BusinessWeek: “The day after Chinese architect Wang Shu was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s equivalent of a Nobel, in May 2012, he returned to the old Beijing neighborhood where he grew up and found it in the process of being demolished. The hutong, with its maze of narrow streets and traditional courtyard houses, was being sacrificed to make room for a new philosophy center.
While European cities that exploded with industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are still sorting out the consequences of modernization, their boom times appear sedate compared with China’s last two decades. By 2030 the mainland will be home to 13 megacities—those with a population of 10 million or more—up from six today, estimates a McKinsey report. That breakneck urbanization is fast obliterating 5,000 years of architecture and culture. “Cities today have become far too large,” Wang says. “I’m really worried, because it’s happening too fast and we have already lost so much.””
via Wang Shu, China’s Champion of Slow Architecture – Businessweek.
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