Skyscraper Copies in Asia

Tokyo copying the worst that the West did to their own people and to their own cities.

-Flickr.

The situation with the new Asian states awakening from their competitive slumber is absolutely tragic. They are swallowing all the deceptions that originally sold city-destroying, soul-destroying, and culture-destroying architectural and urban typologies to the West. If this were the 1950s, then OK, we might excuse this error as a lack of experience. But we have several decades of mistakes, endlessly documented, endlessly discussed and debated. Why are the new Asian states copying the worst that the West did to their own people and to their own cities? Probably, the reason is that the West itself is still promoting the same destructive typologies — only a minority of us are condemning them, whereas the system is still stuck in a heroic city-destroying mode. - Nikos A. Saliongaros