Beijing's Summer Palace

Welcome to Beijing's Summer Palace, which I (it's Jeremy here) visited a few weeks ago. It was not at all summery, but it was very beautiful. This is the pleasure palace where the Qing dynasty frittered away all their money while the country descended into chaos. When you visit, you can kind of see why - it'd be hard to pay attention to matters of state when you're surrounded by sumptuous landscaping like this (below). The lake in this image, Kunming, is said to have taken 100,000 people eight years to dig. They knew how to think big, those Qing leaders...

The marble boat in the image below is the most notorious symbol of the excesses of the Empress Dowager, Cixi - partly because the navy was being starved of funds around the same time it was being constructed.  

The formal rooms of the palace are all up the hill (created from the soil dug from the lake), but I'd seen them before so I stuck to the areas around the lake, which still include some impressive structures:

Here's the 17-arch bridge, leading to a small island in the middle of the lake from which a woman was singing Chinese opera across the ice: 

The monochromatic tones of the frozen lake and accompanying hazy sky were lovely, once I became accustomed to the cold (the temperature was a little below zero). 

The grounds of the palace are open to the public. These guys were giving their kites an early-morning flight on the 17-arch bridge. I was amazed they flew at all, given there seemed to be hardly a breath of wind.  

The next Beijing area we'll visit is the city's exciting 798 contemporary art district. That'll probably be later in the week.

We like: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed

Our copy of 'CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed' just arrived from Amazon, and we're agog. Photographer Frederic Chaubin spent seven years photographing extraordinary buildings that were designed and erected in the last 15 years of the existence of the USSR.

The old cliche is of Soviet architecture being a reflection of the state that created it: monolithic, overbearing and uniform. Chaubin's book shows the exceptions to this rule, an incredible flowering of creativity in the late-Soviet period that resulted in some of the most breathtaking and nutcase buildings you'll ever see.

  

  

Chaubin calls these buildings "aesthetic outsiders in an ocean of grey", and suggests they were able to be built because the "Soviet net grew slack... the intertia of the Soviet machine, too busy putting off its own demise, let the work it commissioned on its margins float free of its control". Most of these buildings are in the former Soviet Union's fringes: the Polish border, the Caucasus, or the Black Sea.  But then he also wonders if the USSR under Andropov (who followed Kruschev's almost two decades in power) grew bolder.

Another good quote from Chaubin's very good opening essay: "The fact is that in Russia the most Neanderthal conformism always coexists with the boldest avant-gardes". (He's a pretty good writer as well as photographer).

There's always something enticing about faded utopian dreams, and this book is one of the best examples of that. So yes, it's highly recommended.

We like: Selby

One of our favourite houses in our February/March issue is Selby, the 1973 gem just outside Havelock North designed by Miles Warren. It's pure class, from its park-like setting shown above right down to its signature foundation stone and exterior lights:

These are some more of the outtakes from Paul McCredie's excellent shoot, images that we couldn't fit into the magazine. Here's the entry court, which shows the drama of those sawn-off gabled forms.

This particular diagonal line (in the shot below) points to the main entrance.

Just inside the front door, a window reveals a smaller sitting room, set a few steps down from the home's main pavilion.

The main living room is a much more baronial affair, with lofty heart rimu ceilings supported by dramatic diagonal beams.

This shot (below) shows the swimming pool, as well as the pool house and garden tower. Both the latter structures were built some years after the home was completed - the tower, for example, was finished in 1993.

Selby's owners, John and Helen Foster, gave the house the garden is deserved, a beautiful, formal blend of manicured plants overlooking the tree-lined sheep paddock.

Here we are in the entry court again, with a shot that reveals how fully resolved every detail in the house is.

Incidentally, Selby is for sale (you can view the listing at the Bayleys website here). We normally avoid featuring properties for sale in our pages, for fear of becoming a real estate publication, but in Selby's case we made an exception because the house is so exceptional.