China: design a “national priority.”
Out of context: Reply #30
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- nadanada0
"Original / lateral thought is not taught or encouraged in chinese education."
^ this.
there are a few emerging architects/designers from china that really are trying. i worked as an intern in shanghai for an architecture firm that is doing really interesting stuff. the owner (dean of my arch school) was educated at harvard and definitely lead the pack... but you could tell that even though the employees were really bright and well-educated (for local chinese schools) they could not produce a unique thought at all. they kept a copy of the rem koolhaas el croquis issue on its own desk, venerated and blindly copied from.
the owner was frequently frustrated as he kept re-designing everything that looked like it came straight out of rem koolhaas' office, day in and day out. yet - he still subscribed to the blind-copy mentality sometimes. he would look at a sketch or a model and say, "well, in europe this is what they are doing. let's do bold gradient colors." etc.
- it's a culturel thing - they have copied artwork from previous generations for, well, generations.nadanada