The Surging News reporter Qian Xueer comprehensive report
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York recently announced that it will begin in September with the exhibition "Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China", focusing on China's new generation of architects and their commitment to social and environmental sustainability. Participating architects include Wang Shu, Yuan Feng, Liu Yichun, Chen Yifeng, Xu Tiantian, Zhu Jing, Dong Gong and Zhang Ke. These architects were generally skeptical of ways to completely bulldoze the architectural landscape and rebuild it, preferring to focus on relatively small-scale interventions, seeking meaningful participation in the built environmental and social structures.
From September 16, 2021 to July 4, 2022, MoMA will exhibit eight projects by China's new generation of architects in the Street Floor Exhibition Hall. They will showcase the diversity of construction methods – the adaptive reuse of former industrial buildings, the recycling of building materials, the reinterpretation of ancient building techniques, to the insertion of non-intrusive buildings to revitalize the economy of a village or an entire region. Exhibitors include: Pritzker Award-winning amateur architecture studios (Wang Shu, Lu Wenyu), Chuangmeng International (Yuan Feng), Dashe Architects (Liu Yichun, Chen Yifeng), DnA Architects (Xu Tiantian), Zhu Kai Architects (Zhu Gong), Zhixiang Architects (Dong Gong), and Akahan Architectural Award-winning Standard Construction Architects (Zhang Ke).
Jingdezhen Royal Kiln Museum; Design: Zhu Kai Architects + Tsinghua University Architectural Design and Research Institute; Venue: Schranimage, Jingdezhen ©, Jiangxi
After four years of research, the exhibition, which includes extensive dialogue with architects and extensive fieldwork of all the exhibited projects, will feature models, drawings, photographs, videos, and physical models of some 160 recently acquired works of contemporary Chinese architecture. The exhibition is organized by Martino Stierli, Chief Curator of Philip Johnson's Seat Architectural Design, in collaboration with Evangelos Kotsioris, Curatorial Assistant in the Architectural Design Department. Professor Li Xiangning of Tongji University in Shanghai provided curatorial advice.
Long Museum West Bund; Design: Dashe Architectural Design Office; Venue: Shanghai Photo: Su Shengliang
China's economic and social transformation over the past 30 years has been accompanied by a boom in architecture, making China the largest construction site in human history. For years, architects have focused on large-scale urban projects and ornate buildings, many of which were designed by Western architects. Now, a younger generation of architects independent of the state-run design institutes is beginning to reflect.
Wang Shu is the winner of the 2012 Pritzker Prize, the first Chinese architect to receive the prize. He is known in academia for his critical rejection of "soulless so-called professional modern architecture". The Prize jury once commented: "His architecture is timeless, deeply rooted in the historical background and environment, but also cosmopolitan. Earlier, Wang Shu pointed out at a forum that as the French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss of the 1960s proposed, the most profound conflicts faced by human beings are the conflicts between humans and nature, and the same is true of architecture. According to his observations, over the past two or three decades, Chinese architecture has gradually emerged as a space of tension between modernism and mainland China. "A group of architects emerged in China, who cross-discussed the modernist language around the concept of natural materials, and finally implemented it in construction."
These architects are generally skeptical of the "tabula rasa approach" of urban construction, a way to completely bulldoze and rebuild original buildings and landscapes, even though it has changed the urban fabric of China and the daily lives of millions of people. They focus more on relatively small-scale interventions, seeking meaningful participation in the established environmental and social structures. In addition to exploring the possibility of merging old and new urban buildings, most of these projects are located in population centers and megacities in the traditional sense, driving the revival of China's second-tier cities and rural areas.
Participating architect Liu Yichun, who has always focused on "working with the ruins" in architecture, once shared in a speech, "Less demolition is the greatest sustainability." Less demolition means a kind of retention, and this reservation is also a kind of cultural sustainability. In his view, the publicity of architecture is related to a certain "sense of ruin" of architecture, or meaninglessness and neutralization, which is a very interesting aspect of publicity. ”
The Royal Kiln Museum, designed by Zhu Cheng Architects, is located in the center of the Historical District of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, adjacent to the ming and Qing Dynasty Imperial Kiln Sites, and is surrounded by buildings of different ages. The regional practice of the Imperial Kiln Museum incorporates the reading of the site, and this complex analysis involves related fields of knowledge such as urbanism, archaeology, anthropology, and climate. The Imperial Kiln Museum consists of eight linear brick arches of varying sizes and sizes, arranged in a long north-south direction, which are immediately separated, both real and virtual, and implanted in complex lots with a humble attitude and appropriate scale.
Alila Yangshuo Sugar House Hotel; Design: Straight To Architecture; Location: Guilin, Guangxi Photo: Su Shengliang
In the project of the participating architects, Alila Yangshuo Sugar House Hotel, which is directly facing the architectural firm, is located in a mountain pass on the li river in Yangshuo County, Guangxi Province, with a representative karst landform. The site is rich in natural landscape and preserves the old sugar factory built in the 1960s. In order to protect the ecological environment of the Li River, the old sugar factory was shut down in the 1980s, but fortunately its building was preserved intact. Architect Dong Gong and his team regard the old sugar factory as a carrier of a generation's life memories and emotions, and the landscaped fire pool reflects the reflection of the old factory, further emphasizing a certain commemorativeness of the old sugar factory. New and old buildings evolve and change in the same order.
The bamboo theater designed by DnA Architects is located in Hengkeng Village, Songyang, Zhejiang, on the slope of a sharp hill at an altitude of 1080 meters, which is a typical mountain village in southwest Zhejiang. The local ancient villages are growing in the mountains full of moso bamboo forest, but there is no room for stay in the bamboo forest, architect Xu Tiantian and other combined with the natural properties of moso bamboo, in the deep bamboo forest on the relatively flat site, the surrounding moso bamboo orderly down, surrounded by a dome-like state, the use of growing bamboo to enclose the open rest space, so that this bamboo forest theater becomes a living metabolism.
Bamboo Theater; Design: DnA Architects; Location: Songyang, Zhejiang Photo: Wang Ziling
In this exhibition, architects and projects will show what it means to build in China today and explore how modern architecture can take firm root in the country's unique cultural context. From the vaults of the Royal Kiln Museum in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, to the open-air bamboo theater in Hengkeng Village, to the converted sugar factory near Guilin, the exhibition will examine these cautious and decisive interventions that paint a blueprint for less mining and more resource-conscious future architectural practice.
Wei Hutong; Design: Standard Construction & Office; Location: Beijing Photo: Wu Qingshan
"Micro Hutong" is a construction experiment conducted by Zhang Ke's standard construction on Dashilar Yangmeizhu Xie Street, with the aim of exploring the possibility of creating ultra-small social houses for many people in the limited space of traditional hutongs. Inheriting the intimate space of traditional hutongs, micro-hutongs also revive their social performance and enhance their spatial characteristics. Its use of light steel structure and plywood surface material ensures its low-cost construction and can be developed into a feasible model for the renewal and protection of Beijing hutongs.
(This article is based on MoMA, Artdaily and "Youfang" and other related information)
Editor-in-Charge: Weihua Gu