#radical architecture

[jareckiworld]

Minoru Nomata — Light Structures XI (acrylic on canvas, 2007)

[conformi]

Man Ray, Chacun sa chimère, 1932 VS Superstudio, Un viaggio da A a B, 1969

[kestarren]

"Far Sights-7" by Minoru Nomata, 2009. Conté crayon, charcoal & pastel on paper. Japanese artist born 1955.

[arc-hus]

The Room, San Miguel, Chiloé Archipelago, Chile - Smiljan Radic

[goodhairbadmanners]

[failworse]

[...] one is reminded of the interesting element to Albert Speer’s otherwise utterly banal ‘Theory of Ruin Value’. Not the bluster over the impressiveness of ancient ruins, and the need to leave similarly imposing remains. Rather, the psychotic, suicidal notion of building with the ruins already in mind: a death-drive architecture, where posterity’s opinion is internalised to such a ludicrous degree that, in a sense, the corpse has been designed before the living body.

Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism

[kelly-danger]

People dont talk enough about how skaters will see hostile architecture and be like 'fuck it *breaks that shit*'. Theres something radical about seeing skate stoppers on a ledge and saying "ok time to get the hammer and chisel". Theres plenty of empty ledges still, sure. But its about the principal of the thing. Imagine if we all saw anti homeless architecture and said 'fuck it *breaks that shit*'

[abwwia]

Zaha Hadid (1950-2016)

زها حديد Zahā Ḥadīd | Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA (31 Oct 1950 – 31 Mar 2016) was an Iraqi-British architect, artist and designer, recognised as a key figure in architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. via W #PalianSHOW

زها حديد Zahā Ḥadīd Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA 31 Oct 1950 – 31 Mar 2016 was an Iraqi-British architect, artist and designer, recognised as a key figure in architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Hadid studied mathematics as an undergraduate and then enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972. In 2004 she became the…

[jareckiworld]

Minoru Nomata — Skyglow-V7 (acrylic on canvas, 2008)

[conformi]

Superstudio, Il Monumento Continuo/Piazza Navona, 1970 VS Le Corbusier, Apartment of Charles de Beistegui, Paris, France, 1929-1931

[philmonjohn]

A Call to the Children of the Global South: The System That Made My Father Disown Me

I didn’t write this living testimony for virality. I wrote it because silence almost killed me. Because truth, even when ignored by algorithms, remembers how to survive. If this resonated with you — even quietly — share it with someone else who’s still trying to name their Fracture. That’s how we outlive the system. - Philmon John, May 2025

THE FRACTURE Several months ago, when I, a South-Asian American man, turned 35, my father disowned me.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t cry. He simply stopped calling me his son.

My father is a Brown, MAGA-aligned conservative Christian pastor, born in Kerala, India, and now living in the United States. His rejection wasn’t provoked by any breach of trust or familial responsibility, but by my coming out as queer and bisexual — and by my deliberate move away from a version of Christianity shaped more by colonial rule than compassion.

I became blasphemy made flesh.

My mother and sister, equally immersed in religious conservatism, followed suit. Most of my extended family — conservative Indian Christians — responded with quiet complicity. I became an exile in my own lineage, cast out from a network that once celebrated me as the Mootha Makkan, the Malayalam term for “eldest son”.

This break didn’t occur in isolation. It was the culmination of years of internal questioning and ideological transformation.

I was raised with warmth and structure, but also under the weight of rigid theology. My parents cycled through different churches in pursuit of doctrinal purity. In that environment, my queerness had no safe harbor. It had to be hidden, managed, controlled — forced into secrecy.

Literal, cherry-popping closets.

Even my childhood discipline was carved straight from scripture — “spare the rod, spoil the child” was not metaphor but mandate. I was hit for defiance, for curiosity, for emotional honesty. Control was synonymous with love. The theology: obedience over empathy. Is it sad I would rather now have had a beating from my father, than his silence?

I would’ve taken the rod — at least it acknowledged me.

Instead, Daddy looks through me.

THE INHERITANCE And I obeyed. For a time, I rose through the ranks of the church. I led worship. I played guitar in the worship band. I wasn’t just a believer — I was a builder of belief, a conductor of chorus, a jester of jubilee and Sunday morning joy — all while masking a private ache I could not yet articulate.

In the last five years, I began methodically deconstructing the ideological scaffolding I had inherited. I examined the mechanisms of theology, patriarchy, and colonial imposition — and the specific burdens placed upon firstborn sons of immigrant families. Who defines our roles? Who benefits from our silence? Why is this happening to me?

These questions consistently pointed toward the dominant global structure: wealthy white patriarchal supremacy. Rooted in European imperialism and sustained by centuries of religious and cultural colonization, this system fractures not only societies but the deeply intimate architecture of family.

What my family experienced is not unlike what the United States of America continues to experience — a slow, painful reckoning with a foundational ideology of white, heteronormative, Christian patriarchal dominance.

My family comes from Kerala, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. But the Christianity I inherited was not indigenous. It was filtered through the moral codes of Portuguese priests and British missionaries and the discipline of Victorian culture. Christ was not presented as a radical Middle Eastern teacher but as a sanitized figure — pale, passive, and Western.

In this theology, Christ is symbolic. Paul is the system. Doctrine exists to reinforce patriarchy, to police desire, to ensure control. When I embraced a theology rooted in love, empathy, and justice — the ethics I believe Jesus actually lived — I was met not with discussion, but dismissal.

To my family, my identity wasn’t authenticity. It was apostasy.

THE RECKONING In 2020, the ground shifted.

I turned the triple decade — 30 — as the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.

Remote work slowed life down, and I had space to think deeply.

That year, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others triggered a national and personal reckoning.

I turned to K-LOVE, the Christian radio station I grew up with, hoping to hear words of solidarity, truth, or even mourning. Instead, there was silence. No mention of racial justice. No prayers for the dead. Just songs about personal salvation, void of historical context or social responsibility.

As Geraldine Heng argues in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, race was not merely a modern invention void of scientific basis — it was already taking shape in medieval Europe, where Christianity was used to sanctify, encode, and sell racial hierarchies as divine order and social technology.

As Ademọ́la, also known as Ogbeni Demola, once said: “The white man built his heaven on your land and pointed yours to the sky.” That brain-powered perceptive clarity — distilled in a single line — stays with me every day.

With professional routines interrupted and spiritual ties frayed, I immersed myself in scholarship. I entered what I now see as a period of epistemic reconstruction. I read widely — revolutionaries, poets, sociologists, historians, mathematicians, theologians, cultural critics, and the unflinching truth-tellers who name what empire tries to erase.

I first turned to the voices who now live only in memory: Bhagat Singh, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Vine Deloria Jr. Each carried the weight of revolution, tenderness, and truth — from anti-colonial struggle to queer theory to Indigenous reclamation.

I then reached for the veteran thought leaders still shaping the world, starting with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Shashi Tharoor, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Susan Visvanathan, Geraldine Heng, George Gheverghese Joseph, J. Sakai, Vijay Prashad, Vilna Bashi Treitler, Claire Jean Kim, and Arundhati Roy — voices who dismantle the illusions of empire through history, mathematics, linguistics, and racial theory.

In the present, I absorbed insights from a new generation of public intellectuals and cultural critics: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jared Yates Sexton, Cathy Park Hong, Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Heather McGhee, Mehdi Hasan, Adrienne Keene, Keri Leigh Merritt, Vincent Bevins, Sarah Kendzior, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, Wajahat Ali, W. Kamau Bell, Mary Trump, & John Oliver. Together, they form a constellation of clarity — thinkers who gave me language for grief, strategy for resistance, and above all, a framework for empathy rooted in history, not abstraction.

I also turned to the thinkers shaping today’s cultural and political discourse. I dreamt of the world blueprinted by Bhaskar Sunkara in his revolutionary The Socialist Manifesto and plunged into Jacobin’s blistering critiques of capitalism. The Atlantic’s longform journalism kept me tethered to a truth-seeking tradition. The Guardian stood out for its global scale and reach, offering progressive, longform storytelling that speaks to both local injustices and systemic inequalities across the world. And Roman Krznaric’s Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It helped crystallize my core belief:

Be a good human. Practice empathy.

That’s the playbook, America. Practice empathy. Do that — and teach accurate, critically reflective history — and we have the chance to truly become the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.

And this empathy must extend to all — especially to trans people. In India, the Hijra community — trans and intersex folk who have existed visibly for thousands of years — embody a sacred third gender long before the West had language for it. But they are not alone. Across the colonized world, the empire erased a sacred third space: the Muxe of Zapotec culture, the Bakla of the Philippines, the Fa’afafine of Samoa, the Two-Spirit nations of Turtle Island, the Māhū of Hawaiʻi, the Sworn Virgins of the Balkans — each of these communities held space outside Western gender binaries, rooted in care, ceremony, and spirit. Some align with what we today call trans or intersex, while others exist entirely outside Western definitions. Colonization reframed them as deviants.

And still, we must remember this: trans people are not new. Our respect for them must be as ancient as their existence.

THE RESISTANCE As I examined the dynamics of coloniality, racial capitalism, and Western empire, I realized just how deeply imperial power had shaped my family, our values, and our spiritual language. The empire didn’t just occupy land — it rewrote moral codes. It restructured the family.

I learned how Irish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, and Albanian immigrants were initially excluded from whiteness in America. Over time, many adopted and embraced whiteness as strategic economic and social protection — and in doing so, embraced anti-Blackness and patriarchal hierarchies to maintain their newfound status. Today, many European-hyphenated Americans defend systems that once excluded them.

And over time, some Asian-Americans have followed the very same racial template.

At 33 — the age Jesus is believed to have died — I laid my childhood faith to rest. In its place rose something rooted in clarity, not doctrine.

I didn’t walk away from religion into cynicism or nihilism. I stepped into a humanist, justice-centered worldview. A system grounded in reason, evidence, and above all, empathy. A belief in people over dogma. In community over conformity.

I didn’t lose faith. I redefined it.

I left the pasture of institutional faith, not for chaos, but for an ethical wilderness — a space lacking divine command but filled with moral clarity. A place built on personal responsibility and universal dignity.

This is where I stand today.

To those with similar histories: if your roots trace back to Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, Oceania, or to Indigenous and marginalized communities within the Global North — you are a Child of the Global South. Even in the Global North, your experience carries the weight of displaced geography, the quiet grief of colonial trauma, and a genealogy forged by the system of empire. Your pain is political. Your silence is inherited. You are not invisible. They buried you without a funeral. They mourned not your death, but your deviation from design. However, we are not dead. We are just no longer theirs.

White supremacy endures by fracturing us. It manufactures tensions between communities of color by design — placing Asian businesses in Black communities without infrastructure and opportunities for BIPOC folk to share and benefit from the economic engine. Central to this strategy is the model minority myth, crafted during the Cold War to present Asian-Americans as obedient, self-reliant, and successful — not to celebrate them, but to invalidate Black resistance and justify structural racism. It’s a myth that fosters anti-Blackness in Asian communities and xenophobia in Black ones, while shielding white supremacy from critique. These divisions are not cultural accidents; they’re colonial blueprints.

And these blueprints stretch across oceans and continents and time.

In colonial South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi — still shaped by British racial hierarchies — distanced Indians from Black Africans, calling them “kaffirs” and demanding separate facilities. In Uganda, the British installed South Asians as a merchant middle class between colonizers and native Africans, breeding distrust. When Idi Amin expelled 80,000 Asians in 1972, it was a violent backlash to a racial hierarchy seeded by empire. These fractures — between Black and Asian, colonized and sub-colonized — are the legacy of white patriarchal supremacy.

Divide, distract, and dominate.

We must resist being weaponized against each other.

Every Asian-American must read Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. Every high schooler in America must read and discuss Jared Yates Sexton.

Study the systems. Name them. Disarm them.

Because unless we become and remain united, the status quo — one that serves wealthy cisgender, heterosexual, white Christian men — will remain intact.

This is A Call to the Children of the Global South. And An Invitation to the Children of the Global North: Stop the infighting. Study and interrogate the systems. Reject the design.

To those in media, publishing, and the arts: postcolonial narratives are not cultural sidebars. They are central to national healing. They preserve memory, restore dignity, and confront whitewashed histories.

If you want work that matters — support art that pushes past trauma into structural critique.

Greenlight truth. Platform memory. Choose courage over comfort.

Postcolonial stories should be the norm — not niche art.

Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a cinematic breakthrough — razor-sharp and genre-defying — in its exposure of white supremacy’s quiet machinery: liberal smiles, performative allyship, and the pacification of dissent through assimilation. The Sunken Place is not just a metaphor for silenced Black consciousness — it’s the empire’s preferred position for the marginalized: visible, exploited, but unheard.

A system that offers the illusion of inclusion, weaponizing identity as control.

Ken Levine’s BioShock Infinite exposed white supremacy through a dystopian, fictional but historically grounded lens - depicting the religious justification of Black enslavement, Indigenous erasure, and genocidal nationalism in a floating, evangelical empire.

David Simon’s The Wire exposed the institutional decay of law enforcement, education, and the legal system - revealing how systemic failure, not individual morality, drives urban collapse.

Jesse Armstrong’s Succession traced the architecture of empire through family - showing how media empires weaponize racism, propaganda, and manufactured outrage to generate profit and secure generational wealth.

Ava DuVernay's Origin unearths caste and race as twin blueprints of white supremacy - linking Dalit oppression in India to the subjugation of Black Americans. Adapted from Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, it dismantles the myth of isolated injustice, revealing a global system meticulously engineered to rank human worth - and the radical act of naming the system.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — a revelatory, critically and commercially successful film about Afro-Asian resistance in 1930s Mississippi — exposes the hunger for speculative narratives grounded in historical truth.

Across the Spider-Verse gave us Pavitr Prabhakar - a Brown superhero who wasn't nerdy or celibate, as Western media typically portrayed the South-Asian man, but cool, smart, athletic, with great hair, in love, and proudly anti-colonial. He called out the British for stealing and keeping Indian artifacts… in a Spider-Man movie. That moment was history reclaimed.

A glitch in the wealthy white patriarchal matrix.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is a visceral fable of vengeance and resistance, where the brutality of caste, corruption, and religious nationalism collide. Amid this chaos, the film uplifts the Hijra community who stand not only as victims, but as warriors against systemic violence. Their alliance reframes queerness not as deviance, but as defiance — ultimately confronting the machinery of empire with what it fears most: a system-breaking empathy it cannot contain.

The vitriolic backlash from white male gamers and fandoms isn’t about quality — it’s about losing default status in stories. Everyone else has had to empathize with majority white male protagonists for decades. Diverse representation in media isn’t a threat to art — it’s a threat to white supremacy. It’s not just a mirror held up to the globe — it’s a refusal to let one worldview define it.

Hollywood, gaming studios, and the gatekeepers of entertainment — if you want to reclaim artistic integrity and still make money doing it, we need art that remembers, resists, and reclaims — stories that name the machine and short-circuit its lies. The world is ready. So am I.

Today, efforts like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society are not merely policy shops — they are ideological engines: built to roll back civil rights, impose authoritarian values, and erase uncomfortable truths. They represent a hyper-concentrated form of white supremacy, rooted in unresolved Civil War grievances and the failures of Reconstruction.

Miraculously, or perhaps, blessed with intellectual curiosity and natural empathy, through all of this, my wife — a compassionate, steadfast partner and a Christian woman — has remained by my side. She has witnessed my transformation with both love and complexity. While our bond is rooted in deep respect and shared values, our spiritual landscapes have diverged. Her faith brings her solace; mine has evolved into something more secular, grounded in justice and humanism. We’ve navigated that tension with care — proof that love can stretch across differing beliefs, even as the echoes of religious conditioning still ripple through our lives.

I am proud of her increasing intellectual curiosity and her willingness to accept me for who I am now, even if I wasn’t ready to accept myself when we met.

But our marriage has defied the splintering that white supremacy specifically creates: hyper-capitalist, hyper-individualistic, fractured families and societies.

As Children of the Global South — descendants of peoples who survived enslavement, colonization, and erasure — we carry within us the urgent need for stories that do not turn away from history, but confront it with unflinching truth.

In the pain of losing my family, I found a deeper purpose: to tell this story — and my own — any way I can. A sudden rush of empathy, pity, and love struck me: My parents’ and sister’s rejection was not theirs alone — it was a lingering Fracture left by colonization and global exploitation, tearing apart families across generations. As Children of the Global South, we still carry those wounds.

Make no mistake: white supremacy leaves wounds — because it is the system. And unless it is dismantled, both the Global South and North — and their collective Children — will remain trapped in a dance choreographed by empire — built to divide, exploit, and erase. Any vision of democracy, in America, will remain a fragile illusion — if not an outright mythology — built on a conceptually false foundation: white supremacy itself.

A cruel, heartbreaking legacy of erasure — passed down through empire — indoctrinating God-fearing Brown fathers to erase their godless, queer Brown sons. Preaching shame as scripture. Teaching silence as survival.

I reject that inheritance.

Empathy as praxis is how we reject that inheritance. In a world engineered to divide, it rebuilds connection, disarms supremacy, and charts a path forward. If humanity is to survive — let alone heal — empathy must become our collective discipline.

And perhaps what cut even deeper for my father — beyond my queerness — was that I no longer validated his role as a pastor. In stepping away from the faith he had built his life upon, I wasn’t just rejecting a belief system. I was, in his eyes, nullifying his life’s work. For a man shaped by empire, ordained by colonial Christianity, and burdened with the role of moral gatekeeper, my departure from his manufactured worldview may have landed as personal failure. But it wasn’t. It was never about wanting to hurt him. I love my father. I love my mother. I love my sister. It was never about them — it was about the system that taught them love was conditional, acceptance required obedience, and dissent unforgivable. That kind of pain is real — but its source is systemic. I still want to be Mootha Makkan — not by obedience, but by truth. By love without condition. Not through erasure, but by living fully in the open. Not in their image, but in mine.

Yet, and yes, I also carry the wound — but I also carry the will to heal it.

THE CALL I believe in empathy. I believe in memory. I believe the Children of the Global South are not broken. We are not rejected. We are awakening.

Children of the Global North: join us. We are not your enemies. We are your present and future collaborators, business & creative partners, lovers, and kin. We are building something new — something ancient yet reawakened, a pursuit of empathy, and a reckoning with history that refuses to forget.

If this story resonated with you, kindly share it, spread the word and please comment. I’d love to hear from you. Your voice, your memory, your Fracture — it matters here.

You are not alone. All are welcome.

Thank you so, so much for your time in reading my story.

You can also email me directly: vinesvenus at protonmail.com I'll be writing more on Medium as well: https://medium.com/@vinesvenus/a-call-to-the-children-of-the-global-south-the-system-that-made-my-father-disown-me-fecad6c0b862

[uhhhhhhh3000]

[upstairsdownstairsandinbetween]

The Einstein Tower, Potsdam, Germany,

The Einstein Tower, is one of the best-known examples of German expressionist architecture. Designed as an amorphic structure of reinforced concrete, Mendelsohn wanted the tower to represent as well as facilitate the study of  Einstein’s radical theory of relativity – a groundbreaking theorem of motion, light and space.

Astrophysicist Erin Finlay Freundlich commissioned Mendelsohn (along with a young Richard Neutra on his team) to design the Einstein Tower as a research facility for the theory of relativity. Between 1917-1920 Mendelsohn made numerous sketches of the facility, attempting to create a dynamic structure which would give form to Einstein’s groundbreaking theories. The resulting plan revealed a centralized observatory tower, banded by rings of windows, raised on top of a wavelike platform that would house the laboratories. 

Influenced by the work of expressionist artists of the time, such as the painter Wassily Kandinsky and designer Hermann Obrist, Mr Mendelsohn began to search for new methods of construction that would allow expressional freedom, which is why he eventually settled upon easily sculpted reinforced concrete as his material.

Building commenced in 1921. Unfortunately, however, the sculpted concrete structure proved difficult to execute with the technological capabilities of the time. The failure to complete the building according to his original plan prevented him from designing such ambitious projects in the future, and the Einstein Tower remains his best known building.

The research center opened in 1924 and held the most important solar observatory facilities until World War II, when it was severely damaged. In 1999 the building was reopened, in honor of its 75th anniversary, following two years of renovation; today it houses a working solar observatory as well as a visitors’ center.

Erich Mendelsohn Architect

[transrevolutions]

While overall I felt like the tbosas movie was well done, there's one part that really bothered me. When Sejanus gets involved with the rebels in the book, he's fully on board, stealing them ammo and weapons from the base, and planning to hold guards at gunpoint to free the prisoners. In the movie, however, he just wants to run away and then is surprised and upset by the fact that the rebels were planning an act of violence.

This doesn't seem like a major change, but from a political standpoint (as tbosas is a very political book), it's a big one and one I very much do not like.

In the text, Sejanus plays the role of the moral compass. Whereas both Coriolanus and Lucy Gray having complex and subjective motivations, Sejanus is always driven by wanting to do the right thing, even if it costs him. He acts as a baseline, keeping the readers from getting lost in endless loops of justification for atrocities just because Coriolanus's internal narration is rhetorically persuasive.

So when Sejanus (who up until this point has been relatively pacifist) joins up with the rebels in the book and agrees to participate in an act of revolutionary violence, the text is pointing out that that act of rebellion is morally permissible. That even violence against the oppressor class can be an altruistic action. Sejanus planning to fight the guards with the rebels is not a sign of his corruption, it's a sign of the fact that his society has become so corrupt that not doing it would be morally worse than doing it. After all, someone's going to die either way, so why not have it be the oppressors?

If movie!Sejanus is still occupying the role of the moral compass (which he seems to be), then his dismay at the possibility of the rebels using violence acts as a narrative condemnation of the violence, when the opposite is true in the book. The movie tries to make a distinction between the "good" dissenters (pacifist, nonviolent, morally superior) and the "bad" dissenters (violent radicals/terrorists). In the current political climate, this idea and narrative is extremely unsettling. And I'm disappointed they did this, but not surprised. Like the other Hunger Games movies, it was produced by a large media company, and they can't follow the satire of the book too closely lest people realize the fundamental irony of it. People in positions of power do not want to tell a story where violent activism is portrayed as moral--at least when it's against a society that obviously mirrors our own. (The brutalist architecture style is another complaint that I have, but that can be discussed in another post.)

Changing that seemingly small detail about Sejanus's involvement with the rebels doesn't do much to change the continuity of the storyline, but it does a lot to change the underlying message of his character and the story. This was almost certainly intentional, because the same sort of thing was done in the original trilogy movies as well. Companies are scared of subversive media because it makes them look like the 'bad guys' too, so they wrap rebellion in a lens of fantasy and moderatism.

[garadinervi]

Susan Snodgrass, Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs, Half Letter Press, Chicago, IL, 2019 [Art: © Estate of Ken Isaacs]

From the back cover: «Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs surveys the highly individual practice of American architect and designer Ken Isaacs (1927-2016), whose populist, DIY designs created from the 1950s to the 1970s challenged conventional architectural concepts in housing, as well as mainstream definitions of modernism. His flexible, accessible plans provided alternative solutions to the spatial and environmental challenges of midcentury modern life, while influencing subsequent generations of architects and designers interested in nomadic architecture, sustainability, and DIY practices.»

[niteshade925]

2025 China (1): Breakfast and Home Cooking; outline of the plan for this series at the end

Finally the series begins! Let's start with some food pics

Since some of the restaurants I went to were the same ones as last year, I'm going to skip over those, but the one thing I cannot skip is a good old Tianjin breakfast of youtiao/油条 (in Tianjin they are called guozi/馃子), jianbingguozi/煎饼果子, and doufunao/豆腐脑 (the savoury version):

To clear up some confusion over the naming, all desserts made of dough used to be called guozi/馃子 (饣being the Simplified food radical, ���is the Traditional version of the same radical), but now the character 馃 is gradually replaced with 果 in common usage, so when you see 果 being used to refer to anything made of dough, it's probably actually 馃. Also nowadays the word guozi/馃子 generally refers exclusively to youtiao. This also applies to jianbingguozi/煎饼果子, which should be written as 煎饼馃子, because the classic version of jianbingguozi has a guozi or youtiao folded inside the jianbing. This version here in the picture has guobier/果篦儿 inside, which is also fried dough but in thin crispy sheets, so the 果 here is also the same as 馃. Guobier is called baocui/薄脆 outside of Tianjin.

And then the not-authentic version of the Tianjin guobacai/锅巴菜 (in Tianjin dialect this is pronounced gabacai/嘎巴菜). It's not authentic because I don't like cilantro lol. In essence though this is basically savoury doufunao with jianbing strips instead of tofu, kind of analogous to the German frittatensuppe. Both jianbingguozi and guobacai are variations that stemmed from the Shandong jianbing.

Left: a Tianjin dessert named gaogan/糕干, a cake made of steamed rice flour and various dried fruits/sweet red bean paste.

Right: zongzi/粽子, just in time for Duanwu Festival/端午节 (aka Dragon Boat Festival/龙舟节). The color of the string tells you what the filling is, but in general zongzi in northern China are sweet and are served as a dessert. In other regions (mostly southern China) zongzi may be salty or savoury and may contain meats like cured ham, and these zongzi can be served as a part of a meal.

And here's some home cooking. This is dalumian/打卤面, or noodles served with a sauce and fresh vegetables, here the sauce is a savoury sauce simmered with meat, eggs, mushrooms, other veggies. In Tianjin dalumian can also be called laomian/捞面, and may be eaten on birthdays since long noodles symbolize longevity. There's also other stir fried dishes on the side here.

And some plans for the 2025 China series:

This time the series will be mostly museum pictures, so the food posts will be more spaced out in between posts about exhibitions. Organization wise, the 2024 China series was mostly organized in a chronological order, but this time I'm going to mix things up a bit to even out the pacing a little and give myself a breather (some posts are way more time consuming to research and write than others). I went to Shanghai and then Beijing this year, but I'll begin with Beijing since I didn't finish going through the Ancient China exhibition of the National Museum of China last year.

For now, the general plan will be:

National Museum of China/中国国家博物�� (Ancient China exhibition/古代中国展)

The Palace Museum/故宫博物院 (architecture, the Rejoicing in Woods and Springs/乐林泉展 exhibition, the Ceramics Gallery/陶瓷馆, the All Beings Thrive in Harmony/万物和生展 paintings exhibition, the Treasure Gallery/珍宝馆, and the Gallery of Clocks/钟表馆)

Yonghe Temple/雍和宫

Prince Kung's Palace Museum/恭王府博物馆 (mostly architecture and scenery)

Chinese Archaeological Museum/中国考古博物馆

China Maritime Museum/中国航海博物馆 (in Shanghai)

The posts about food and scenery will be placed in between all of these museum posts

Also I'm still busy for the rest of July so there will be 1 to 2 posts every 2 weeks for July, and then I'll figure out a schedule after July ends.