China Turns To More Modern Architecture

China Turns To More Modern Architecture

by Lisa Chow

To listen to this story Click Here and then click on Listen Now.

Morning Edition, July 18, 2008 ·

Most of the buildings in Tiananmen Square, beneath the famous portrait of Mao Zedong, are monumental structures, with rigid lines and large columns. They look dynastic, part of post-revolutionary Communist China.

But not far away is a striking new building, radically different from those in the Square.

The new National Grand Theater is an enormous titanium and glass dome surrounded entirely by water. The entrance is underground.


The building is probably the most controversial structure built in Beijing in the past few years, costing more than $300 million.

"A modern building in an existing place is disturbing. That is a fact," says French architect Paul Andreu.

After winning the design competition, Andreu met with China's then-premier, Zhu Rongji. He says Zhu knew there was a risk the public would disapprove of the design.

"He told me 'your building is difficult. This place is gold for us. Take care. But we selected you and if we have 51 percent or 52 percent of the people pleased, that's a first success,'" Andreu says.

Besides Andreu's building, the Chinese government has awarded some of its biggest projects to foreign architects. The Bird's Nest stadium was designed by Swiss architects, and a Dutchman designed the new headquarters for China's state television network, CCTV.


The government not only spent $1.5 billion on these buildings, it broke rules to make them happen.

Architect Rem Koolhaas, says China's soaring ambition helped him realize his unusual design for the state TV headquarters.

"To reinvent institutions, reinvent laws, reinvent a society and trying to find organs that express and make it work — that is of course unique to this moment here," Koolhaas says.

The structure Koolhaas helped create includes two L-shaped high-rise towers leaning inward and linked at the top and bottom. It seems to defy gravity.

The structure has been touted as the second-largest office building in the world, after the Pentagon.

Breaking The Rules, Creating New Ones

"There is nothing like this anywhere in the world. And there is no precedent," says Rory McGowan, chief engineer with London-based Arup, which designed the CCTV building.

McGowan says that because of the building's shape and size, it broke all of the building codes. So China brought together its top engineers to help come up with new codes.

But, McGowan says, what really set this project apart were the building criteria that CCTV presented to the architects at the start.

"The brief was to have the entire workings of the national media company on one site," he says. "That is unparalleled brief. It's never happened before and it will probably never happen again."

He says the site — where 10,000 people work — will house everything from mobile broadcasting trucks to a hotel, conference facilities, broadcasting studios and management.

Koolhaas points to another factor behind the lofty goal for this building: age.

He says in American cultural institutions, decision makers are 70. In Europe, they are 50 to 55 years old.

"The average age of decision maker here [in China] is 30, 35," Koolkaas says. "And that in itself ... simply statistically means that we're talking to people in the beginning of their life and therefore have the thrust and sense of adventure."

'The World's Bird Capital'

Yet many younger people in Beijing aren't particularly drawn to the flashiness.

"I don't like it," says Luo Qing, 32, who has watched the CCTV towers go up across the street from her office. "I can't deal with such a modern-looking building. I still prefer more traditional Chinese architecture."

Qing's colleague Sun Peng, also 32, agrees.

"I think Beijing should construct buildings that reflect the city's history and culture, especially for important landmarks such as the CCTV tower," Peng says.

One of the strongest critics is Xiao Mo, a retired professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

"There is bird's egg in the south, a bird's nest in the north, a bird's tree on the east and a bird's cage on the west," Mo says, referring to the National Grand Theater, the CCTV building and the Olympics basketball stadium, designed by Swiss architects.

"They've turned our beautiful Beijing into the world's bird capital," Mo says.

"I do believe that culture is important," architect Andreu says, standing in front of his egg-shaped theater, what he calls a "cultural island in the middle of a lake."

"We have all these ancestors and all these ideas behind us, and all these centuries of culture behind us, but what is required from us is to live our lives, not to look back," he says.

And at least for now, the Chinese government agrees.

Night

Night

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Into the darkness and the hush of the night
   Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away,
   And with it fade the phantoms of the day,
   The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the
    light.
The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight,
   The unprofitable splendor and display,
   The agitations, and the cares that prey
   Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight.

The better life begins; the world no more
   Molests us; all its records we erase
   From the dull common-place book of our lives,
That like a palimpsest is written o'er
   With trivial incidents of time and place,
   And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.

Scraper Bikes

Scraper Bike Fever Spreads, Thanks To YouTube

by Jacob Fenston

To Listen to story Click Here and then click on "Listen Now."

Weekend Edition Saturday, September 13, 2008 ·

YouTube has spawned many sudden sensations. Take scraper bikes, for example. A music video about the tricked-out bicycles posted to the site by some teenagers in Oakland, Calif., has attracted a cult following, with nearly 3 million views.

The video spawned what is becoming a worldwide movement, even as it changed the lives of the young men who customized the bikes and made the video.

"Actually, scraper bikes saved my life," says Tyrone Stevenson Jr., who prefers the title "Scraper Bike King."

"Because I was at a young age, getting into a lot of serious trouble, selling drugs and on the verge of going to jail. So my mom told me this is a way to channel anger and frustration, just focusing on something that's creative, something that's me, and the bikes is me."

Oakland is a town where hip-hop is king and cars known as "scrapers" are huge. They're large, bright and have rims so big that they scrape the inside of the wheel well. Stevenson and his friends took those aesthetics and applied them to bicycles, fitting large wheels on small frames.


Stevenson, 19, started making scraper bikes a few years ago. He couldn't afford a car, so he made do with a bike. But not just any bike.

"The idea from the scraper bikes, it basically came from the cars that ride in Oakland — we call them scrapers — basically it's an old model car, such as a Buick, that's painted a custom color to match the rims. I wanted to take that and put a bike onto it."

To do that, he put the few resources he had to work. He added colorful foil food wrappers — from Oreos or Skittles — to the spokes, so when they roll they flash with color. Then he spray-painted the frames to match.

But scraper bikes didn't really catch on until he and some friends recorded a music video about them and posted it on YouTube. And now…





"Oakland has been taken over by scraper bikes," says Stevenson. "On the Internet, it is worldwide. There's people from literally across the world making these bikes, from Portland, Oregon, to Japan to Australia to Jamaica."

Stevenson says he's already making a living scraperizing bikes, but he's got big plans for the future: trademarks, patents and, someday soon, a scraper bike shop.

"The true meaning of a scraper bike is basically, I want to give back something positive to the community," Stevenson said.

"Because there's so much going on. Drugs and killing and stuff, this is a way of giving the kids a way to a positive future, but being creative at the same time."

Jacob Fenston reports from member station KQED.

Back to School

Student
by Ted Kooser
From Delights & Shadows. © Copper Canyon Press, 2007

The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,
and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,

paddling ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,
breaks the surf. He's got his baseball cap on

backward as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.




From The Writer's Almanac

Independence

"When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."

From The American Language by H.L. Mencken











Portrait of H. L. Mencken, 1927, by Nikol Schattenstein, 1877 - 1954. In the collection of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland.

WHO Proposes Checklist to Reduce Surgery Errors

WHO Proposes Checklist to Reduce Surgery Errors

by Richard Knox

To Listen to the story Click Here and then Click on "Listen now."

Morning Edition, June 27, 2008 · Since the 1930s, airplane pilots have run through checklists before taking off. Now the World Health Organization wants surgeons all over the globe to use them, too.


Dr. E. Patchen Dellinger, a surgeon at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, says people are surprised when he tells them about the project.

"One of the common reactions is, 'You mean you weren't doing that before? Good heavens!'" he says.

The new WHO checklist has 22 items spread over three stages: before, during and after an operation. Among other things, people on the surgical team must verify that they're about to operate on the right patient, with the right procedure, in the right place. They also must verify if the patient has allergies, if he or she may need blood, if pre-op antibiotics have been administered and, finally, if any instruments or surgical sponges are unaccounted for. (They may have accidentally been left inside the patient.)



Eight medical centers around the world, from Tanzania to England and Seattle to Manila, have been participating in a pilot program using the checklist. At the start of the program, the hospitals were doing everything they should only a third of the time. A thousand operations later, that rate improved to two-thirds of the time, with some hospitals approaching 100 percent.

The WHO tapped Dr. Atul Gawande to head the international task force that devised the checklist. He's a Boston surgeon and a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who writes frequently about how things go wrong in medicine.

Gawande says there's been some resistance to the list. One London surgeon thought it was demeaning "Mickey Mouse stuff" until one day in the operating room.

"Right before the incision [the medical team] took a timeout," Gawande says, "and when it came to the nurse's turn to raise any concerns, the nurse asked: 'Are we really sure we have the right size knee replacement for this patient?'"

Turns out, they didn't — not anywhere in the hospital. That surgeon now swears by the surgical checklist. And Gawande wants to extend it to other parts of the hospital.

Population Control: Important After All

Population Control: Important After All

For Release Sunday, September 14, 2008 © 2008
Washington Post Writers Group









Neal Peirce

For years, in company with most journalists, I’ve been ducking the population issue. We Americans seem to have it on our DNA — we believe that all economic development and growth, no matter the consequences, is a positive thing.

But a new article by seasoned environmental writer Tom Horton — “Growing! Growing! Gone! The Chesapeake Bay and the Myth of Endless Growth” — brings me up short.

The once-acclaimed federal-state campaign to restore the Chesapeake, now in its 25th year with billions of dollars invested, notes Horton, is in shambles. Its 2010 deadline for cleaner water won’t be met, blue crabs are at an historic low, and nitrogen, the Bay’s dominant pollutant, remains double healthy levels.

One example of the problem is the clogging of Taylor floats, where oysters grow, at the University of Maryland hatchery in Horn Point.

And it’s all about people, suggests Horton. From 8 million people in the 1950s, the population of the Bay’s six-state, 64,000 square mile watershed has ballooned to 17 million, with 1.7 million more coming each year.

That much population increase would put pressure on any region. But it’s all the more acute in the great, sun-sensitive Chesapeake. Its average 22-foot depth leaves little water to absorb pollution washing in from 48 million acres of land.

Why couldn’t and shouldn’t both the Bay region and the United States, asks Horton in his paper for the Baltimore-based Abell Foundation, aim for stable population? Couldn’t we stay close to our current 304 million nationwide population rather than go for the half billion now predicted for mid-century?

That case collides, of course, with the prevalent idea that economic prosperity depends on growth, or that stopping growth is politically or morally unacceptable.

But hello! With less than 5 percent of world population, the United States consumes a quarter of the world’s natural resources. We generate immense pollution. If every one of the world’s 6.6 billion people consumed at an equal scale, we’d need five or six planet Earths to accommodate them.

A central challenge is how we grow. Weak zoning, around the Chesapeake and across America, stymies “smart growth” laws. We get what Horton calls “rampant development” impacting sensitive shorelines and rural lands. Politicos and chambers of commerce, realtors, land speculators and contractors celebrate any new growth. But the public ends up subsidizing (and paying ever-higher taxes) to build and maintain the new suburbia — highways, schools, waste and stormwater drainage systems, power and sewer lines and more.

But, Horton argues, we can live happily and well without sprawl and fast population growth. Rebuilding our struggling downtowns and abandoned industrial landscapes, and constructing new transit systems for a post-carbon age, he asserts, can “stoke an economy as surely as expanding the suburbs and building malls in the countryside.”

Hilton also spurns the economic theory that we can grow infinitely by substituting more cash and better technology — for example larger and larger sewage treatment plants to accommodate the prodigious pollution of fast-rising populations. “Try hunting ducks at dawn over a sewage plant, or slurping effluent on the half shell,” he writes.

Would immigration crackdowns relieve America’s population pressures? Some anti-immigration groups suggest so. But how? Do we really think we can seal off the Mexican border with huge fences and guards, creating a literal Fortress America?

For guidance I contacted the noted demographer Joel Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University.

“Populations do matter, but they’re not the whole story,” said Cohen. It’s how we grow– for example “numbers of people who feel entitled to have a home at the shore, and a speedboat, and water skiing, and sport fishing on demand.” Cohen suggested discouraging second homes and low-density housing — a prescription close to Horton’s call for more city-focused development.

The U.S. fertility rate is close to the classic “population replacement” level — an average of 2.1 children for each woman. We’re adding people faster than any other industrialized nation because we have so many immigrants, most heavily from Mexico, many in prime child-bearing age.

But Draconian measures like high border fences are a reprehensible symbol and likely doomed to failure, says Cohen. His compellingly logical alternative: “adequate health and sex education in America’s public schools,” together with abandoning our “ostrich-like” attitudes about young peoples’ sexuality. “Give young people the means to control their fertility, and educate immigrant children on an equal basis with native-born children,” contends Cohen, and America’s high out-of-wedlock birth rate (roughly one in three) would likely drop.

As for Mexican immigration in particular, Cohen reminds us what people really want is security, dignity, and some prosperity. With reasonable life prospects, many immigrants would rather stay home. So U.S. economic development aid to Mexico, plus educational programs to assist in reproductive and sexual health there, would be the smartest formula of all.

Armed with Horton’s and Cohen’s ideas, it’s suddenly possible to see exciting opportunities for North American sustainability — environmental, and human.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com