Photo of the day: Bikes as Art in Baitasi

Our photo theme this week: Remaking Baitasi. Baitasi is a monument in west-central Beijing, named after the Yuan Dynasty White Stupa Temple. In recent years, it’s also become a site of Beijing Design Week, an annual, city-wide program showcasing leading ideas in urban design. Some background on Baitasi and its recent evolution into a BJDW “core area” here.

This is one of the more fun pieces we brushed up on in Baitasi during this year’s Beijing Design Week. Entitled “串门” (literally; “strung together gate”; colloquially, “to drop in”), this fence was built incorporating urban detritus specific to circa-today Beijing, most notably a pair of bright yellow Ofo dockless share bikes. While we here at Radii are pretty pro share bike, heaps of the abandoned two-wheelers have caused some derision in certain quarters: this recent NYT article quotes an irate hutong dweller as saying, “There’s no sense of decency anymore… We treat each other like enemies,” before angrily hurling a share bike deposited in front of his stoop.

Well, constructing urban installation art out of them is one solution, maybe. Here are some more details: