The New Yorker, 2005-12-26

[fiefoe]

"Shanghai Surprise" / Paul Goldberger

• Modern Shanghai combines the soul of Houston with the body of Las Vegas.
• The seven-acre development, which is highly popular, is what Western builders call a “festival marketplace.” Like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, New York’s South Street Seaport, and Boston’s Quincy Market, Xintiandi is a stage set of an idyllic past, created so that people in China can experience the same finely wrought balance of theme park and shopping mall that increasingly passes for upscale urban life in the United States.
• Like many buildings in cosmopolitan Shanghai, a shikumen combines Asian and Western influences; it is a Chinese home with a Parisian sensibility, a hybrid form both delicate and monumental.
• Nothing seems less Chinese than the notion of the flâneur, of the street as a place in which to observe other people. {?!}
• The exhibit romantically proposes that the boarder—whose room is a small, dark chamber off a landing {亭子间, for those who care}—is a struggling young writer.
• The inspiration for the Xintiandi project was a gray brick building, no larger than a house, sitting in the middle of the site; it is where the Chinese Communist Party originally met, in 1921.
  

'Radically quaint' is a fine phrase for Xintiandi, I'd give him that.

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