Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

In volume 3 issue 1 of Reviews in Cultural Theory, Joshua Neves has reviewed these two books:

Yomi Braester. Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Duke University Press, 2010. 405 pp.

Robin Visser. Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Duke University Press, 2010. 362 pp.

Read the review in the original context here

and click here for youtube discussion by the authors of those books.

I wrote about Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt  not too long ago and this morning I saw this on iGNANT and had to post it right away. The Rolling Masterplan was proposed by swedish architecture firm Jagnefalt Milton  in 2010 as an entry  for a design competition  for the city of Åndalsnes in Norway. The plan was to use the old industry train tracks for a new kind of infrastructure carrying mobile buildings that could be rolled back and forth depending on the season or situation. The design integrated existing railway tracks with new extensions to moved  buildings throughout the city, providing an opportunity for reorganizing in various confirgurations to accommodate a combination of different scenarios.

As I have mentioned before in my post about Cedric Price’s Fun Palace that Price envisioned an architecture that incorporated mobility. Price saw Fun Palace as a structure that was flexible and could be reconfigured for…