The movie: 100 Days of Stories

Chinese film maker Kevin Wang made a short documentary about our performance ’100 Days of Stories’ as part of the Shenzhen/ Hong Kong Architecture Biennale. You can watch the whole movie online now! See below:

Highway in Xi’an

We already showed you the pictures, but now we have moving images! In July 2009, Xi’an opened the brand new 8-lane Xi’an Xianyang International Airport Express Highway (See pictures of the opening ceremony). But half a year after opening, the 20,6 kilometer long road does not seem to be used much – to put it mildly.

We took the highway with a taxi during rush hour in Xi’an. You can see for yourself on the images below. Is this a so-called “Grand Travail Inutil”? We’re inclined to think so, at least for the next couple of years. Our driver said: “I think we’ll never have enough cars to fill this road”, but that might not be true either…

Crossing a street in Xi’an

All around the country, Chinese cities are expanding at great speeds. To speed up the process of urbanisation, city governments sell out enourmous pieces of land to developpers. The different plots are seperated by big, very big, roads. Not only are these very unpleasant to walk along, they are also difficult to cross, as our experiment in Xi’an’s new northern district shows. How livable will a city be when it consists only of these types of wide speedway-like avenues and no small alleys or even streets whatsover? Take a look at the video:

Go West Project presentation at Factory, 25/06/2009 on Vimeo

The presentation we did at Factory last month has been filmed, and Factory’s Geoff Broz made a video out of it! For the ones who could not attend, and those who would like to have a wrap up of what we did there: via Go West Project presentation at Factory, 25/06/2009 on Vimeo.