Tag Archives: Water Cube

Beijing To-Do List

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I have to admit that booking a trip to Beijing was somewhat compulsive. I’ve just started a new job and the airfare is quite expensive. But a friend of mine is going to be living there for the summer, and casually mentioned over lunch a few weeks ago that if I wanted to come for a visit, I could stay with her for free. Who could say no to a free room? Although I know very little about Beijing, I’m really excited to be going, and I’ve started putting together my to-do list. Of course, The Great Wall of China, Beihai Park and the Forbidden City are high priorities, as is a walk through one of the surviving hutongs and trips to the 2008 Olympic venues (The Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube). Here’s a few of the other things I’m thinking:

Sanlitun Soho by Kengo Kuma

When I was finishing architecture school, I basically stole the design for my final year project from Japanese master Kengo Kuma. But I’ve never seen one of his projects in person (I’ve just been a fan from books and magazines). I’m not sure if his Sanlitun Soho is one of his best works, but I’m curious if his spaces are as graceful in person as they are in architecture magazines.

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Beijing, My Invisible City

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Beijing's Water Cube, photo by Wilson Loo

At the end of May, I’m going to Beijing for two weeks. I’ve never been to China before. I’m going to be visiting a friend of mine from University. It’s interesting because unlike other global cities such as New York, London, Paris—places that long before I ever saw them in person, I had seen them repeatedly in film and on TV and in magazines and newspapers—I have almost no real imagination of what Beijing is like. I can’t picture how the streets feel or what the everyday architecture (houses, schools, offices) might be like. Of course, I know some of the iconic buildings from the 2008 summer Olympics (the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube), as well as the Imperial Palaces of the Forbidden City and the uncanny, Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV building. But those are all otherworldly oddities (I’m assuming) in the city, and not what you would see walking down your average street (whereas in New York, I was familiar with brownstone walk-ups from the age I started watched Sesame Street). So when I picture Beijing, I draw a blank. But I also feel that visiting Beijing right now is in someway visiting the centre of the earth—the new control centre for the global economy (sorry Washington, Manhattan and elsewhere). So I can imagine that whichever part of the city I go to there will be rumble of construction underfoot, and everything changing all around me almost as fast as I try to register how it is.