In Tianducheng, on the outskkirts of Hangzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province a Pariisan streetscape facsimile is taking shape. It has all the bits you make expect from an alternate Paris: an Eiffel Tower, a tree lined boulevard, mansard roofs galore. 2000 people reportedly live there,
We are aware that reporting on zany building in China is cliché, but then it struck us: what if China wasn’t behind this after all? What if France was? What if it is an act not of banal facsimile, but one of pre-emptive preservation?
Perhaps France is making a backup copy of itself.
Emails circulated the architecture mail system several times over last year with pictures of Ronchamp sitting in the dusty Chinese city of Zhengzhou. An interesting novelty. But with a portion of Paris also turning up, a pattern is forming.
Could China be the USB external hard-drive of the French built environment? Regular backing up of our data is a just a fact of life for most of us worried that we may lose important data. External USB hard-drives are being made for less and with higher capacities every day, such that the delete button is increasingly becoming irrelevant. So why limit our backups to data? China’s construction industry seems perfect for the task of backing up bricks rather than bits - cheap and powered by the brute force of sheer population. Copies of places may be made in a fraction of the time that it took to create them.
If in the event of a catastrophic episode, the part of France in question could be restored and life would go on as it was before.
China: ample space for a spare copy of France.
Related posts:
Another Eiffel Tower, 1/6 of the original(?), resides in The World Park in Beijing. There’s no image of the structure on the website, but it appears towards the end of this movie trailer of “The World” (2004), directed by Jia Zhangke.
And I really like the idea of recreating France in stratospheric Tibet and in the arid west. China, or “of things Chinese”, was once all the rage in French garden design, and now perhaps the tables have turned: Francophilia as the new urbanism.
Anyway, great post. You should really forget about this whole Super Colossal business and devote all your time to the Super Colossal Blog.
Oops. Forgot the link to the trailer, so here goes: click me.
What if France is making a backup copy of itself in China?…
An email arrived this morning from IFTF’s Jason Tester with the subject header: What if France is making a backup copy of itself in China? The email contained a link to a post on Super Colossal titled: China: USB External HD to the French. The scenari…
[…] The email contained a link to a post on Super Colossal titled: "China: USB External HD to the French." […]
[…] and spooky at the same time. I found the topic here : http://www.supercolossal.ch/2007/09/04/china-usb-external-hard-drive-to-the-french/ Could be turned out as a good sci-fi movie […]
I’m crying laughing at this…
Hahaha that was really funny, I posted a French version on my blog! I am backing-up a french version of your great post ;)
[…] le souligne cette pensée, et si la Chine était en train de faire une “sauvegarde systeme” des monuments […]
[…] Source : Super Colossal. […]
[…] “Could China be the USB external hard-drive of the French built environment?” […]
The West copy China for thousand of years. Now China is rich and powerful, China copy West right back. Who laughing now Mr. Marco Polo?
[…] quip that China, with its replicant Eiffel Towers and fake chateaux, has become a kind of architectural back-up harddrive for the French. Are developing nations being used as blank spatial slates upon which the West will rewrite its own […]
[…] regions as physical storage, or ‘plug-and-play’ […]
Using such a hdd will definitely save my data in safety :)
This is quite a up-to-date info. I’ll share it on Delicious.
Great post … I love this site…Thanks
I would like to see China build a backup copy of the pyramids, if they, by sheer manpower can recreate anything. Then at least they would have duplicated something worthwile and challenging.