serves for short naps and plays with the contrast between its soft, ondulating surface, and the hard core.

– X Living designed a dress shop in Hamgzhou, interpreting the dressing philosophy of women’s clothing using different techniques in designing the four spaces.

– China is the most critical and significant example – for the numbers/proportions with which building impacts on the economy and in society and for the speed and entity of the modernisation phenomena in motion – if we are to determine and assert a potential social and collective role for architecture.

– Coop Himmelb(l)au’s MOCAPE in Shenzhen, combines two independent cultural institutions that are merged in a monolithic body surrounded by a multifunctional facade.

– Kai M Caemmerer catches Chinese new cities before they are populated by mass, when they appear as empty, waiting places.

– The exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York features newly commissioned works by Chinese artists united by the use of storytelling, to propose alternative ways of looking at places.

Top: ZAO/standardarchitecture, Micro Hutong, Beijing, 2016