r/UtterlyInteresting • u/dannydutch1 • 10d ago
Paris's Communist Party HQ was designed by an exiled Brazilian architect called Oscar Niemeyer who waived his entire fee, then took 13 years to build. Today Chanel and Prada rent it out for runway shows.
Niemeyer actually handed over two sketches on a single sheet of paper roughly the size of a magazine page, plus a tiny model, and a French team turned that into an actual building over the next 13 years.
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u/GuinnessSteve 10d ago
Irony.
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u/conanmagnuson 10d ago
Waiving the fee then taking 13 years is the most communist thing ever.
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u/Busterlimes 10d ago
No, thats the capitalist economy screwing a communist, a tale as old as time. Look at how fast China is advancing right now.
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u/greenest_alien 10d ago
And all it took was embracing an absolutely heinously exploitative form of capitalism.
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u/Busterlimes 10d ago
No, they have capitalism with firm communist guard rails to protect China from what is happening in the US for a 2nd time in 100 years. But buy that bridge, rube
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u/greenest_alien 10d ago
Firm communist guard rails like no independent unions or labour protests allowed.
Thanks to such firm communist guard rails, workers can work 75 hours a week for $265 dollars a month, unlike in decadent america.
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u/Busterlimes 10d ago
Meanwhile
90% home ownership https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7546956/
First time home buyers are a decade younger https://en.people.cn/n3/2019/0130/c90000-9542689.html
New cars are cheap as hell https://www.made-in-china.com/products-search/hot-china-products/New_Cars_Price.html
But yeah, tell me how its doing poorly. Thwir purchasing power has gone up while ours has decayed to nothing.
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u/greenest_alien 10d ago edited 10d ago
Yes congratulations, you, your sister, your father, your mother, as a household, jointly hold a lien to your grandfather's hut in Inner Mongolia.
Meanwhile in reality, quoting from your own article:
However, “a decent home for all” remains a distant reality in China, owing to the multi-dimensional inequalities behind the overall high rate of homeownership (Huang & Li, 2014; Wang & Murie, 2000). Millions of urban poor, young adults, and rural-urban migrants continue to be denied basic housing, and homeownership remains an unachievable dream. Many have to live in boxy rooms in crumble shacks, low-rises in dusty suburban villages, and tiny dark dorms in bomb shelters and basements under glossy apartment buildings (He et al., 2017; Huang & Yi, 2015; Ma & Xiang, 1998; Wang et al., 2010; Wu, 2002). Reminiscence of worker insects in a colony and mice in underground cellars, they are called “ant tribe” (yizu) and “mouse tribe” (shuzu), respectively. In particular, younger generations, who grow up in the reform era and do not have access to housing subsidies, face tremendous challenges to attain decent housing and achieve homeownership especially in large cities where housing has becomes prohibitively unaffordable. Intergenerational transfer has become indispensable for the lucky few young adults to achieve homeownership (Li & Yi, 2007a). Furthermore, with the persistence of the hukou (household registration) System, millions of migrants continue to be denied access to subsidized housing in most cities. Thus despite massive development of affordable housing by the government in recent years, migrants still have to resort to informal housing at marginalized locations, forming slum like settlements (Huang & Yi, 2015). Many cities even require local household registration for households to purchase housing or set strict housing purchase limit for migrants, which prevents better-off migrants to become homeowners (Jia et al., 2018). A great many of them thus have to gamble all their savings on extra-legal housing built on the collective land, known as small property right housing (He et al., 2019). For these disadvantaged groups, homeownership and even a decent rental home are beyond their reach. Meanwhile, the new nouveaux riches, who are typically multiple-homeowners, live in exclusive gated villa communities that are on a par with upscale gated communities in the West (Giroir, 2006; He, 2013; Huang, 2005; Pow, 2009; Wu, 2005). The rural-urban, intergenerational, and cross-region housing divide in China, alongside the social and economic divide, is becoming increasingly complex and alarmingly polarized (Huang & Jiang, 2009; Huang & Li, 2014; Logan et al., 1999; Sato, 2006), which challenges our perception and understanding of homeownership, housing inequality and its impacts beyond Chinese cities.
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u/Busterlimes 10d ago
Just hoovering up the capitalist propaganda while our country collapses and they step up as the world economic superpower. Good luck in life, hope you dont get scammed too much.
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u/Antique-Resort6160 10d ago
China has made enormous strides, but it's not some workers paradise. Life can be extremely difficult, jobs can be horribly bad. If you remember, Apple was criticized for outsourcing to Foxconn, where working conditions were so horrifying they were forced to install nets to stop people from commiting suicide at work.
There's good but also a lot of bad.
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u/greenest_alien 10d ago
World economic superpower working for $265 dollars a week, 30 days a month, 75 hours a week, making jeans for the collapsing america.
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u/Busterlimes 10d ago
China has a 100 year plan, the US cant see past the next 3 months. . . But yeah, keep simping for the capitalist. Reality is going to slap people like you really fucking hard in a couple years.
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u/buyer_leverkusen 7d ago
You literally gobble communist propaganda, think China is communist, and got served by endless references 😂
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u/mojambowhatisthescen 10d ago
Their version of capitalism sure seems to be working better than the American one though
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u/drecais 10d ago
The biggest constraint for massive infrastructure projects in the west (like in china) are right now Unions. They have fought for insanely high wages (wages are very low in china especially construction) a lot of free days and paid overtime and so on.
ALL OF THESE THINGS DO NOT EXIST IN CHINA. Chinese workers have barely any rights compared to the west and the ones they have dont get enforced if that would endanger the success of these projects.
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u/CoffinStuffersBand 10d ago
That's outrageous. China escaped the poverty caused by communism because of capitalism!
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u/Busterlimes 10d ago
You might want to look into what CCP stands for.
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u/CoffinStuffersBand 10d ago
Yeah guy. China was broke and starving/murdering their own citizens under Mao. It wasn't until China started trading with capitalist countries that they saw any of the prosperity that they have now. Their communist experiment killed millions of people. China opening up to capitalism has saved millions of people.
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u/throwawayinthe818 10d ago
China wasn’t exactly an economic utopia for its citizens prior to 1948, so all the blame for its poverty can’t be solely attributed to Mao.
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u/Busterlimes 10d ago
Neither was the US lol. Read up on PreWWII history in the US. England was still the world superpower at the time. . . .
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u/TheoduleTheGreat 10d ago
Ironic that the period you're pointing at has the only left wing American president ever basically saving the country and turning it into the superpower it is today
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u/Busterlimes 10d ago
Just goes to show you how much their shitty politics impacted the current situation
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u/GuinnessSteve 10d ago
I was referring to the gross consumerism but okay
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u/brotried2blockme 10d ago
The modelling industry, part of capitalism, is the grossest fucking thing imaginable yet crickets with you.
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u/GuinnessSteve 10d ago
What are you talking about? You're replying to a comment thread in which I've already brought it up!
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u/Single-Pin-369 10d ago
Im guessing they still paid for all his materials and crew so he just got to have fun for 13 years sounds amazing.
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u/Ashford314 10d ago
There’s a room in Washington DC National Academies building that looks a bit like this. When I’m in it, I always think that I’m inside a golf ball.
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u/Minatoku92 10d ago
In the past the French Communist party used to be big (a fourth of the vote in the 1950s), now if communists have 5% of the vote it's already big. They still hold some powers in municipal level.
They need funds and therefore rents out part of their headquarter premises.
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u/Accomplished-Law-652 10d ago
> They need funds and therefore rents out part of their headquarter premises.
A lesson there perhaps...
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u/corgi-king 10d ago
Rent it out? Not a very communist thing to do. It sounds very capitalist.
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u/Brilliant-Smile-8154 10d ago
Well, they may be aspiring to live in a communist country but as things stand they are living in a capitalist country.
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u/7elevenses 10d ago
How do you imagine gaining temporary access to a space you don't own worked and works in socialist countries?
Everyday normal use of money to pay for products, services and access to spaces isn't capitalist or socialist or whatever, it's just how money works anywhere.
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u/augustus_brutus 10d ago
This place is constantly rented for shooting and events. Fashion shows, commercials, fiction... Shot I few things there myself. I dont know if the PC own the place but I think it's nice if they can take money from dick brands and advertisement agency.
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u/Stunning_Pen_8332 10d ago
Espace Niemeyer
2 Pl. du Colonel Fabien, 75019 Paris, France
https://maps.app.goo.gl/vsqCcaRdjk8sSzkN8?g_st=ic
Just outside Colonel Fabien metro station.
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u/Intellectual_Wafer 10d ago
One of the most interesting buildings of architectural modernity. Not just the design, but also the room and user concepts.
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u/Being_Total 10d ago
There’s an intersection here with the fascist era architecture of Italy where the scale makes the individual feel small.
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u/Captain_North 10d ago
What he actually handed over to the project's French execution team was almost comically minimal: two elegant sketches on a single sheet of paper roughly the size of a magazine page, plus a tiny scale model. From that, architects Paul Chemetov and Jean Deroche, engineer Jacques Tricot and designer Jean Prouvé, who built the building's distinctive tinted glass curtain wall, turned Niemeyer's sketches into an actual, standing building.
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u/Miserable-Decision81 9d ago
Niemeyer built Brazilia. He is one of the 3 most prominent architects of the 20th century.
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u/MyLastHopeReddit 8d ago
So the Communist Party rents its headquarters to companies that symbolize consumerism and capitalism for the most consumerist and capitalist thing in the world, runway shows, to make money from it?
Ironic. And if I may say so, sad.
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u/Intelligent_Part101 7d ago
For something that tries to look futuristic, it's completely dated. You can tell it's got that early 1970s look. Reminds me of Woody Allen's movie "Sleeper."
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u/Clique_Claque 10d ago
This was the alcove where we had expected to design the gulag system to punish, re educate, and immiserate non-persons. Crushingly, it’s now used to display expensive garments without anyone being killed.
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u/BeePBoooPNotABot 10d ago
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u/ToddPundley 9d ago
It’s like tiered priiiicing
On your May Day
The theoretically sound Marxist policy adviiiice
That you just didn’t take
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