British reporter Richard Spencer writes on his blog from Beijing:
A few weeks ago I mentioned Jasper Becker’s new history of Beijing, City of Everlasting Tranquillity, and said I would return to it. Becker writes a lot about Liang Sicheng, and hammers home a point that is on the one hand obviously true but had previously rather escaped me. While the shutdown of industry reflects the end of Mao’s specifically industrial vision for Beijing, the rampant capitalism of the last 15 years has reinforced a more generally Maoist sensibility.
Becker describes how Liang and Le Corbusier competed to design the headquarters for the United Nations in New York after the Second World War. Le Corbusier’s “unadorned and uncompromising geometrical blocks and slabs” won out over Liang’s designs derived from the rules of traditional Chinese architecture.
