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Julia Lovell

Splendidly Fantastic: Architecture and Power Games in China

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Julia Lovell teaches modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, The Great Wall: China Against the World and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. Her several translations of modern Chinese fiction include Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao (winner of the 2011 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature), Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars, and Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China. Recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize, she is currently working on a global history of Maoism.
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44 printed pages
Original publication
2012
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  • Masha Dusapinhas quoted2 years ago
    Ask foreign starchitects what has drawn them to China and you tend to get vague exhalations about how China is opening up politically, economically, culturally; about how it is travelling in the right direction. “Architects want to be in the forefront, to be contemporary,” Ben van Berkel remarks. “And if you want to be that, you have to be aware of China. China, at the same time, wants to collaborate, to get better in every aspect of its culture … We should learn from China. It’s not just an economic quickness there, there’s also a drive, an ambition. There’s energy and intelligence.”31 China, Koolhaas has observed, is a “parallel universe” compared with the “backward-looking US”.32 “As a professor at Harvard, I have spent more than ten years carefully studying the direction in which China is developing. I’m convinced that it’ll be positive in the end.”33 (This is a prediction that no Harvard Sinologist — with a lifetime of studying China — would venture to make.) “In China, there’s a debate about progress that isn’t happening elsewhere,” David Gianotten remarks. “I don’t want to compare China with the West. Judgements are irrelevant here … We should embrace the Chinese context, what’s going on; the openness is very exciting.”
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    Richard Rogers, Toyo Ito, Dominique Perrault
  • Masha Dusapinhas quoted2 years ago
    Mao conquered the rest — the southern half — of the square a year after his death, when his orange, embalmed body — a sleeping beauty awaiting the kiss of history

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