Shanghai Surprise

Cityscapes…love ‘em. I’d like to find a coffee table book with big, colorful spreads of all the skylines of the major cities of the United States and the world. Know of any?

I haven’t seen many international skylines in person. I’ve been to Rome, Florence and Athens. The Athens skyline, excluding the incredible historic monuments and crumbling temples, looks like Queens right after ConEd belches up some bad coal dust. Pretty dreary, no creativity, little planning, no sense of whimsy, imagination, or “wow.”

A while back the New York Times featured a photo of the skyline of Shanghai, China. UNBELIEVABLE! Stopped me dead in my tracks.

source: ghmadsen.com

The buildings are out of an Isaac Asimov science fiction novel. Obviously they have an Asian flair, but they’re fantastically original, visionary architectural wonders relaying a sense of place, wonder, whimsy, and gravity, all at the same time. For a major city in cold, dank, backward, over-populated China, where people still drive two-wheeled carts powered by donkeys, eat grubs and lichen, urinate in the corners of office buildings, and drink tea that smells like Limburger cheese, it was extraordinarily imaginative.

Point please?

It’s about surprise. Creativity being the driving force behind expression, i.e. Einstein’s “imagination before knowledge.” It’s thinking out of the box. It’s finding the wink, the wow, the slightly bent, the alternative, the leap over the wall, or the reset button in your daily work. 

I’m not entirely sure that right brainers will rule the future as Daniel Pink suggests, but it’s refreshing to know the unexpected is becoming more expected.