Aaron Betsky at Architect Magazine:
When I travel to China, I find big, bold buildings for the arts in almost every city I visit. Building cultural facilities that double as monuments, markers, or anchors for a community marks a certain stage in a country’s social and economic development.
The United States has gone through waves of museum and concert hall construction starting in the Gilded Era. Japan threw up a slew of such structures during its boom in the 1980s. Europe saw a profusion of local community buildings devoted to culture using E.U. funds around the turn of the century.
China has been building structures devoted to music, visual arts, libraries, and other forms of culture at the same time as it has been threading its country with tens of thousands of miles of trains, subways, and other transportation infrastructure. The arts and learning projects are often prospective monuments, seeking to give focus and meaning to new or exploding urban areas.
more here.
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