Tag: Built Environment
-
Taking advantage of the extended Memorial Day weekend, I tacked on an extra day and winged it away from the West Coast for a weekend in New York City. What a place; I had visited in my early twenties, but it makes a major difference when you have local friends to visit and, crucially, a credit…
-
I am lucky enough to have my parents visiting at the moment; here for a few days before heading down to San Diego, and taking a leisurely drive up the coast. While the first Saturday was a wash-out, the sun came out to play on Sunday, and we counted ourselves lucky to have such a…
-
A quick 48 hours in London to catch up with some old friends and reacquaint ourselves with the old city. Tacita Dean @ Tate Modern Man I wish I had made it to see Fiona Banner at Tate Britain though. Brick Lane Graffiti
-
I had four of the best years of my life in Glasgow. Which is why I left and never went back! I feel immense affection for this city that I called home during my university years. It was (at the time) a long way away from home, pretty close to being a foreign city (depending…
-
Cloudgate (雲門舞集) are an institution in Taiwan; and one of its most treasured cultural exports. Combining traditional Asian and Chinese motifs, they combine them in extraordinary ways, mixing digital media, human-scale calligraphy, old folk tales and contemporary dance. It’s always a challenge to get seats for their performances in Taiwan, since they are so often on…
-
Escaping Shanghai is always a challenge, but as I have highlighted in previous posts, the HSR service heading out to Nanjing is opening up the entire Yangtze corridor. This time with my manager, Paul, in tow, we headed out on Sunday to Suzhou station, and a cab to take us out to Tongli, a so-called…
-
I had deep reservations with the Taipei Flora Expo, even before getting the tickets. China gets the Olympics; Taiwan gets the Deaflympics and World Games. Shanghai gets the World Expo; Taipei makes a ‘Flora Expo’ for itself. I don’t see anything more than a cynical distraction from real issues, and a vote-grabbing exercise; ‘lipstick on a…
-
“Moi?” It’s quite likely that I have been to France in the region of thirty times. I have canoed the Ardeche, the Tarn, the Loire. I have frolicked on the beaches of Normandy, of Bordeaux, and of the Mediterranean. I have carved snow in Corchevel, Meribel, Tignes, Val D’Isere, amongst others. I have taken in…
-
Shanghai is a huge, vibrant, emergent city that has had the world’s gaze upon it for at least the last five years. I might argue, however, that there has not been a any cultural development coming out of the city that has really influenced the rest of the world; and ‘modern Chinese style’ doesn’t count…
-
And what better way to mark it than with an introduction to the skywalk in the Shanghai World Finance Center? While I had been there before, I had not had the chance to experience a death-defying encounter with a 474m drop, in the world’s highest observation deck (higher, even than the Burj). All I can…