Demolishing Dalian – A Long-running Story

The Guardian ran a story the other day, by Francesca Perry, on a new wave of architectural heritage destruction in Dalian. Sadly Dalian’s gradual architectural demolition is long running and all-encompassing (housing, shops, hotels, entire streets) not withstanding some attempts at a sort of Disneyfication of “Russian” streets and plenty of facadicide. It’s also been the case that where attempts at preservation or refurbishment have been tried they have not been well executed. The now disgraced Bo Xilai, when mayor of Dalian (1993-2000), liked (as part of his self-glorification campaign) to have it regularly reported that he was restoring the city to its former glory. The reality is that, apart from a few poorly executed projects such as Russian Street, he did no such thing and indeed quite the opposite.

First off the whole scale destructions of the 2000s – I  would point you to my blog post from February 2009 when I was in Dalian to witness the wholesale destruction of Harbin Jie which, as you can see, was originally a fairly grand street of European style villas. This was not simply one street but about half a dozen similar streets – a few showcase examples may remain but the cluster of excellent houses has been obliterated.

Harbin Jie coming down in early 2009

Secondly to the poor quality of preservation/refurbishment in Dalian – there are many examples of poor and shoddy preservation but here is a blog post from a visit to the city in August 2009 when there was a spate of replacing the elegant red roof tiles on many buildings (including on the show piece Zhongshan Square/Bankers Circle) with poor quality plastic imitations. This was accompanied by the almost wholesale ripping out of original Crittal (most probably manufactured at Crittal’s Shanghai factory) or iron window frames and their replacement with architecturally incorrect and vile uPVC (the tendency to replace Crittal, wood and iron window frames with uPVC is, i know, a global scourge of bad taste and poor refurbishment). How well these tiles have lasted I cannot say, but even from a distance they look horrid compared to the originals, which were easy enough to replace with similar.

plastic tile replacements on the CITIC Building, Zhongshan Square, Dalian in 2009

So while there is still a lot to fight to preserve in Dalian, we should also remember that the city has, sadly, suffered a good quarter century of destruction already.