Reporter | Chen Jiajing
Edit | Yellow Moon
In November 2019, the construction of the public rental housing project "Yanbao Baiwan Home" between the East Fourth Ring Road and the East Fifth Ring Road in Beijing was completed. Designed by MAD Architects and architect Ma Yansong, the project originally adopted an open block design concept and did not have a wall, but as residents have moved in in the past two years, there has been new controversy about whether the community should be open or closed. Some residents are concerned about the safety hazards posed by the opening of the community, so not long ago, one of the entrances to the community added a fence to facilitate the management of crowd access.
In fact, open residential areas are no longer new. In 2016, the State Council issued the "Several Opinions on Further Strengthening the Management of Urban Planning and Construction", which pointed out that "new residential buildings should promote the block system, in principle, no longer build closed residential communities, and the completed residential communities and unit compounds should be gradually opened to achieve the publicization of internal roads." This statement once sparked a heated discussion. It is true that the walls and gates of the closed community can isolate the residents of the community from the outside world to a certain extent, protecting the lives and property of residents, and this physical defense line has become particularly critical during the COVID-19 epidemic. But are walls really the best way to solve security problems? Is it security or psychological security that it offers?
Interface Culture has reported that in 2018, public rental housing in a closed community in Shenzhen triggered a strong protest from other high-end commercial housing owners due to the stay of a group of families with autistic children, citing the same concerns about safety. It is worth mentioning that although the public rental housing that has entered the public opinion is in the same community as the high-end commercial housing, the two are separated by a wall and are independently managed. Walls like this are still ubiquitous in China's current social housing, not only in physical space, but also in people's inner worlds.
Compared with the design of public buildings, public rental housing also brings new challenges to architects. As affordable housing, public rental housing is for urban lower-middle-income housing families and migrant workers, small apartments, high density is the characteristics of this type of housing, in order to allow more people to have housing, and architects need to consider how to make people live better. In Ma Yansong's view, affordable housing is not only about the house itself, but also about social fairness and dignity. At the "New Residence" Building Exhibition held recently, Ma Yansong reviewed the architectural concept and practical challenges of the Yanbao Baiwan Home Project, and discussed with several guests the common problems of social housing in China and the role played by architects in promoting the diversification of ideal communities and social housing.
<h3>Some people want to be isolated from the outside world because they think they are different from others</h3>
China's modern residential planning began in the planned economic period in the 1950s. Influenced by the "micro-settlements" of the former Soviet Union, the large-scale and closed "unit compound" has become the basic form of urban residence in China, and the model of the compound continues to this day. In Beijing, most of the community is closed, and people have become accustomed to this, but Ma Yansong believes that this is not the ideal way to live, because it invisibly separates people from each other. "After each neighborhood is sealed, the city is inexplicably reduced by half, and in many places you don't know what's inside it, (don't know) its excitement and the people inside."
Before designing public rental housing projects, Ma Yansong also visited some other social security housing projects, and he found that such housing is often remote, surrounded by walls, surrounded by wasteland, making people feel like prisons. They seem to provide living space, but the residents inside can hardly feel that they are accepted by society and the city. In fact, every community can be part of the city, which is why he decided to design the project as an open community, that is, to open the walls of the community and introduce urban roads. As a living service package, the first floor of the street space can introduce a series of rich functions such as convenience stores, coffee shops, bookstores, pension institutions, etc., so that community life can be integrated into the city; the roof of the second floor forms a community garden, and connects the garden of each plot into a whole through the covered bridge, so that the different spatial functions such as gyms, theaters, and farms within the community are connected together, so that people have the opportunity to interact and interact in it.
It is reported that the total number of listings in the project is 4,000 units, and the current occupancy rate has exceeded 70%. The idea of an open community is not shared by all residents. Ma Yansong once heard someone complain: the walls of the community have been demolished, how to ensure safety? Who pays for the thief who comes in and steals something? In his view, such a view largely reflects not the problem of architecture, but the difference in people's concepts. Especially in Beijing, some people want to be isolated from the outside world, in fact, thinking that they are different from others. The significance of discussing social housing today is that architects not only need to provide housing for residents, but also try to create a sense of belonging to the community and the city, and provide a new social life and living ideal.
Architecture researcher Tang Keyang pointed out that people's concerns about open communities are related to the community traditions in China's history and the collective inertia that people have formed over time. Taking Beijing as an example, not only since the founding of the People's Republic of China, but also historically, Beijing's traditional communities have also been closed. Although the people who live in the hutong have a rich neighborhood life, the hutong itself is not an open community, and it has fences at both ends. Therefore, China's culture determines our understanding and habits of community, which are difficult to change in a short period of time, on the other hand, modern people are more concerned about privacy than in the past. But Don Keyan believes that privacy and public are not 1 and 0 antagonistic relationships, and we need to break through the binary thinking to look at this problem. As in this project, some of the spatial designs adopted by the architects actually guarantee the independence of the residents within the residence, while at the same time visually making people in different spaces visible to each other on the outside. Allowing some distractions while maintaining privacy (such as external vehicles passing through the community) may open up a new possibility for building richer community content.
In the view of Dang Qun, a partner of MAD Architects, the architect's understanding of privacy and publicity is also reflected in how to deal with the normative boundaries of buildings. For example, in terms of greening rate, the national requirement for higher density affordable housing is 30%-40%, while the greening rate of Yanbao Baiwan Home has reached 47%. This figure is actually the result of conversion - in the two-story platform with the largest green area, many green spaces and vegetation overlap with the greening of the first floor, which is equivalent to using a piece of land twice - if the greening of the ground, the greening of the platform, and the three-dimensional greening are counted, the greening rate of the entire community is almost 100%. This is beyond our usual understanding of green boundaries, which are not even physical boundaries or legal boundaries. From this point of view, the opening of the community and other normative issues are the same, architects need to think about "where the boundary is" from the design point of view and whether it is possible to transcend the boundary in space, environment, and thought.
<h3>A homogeneous environment creates a space for inhumanity</h3>
With the reform and opening up, the wave of housing commercialization in the 1990s promoted housing to become a customized commodity for mass production. Ma Yansong said that the so-called "one side of a thousand cities" is basically caused by commercial housing. We will find that the spatial planning of each city is similar, and the environment in which everyone is located and the internal pattern of the house in which they live are also similar. "If we believe that the environment makes people and that the environment creates our social life, then this homogeneous environment creates a homogeneous, inhuman space in which we cannot say what distinguishes a person from others." Ma Yansong once used "planting buildings" to describe the singleness of China's social housing planning model, a large number of houses are only repeated on the plane, and the repeated "planting" of several floors depends on the height limit, so that one by one the land occupies the place, and the residence becomes a commodity.
The party and the masses also believe that singularization is the biggest problem in China's social housing at present. When real estate becomes a commodity, the focus of discussion becomes the problem of mass production, the lowest cost, that is, the problem of repetition. "The side of a thousand cities is not only the side of a thousand cities in (architectural) form, but more importantly, everyone is the same way of life... This mass production repeats not just matter, but also regulates what almost all of us — this generation and the previous generation, and even the next generation — will become in the future, because our lifestyles and values are exactly the same, it's not just a matter of physical space or architecture. ”
Compared with public projects and urban landmarks, public rental housing is more efficient, functional and practical. Small apartment type and high density are the premise of design, and at the same time, public rental housing also has many requirements in terms of residential industrialization, design standardization, and building form. For a long time, people believe that affordable housing only needs to meet the most basic living conditions, but Ma Yansong prefers to reflect the sense of community and human personality in the same residential space to change the public's perception of living.
Taking this project as an example, its building plan is Y-shaped, and the design of the top floor retreat allows the building complex to form a staggered "mountain" shape, breaking the monotonous pattern of traditional residential buildings "sitting in rows" and enriching the urban skyline. The connection between the building and the building forms a semi-enclosed space, giving people a sense of belonging. This three-way building type also plays an important function, that is, by setting the corridor on the north side, avoiding the due north type, so that each apartment type has the possibility of sunlight. Ma Yansong called it the "right to sunshine": in front of the sun, everyone is equal.
Ma Yansong also mentioned that in Europe and Japan, the most important works of many influential architects are residences, compared with Chinese architects who deal with very few residences and have almost no masterpieces. One of the big misconceptions is that some people think that developers know what homes are like and what the market is like and therefore don't need an architect. "If architects think that architecture can improve society and provide a better living environment, I think they should actively participate in some practice." In addition to the architect's continuous return to the results of practice and continuous improvement of the design, the investment in community funds, operation, management and government policy support may be more important, and whether many designs can play a role in activating the community atmosphere and promoting the diversification of social housing remains to be tested by time.