Architects today mostly envision our future cities filled with floating neighborhoods, levitating skyscrapers, photovoltaic cell-paved roads and energy producing green factories. In their utopian hipster renderings these buildings are mostly very fluid in design, cladded with live-green or responsive facades. However, these visions may prove to have been very naive, as it was the case many times before.
While the transfer of power from West to East is apparent in economy and geopolitics, it is also silently affecting other areas, among them architectural aesthetics. This phenomenon has so far been visible only in African and Asian cities, but since often architectural trends bend under political and monetary pressures, is it possible that „chinaesthetics” will find its way into the West? What are the control mechanisms for limiting this fictive trend and should it be limited at all? These question are just a few of the many that this research deals with.
More often than not ambitious predictions of the future fell short of expectations, which is to say that they might continue to do so.
A master thesis project on the left (by Johan Kure, Kemo Usto and Thiru Manickam from Denmark), with a very hipster title "Favela Cloud" stands in clear contradiction to the future that is already being constructed by Chinese companies, on the right. Is it tyrannic of Western architects to believe their sense of beauty is the „correct one“ and enforce it worldwide?
Although an extreme example that will never become reality, it is not too hard to imagine that a similar thing might happen with some other European cities that are in dire need of cash influx and that would welcome with arms wide open the Eastern capital and their "questionable" aesthetics.
