Rowan asks, "...can a city, in all its teeming complexity, really be planned? Or does the attempt lead only to a synthetic simulacrum, a kind-of city that is not quite the real thing?"
Nonetheless, Rowan is surprised by the boldness of Kurokawa's vision:
"To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It's a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer's creation. It's a city of fable or dream, as recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan."
Comments
Back to 1950's Urban Planning
The same style as Brasilia, which was designed in 1956. No doubt, the wind-swept plazas that modernists loved are even more uncomfortable in the steppes of Kazakhstan than they in Brazil.
That is what you get when you ask one of today's avant-gardist architects to design a futuristic city for you - a design that is a half century out of date.
Charles Siegel