New Futuristic Chinatown Concept
Think we’re stuck with the way Chinatowns around the world look? Not according to the award-winning Beijing-based architectural design studio MAD, who have created an unusual concept for a new kind of Chinatown.
MAD say that the old Chinatown renders all of our cities boring and alike and is nothing more than restaurant streets and fake traditional buildings representing a kitsch image of contemporary China, with no real life inside. It is a historical theme park that poisons the urban space.
Named ‘The Superstar’, MAD’s concept takes the form of a New Chinatown and is a fully integrated, coherent, and above all modern upgrade of the 20th century Chinatown model. It’s a place to enjoy, to consume Chinese food, quality goods and culture events; it’s a place to create and to produce, where citizens can use workshops to study, design and realise their ideas.
Superstar: A Mobile China Town is a benevolent virus that releases unknown energy in between unprincipled changes and principled steadiness. It can land at every corner of the world, exchanging the new Chinese energy with the environment where it stays.
It’s self-sustaining: it grows its own food, requires no resources from the host city, and recycles all of its waste; it’s a living place, with authentic Chinese nature, health resorts, sports facilities and drinking water lakes. There’s even a digital cemetery, to remember the dead.
The Superstar is a dream that’s home to 15,000 people: there is no hierarchy, no hyponymy, but a fusion of technology and nature, future and humanity.
The Superstar is a part of The Uneternal City exhibit which collects and displays futuristic concept art from the brightest minds in the industry. The show debuts in Arsenale, Italy from the 14th of September to 23rd of November 2008.
Mad were previously posted with their Fish tank concept
Technorati Tags: architecture, Chinatown, concepts, ideas, New Chinatown, Superstar: A Mobile China Town, The Superstar, The Uneternal City
1 comment | | categories : China, Ideas
jez…is this kind of a joke? This design concept in my humble opinion is millions times worse than those “restaurant streets and fake traditional buildings representing a kitsch image of contemporary China, with no real life inside.” What these super stars have to do with China, except reflect some arrogant nationalism?