Improving the outdoor bathroom

They gave me this nice office in my institute when I came this spring as the first "pioneer" of my group in Shanghai, which subsequently moved to the same place a couple of months later. There was this free faculty office not in use, although in my impression one of the best rooms in the whole building. It is built as an included exterior on what might have been planned as a nice balcony along the side of the institute. Apparently in some later stages of construction they noticed a shortage of rooms and attached these offices on the balcony, and fortunately,  maybe not daring to fall back to concrete bricks, they used exclusively windows as walls. Although this is less convenient between too neighboring offices, there is a nice tree on one side of the window front which makes the office actually quite pleasant, although I might reconsider the assessment when the temperate keeps falling in the same rate as in the recent days.   The third side towards the remaining stretch of balcony is also entirely made of glass windows. Of course the rest of the balcony now is not in use - apart from a considerable number of cramped air conditioning systems of course - and all black from the spreading dust of the Beijing air. Looking through this side window does not offer a very pleasant view though because the next building, the physics department, fills the scenery entirely, overtowering our institute by 10 floors the least.
However, recently the sight of the physics department building turns out to be very interesting: one can observe the renovating process of the outside of the building. I have to say, when I first noticed that they are about to renovate this building, I was quite relieved, it was just such an eye sore. If I would vote for the ugliest ever designed exterior of any kind of architecture, I would probably keep thinking about these Chinese 70-80's blocks with on the outside attached ceramic tiling. The tiling are usually light yellow-dirty and look like a bathroom turned inside out.
In any case it was indeed interesting to observe the daily progress of the renovation work. First, and in agreement with my own understanding of the progress of making old walls look new, the old ceramic tiling was covered with a thin stretch of cement to cover old scratches; of course all done by hand of some migrant workers on a shabby and dangerously windy scaffold or hanging attached to the roof seemingly floating in midair. I was even a bit impressed and silently nodding in affirmative, when they  pressed some kind of aluminium net  onto the surface of the wet cement to improve its stability and adherence. The next day, we already gave in to some speculation at lunch time about what color they might use to paint the building. High in discourse were gray or red. Since white would turn gray instantly (and maybe some other colors, too), the probability of gray was handled as the highest at least in the long run (that is a couple of weeks after finishing). However, it turned out that they were far from finished. The next couple of days passed by with first painting the wall white (thus gray seemed to win). But then,  as if out of context, the worker started to draw lines on the fresh paint resembling a giant vertical checkerboard. These lines were first drafted with a small pencil it seemed, using weighted ropes to ensure verticallity. These lines already made me ponder quite a bit about the goal and the design. However, they hadn't finished yet. Next the thin lines were thickened with black Chinese ink ignoring that gravitational forces kept spilling black droplets over the white background. Then tapes were applied exactly on top of the black lines with the half finished tape roles dangling all about. At this stage I already resolved that thinking about what they actually attempted might be just a fruitless exercise.  So  looking out of the window from time to time would be just fine. Finally, today, the progress arrived at the final stages: It's just incredible, they sprayed some marble-like color blend on the wall! Now that solved the riddle and left me in stupefaction. They indeed upgraded the ceramic tiling! The inside-out bathroom now get's marble! But to save the marble, they just paint color that looks like marble! As it is in the upper floors anyway, where no one could reach and feel the wall, this is just the same, right? The black checkerboard pattern serves as the jointing imitation of the marble imitation! The tapes help to protect the black paint from the marble spray!

I can't help being impressed by this environmental friendly and ingenious design!