Word: lowing
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...world's largest shopping center. Opened in 2005, it's a gaudy monument to the breakneck ascent of Chinese capitalism - 7 million sq. ft. (650,000 sq m) of leasable space, with wings designed to mimic Venice and the Champs Elysées. But, as Anthony J. Barbieri-Low notes in Artisans in Early Imperial China, the concept behind these new mainland megamalls (four of the globe's 10 biggest are in China) is quite old news. As in two millenniums...
...Near the middle of his arresting academic study of the craftsmen of the Qin (221-207 B.C.) and Han (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) dynasties, Barbieri-Low - an assistant professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Santa Barbara - describes the frenetic Eastern Market of the Han capital of Chang'an (present-day Xi'an). Established in 201 B.C. by Liu Bang, the first Han Emperor, this shopper's paradise was surfeited with stalls hawking everything from silk to cheap tableware. At a whopping 5.4 million sq. ft. (500,000 sq m), it covered more space, as Barbieri-Low points...
...Through this book," Barbieri-Low writes, "I hope to refocus our gaze from the glittering objects and monuments of China to the men and women who made them." To that end, he's a sapient guide through not only the bustling, state-regulated markets, but back down the production line to the small private workshops where many of the goods - some of them knock-offs of wares made in larger imperial facilities - were produced by conscripts, convicts and slaves as well as free artisans...
...Phaeno - apart from the Zaha Hadid?designed building itself, which is a triumph of experimental construction techniques and design aesthetics - is to be found in the 18 pieces brought by Arthur Ganson from his workshop at MIT in Boston. Ganson creates machines that are exquisitely engineered from low-tech materials to "express a feeling or a thought or a question." A wishbone hauling its own dream machine across the floor may not have a clear meaning, but that takes second place, he says, to "communicating the intensity and patience I put into getting the thing to walk." www.phaeno.de/mechanik.html
...Subsequent media outcry in Britain has painted a picture of the deplorably low tolerance some nations have for religious ideas. It has revealed a rigid conformity to secularism, a sense of blind nationalism and a lamentable distrust of the other belief systems...