In last week’s post I mentioned that the city of Tianjin in China had a slew of really interesting bridge designs, as well as just general architecture of its buildings. As you walk down the river that snakes through town, you seemingly pass between China, the United States, and parts of Europe, just by the design changes in the buildings (you can see what looks like the top of the Empire State building in the background, albeit much shorter). This all appears to be intentional on the part of the city planners, much the same way as you’ll have “little Italy” and “little China” in major cities in the United States, except here, there doesn’t seem to be a population mix to represent the cultures that the designs are referencing. In any case, it was pretty fascinating and definitely unexpected! Tianjin felt much less busy than many Chinese cities, and everything was spread out a little more… which frankly was a nice break. This particular building was the St Regis building, and I loved the cube design, flanked by the tall buildings on either side. Pretty cool stuff!
I had a few people ask me where exactly Tianjin was. The city sits just southeast of Beijing, and serves as a port city for the nation’s capital. If the name sounds familiar, you may recall the videos that went viral several years ago of a factory explosion that happened in China; this was unfortunately in Tianjin. Beyond the tragedy though, the city has a population of over 15 million people, for contrast, that’s almost 2 New Yorks crammed into a single city!
–Dan Thompson