New Architecture of Qingdao (Part 4)

This will be the last entry on Qingdao for now. It stems from my conversation with my tennis kakis on Sunday. By coincidence, one of them has been stationed in Qingdao for 3.5 years in the 1990s. She said she couldn't recognise the city today. It has changed so much in so short a time. Another, who judges sailing events, was in Qingdao for one such meet, and said the city decided that sailing will not be done in the old part of the city but at the coast of the new city, and boom, they created an expansive urban promenade from the shore to the city council building, marked by a prominent red globe sculpture and zoned out-of-bounds to any buildings. "Looks damn impressive from the sea," he said. Construction speed is frentic. Shangri-la Hotel is building a major new wing and it's only basement excavation now. But they expect it to be up and running by end-2007. My host is confident that his half finished factory will be completed for occupation by next Mar. Things get ahead of bureacracy sometimes, and so new cars that come onto the streets are allowed to be driven without a licence plate, as long as the drivers have papers that show the licence plate is being processed. (Yup, that's a Merz CLK in front of our windscreen. And in front of it is the new City Council building, which commands unimpeded views of the sea down a few city blocks.) The prize of all this speed is a hotchpotch of architecture, a bizzare mixture of styles and materials in the new downtown. It would have been worse mess, I think, had they not been hammered into some semblance of urban order by height and massing control, and subjected to wide walkways and boulevards, things which, I was told, were learnt from Singapore. (Well, to have learnt from Singapore is really to have learnt from USA, since most of our top planners were trained in USA.) But the one thing they did or didn't learn from Singapore, was the masterstroke of building a new downtown away from their old city. (Hush now, but just what is the leaden MRTC building doing in the part of our town where a part of Chjimes was? And just whose bright idea was it to demolish the old National Library and Bras Basah park?) Well, the old part of Qingdao, where the railway station is, is still charming and old, I was told, but I didn't get to see it. Next trip perhaps. For now, one can view the swaggering skyline of the new Qingdao with the comforting thought that they can be always be done over again without much pain or regret. After all, they're all less than 15 years old. All of it!
Chup