Drawer #3.1: Units of Air Conditioning

Back in June, just before I left for the States & the blog went into radio silence, we moved out of our Shanghai lane house, where, somehow, 10 years had passed by. And we moved into an apartment in the “small” (pop 3 million) Chinese city of Kunshan. Which is to say, we moved into my idea of a nightmare: a classic Chinese tower block compound in the [empty] suburbs. 

You may remember this from Drawer 3.6, the one about White Tile Buildings with Blue Glass Windows: me, in my first week of Shanghai living, in a taxi on the elevated highway, with the weather a simulacra of the atmosphere of Venus, in a state of near-suicidal despair at the prospect of living amidst the dismal grimy brutalist architecture of this ugly place.

And now, the view from our new flat:

That, you may well ask, is a sports arena/indoor stadium/theater/cinema/bowling alley complex. It's where the World Badminton Championships take place. It also contains a Starbucks. For which I am deeply grateful. Tell me, why would an architect, with such a choice commission, design something in metal that so closely resembles dated & dirty white tile?

As for today’s drawer, the companion to #3.6, well, because if brutalist bathroom tile buildings are #1 for ugliness, a/c units helter skelter over every face & nook & cranny of brutalist buildings are #2.

According to a recent article in NYTimes: “During the 1990's, 5 percent of urban residents in China owned air-conditioners. A decade later, it was nearly 100 percent.” Two decades later, even the pigeons have a/c:

Since the tower blocks hardly ever have central cooling systems, each occupant solves the question of where to put their personal a/c unit in their own inimitable way.

To start, you need a hole. Right hru the concrete facade of your building. No safety code or building inspector need be involved; only one of the hole driller dudes. They can generally be found in posses on busy intersections near new construction, smoking Double Happiness or Zhonghua cigarettes, hanging on electric bikes with a wire bin on the back full up with giganto-size hole saw bits. I think of these guys as kin to Harry Tuttle, the guerrilla plumber in Brazil. 

Once you've got a hole thru which to run the lines between in the interior unit & the compressor outside, you call the a/c installer guy; if he's lucky, there's a ledge or even a pre-built a/c shelf...

but often enough he’s just launching himself out over space at a terrifying angle to secure an L-bracket to the facade. 

Once he has one bracket in, he in his faux-leather-soled slip-on shoes steps out on to it, & sets in the second bracket further out of reach. No pics: I can’t even watch this procedure much less document it.  

Once it’s all in place, you'll have to insist that the hole, thru which you can see daylight, be filled to keep the weather out. He'll look at you like you are a real pain & then he'll go out to the corner hardware store for a can of spray foam. Which he'll squirt into the hole until foam oozes out of the wall into your bedroom. He is not interested in the aesthetics of the problem.

But I digress. What it means is that all those randomly installed units absolutely litter the building facades adding an amazing amount of visual chaos to the city scape.

But apparently it wasn’t just my pet peeve. When the city began gearing up for the World Expo in 2010, its “Better City Better Life” campaign (apparently) decreed that all the a/cs on any building that might be in an any area that a visitor might pass through en route to the Expo needed to be hidden behind a screen. 

Think about this. In 2010, it was estimated that there were 22 million people living in SH. In the lane house across from us, there were 4 adults & plus at certain times 2 children.  In 2006, they had 4 a/c units; I watched them put in at least 2 more. People to a/cs: 1:1 ratio. 

But they’re middle class so let's say only 75% of the population was represented by an a/c: that’s still 16,500,000 units to cover. Even if they did only 50% of those, the logistics boggle the mind.  Inventorying them all,  hiring who knows how many thousands of fab shops (as ubiquitous here as hair salons & massage joints) to make and installing them all…. And what’s more they even individualized designs & painted them to suit the building...

And it worked! It made a HUGE difference to the city’s appearance: like a kid with brutal acne suddenly having normal skin. To say beautiful would be overstating the effect.

But back to our view. Redeemed by night:

Drawer #3.1: From top: Box 1, 3 & 4: Cardboard, milk paint, glass, straws; Box 2: Empty tin for  Traditional Chinese Medicine Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David; all others, Christina Shmigel

Row 8: Insulated Pipeline

The back compartment of each drawer of the 8th row, starting with 8.3 and heading across 8.4, 8.5, 8.6 , 8.7 & 8.8...

Somewhere, sometime, in the grand scheme of the Cabinet, I had the idea that a theme should run secretly across several drawers, for the amusement of the discerning observer. In the end, only two such patterns emerged,  one in Row 4 (which I actually think was accidental. See 4.5. 4.6 & 4.7 )  & this one across the back reaches of the drawers in Row 8. There's one other planned path & that is the meridian that runs in a somewhat interrupted square around the peripheral edges of the Cabinet...but that's another story... 8.1...

The wrapped pipe that runs thru these drawers, though it hardly does justice to the real thing, is meant as an ode to the artfully insulated plumbing of the old lanes...During the "High Communist" period, housing in Shanghai was scarce & entire families were forcibly moved, by the government, into single rooms in houses built as single family homes; a lane house likes ours might have been occupied by as many as 5 or 6 multi-generational families, some twenty or thirty people. 

When we first moved into the house, I had the same conversation over & over again with curious neighbors: How many floors? Three. How many people? Two. How many children? None. Followed by much head shaking & muttering on the part of my cross-examiner.

The kitchen under the old style was communal, sometimes housing several burners, each with its own gas meter;  food prep was done outside at the sink in the lane. Our immediate neighbors still live this way, three or four unrelated couples prepping their food & washing their laundry outside (and, in their kitchen, playing mahjong deep into the wee hours of the morning...)

For full drawers in this row, check out Drawers 8.1 & 8.2 & 8.6...with others still to come...

Drawer # 5.6: Tea & Blankets

It's 104 degrees as I write this, the hottest day thus far in three weeks of stunningly hot weather: I'm getting cabin fever from staying in all day everyday in my air conditioned 9' x 12' studio/office.

So why am I posting about blankets!? Because our ayi (housekeeper) says it's a good time to wash all our winter ones & because I've finally finished my patchwork!

Drawer # 5.6 is somehow about marriage & domesticity.

The blue & white bowls are the most common of old tea cups,  decorated with the character for "double happiness" and the drawing/pattern known as "auspicious clouds." The red cloths that line the boxes, & from which the flowers are cut, are the fabrics, now out of fashion, traditionally used for marriage blankets, as seen in the first of the blanket photos.  

In the top most box of the drawer, the liner cloth is the indigo & white batik known as Nankeen Cloth, another traditional fabric fast disappearing from production, seen, in the photos above, hanging in the secret garden of the  lovely Shanghai Lan Lan Handprinted Blue Nankeen Cloth Museum.  The object in the top box is the remnant of a firecracker casing that landed on our 3rd floor porch one morning as a rousing barrage of firepower kept the demons away from the bride departing her family home next door. 

Drawer photo credit: Bruno David; all others are mine.

Drawer # 3.6: White Tile Buildings with Blue Glass

    

I cried nearly the entire 12 hours of my first return flight from Shanghai.

Now, nine years and several weeks later, when I think of that great outpouring, what comes to mind is a moment on the elevated highway: I’m in a taxi, stuck in traffic on the elevated highway, heading north of the city to the university office of He-Whom-I’m-Trailing.

Surrounding the highway, as far as the eye can see, there are apartment complexes, high rises of 20 stories or more, grim & grim. Reinforced concrete faced in bathroom tile. With blue glass windows in white aluminum frames set into unadorned concrete window openings. Elsewhere, that blue glass is a beautiful cobalt blue but here it seems an affront, a charade, a cynical masquerade to deny the entirely blueless, denatured sky which hangs above & all around. A hazy of grey that we now recognize as Plum Rain Season and which HWIT likens to the atmosphere of Venus. 

The tile of the buildings is glazed white porcelain, with the occasional embellishing trim of powder blue; or there’s a kind of pepto pink or a beige that I hate on principle or mauve, all equally ravaged by rust stains and layers of greasy black dust. One might think that glazed porcelain tile would wash off in the Plum Rain but it does not.

I look at the tile buildings for hours from many nerve-jangling Shanghai taxis, sitting in the blare of the radio (“Sex Bomb! Sex Bomb!” one memorable day), windows opened by the driver who is saving himself the expense of the a/c (should it be working at all), bus exhaust streaming in on the hot humid outside air. 

The tile has the rectangular proportions of a brickface but it is not laid like brick. It is laid all in a row with its long side standing up vertically. The grout in that row, between the long sides, is laid in thin lines; the grout between those rows is laid in a wider line, which together results in a kind of stripeyness. It is my very first moment of …not exactly affection… but some kind of positive regard for these buildings when I notice this pattern. 

To me, up until that moment when the stripes reveal themselves, those tile buildings are the very incarnation of the dystopic city. It is those tile buildings that make me cry. How will I, with all my craving for beauty, ever survive in a place so ugly.

                            

Years later. In the studio, the milk paint surface of a piece of cardboard recalls perfectly the surface of the tile in its element-beaten state. I draw the stripey pattern. I score it. And suddenly, a new body of work opens up. Suddenly the aesthetic that rises out of reinforced concrete, with its cantilevers and curves, is endlessly inspiring; elevated highway rides an opportunity for research.

The constructions as they sit on the studio table breathe so happily…and choke off as they are put in place inside the deep (& deeply restricting) boxes of the cabinet drawers. On a whim, I place one into a glass vitrine bought some weeks earlier for its own loveliness…and the two together sing out with the autonomy that marks for me a work’s “success.”  There in begins a new installation, the companion work to the cabinet. If the cabinet holds all its archived treasures hidden, the vitrines set their contents on display, marking them as precious, no matter how mundane they might actually be. 

The other day a student in a safety-yellow t-shirt walked towards me. His chest proclaimed:

   EVERY    
   CLOUD   
   HAS A     
   SILVER   

I need the final beat. I let him pass me. I hope that the word that is stuck in my throat is emblazoned across his back. It isn't.

So there you have it: every cloud has a silver.

                                                           

                                      Drawer # 3.6: Cardboard, milk paint, graphite, blue glass. 

                                      On the right, the original version; on the left, as it is in the cabinet today

                                      Credits: Drawer photo: Bruno David; Vitrines: Hugo; Gif by Picasion

 all others c.shmigel