Shanzhai Capitol Building in Wuhan lies empty for years, now occupied by vagrant food

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Shanzhai Capitol Building in Wuhan lies empty for years, now occupied by vagrant food vendors: Shanghaiist

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An impressive replica of the US Capitol Building has stood dormant in the city of Wuhan for several years now, becoming a makeshift home to wandering food vendors in the area.

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The building features five floors and is configured in a U-shape, remaining faithful to many of the design elements of the original, namely the domed roof and Romanesque columns.

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Originally intended to be used as a luxury hotel, construction halted after financing for the building dried up. It has now spent the past few years falling into a state of disrepair.

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The building has not gone to waste, however, with vagrant food vendors now taking residence inside the edifice and local residents using the courtyard to grow vegetables.

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The Chinese have quite the penchant for constructing replicas of world-famous architectural icons. Highlights from the past year include the Sphinx in Anhui, Louvre in Hebei and of course the 1 billion yuan replica Titanic currently under construction.

We should also give mention to the city of Wuxi which features, not one, not two, but four buildings which share a more than passing resemblance to the Capitol Building.
 
Kill all the Buddist monks and you don't need a lot of grand space like that. They would have to have a real U.S. government to use that kind of building, and they don't have it, so of course it's going to be empty.

It's a monolithic memorial to what China doesn't have, and what it has. No freedom, lots of corruption and shitty regulation of food.

Doesn't their government still pretty much consist of the cold war vip car, a military uniform, and a pistol you hit or shoot people with? That kind of democracy was perfected in 1930's Soviet Union and doen't take up a lot of office space.
 
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has anyone pointed out that outside of having a domed roof that looking nothing like the US Capitol Building?
 
They have built a lot of look alike structures from federalist to Georgian, even norman churches and second empire style buildings (think the Addams family mansion.)

And they always get the design elements off by putting in too many windows, or changing the column numbers. I don't know what the reasoning is. There's tons of good examples of stuff they could put in, but it always looks a little odd.

And its just not them. Instead of a bunch of modern Agustus Pugins running around in countries doing awesome stuff, there is a lot of look alike things these days, or just really drab stuff.

Everybody knows they overbuilt during their last boom. A lot of countries did. I was driving through Sacramento the other day and saw they had torn down one of the city hall complexes that was less than 15 years old.

The downtown K street mall here where they are building the King's new arena was only full for a couple of years and there was a lot of rent fraud associated with it. Parts were as empty as this building in China.
 
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