Building booms around the world can render entire neighborhoods unrecognizable in a matter of days, demolishing historic structures to make way for new developments. In cities like Beijing, where older architecture such as “siheyuan” courtyard houses stand out for their uniqueness and beauty, the transition from traditional to contemporary can feel all the more jarring. Urban development is all but inevitable to manage growing populations, but for many onlookers, it’s sad to see the past bulldozed in favor of new buildings that don’t even acknowledge the area’s cultural and architectural legacy.

Many of Beijing’s older buildings fell in a frenzy of demolition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Traditional “hutongs,” or ancient city alleys lined with siheyuan residences, had fallen into disrepair and often lacked basic services and sanitation. City planners reportedly saw the historic, hutong-filled core of the city surrounding Tianenmen Square and the Forbidden City as prime real estate. In the ‘90s, about 600 hutong were destroyed every year, displacing roughly 500,000 residents. In place of those neighborhoods built during the Ming Dynasty came glittering skyscrapers and eight-lane highways.

Only a few hundred complete courtyard houses remain, down from the 3,000 that stood during the 1980s. But among those that still exist, an interesting trend is taking root: modernization projects that preserve and honor the historic structures while making them suitable for 21st century lifestyles. The best examples of respectful Chinese courtyard house renovations repair and maintain the existing elements of the siheyuan, keep the courtyards open to the outdoors and add new complementary elements that augment the usefulness of the original buildings without diminishing their character.

Transforming Formerly Hidden Courtyards into Inclusive Spaces

Designing homes around courtyards is an ancient tradition in China, with evidence of walled-in yards going as far back as the Shang Dynasty (approx. 1700 – 1100 BCE). The houses themselves opened out onto the alleyways outside, creating tranquil and private outdoor spaces protected from the eyes of strangers. This layout is similar to that of Beijing itself, which began as a walled city arranged like a checkerboard according to Confucian code. Each courtyard contained at least two trees along with water features and caged birds. Originally, each siheyuan was occupied by a single (often wealthy) family, but over time, they came to be inhabited by groups of families forming their own tiny villages. Many have since been converted into businesses.

The walls of a hutong “can be seen as a boundary between public and private venues,” acknowledges the firm MINOR Lab, which completed this renovation in the Dongcheng District in 2017 updating an old hutong with lots of transparent glass, translucent textured acrylic panels for privacy and warm wood. But their project, like many others, transforms these former residences into spaces that are meant for community use.

“Within the walls remains an inward and enclosed space, however, the yard resembles a vast container, letting in sky, wind, sunlight, air and sound. The crowns of the two grand gingko trees are the flowing roof in the open air, overlapping layers of grey tiles. The exterior space under the trees connects to the interior one underneath the four roofs, floating and exchanging in a continuous way.”

An interesting project by the firm CAA explores the continuation of multi-family and multi-generational hutong traditions in a way that can help support the owner’s aging parents, who have Alzheimer’s Disease. CAA kept the hutong’s original wooden structure and added an additional steel roof, creating larger windows and skylights in the existing structures to make them brighter. The layout of the courtyard and the surrounding houses gives each generation their own private living space, but they’re connected to each other, and the flat, accessible courtyard allows the client’s mother to get around in her wheelchair.

“Tea House in Hutong” by ARCHSTUDIO is a striking example of the bolder approach. Forced to demolish parts that were too unsafe to keep, the architects added new wood and metal structures and created more enclosed spaces protected from the elements by adding a white-painted concrete roof. Openings to the outdoors are glassed in like atriums, and you can still get a sense of the original space as you gaze across the courtyard despite all of these alterations.

The same firm took an old siheyuan in Beijing’s Dashilar Area and transformed it into a public space with a dramatic, river-like undulating surface of grey brick that flows in and out of the interior and exterior spaces. Curved walls hide auxiliary spaces like the kitchen, bathrooms, private guest rooms and storage areas while visually connecting communal spaces like the dining room and reception to the courtyard. It’s not subtle by any means and it doesn’t shy away from ultramodern touches, but somehow the combination of old and new still feels cohesive.

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Art Of The Chinese Courtyard Respectful Renovations Keep Hutongs Alive

Human civilization has grown and expanded at an amazing rate – or alarming, depending on who you ask – and you can watch the last 32 years of it unfold via satellite imagery thanks to Google’s Timelapse feature. Originally released in 2013, Timelapse has been updated to add four more years of data and tons of new imagery data from two new satellites, offering clearer views with more detail than ever before. Choose any location in the world to see how it has changed – from cities to the shrinking ice caps.

Some of the most dramatic changes have occurred in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Dubai and Chongqing, China, but you can also watch the Aral Sea dry up and the Shirase Glacier of Antarctica melt into the sea.

Aral Sea

Miami, Florida

Beijing, China

Las Vegas, Nevada

Shirase Glacier

Hangzhou, China

Look for the location of your choice and create your own annual time lapse at Google’s Time Engine Tour Editor.

Architecture that was at its prime in the 1970s has slowly fallen into decline and often ruin thanks to decades of neglect, especially in America’s poorest and most racially segregated communities, including Gary, Detroit, Camden and Harlem. Many of these structures were historically significant, built between the late 1880s and the 1920s, but when no budget exists to care for them and entire cities are left behind by economic progress, the forces of nature and decay take over.

In a potent visual representation of poverty in America’s urban centers and the loss of historic architectural character via demolition, Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara has spent the last 40+ years documenting the downfall of dozens of structures and city streets. The resulting series, ‘Tracking Time,’ is a time-lapse in slow motion, photographing the same buildings once every few years.

One old shop in Harlem gets painted several times over, has its stained glass windows knocked out, loses a facade to an ugly garage door and is split up into multiple smaller businesses before finally being boarded over and transformed into a mini-mall-style church in 2014.

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A massive brick building in South Bronx becomes modest row houses, while The Ransom Gillis House in Detroit (top) sinks into the ground, its bricks falling in clumps, the roof caving in, ivy and trees taking over. It’s almost completely obscured by greenery before a restoration brings it back to its former glory.

But other stories aren’t so positive, since people care more about mansions than they do about public housing projects, row houses, and modest residential neighborhoods. Occasionally, Vergara ventures inside to show us that even though the facades still look beautiful, like that of the former Camden Free Public Library, the interiors are utterly destroyed.

It can be a heartbreaking journey but also a fascinating one, watching some of these structures remain the same for many years while the world changes around them before transforming into something new. And some do manage to endure.

Few nations have experienced quite the explosive rate of growth over the last century as China, and a new photo series shows us just how dramatic those changes actually look on the ground. Photographer, computer scientist and MIT alum Dheera Venkatraman pored through books and archives to find images taken in the 20th century and then went out and re-took them, shot by shot, attempting to frame them exactly as they were originally photographed. All of the new imagery has been converted to black and white to highlight what’s different and what has managed to survive after decades of frantic industrialization.

The result is a series called Time Travel in China, creating pairs of images that Venkatraman likens to a ‘spot-the-difference’ game. Agricultural fields become towns, skyscrapers shoot up into the air, bridges stretch across waterways, dirt roads are paved, infrastructure becomes more complex.

Yet not only do the contours of the land and the silhouettes of the mountains remain the same, a surprising number of buildings do, too, especially temples and historical structures. In some cases, the only notable shifts in a forty- or even eighty-year period are the vehicles, some lights and a handful of modern towers.

“When most people travel, they think of traveling in space,” she says. “Whether it’s hiking through a national park or learning about a distant culture, it’s usually about the destination. This time, I decided to travel in time.”

“It wasn’t always easy to get that perfect angle match,” she continues in a post on PetaPixel. “In some places, the vantage point ended up being in a private location, and in some cases there was a large obstruction or building preventing me from getting the same view. But nonetheless, I managed to capture several shocking contrasts over the past century of Chinese history.”

A half century or into the future, will New York City even still exist as it stands today, or will these fanciful and sometimes bizarre proposals get a chance to become reality? These visions for future Manhattan aim to maximize available space by building new infrastructure right on top of transportation hubs as well as the Hudson River, and adapt to changing needs by creating new drone superhighways and building porous street systems that can absorb floodwaters.

Excavated & Walled Central Park

Considering that the entire city is liable to be flooded at the first sign of a serious storm, let alone rising sea levels, sinking any part of Manhattan doesn’t seem like the greatest idea. Yet, the visuals associated with this crazy concept are too stunning to dismiss. The winner of eVolo’s 2016 Skyscraper Competition, ‘New York Horizon’ excavates the entire park to reveal a mountainous landscape, and wraps it in a 1,000-foot-tall mirrored megastructure. Tenants living inside the megastructure would have unparalleled access to the park, but views of it from any other buildings that aren’t skyscrapers would appear to be limited.

Bizarro Futuristic Coney Island

The New York CityVision Competition by London-based firm Squint/Opera imagines a dazzling new future for Coney Island Park that could save it from the current threats of being turned into a condominium park. Transporting the defunct ‘Southern Star Big Wheel’ ferris wheel all the way from Melbourne, Australia is crazy enough, but those giant clown heads in the sky are asking a little too much.

The Hive: Drone Hub in Midtown Manhattan

The modules on the outside of ‘The Hive’ skyscraper are designed to fit nine different types of drones, acting as one big dock and charging station for both personal and commercial usage. Incorporating a ‘vertical highway model’ around the tower, the design regulates drone traffic to prevent the sky from becoming one big buzzing traffic jam of flying robots. “To provide a safe landing environment, the tower projected a new method for drones to dock horizontally onto their corresponding platforms with the fitting shape and scale; the platform with docked drones can be flipped vertically to be in parallel with the tower facade. The facade is constantly animated as the platforms flip outwards and backwards to nest back into it.”

Floating Neighborhood

An entire neighborhood for 65,000 people will hover right over the congested island of Manhattan in a proposal that seems too crazy to be true, yet is under construction right now. Hudson Yards will rest on 300 concrete-sleeved caissons right on top of the 26-acre West Side Yard, which is a critical part of New York City’s transit system. The plan includes six skyscrapers, 100 shops, 20 restaurants, a school and 14 acres of parks, and will be completed by 2024.

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Future Nyc 12 Proposals To Reshape The Big Apple