megan mcdonough | October 22nd, 2012 
Urban fabric is a delightful term. It rolls over your tongue, evoking flavors and textures of a well-worn quilt or exotic meal. It accounts for tears and tatters, bitterness and bite. It does a city justice as the medley of conditions it is forced to meet. In the words of Vitruvius, it has firmness and utility, and, thus, delight. Urban fabric has a beauty to it. The strongest form of built-up beauty possible, taking decades, centuries, even millennia to weave the old and new into an ever-shifting blanket of landscape. As architects, we’re taught to appreciate the juxtapositions and quirks of spaces and places. Cities are not perfection, but they are historians, authors, artists, and philosophers- constant generators of change.
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[ cities, parametric, student, volume7_issue3 ]
shaowen zhang | September 20th, 2011 
43. I just can’t stop thinking of you
Place, identity. The physics and metaphysics of place and identity stem directly from the plan, but the associations of my once urban utopia are things I can now seldom relate to, and the entirety of the urban framework has changed. It’s a sort of unyielding and unequivocal transformation that pervades the already established built environment, the former not any more perfect in design, yet somehow more legible. Layers upon layers of information extend upwards and outwards with rapid velocity. Here today, gone tomorrow. Destroyed, re-configured, layered, erased. And as the external world reproduces with such rapidity, I often question if I am truly in reality. Does anyone think anymore? Does anyone dream anymore? //
[ beijing, cities, contemporary life ]
shaowen zhang | September 6th, 2011 
I was born in the city. The most colorful memories of my childhood were in the city, and despite a hiatus to the suburbs of Atlanta, I continue to dwell in the city. High-density development is a kaleidoscope of variables, each with its own web of complexities. Chinese cities in particular are among some of the densest in the world, and as a result, some of the most esoteric.
Here is an essay of paradox. Here is an essay of contradiction. //
[ beijing, cities, contemporary life ]
