One awful example is a new glass box fitted out with hundreds of color-changing lights right next to the Moller Villa (fairy tale brick castle) on the corner of Shanxi Lu and the Yanan Highway.

Who could have thought this was acceptable?

Another is the curved white gleaming shopping mall shoved right up the backside of the Jing An Temple. Of course the Jing An Temple itself is largely a tourist temple and has undergone a “facelift” so that it now looks like it was built yesterday.

Oversize, ill-fitting, poorly matching buildings sprout up all over this city often with garish lights or other exterior baubles and no pretense of trying to fit int he with the surrounding architecture.

Somehow it’s fitting that the ugly 80’s-version-of-future concrete TV tower is the symbol of modern Shanghai (and yes I realize it was built in the early 90’s, but the design clearly speaks 80’s China).