BIG....Its
state TV headquarters has been called the big underpants. Now China's official
newspaper has a phallic tower to match.
BEIJING'S building boom has
already spawned a wealth of novelty forms, with a stadium in the shape of a
bird's nest, a theatre nicknamed the egg, and a TV headquarters that has been
likened to a giant pair of underpants. But the official People's Daily
newspaper might have trumped them all with its new office building, which
appears to be modelled on a colossal phallus.
Photos of the
scaffold-shrouded shaft have been circulating on Weibo, the Chinese
micro-blogging site, to the authorities' dismay, with censors working overtime
to remove the offending images. "It seems the People's Daily is going to
rise up, there's hope for the Chinese dream," commented one user. "Of
course the national mouthpiece should be imposing," added another.
The 150m-tall tower, located
in the city's eastern business district, appropriately near OMA's pants-shaped
CCTV headquarters, is the work of architect Zhou Qi, a professor at Jiangsu's
Southeast University.
"Our way of expression
is kind of extreme," Zhou told the Modern Express newspaper,
"different from the culture of moderation that Chinese people are
accustomed to." He explained the design was inspired not by part of his
anatomy, but by the traditional Chinese philosophy of "round sky and
square earth" – the tower tapers from a square base to a cylindrical top.
He claimed that the
elongated spherical form was designed to recall the Chinese character for
"people" from above. The fact it might look like a male member from
below was clearly a secondary concern.
Cleaner-minded commentators
have compared the building to everything from a steel-framed penguin to an
electric iron, a giant juicer and an aircraft carrier.
But perhaps Zhou should take
solace in the fact that his tower joins a long tradition in architecture – from
the thrusting Dionysian columns of ancient Greece to the sturdy stone linga of
Hindu temples.
Beyond the ancients,
phallocentric design found fertile ground most notably in revolutionary France,
where architects Jean-Jaques Lequeu and Claude Nicolas Ledoux were continually
preoccupied with penile plans.
In his unbuilt design for a
House of Pleasure in 1773, Ledoux conceived a "lonely phallus", lined
with bedrooms along its length, culminating in a large ovoid salon at the head,
while testicle-shaped galleries framed the entrance.
A second design elaborated
his allegorical ideas about sex, with private bedrooms arranged to "thrust
out from the circular ring of the building, metaphorically representing
penetration, the circular ring representing the vaginal passage and womb of the
female," according to architectural historian Paulette Singley.
France's penchant for the
priapic continued into the 19th century, promoted by figures such as the
painter Jules Breton, who suggested that the Luxor obelisk in Paris be adorned
with a suggestive female hand grasping its girth, and the Vendome column be
embellished with a clambering naked woman.
More recently, architect
Jean Nouvel has seemingly been keen to maintain the tradition: both his Torre
Agbar in Barcelona and the Burj Doha in Qatar have attracted sniggers.
But China's authorities have
yet to see the funny side: searches for the "People's Daily building"
on Weibo are now simply met with the message "According to relevant laws,
regulations and policies, search results cannot be displayed."(The
Guardian)
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