Human beings have never stopped imagining the future city, and science fiction works have given countless conjectures: layers of buildings, jungle-like eerie neighborhoods, laboratory-like rooms... I thought these would always exist only in the imagination, but unexpectedly, a museum gave me the surreal experience of entering the city of the future.
In the spring of 2021, I entered a mediocre industrial park in Shanghai, passed the unremarkable office building, and then took a 3-minute elevator up to the 9th floor of the Fengyuzhu office building. After I walked through a black space and stepped into the Model Museum, the specially designed chasing light on the ceiling began to move with my movements, making it impossible to distinguish between reality and dream. At that moment, I felt as if I had traveled to a scene that would only be found in a science fiction movie.
Space | Architectural Model Museum
Area | The building area is 1000 square meters
Design | Yu Ting / Wutopia Lab
Location | Shanghai Jing'an District Jiangchang 3rd Road No. 191 Fengyuzhu Design Building 9th Floor
Designed by "net red" and "poisonous tongue" architect Yu Ting, this museum is the first architectural model museum in China. Like Yu Ting himself, who often does not play cards according to convention, the museum does not have the usual seriousness of a museum and rejects the formulaic form of exhibition, but is imagined as a virtual city.
Yu Ting said: "In addition to the hundreds of architectural models from different architects, even the whole space itself is a huge urban model – that is, the Model in Model." ”
01
China's first architectural model museum
268 years ago, the world's first public museum, the British Museum, was born. In today's museum where everything can be a museum, cultural relics, insects, stone carvings, dinosaurs, chairs, and classic cars can be established as long as the number reaches a certain amount. But this is the first time that a museum that houses architectural models has appeared in China.
Its initiator is Li Hui, founder of Fengyuzhu*. Fengyuzhu is a cultural technology company in Shanghai, which has achieved good results in applying scientific and technological digital, especially new media digital technology, to exhibition and display.
Although he is engaged in the work of exhibition, Li Hui, who graduated from the Department of Architecture of Tongji University, has not forgotten his passion for architecture. After graduating that year, he started from scratch as a model company, and as the company grew, he also secretly had the idea of building an architectural model museum in his heart. It wasn't until he went to Japan to visit the Archi-Depot building warehouse that he made up his mind.
*Fengyuzhu is not only a partner and sponsor of the "Tongji University International Construction Festival", but also the chief sponsor and partner of the "Nature Construction Award".
Archi-Depot Building Warehouse / Image from designer.org.tw
The Archi-Depot Architectural Warehouse is the only space in Japan to exhibit and preserve architectural modellings. It is divided into exhibition halls and vaults, which are usually used for planned exhibitions related to architectural themes, and in the model vault adjacent to the museum, more than 500 models of works from architects and designers' firms are stored in a professional way, and the models of famous architects such as Yoon toyo Toyo, Kengo Kuma, Kenzo Tange, and Shigeru Ban are listed.
Professional storage technology, a large number of excellent architectural models, reproduced the design concepts of outstanding architects, which shocked Li Hui. So building a model museum became his belief.
The models/images stored in the Archi-Depot warehouse are from designer.org.tw
This dream came true in 2019. It was completed by popular architect Yu Ting. Li Hui said: "We hope that the design of the museum is not simply an interior design, nor is it just a place to store models, but we hope to show the characteristics of architectural design through unique interior design." He also had big ambitions to show all the models of buildings built and unbuilt in China by well-known architects.
Yu Ting has successfully designed a library, and he is also good at using metaphorical forms and the analogy of this article to give life and narrative to architectural spaces. As he looked through the photographs of the Archi-Depot building warehouse, an inspiration struck him like lightning: it showed architectural models of various completed or unbuilt projects, stripped of the geography and time of the building entity compared to the real building, and put them together to form a new world.
Before officially entering the museum, you must pass through a black area. Directly opposite the elevator is a huge black CNC wall on which information, including patterns, can be displayed, which is very sci-fi / Photo: CreatAR Images / Image courtesy of Fengyuzhu
Yu Ting said: "So, I decided to design the whole museum into a huge model of the city of the future. And these collected models are different components of the fabric of this future city, each predicting a different future. ”
That is to say, the museum space, together with the architectural model, constitutes a metaphor for the Model in model.
02
The Last Redoubt
A sci-fi city of 5653 steel pipes
If museums symbolize the city of the future, what will the city of the future look like? How did Yu Ting achieve it?
In 1978, in his book Crazy New York, Rem Koolhaas used cartoons published in a magazine by cartoonist A.B Walker in March 1909 to illustrate the utopian imagination of New York skyscrapers, which Koolhaas wrote at the bottom of the comic: The Skyscraper as utopian device for the production of unlimited of virgin sites on a single metropolitan location。
In 2011, Yu Ting's doctoral dissertation on "vertical cities" also quoted this picture and Koolhaas text. The densely packed models in archi-Depot's warehouse evoke his memories of the "vertical city", which became the basic prototype of the museum.
Cartoonist A.B Walker's hypothetical of the original function of the skyscraper / Image from Yu Ting
But he does not want to visualize a real vertical city, but wants to abstractly present the experience of suspension and volleying that "vertical" brings to people.
Finally, the "Jennobia" mentioned in the light "City Two" in "The Invisible City" was completely built on stilts, which helped him determine the basic structure of the future city.
Design drawings/ Images courtesy of Wutopia Lab
In order to present a city as light and spiritual as Jane's, he chose a diameter of 32 mm and a total of 5653 steel pipes as the basic elements to construct. Although the entire museum is only 1,000 square meters in total, Yu Ting cleverly uses the height of the space to create a double-storey composite space, and the main exhibition hall is located on the first floor.
He named the city Last Redoubt, after the 1912 science fiction novel The Night Land.
Photo by CreatAR Images
Just like the name of the museum, Yu Ting also names different spaces with names derived from science fiction, movies, and paintings, thus forming a complete city with its own logic. The museum consists of an outer city and an inner city. The prologue hall is like an outer city, and the two main exhibition halls on the left and right are like an inner city.
He saw the prologue as the acropolis of Last Redoubt, calling it Visionary City. Visionary City originated from the paintings of the future city by the American painter William R Leigh in the early 20th century.
Visionary City, Entrance Lobby / Photo by CreatAR Images
Visionary City is square, with only one device placed on one side. The installation was inspired by the Stacks from the movie Ready Player One. The whole prologue hall looks ordinary, but when the surrounding glass is energized, the outline of the architectural model appears on the glass wall, and suddenly a vertical virtual city suddenly appears.
Yu Ting said that it was like a sudden hallucination.
Up close to the Stacks / Photo by CreatAR Images
The large exhibition hall on the right and the large exhibition hall on the left are completely different forms, "the difference is that different arrangements are adopted according to the original plane size." ”
The large exhibition hall on the right was named Tijuana by him. Tijuana is a human colony on an asteroid in the sci-fi anime Star Cowboy. The whole space is composed of 4 spaces arranged horizontally.
Tijuana Showroom / Photo by CreatAR Images
In the large exhibition hall on the right, he called it Ironia, compared to the City of Iron in the Japanese science fiction manga "Dream", "In fact, the original name I thought was too long, so I changed it to Ironia." ”
Unlike Tijuana, Ironia is designed as a longitudinal space. The small space connecting the two spaces, he named the separation capsule Pod Bay in 2001: A Space Odyssey, "Pod Bay is a city-like square, the meeting space of Tijuana and Ironia." ”
Ironia Showroom / Photo by CreatAR Images
The pure white space and building materials automatically add futurism to the museum, while the simulation of the imagery in the science fiction genre adds infinite imagination to the space.
Lightness, coupled with the flow of light and shadow, the whole museum seems to travel in space.
Pod Bay Showroom / Photo by CreatAR Images
03
Unexpected presence
Walk through a maze with a maze
In addition to the planning of large spaces, in the design process, Yu Ting also encountered some "accidents". And these "accidents" were successfully used by him as a unique small exhibition space. This gives dramatic tension to the space that may be slightly monotonous.
The museum was transformed from an ordinary office, and there was a circular space in the original space. Instead of "clearing" the "accident," Yu Ting used it as a social space, "deciding to use it for VR displays, breaks, or talks." ”
The circle is a rare form in the entire museum. Yu Ting named it after The Thunder dome from the movie Mad Max / Photography: CreatAR Images
In addition to this "accident", there is also a surprise "accident". On the side of The Thunder dome is a staircase that leads to the mezzanine. Yu Ting originally wanted to design the downstairs space as a storage room, "but when I stood in this room, I originally turned the floor slab into a perforated slab to reduce the weight of the mezzanine, and the light leaked through the hole and spilled into the room bit by bit." The light moved my heart, and I decided to design it as a special exhibition hall. I named it Tyell, a tribute to the great Blade Runner. ”
Top: Tyell; Bottom: The stairway above Tyell leading to the second-storey mezzanine / Photo: CreatAR Images
Last Redoubt is embedded in the original plane as a complete square city, leaving some fragmented corner space after embedding. Yu Ting used them as special exhibition spaces and marked them with red, yellow and blue.
In his view, a future city will not be separated from faith and soul, and these three spaces should represent the emergence of sacred space. The red space, the blue space, and the yellow space were named Olympus (from the science fiction movie "Apple Nuclear War"), Asgard (from the science fiction movie "Thor"), and Arrakis (from the science fiction movie "Dune").
Left: Olympus small exhibition hall; right: Arrakis small exhibition hall
Asgard's small exhibition hall / Photo by CreatAR Images
The interior of Last Redoubt is imagined to be a city of more than a dozen storeys, each with a model placement. The plates on which the models are placed are cantilevered and welded to a round rod, and the different models sit on the plates at different heights, which shape the form of Last Redoubt.
If the space on the first floor pays more attention to meeting the function of the model exhibition, then the mezzanine space on the second floor makes people's visits fun. Layers of space and intricately intertwined routes allow the mezzanine to form a labyrinth-like world and enrich people's experience of space.
During the walk, you don't know you're going to meet that model. It's like in real life, when you walk the streets, you accidentally meet a building.
Overlapping spaces, labyrinthine walking / Photography: CreatAR Images
04
Can't see enough of the architectural model
Just as the giant model of Last Redoubt is evocative, the more than 100 model works of well-known architects at home and abroad are also unforgettable.
So what kind of model can enter this space? They have no more than a certain influence in academia, design, and urban development. In order to clarify this standard, the museum set up an academic committee, invited the architect Zhang Yonghe as the honorary chairman, Li Xiangning as the executive chairman, and invited liu Jiakun, Yuan Feng, Zhang Ming, Liu Yichun and nine other well-known architects from all over China as members. "The main function of the Academic Council is to select and judge designs that merit entry into the Model Museum. At the same time, after the establishment of the professional committee, several selection criteria were also determined:
1. Unless it is a unique design, in principle, it should be that the building that has been completed and implemented can enter the museum;
2. The project must be built in China and can be designed by a foreign architect;
3. Must be an excellent work, either winning a national or international design award, or being selected for an internationally renowned design exhibition.
In short, they are all good designs that need to be approved by the committee. ”
At present, the buildings are award-winning works of the Venice Biennale, game designs by female architects, works by Shanghai architects, models that have appeared at the Tongji Construction Festival, and works by several academicians, which are displayed in different theme exhibition halls.
There are both 3D printed models and a large number of handmade models.
In today's popular computer modeling, seeing real models is indeed very novel. Before designing, in addition to drawing, architects will also consider the construction size and construction method through modeling, and the problem can be more intuitively seen by making a real model. Looking at these models, I can't help but imagine how many times the architect has deduced and adjusted the final plan before a complex building is completed.
The preface hall part is a temporary exhibition hall to display Zhang Yonghe's works, and for the first time, a total of 33 architectural models of Zhang Yonghe are displayed, and the representative architectural models of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo Entrepreneur Joint Pavilion, Longhua Temple Museum, Liangzhu Campus of China Academy of Art, FRP House, Tongji Building Square and so on are displayed. For viewers who can't travel all over China, the first time they see so many models of Zhang Yonghe, they have to say that they feast their eyes.
Zhang Yonghe Architectural Model Exhibition / Images from the Architectural Model Museum
From Hutong Bubble No. 32 designed by Ma Yansong, to the China Pavilion of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo designed by He Jingtang, to the Dinosaur Egg Museum of Qinglongshan National Geopark designed by Li Baofeng... The exquisite shapes and exquisite details of these models not only reproduce the architect's design concept and craftsman-like mind, but also restore the scene of the architects' thinking and creation.
Various models on display in the museum / Photography: CreatAR Images
Of course, what attracts me, as a Chengdu resident, is the "bamboo" placed in the TijuanaC position. Located in Daoming Village, Chongzhou, Chengdu, Zhuli exhibited as a Chinese practical work on "Building a Future Village" in the Chinese Pavilion of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Scanning the QR code next to it, you can directly read the report on Takeri of Ichibuichi on Takeri, "Takeari: A Poem on Land Travel and a Building Selected for the Venice Biennale", which can help the audience understand its design process in detail.
The architectural model of the He Duoling Art Museum, also from Chengdu, was also donated to the museum in 2020.
The results of the 2020 Best Collectible Model Selection are released: "QinglongShan Dinosaur Egg Site Museum" from Li Baofeng, professor of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, was selected with the highest number of votes of 3635 votes / Image from the Architectural Model Museum
In addition, the museum has several works from Pritzker Prize winners. For example, the Shimizu concrete poet, Tadao Ando's Dream Chair. Composed of three curves and suspended in the air, this chair has the shape of a combination of virtual and real, with his own autograph on it.
Tadao Ando's Dream Chair / Image from the Museum of Model Buildings
The Odyproge bench and the flower-bud RADIA table stool designed by zaha Hadid, the head of the architectural witch, are also collected.
The Oddpro bench attracts attention with its solid wood material, streamlined shape, and signature-paved stool, and there are only 10 benches in the world.
In addition, the museum also collects the Taihu Lake house model designed and signed by Wang Shu.
Odyprog bench designed by Zaha Hadid
Radia table stool designed by Zaha Hadid
Wang Shu's design and autographed work "Taihu Room" / The image is from the Architectural Model Museum
Li Hui said, "We hope that through the exhibits here, we will show the audience what China's best architectural design looks like, so that everyone can understand what is a really good building and what is an internationally recognized architectural trend." This role of 'architectural aesthetic cultivation' will have a positive impact on China's urban construction in the future." I think that would be the greater value of the Model Museum. ”
Different from online pictures, the model museum is sketching a historical map of contemporary Chinese architecture with physical objects, which has both historical and academic value, and will also provide ideas for urban building construction. It is believed that with the increase of models, the architectural model museum will exert greater energy.
Editor-in-chief: Makiyuki, Tsuru
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