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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110425201247/http://www.urbanatomy.com:80/index.php/article/detail/375/neomodernity Home Guidebooks Shopping Classifieds Sign Up Login Shanghai | PRD | Beijing Article News & Features Bars & Clubs Restaurants Life & Style Arts & Culture Events YCIS Home » News & Features » Urban Future (Blog) » Detail Neomodernity Video City Beat by nickland @ Friday, 22 April 2011 12:23 City Beat Local Blogs When it comes to Shanghai modernity, just once wasn't enough Claims to have discovered, or invented, the neomodern, neomodernity, or neomodernism have been announced in fields as varied as the fine arts, political and moral philosophy, theology, economics, memetics, chess, and apparently bathroom design. In sociology, Ulrich Beck’s ‘second modernity’ is a close equivalent. As with modernism and postmodernism, it is architecture that is central to the enduring public definition of neomodernity. Philosophers have only ever interpreted the world, but architects get to build it. Although still inchoate, a neomodern architectural landscape is quite unmistakably under construction. This is especially evident in Shanghai. When guided by actual architectural construction, the thread leading to Shanghai neomodernity begins in Turin, with Renzo Piano’s 1989 ‘restoration’ of the Fiat Lingotto Factory. This work was exemplary in a number of respects. It balanced creation with renovation, radically upgrading and re-purposing an existing, large-scale structure, whilst venerating the original. The factory was already an iconic modernist edifice, immortalized in Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (1923). Piano’s multi-use design mixed functional revolution with structural conservation. Hyper-contemporary features (including a rooftop bubble and new window system) employed light, transparent materials, in order to minimize structural (whilst maximizing functional) impact. In this way, an industrial plant was transformed into a hotel, leisure, exhibition and conference space, through aesthetic recapitulation of industrial heritage. The neomodern template had been laid. Schoolboys Cross-Dress For Girls’ Student slapped by teacher Smart Car: Kobe Bryant Is “Big, In Fool's gold: Why Youku is a sell Chinese scientists discover way to

It might reasonably be argued that the modern is always and inherently neomodern, that relentles are hard-wired into it, from the beginning. Yet the complicating prefix is important and informativ Rather than expressing smooth, continuous improvement, neomodern construction manifests, an Modernity is split and becomes, in part, past. The semi-paradoxical notion of ‘modernist heritage animating, inspiration. Modernity dates awkwardly, and intriguingly, because it positions itself upon the leading edge of from the future. In its vital, colloquial sense, the ‘modern’ is an indexical term that describes wha recently. It is in this sense that modernization remains irrepressibly up-to-date, anchored, indexic slip unanchored from the ‘now’ into the dead waters of history is thus to forsake the claim to mo past cannot be modern, and the modern cannot be simply past. Whilst ‘vulgar’ by the standards of intellectual and technical usage, it is this popular sense of the intense, agitational force. Even amongst the intelligentsia, postmodernism drew its powers of inc incomprehensible claim to inhabit a moment beyond now. Whilst it is no great stretch to make th ‘now’ compatible with intuition, to float a contemporary state on the far side of now invites stimu ‘now’ is especially interesting in this regard, by the way – ‘xianzai’ is literally where we are ‘first a beginning arithmetically.) In the fine arts, the consensual distinction between the ‘modern’ and the ‘contemporary’ resolves draining the word ‘modern’ of its colloquial and provocative sense, leaving only a husk of historica these words and movements, however, is to insist that modernity, even primordial modernity, res accomplished history, because it relates to an absolute future. The dynamized now of modernity moment in time. What modernity discovered, and perpetually recalls, was not just the next thing ahead in general, and perhaps even the road. Shanghai reached escape velocity into neomodernity comparatively recently. The turn-of-the-mille for instance, was a mile-stone in urban restoration, but was only embryonically, and perhaps also far clearer example of the architectural trends represented by Piano is found at the Red Town dev 2004.

The archetypal neomodern project is a ‘creative cluster’, and Red Town is no exception. It consist industrial site, re-animated as an arts and leisure hub. At its geographical edge, and conceptual c the Shanghai Steel Company’s old No.10 Steel Plant, now home to the Shanghai Sculpture Space ( style, the monumental relics of heavy industry have been embraced and re-vitalized – not merely transfigured. In the first years of the SSS, huge pieces of rusted machinery, extracted from the re-purposed bui and alongside the outdoor sculptures, as if deliberately scrambling the boundaries of art and scra notably a jumble of massive gutters that once served as conduits for molten metal, have been reb artworks. At the heart of the neomodern lies something akin to a field of ruins, yet there is nothing remote remains. They attest more strongly to resilient – if interrupted -- survival, than to disappearance a renaissance. Above all, perhaps, the neomodern is manifested indirectly, through display spaces. It points awa what it revives, in the manner of contemporary museum design, with its ideal of invisible mediatio information age, in which subtlety trumps assertion, inventive perception supplants self-expressio outperforms stubborn purpose. “We want to demolish museums and libraries” Marinetti declared, in his futurist manifesto, raging past. Yet, to make a museum exhibit of modernity is not to mortify, but rather the opposite. The modern is conspicuously demonstrated by the fact that it has not remained what it was. The deat chick. The Shanghai neomodern style is at once jarringly crude and hyper-refined, orchestrating a hard ( heavy metal remnants and intangible design. It exults in the most cyclopean, stressed, and time-t and rusted girders, massive chains, vast slabs of semi-crumbled brickwork, pitted concrete, splint eroded shells of warehouses and machine shops. Its preferred heritage components are character brutal, industrial functionalism, expressed on a mind-crushing scale. Around and amongst these paleo-modernist dinosaur skeletons, it weaves an exquisite web of ma near-transparent structures, emphasizing lightness, subtlety, openness, and innovation. High-ban communications, intelligent environmental control systems, hydroponically-nourished creeping p furnishings, tastefully understated interior decoration and sophisticated artworks complete the m

Neomodernity is at once more modernity, and modernity again. By synthesizing (accelerating) pro recurrence, it produces a distinctive schema or figure: the time spiral. But that is to get a little bey Postcript With peculiar synchronicity, half an hour after posting this, a copy of Wonsuk Chang's essay 'Refle Ideas in the Yijing' arrived in my inbox. The article ends: "Time in the Yijing may serve a conservative purpose -- namely, restoring the past. But it also serv producing novelty. These two aspects of time do not contradict each other. Many passages in the what restores the past simultaneously involves some element of novel creation. The process begi movement and finally reaches the point where creative novelty emerges. This evolutionary proces spiral, which ever produces novelty while simultaneously returning again and again to the nascen Comments Leave a Comment

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