Contemporary architecture in Beijing

In this post I'd like to share photos of the contemporary buildings that we saw over the last two days across the city.

Starting with the impressive Beijing Urban Planning Museum.

Ever since it opened this museum has become the starting point for all architects/city planners who visit this city.

Zooming in on the new CBD of Beijing

The CCTV HQ designed by OMA, sadly this buildings isn't really open to the public! Would have been interesting to see if there more to it that its wacky outer form. 

The main stadium of the 2008 Beijing Olympics - popularly known as the Bird's nest - is one of most known icons of the 21st century. It was designed by Swiss firm Herzog de Meuron in collaboration with artist Ai WeiWei.

It is a befitting design for the larger than life event that was the Olympics.

The transition spaces between the large Olympic park and the actual games arena is very interesting.

View of the different stadiums from the Olympic park

The Watercube designed by PTW architects is too kitsch for my liking and lack are architectural merit from the inside.

Here's a snap from inside the cube .

Digital Beijing at the edge of the Olympic park designed by Studio Pei-Zhu

The Linked hybrid designed by Steven Holl

Although this is one of Holl's most celebrated projects, I think he really struggles to do anything meaningful at these large scale projects!

There are some interesting ideas here but the overall project is not as interesting as the concept.

Some new office towers

And I end this post with this photo of the Sanlitun Village designed by the Oval Partnership. This is a very interesting shopping complex that takes inspiration from the scale and relationship seen in the traditional Hutongs of Beijing.

Viru's 200

I went to see the test match between India and Sri Lanka at the Brabourne stadium for a few hours today after lunch time.. It was amazing that there were soo many people to watch a test match..!!

Virender Sehwag was at his best playing a test match as if it was a 20-20 game ...and he even crossed his 200 runs while I was there.. : )

Day out at Wimbledon

Spend a day watching some great tennis and waiting in never-ending lines : )

The day started early - was already at the wimbledon car park #10 where the loooong queue for the day ground tickets was snaking around - at 7:00 in the morning.

When I got my queue ticket it was close to 8:00 and I was # 2800 something.

And after some five hours of waiting I was finally in and what can I say it was great to be there!
Spend the first few hours walking around the grounds peeping into the free courts (which is all the courts expect the two big ones - centre and first) and soaking some great festive atmosphere and finally some sun!!


While watching some random matches all over the grounds I went to have look at only Indian female to play at this level of the game - Sania Mirza - she was playing doubles and together with her partner put up a good fight and won quiet convincingly.

This is Henman Hill where people were just glowing in the sun and watching some great games on the big screen. Meanwhile I sat in yet another never ending line to buy second hand tickets to watch at least one of the big games of the day being played on Centre court.
While waiting in this line for another couple of hours I took short break from the line and watched some more tennis in a near by court.

But finally I got my ticket and ran to the centre court to watch the most awaited game of the day!

It was none other than the Spanish hero Rafael Nadal. And boy did he play hard. Over 7 hours of queuing was made well worth it.

Even though I'm a greater fan of Roger Federer's graceful game, today Rafa played like this championship was always meant to be his!

What a great day!! And thank god for the beautiful weather!!

Lord's cricket ground

I went on tour of the Lord's cricket ground here in London earlier today.

Heres a few snaps of 'The Home of Cricket'

On the Right is the Victorian Pavilion building and on the left the latest addition to the ground the Media Centre designed by Future Systems. (Click on snap to see it enlarged)

Over the years many additions have been made to the old structures around the ground to increase its capacity - the snaps above and below show additions designed by Micheal Hopkins

And here's a few snaps of the Media Centre

And lastly a snap of the same from the Nursery ground (where they have the nets for practice before important games) to the East of the main ground.

(Kohale we missed you here !!!)

London

Yet another quick trip to London to catch up with Friends and Family.

Along with Pragya went to see an exhibition on Che Guevara titled – “Che Guevara:
Revolutionary & Icon” at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Though it was a good collection of Products/Ads with Che in them I felt the exhibition could have been presented differently from the clichéd way in which we know of him.

Later that day while searching for a nice place to have dinner we* stumbled on this small housing colony very close to Covent Garden. Though bang in the centre of London once inside the Colony you were completely taken away from the noise and mess of the huge city around.

(Interesting the above project also reminded me a lot of my Aunt’s colony in Delhi designed by one the star Indian Architect of Post-Independent India – Raj Rewal. I had posted a snap from here earlier on this blog. Click HERE to see that entry.)
(* - Avani, Neha, Pragya and myself)

The great thing about be able to revisit big cities like London, Paris and Mumbai is the exhibitions that one can see there. And this time was no different so after the ‘Che’ exhibition at V and A, I managed to take a quick look at a very interesting exhibition on Architecture titled – “Future City” – at the Barbican Centre. The Barbican Centre itself is worth a trip by itself but the exhibition had an amazing collection of Architectural Projects and Utopias from over the years from all over the world. Indeed a very interesting exhibition (though they could have used a bigger space for such a large collection)

(Read more about this exhibition on the official gallery website – HERE, or you can download a brochure of the exhibition HERE it shows all the architecture movements covered in it)

And sort of the highlight of the trip – Wimbledon.

Wow, it was great to be able to see the real thing. Thanks to some great planning by ex-Wimbledon employee Amrita Ravimohan we had a great day at the All England Lawn Tennis Club and got to see some big stars play and that to for what I thought was a steal of a price. (Way to go girl !!)

And what was better was that my sister who had just flown in from Dubai the previous night was able to join us.

Here are some pictures that look like stuff you seen on your TV screens a lot of times (but what the hell I want to share my pics). And look who’s in the red box our very own Indian superstar – Sania Mirza – We love you Saniaaaaa…!!! (Check my old blog entry on Sania)

But like I said early the reason for this trip was to meet up with Friends and Family – In fact a new member of the Family – Fahad - my Nephew. Check out a few pics of him. I really hope that I can visit him quiet often, good thing I’m not too far from here.

Here's some snaps of Jean Nouvel's new Monster that sits on one of the most strategic locations in the grid of Barcelona.

The snap on the extreme left was taken from Antonio Gaudi's Placa de la Sagrada Familia.

But one of the highlights of the trip has to be watching FC Barcelona play against Celta at their home stadium.

The highly acclaimed home side had a cracking 2-0 victory over their Spanish league competitors.

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