Honest revelation of tectonics and materiality. The social potential of architectural form. As the world enters an era of mass-urbanization, the primary ambitions of the Brutalist project are more relevant now than ever.

While only architects and masochists could love Brutalism’s eponymous concrete (and let’s see that Venn diagram!), the spatial and social ambitions of the Brutalist movement remain relevant as the world enters an era of mass-urbanization, the first waves of which are most acutely felt in Asia’s megacities.

Central-Mid-Levels Escalators, Hong Kong

China seems to be facing a crisis of modernity as rampant development rips apart the old urban fabric as completely as WWII did in Europe, displacing neighborhoods and alienating communities. Brutalist principles could alleviate these alienating effects, but only if integrated into culturally resonant and financially-successful projects.

While Brutalism proper arrived somewhat late in China (Paul Rudolph’s Lippo Center in Hong Kong comes to mind, as do John Portman’s projects in Shanghai), a kind of proto-brutalism has existed in China for centuries in the form of traditional housing typologies – typologies that Chinese architects are now mobilizing as generative diagrams for their own neo-brutalist projects.

Urbanus – Urban Tulou, Guangzhou

Urbanus provides the most obvious example in their Urban Tulou project, a self-conscious reinterpretation of a collective housing typology prevalent in southeast China. These fortress-like roundhouses would house hundreds of people, with all social and commercial activity focused on an active central courtyard. Urbanus’ project attempts to retain that sense of community while removing the heavy earthen fortifications. Less explicit in its quotation, Urbanus’ Maillen Hillside apartments is an attempt to create public space and encourage random encounters through the folding of a continuous band of apartments, the captured spaces mimicking the courtyards of traditional sihueyuan courtyard houses.

Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture – Xiangshan Campus, Hangzhou

The courtyard typology is a popular reference, as at the Vertical Courtyard Apartments, Hangzhou, by Pritzker winner Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture. This project attempts to recreate the social spaces of traditional village through the insertion of open-air public sky-gardens in a residential tower, providing a focal point for several levels of apartments. The architects’ Hangzhou Arts Academy Campus is more recognizably Brutalist, both formally – the fragmented courtyards and multilevel circulation could be a distress Candilis-Josic-Woods scheme – and materially – the raw concrete and salvaged bricks are beton brut with regionalist flair.

John Portman Assoc. – Jianyeli

Even John Portman turns to typological reference, in the Jianyeli project, a reconstruction of a lilong block of shikumen lane housing. This hybrid typology is a low-rise, high-density settlement pattern that emerged in response to massive population influx in the late 1800s.  Each mixed-use block is defined by a perimeter of ground-level commercial space along major thoroughfares, cut across north-to-south by wide lanes, and subdivided by small east-west alleys, from which each residence is accessed through a private courtyard. This hierarchy of space creates a fascinating gradient from public to private, encouraging community interaction at a variety of urban scales, and creating a vibrant social space that is lost in most recent apartment tower developments.

John Portman Assoc. – Jianyeli

Portman’s Jianyeli is a reasonable facsimile in plan, but in section, the change is radical. Where old Shanghai lane houses were typically three levels (and no basement), the new Jianyeli extends vertically across five, including two below grade. Where the old residences were accessed via a progressively-narrowing series of lanes, the new is accessed primarily from the multilevel underground parking structure, each unit via elevator from its private garage, a major selling point.. Portman uses a strategy that allows interaction or solitude, a freedom of choice lacking in so many residential developments, an ambition shared by Brutalists envisioning the post-modern city.

But nowhere is the Brutalist project more evident than in Hong Kong, where multilevel circulation infrastructure – of no particular aesthetic character – has permeated and transformed the city. This incredibly complex circulation network – impossible to document by traditional means (figure-ground is useless, for instance) – creates a number of gradients – public to private, natural to artificial, commercial to residential, local to foreign – that provide a foundation for the vibrant social life of the city, and posit a Brutalist urbanism as a viable model in an era of mass-urbanization.

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As always, plenty more photos available on my Flickr page: Sets on Urbanus, Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture, John Portman, and Hong Kong.

A version of this essay originally appeared in CLOG: Brutalism, February 2013. It’s an excellent issue, which I highly recommend. Available for purchase at the CLOG website. You can also find a nice write-up at ArchDaily.

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Thanks to the efforts of my friend, former classmate, and occasional colleague Zhiguo Chen, I’ve been published in Chinese! Chen translated my essay “Wang Shu: A New Vernacular?” (Originally published on Archinect and mirrored here) and worked to get it published in an issue of “The Architect”, one of China’s top architectural journals, available in shops across China.

For those interested in reading the essay in Chinese, I’ve posted the full text below (and on my Archinect blog.)

Thanks again, Chen!

(And as always, sorry for the lack of posts… a few in the pipeline, hopefully up soon…)

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业余建筑：一种新的（建筑）方言
Amateur Architecture: A New Vernacular?①
作者：Evan Chakroff 翻译：陈治国
关键词：王澍、业余建筑、普里茨克奖、方言
Key Words: Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture, Pritzker Prize, and Vernacular

王澍被选为今年的普利茨克奖得主，既出人意料，又非常妥贴。近几年来，普利茨克奖评委会越来越看重那些地方化的建筑师，他们通过对场所的内在理解进行创作，在他们的作品中深深植入地方文化。对王澍的选择（进而业余建筑工作室以及合伙人陆文宇），仍在延续这种倾向：因为他的作品敏感地应对历史文化和场地文脉，同时在美学上又振聋发聩。王澍把工作室维持在一个不大的规模，专注于设计本地项目，发展出一套对于地方工匠的建造能力和建造技术的深刻理解，从而使他的工作室能够游刃有余地将传统材料和形式策略发展成一种文化的表达手段。当境外建筑师们还在用肤浅的比喻来表达设计的“意义”（如SOM在金茂大厦中泛滥地运用幸运数字“8”或者哈迪德在广州的“圆润双砾”）的时候，王澍则顺利地从旁侧绕开，避免了将此类比喻用作建筑形式的生成器。他的设计表达了一种乐观的可持续性，强调行人尺度的城市主义，并通过对回收材料的选择性使用和地方乡土形式策略的运用，对历史进行含蓄的回应，唯一的制约来自建筑工人的能力和材料的内在属性。

中国美院象山校区，1 期，中国杭州，2002‐2004
王澍的建成作品不算很多，苏州大学文正图书馆（1999‐2000）、宁波当代艺术馆（2001‐2005）和杭州垂直院宅（2002‐2007）等都能明显展示其设计才华；象山校区则是他工作室的第一个展现建筑师完全进入状态的作品，其创作手法的成熟性，足以获得建筑界的最高奖项。象山校区的设计常被借用中国书法来描述和形容，一期代表着几何明确、形式标准的楷书，而更富表现力的二期则被比作流畅狂放的草书。虽然这种差异可以通过建筑平面明显识别，但现场的感受不甚明显。校区给人一种非常强烈的整体印象，通过相当有限的材料表现方式来创造形式的无限多样性，这是一种充满传统神韵又彻头彻尾属于当代的建造方式。虽然建筑师对于回收砖瓦的运用十分重要，不过真正使得王澍作品充满传统意味的不是他
的材料样板，而是他所运用的形式策略。
不难想象校区一期建筑对于庭院元素的运用参照了中国传统院落式住宅——但这种古老的类型学源自人类与周围环境的最基本联系，并已在多种文化背景里独立发展了许久。校园建筑采用此种类型的优越性十分明显——建筑平面进深较小，允许足够的自然采光和穿堂通风；每座独立建筑各自围合一个中心庭园，减小建筑各翼之间的交通距离，使整个建筑占地较小。工作室和教室拥有良好的保温隔热措施，退到半开放的走廊空间后面；这些交通空间仅以木门与室外相隔，在很冷的深冬，显然不是留恋之所。而这种走廊空间所提供的适宜的温度渐变，有效摒弃了现今中国大多数建筑中过度使用空调的做法。
一期各单体建筑的平面非常类似，院落开口的朝向则不一而同，时而朝向城市，时而框景远山。建筑立面的处理基本上是由日照朝向所决定。北立面主要是抹灰外墙和普通预制门窗——这既可以读作是源自包豪斯的简约主义，也可读成毛泽东时代所热衷的苏俄国际式的历史遗留。朝南的立面普遍运用木门窗，开扇巨大，不同的年月不同的时段，各扇的开启角度互不相同，使建筑立面充满丰富的动态表情。每座建筑都坚实地屹立在稳固的基座上，基座里较低的楼层，拥有更好的私密性。整个校区的建筑，通过有限的材料和建造细节，来达到视觉上的统一；通过由地面层步道和架空走廊结合而成的多层交通网络，来实现空间上的统一。多样化的步行联系，使参观者可以在风雨天气照样能穿越整个校园。

虽然建筑师所使用的材料样板中已经采用了传统元素，但是它们用非传统的方式进行配置和使用。原本较小的木门窗开启扇，向上延伸直到走廊的全高（在宁波当代艺术馆中，开启扇的高度更为极端）。回收的青瓦在钢格架上铺成巨大百叶，附着于简约而现代的水平条窗或者幕墙上。这些超大尺度的钢制百叶应用在现代主义立面上，产生了一种传统和现代的强烈对比。虽然中国的许多城市都有一种源自近代条约港口时期的“殖民地”遗产，包括布扎学院派新古典主义和一些零散的装饰艺术派杰作——但是这个国家典型的建筑主流所运用的材料仍然是露明的木结构和砂浆砖砌体结构，或者从苏俄引进的直白的现代主义国际式的混凝土结构。考虑到这些情况，象山校区的一期建筑可被读作是中国过去这两种主要建筑风格的组装。

中国美院象山校区二期，中国杭州，2004‐2007

如果说一期建筑可看成是一种荒诞的拼装，那么二期建筑则更像是一种有机综合，在设计上试图将中国这两种传统协调于一种新地方主义建筑学。

从总体规划和材料构成的角度而言，二期建筑可以理解为对一期发展出来的技术进行详细深化。在一期，互相分离的院落式建筑通过架空走廊进行连接，在二期，这些走廊被加宽，形成体量，融入其它功能；之前相互分离独立的院落式单体开始串联成更长的构图。一期的建筑坐落在坚实的石头基座上，二期的建筑则与地面脱离，浮于草上，允许车辆行人从底下穿行。当建筑中不出现院落的时候，主要是在二期，折来折去的建筑形式仍然清晰地界定着空间，并创造一定的空间围合感。跟一期相似，建筑使用一系列有限的材料，进行不同的组合，演变出令人称奇的多样性。

在院落类型进行拆解或者重组的地方，架空步道、下沉的机动车道、和每个体量中的室内走廊，共同创造了一种三维的空间秩序。这种空间体系可能使来访者感到些许困惑，但对于长期就读于此的学生却肯定是建立了一种舒适的复杂性：他们可以在脑海里臆想最有效的交通路线穿过综合体，找个地方喷涂他们的模型或者仅仅是抽个烟休息一下。这种对于地面层的苦心经营，跟坎迪亚斯•伍兹（Candias-Josic-Woods）在柏林自由大学中所采用的网格状“铺垫式”策略有些相似，也让人联想起香港将地面层向空间进行三维拓展的复杂城市交通体系。

一期建筑主要是一系列的教室或工作室，由一条中央脊轴串联而成，外围环以一条（时而）开敞的走廊；二期建筑对于室内和室外的空间定义则更加模糊。室外步道在不同的位置转折切入建筑立面，变成室内走廊；室内坡道透过厚重的砖砌镂空隔墙与室外相望。交通空间和使用空间交错复杂，如同一座重构和异化了的明代花园。在此王澍明显地参照了传统的建筑形式——连绵折叠的屋脊线让人想起传统的坡顶建筑——对于传统经验的重构总是使建筑显得更有气质。真正使得整个校区丰富的是空间的复杂性，而不是时而出现的流行开窗方式。

散布在校园间的一些小亭子，毗邻于大教学楼，展现了一种实验性的形式主义，王澍和业余建筑似乎在测试当地施工队在一种更小尺度上的建造能力极限。这些小亭子形式奇异野心勃勃，通过对比显得二期的主要建筑更加直截了当。建筑师似乎在实验和发展他们自己一套独立的形式语言，这种语言还将持续出现在后来的项目当中，如宁波五散宅和杭州中山路步行街。

中山路步行街，2007‐2009，杭州
象山校区显示了业余建筑在创造新校区这样宏大尺度的项目上的设计能力，而中山路项目则展现出他们面对一个承载着厚重历史的现存城市场地和任务，如何介入和解决难题的能力。在这一肩负着复兴城市中南宋御街使命的项目中，王澍选择了一种微妙的修复来转化这条道路而不抛弃它的历史。随着年代变迁，中山路成为一种不同风格建筑的奇异组合：清代店面毗邻共和国时期的新古典建筑立面，时而穿插几栋苏联风格的住宅和厂房等。充分认识到这种多样性和差异性给这条街带来的独特气质和历史气息，业余建筑保留了大部分现有建筑，将他们的设计限制在一些零星的亭子加建和更重要的街道表面（景观）处理。之前的柏油马路改成了斧凿毛石路面，中间穿插若干清渠，侧边附以花池，街树遮荫，石桥交错，从而扩展成更大的滨水景观。

清渠的设置明显鼓励了人们的步行穿越——众多连桥使人们可以来回穿行于不同的路线而不重复。水浅而安全，儿童可涉水玩耍。清渠还有效地将街道中的主要客流与紧邻店面的次一级客流隔离开来。这么做的优点是紧邻店面创造了一系列小空间，可摆放茶几或半开敞的室外货架等。这种对于客流的分隔，在主要步行客流之外增加了购物的随意性和休闲活动。

这些清渠还引起人们对杭州城和长江三角洲历史的遐想。杭州位于京杭大运河南端，周边拥有大量的水乡城市，因此在这种以河运为主要经济驱动力的漫长历史中，杭州成为重要的行政和经济中心。城里原有的历史河道多数已被填埋，用以拓宽马路，因此在这里使用清渠是一种对深远历史的回应，同时提供一种与相邻街道之间的视觉/听觉隔离和炎炎夏日里清凉的小气候。

街道的步行尺度源自历史遗留的宽度，这要归功于建筑师与规划部门所做的谨慎商讨。尽管这宋代御街本来宽到足以通行车马和偶尔的游行，王澍却引入若干亭子建筑，进一步减小空间尺度，将街道原本严格的直线关系转化成更像是一种蜿蜒的小路。

这些厚重的、充满肌理的小亭子，由素混凝土、传统木板和回收砖瓦建成，它们将街道的空间打碎成更易感知的片断。虽然每个亭子各不相同，但是它们采用同一种形式语言，因此整个长条形的更新项目，通过形式和材料的运用被统一起来；如同屈米运用一系列红色的小亭子将整个拉维莱特公园的设计统一起来——各不相同，却源自一派。

设计师将街面处理成清渠、花池、座椅等，还将若干突出的小亭子植入街道空间，这些举措在局部层面上成功塑造了独特的小尺度公共空间；在整条街道穿过鼓楼城门的最南端，王澍则致力于创造一个大尺度的公共广场空间。在城门之前，一座中世纪的教堂和新建的厅堂，围合了一个带有水景的大广场。如果没有这座厅堂，这宜人的广场将紧邻城市的高架快速路；这厅堂看似没有专门功能，它的坚实体量足以减少步行街以外的噪音和浊气。老鼓楼城门为步行街提供了一个清晰的终点，从此遁入外面熙攘的现代都市。

宁波历史博物馆，2003‐2008，中国宁波
业余建筑工作室的多数声誉，至少在西方，源自他们的宁波历史博物馆。这座建筑通过各种出版物获得了无数赞誉，主要关于它的砌满砖瓦的立面；这些砖瓦是从这个区域里拆除的旧建筑中回收而来，铺砌的时候，建筑工人可以随意选择和落位这些砖石，完全符合当代关于“有机”纹理和随意性的设计态度。通常这些砖瓦是人们分析和审视这座建筑的关注点，但是同样有必要提及混凝土的运用——王澍的一个很强的能力就是对于材料和技术的局限性了如指掌，当博物馆的立面局部往外切角倾斜出挑的时候，建筑的立面就是用竹模的混凝土浇筑而成，而砖瓦则用于垂直部分的立面，这样它们的建构逻辑更为合适，当然也更容易建造。材料回收再利用在可持续发展方面的好处毋庸置疑，并且该建筑的魅力在很大程度上源自其震撼人心的立面，但是这座博物馆对于历史的态度较之于简单的再利用建筑材料要来的更加微妙。其真正的建筑力量源自其形体。

博物馆坐落在当代中国十分典型的城市景观：两旁行道树齐列的城市道路明确地划分各功能用地。博物馆的一边隔着马路是政府大楼，另一边紧邻一片公园。这个街区远离宁波老城中心，表面上是南部新中央商务区的行政中心，但是周边街区似乎发展尚不完善。建筑第一眼看来，就是大片景观中的一个雕塑体。建筑突兀的形体这样阅读：有角度的切割完全是当代的手笔，可能是任何一款流行建模软件都有的布尔运算的结果。作为一个雕塑体，它给人印象深刻，但不仅局限于一个简单的形式的操作。我们可以想象一系列的图示来表达这形体是如何从一个理想的矩形体量发展而来，在有室内采光要求的地方切出中庭，或者城市景观视线有要求的角度和位置进行水平向的削减；削切显然发生在特定的位置和方向上，以优化室内空间的尺寸和规模，从而容纳各种功能，如画廊、报告厅、咖啡茶座等。由削切和翻卷所产生的建筑形式，以及建筑的垂直立面向外自然倾斜等，都是对这种撕裂感所产生的形体应对。这些形式操作都服务于一个更重要的目的：通过斜切，建筑的形式不再是理想的由平面垂直升起的体量，纪念性的尺度被打散——在群众可达的屋顶景观——重新创造了一种人尺度的中国传统村落。

这些斜切的空间成一定角度穿插在建筑体量当中，所产生的斜屋面让人回想起传统建筑形式；斜切空间的尺度正好再创了人行街巷的空间尺度；这些穿插交错的实体和空间在屋顶层（以一种现代派之前的都市主义的尺度）创造了一种城市平面，从而引用和再创了中国古典的空间体验。这种对现代之前的中国的古典尺度的重构可能是这个博物馆的诸多主要吸引力之一（因为参观者受到了失落文明的提示），犬儒主义者可能会说，这种传统城市形态的重构被置于建筑实体基座上的屋顶景观部分——被保留却荒废了——成了这座历史博物馆永久收藏的终极展示。

同时，空间的削切也起到框景的作用，将人们的注意力引向周边中央商务区的建筑群。有一道主要的削切制造了一步宽阔的室外楼梯；或可读成一个报告厅，将远处的塔楼置于舞台——一种对于中国飞速城市化发展的奇特现象的关注。

空间削切不仅限于屋顶层面，还切入建筑室内。建筑的平面围绕着两个庭院进行组织的（一个室内，一个室外）——但是还有几部大楼梯切入建筑，和建筑体量中的其它元素（如院落步道等）的穿插结合一起，使得观者可以由用不同的路径穿越建筑室内。这让人回忆起象山，还有类似于象山的材料运用——回收的砖瓦、竹模混凝土、还有槽型玻璃——代表了一种传统和现代的情感综合。

通过材料的选择和形式的拿捏，王澍创造了一项惊人的工作，通过风格的重叠和创造性的采用源自传统中国建筑的形式策略，浓缩了历史。作为空旷景观中的一座独立的标志，也作为一种对于失落的行人尺度的都市主义的一种展示，这座建筑同时还是一个雕塑体和所在场景：建筑和都市主义，过去和现今，合并成一种空前的成就。

中选的必然

当普利茨克董事会透露北京被选为2012 年的颁奖地时，我曾开玩笑地预言王澍将会胜出：中国当局定会从中施加影响，只要保有能力废除任何保障颁奖地点的许诺。

最近的全球经济衰退是否驱动普利茨克委员会来赞美优雅和简约而不是闪耀和姿态？当年彼得•卒姆托获奖的时候，正是2008 年金融危机的复苏当中，这被看成是对以自我为中心的“明星建筑师”的抵制，和对于一种以触觉、建构努力、材料性和手工艺性为最重要因素的建筑的推崇。（在这种建筑学中）美学源自于自然材料的建构；形式由它们的地方文脉和文化传统所驱动产生。正如肯尼•弗兰普顿在其“走向批判的地域主义”中所述，这种建筑学能够“融合普遍文明与场地自身特异性衍生出来的元素之间的冲突”。建筑师有可能从“当地的光线的范围和品质，或者一种特殊的结构形式所衍生出来的建筑构造，或者一个给定场地的地形当中”获得设计灵感。②

卒姆托这位神秘的隐士，正是这新的朴素年代的完美倡导者。评委会最近几年一直在延续这种倾向，其间他们选择了SANAA 和爱德华多•索托•德•莫拉：两者都与他们各自的地方文化和传统有着内在的本质联系。为在2012 年能顺延这种趋势，他们需要发掘一种强调触觉胜于视觉、推崇经验胜于实验的设计实践；也就是那些最好地诠释弗兰普顿称之为“批判的地域主义”的设计公司。有很多出色的公司在这方面进行创作，但是由于选择了北京作为颁奖仪式的举办地，委员会选择了赞美这房间里看似无法阻挡的强大经济力量。

世界的其他部分还在全力对付经济衰退，中国却以毫不减弱的势头继续上升，外国建筑师循钱而至。不管他们将中国看成一片能实现任何臆想的自由沃土，还是一种压抑的独裁政治，其绝对专制的权威确保了大胆创新成为一种民族自豪感，所以他们很受欢迎，并被鼓励畅想。雷姆•库哈斯、扎哈•哈迪德，赫佐格和德穆隆等，都为中国城市献上了野心勃勃的签名作品，并从这个国家的经济优势中受益。像中央电视台新楼、广州歌剧院、北京国家体育场等项目虽然给人留下深刻印象，但是这些标志性形式所代表的以图像化为专注点的设计理念，随着中国的发展开始减缓，渐渐变得不再那么引人注目。

而本土建筑师，对文化文脉和建造能力有更好的理解，有幸开始获得关注。这显然是一件好事，因为中国各地独特的城市特征正在迅速现代化的道路上被一扫而光，如果想减缓这种正在发生的匀质化趋势，中国必须寻求适合于地域特征的、文化上敏感的设计解决方式。如果委员会觉得有必要赞美中国的崛起，却又不打算去吹捧一位空洞的“明星建筑师”——那么谁会胜出呢？中国还有其他一些优秀的设计公司，但是少有符合这种“卒姆托属性”的（刘家琨没准算一个）。这个生于乌鲁木齐，在南京受教育，以杭州为基地的建筑师获选，传达了一条清晰的信息：这份奖不仅认可了这些在中国完成的伟大作品，也是对中国大学教育的认可，以及对使得这些作品发生的政府和经济体系的认可。如果对王澍的选择是由政治因素驱
动的，那也无所谓：因为这丝毫不能减少他获奖的恰当性和他作品的伟大性。
在这“朴素的年代”，王澍的设计代表了一种充满活力和希望且不排斥历史的前进道路。它是一种主观的朴素性——一种对现有制约的乐观认识，它暗示着未来的潜力并且就如何实现这些潜力提供了清晰的大纲，不是一蹴而就，而是通过实践、重复和发展一些容易操作的形式策略，这些策略对于其他具有类似创作哲学的建筑师而言可作为一种范例。

王澍作品的真实力量，在于这种充满雄心（又含糊不清）的对于传统和当代的综合。由技术驱动的形式生成和传统的建造技术相辅相成。这种面向历史的态度在此提议了一种中国建筑的前进道路，那就是并不（仅仅）依赖于眩亮的渲染图和标志性的形式，但却可以获得那种曾经使得中国古代城市如此迷人的城市历史肌理的本质性特征，那些由于现代化的冲刷而濒临灭绝的特征。

王澍的获奖，既受欢迎，又很有必要，希望中国（以及整个世界）能认识到这种精心斟酌、文化敏感的作品的内在价值，并且考虑将一种全球性的设计文化建立在一种有意义的介入而不是空虚的标志性上。业余建筑工作室的作品在指向未来的时候并没有抛弃过去，它们通过运用新的综合模式、新的建筑原型、最终一种新的（建筑）方言，来改造和开拓中国伟大的建筑遗产。

作者后记：“新的（建筑）方言”一说似乎日趋明晰，在本文写作之后，2012 年8 月9 日的纽约时报上刊登一篇文章也提到，哈佛大学设计研究生院的院长莫森•莫斯塔法维（Mohsen Mostafavi）认为：“王澍的作品完全有可能被看成是一种新的（建筑）方言。他扎根于现代主义。他的作品根本不是中国建筑或者西方建筑的简单复制品，而是这两种不同情感的有机融合。”③

作者：Evan Chakroff
俄亥俄州立大学建筑学硕士。曾就职于巴塞尔的赫佐格和德穆隆建筑事务所，和意大利罗马的
福克萨斯建筑事务所，现为NBBJ 上海办公室的资深建筑师。
公司电话：021‐61384700
电子邮箱：evanchakroff@gmail.com
个人网站：http://evanchakroff.com/
译者：陈治国
天津大学建筑学院建筑硕士，俄亥俄州立大学景观建筑学硕士。
凯里森（中国）上海办公室，设计副总监。
上海市黄浦区九江路288 号21 楼
公司电话：021‐61351188
电子邮箱：zhiguo.chen@callison.com
①本文原文刊登于作者个人网站<http://evanchakroff.com/>。原文的部分章节曾被作者通过改编后，
以《Recasting History: The Ningbo Historic Museum》为题刊发于美国LOG 杂志第24 期第057 页，
ISSN: 1547‐4690 ISBN: 978‐0‐9836491。
② Frampton, Kenneth. “Toward A Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, in The
Anti‐Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture (1893) edited by Hal Foster, Bay Press, Seattle.
③ Perlez, Jane. “An Architect’s Vision: Bare Elegance in China”. The New York Times. August 9th, 2012.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/arts/design/wang‐shu‐of‐china‐advocates‐sustainablearchitecture.
html>

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As usual, more photos in my Flickr set: Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture

This past June, I joined architecture students from the Ohio State University on a two week tour through Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. Here, a selection of images. Full set (and full resolution) over on Flickr: KSA Europe 2012. (Sorry for the lack of recent updates… we’ll get back to China soon enough…)

Amateur Architecture: A New Vernacular?

Evan Chakroff | March 11^th, 2012

[Note: this essay was originally posted as a feature article on Archinect, March 11th, 2012. The portion on the Ningbo History Museum was originally published in Log #24, Spring 2012]

Wang Shu may be a surprising choice for this year’s Pritzker Prize, but it’s an excellent one, and well-deserved. In recent years the Pritzker Committee has gravitated towards architects who produce work with an innate understanding of place, allowing their ties to local culture to infuse their work. The choice of Wang Shu (and, by extension, of Amateur Architecture and partner Lu Wenyu) continues this trend: his work is as culturally-sensitive and contextually responsive as it is aesthetically stunning.

By keeping his practice small and his projects local, Wang Shu has developed a keen understanding of construction techniques and the capabilities of local craftsmen that allows his firm to mobilize traditional materials and formal strategies as a kind of cultural currency. While foreign architects grasp at “meaning” through facile metaphor (the profligate lucky “eight” in SOM’s Jin Mao tower, or Hadid’s “two stones” in Guangzhou), Wang Shu is able to bypass this stumbling block and avoid metaphor as a generator of form. Constrained only by the abilities of the construction workers and the innate properties of materials, Wang Shu projects an optimistic sustainability, with an emphasis on pedestrian-scale urbanism and an implicit invocation of history through the selective use of reclaimed material and the adaptation of regional vernacular formal strategies.

Xiangshan Campus, China Academy of Art, Phase I, 2002-2004, Hangzhou, China

Wang Shu has built only a few projects, and while the Wenzheng College Library (1999-2000, Suzhou), the Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum (2001-2005, Ningbo), and the Vertical Courtyard Apartments (2002-2007, Hangzhou) are clearly the work of a talented designer, the Xiangshan Campus is the first of the studio’s projects that is truly engaging, the product of a maturing practice worthy of the architecture world’s highest award.

The campus has often been described as an interpretation of Chinese calligraphy, with Phase One representing the geometric, standard form of the characters, and the more expressive Phase Two representing a freehand, cursive script. Though this distinction can be discerned in plan, in the realm of experience the metaphor breaks down. The overwhelming impression of the campus as a whole is one of limited material expression but infinite variety, a thoroughly contemporary construction imbued with the aura of the traditional. While the architect’s use of salvaged bricks and tiles is important, what really ties Wang Shu’s work to tradition is the adaptation of formal strategies, not the material palette.

It’s easy to assume that the courtyard configuration of the buildings in Phase one of the campus are a reference to traditional Chinese courtyard residences – but this is an archaic typology, developed independently by many cultures, borne from the fundamental relationship of humans to their environment. The advantages of this typology for a campus building are fairly obvious – the plan depth is reduced to allow for maximum daylight penetration and cross-ventilation, and each individual building wraps around a central courtyard, reducing travel distance between opposing wings and minimizing the overall footprint. The studios and classrooms are well insulated, set behind ambiguous corridors: these circulation spaces are protected from the elements only by wooden shutters. While these areas may be cold in the depth of winter, these are not spaces to linger in: the temperature gradient between circulation and program space is appropriate and represents a significant departure from the over-conditioned space characteristic of most designer architecture in China today.

While the buildings of phase one are typically identical in plan, the open ends of the courtyards face many directions, alternately framing views of the city or the nearby hill, and the façade treatment is typically determined by the solar orientation. North-facing walls are typically clad in stucco with typical industrial windows – reading as either Bauhaus-inspired minimalism, or simply as a legacy of Mao-era construction practices that favored Soviet-style international modernism. South-facing façades, on the other hand, are typically composed of the massive wood shutters, with large operable panels that animate the surface in different ways at different times of year.  Each building is solidly grounded, sited atop a plinth that heightens privacy for the activities on the lower levels.

The architecture unifies the campus visually - through the limited set of materials and construction details – and physically – through the multi-level circulation network that incorporates ground level pathways and elevated walkways. Multiple pedestrian connections allow one to traverse the entire length of the campus, in good weather and bad.

While the material palette does incorporate traditional elements, they are deployed in non-traditional ways. The wooden shutters, typically small operable panels, are allowed to expand to the height of the corridor (this is even more extreme at the Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum, where the same details are used on panels three times the size). Salvaged roof tiles are applied to large louvers, supported by steel frames, and applied over a simple, modern ribbon window or curtain wall. Where these outsize steel louvers are applied to the classic modernist facades, a stark contrast is revealed between the traditional and the modern. While many cities in China have a ‘colonial’ legacy from the treaty-port era – including Beaux-Arts neoclassicism and scattered Art Deco masterpieces – the country’s typical building stock was composed of bare wood and plastered brick, or concrete in a stripped-down international style modernism imported from Soviet Russia. With all this in mind, the buildings of Phase One can be read as a grafting together of the dominant styles of China’s past.

Xiangshan Campus, China Academy of Art, Phase II, 2004-2007, Hangzhou, China

While the buildings of Phase One can be seen as a chimeric graft, the buildings of Phase Two are more of a synthesis, an attempt to reconcile these two traditions in a new vernacular architecture.

In planning and in material composition, the buildings of phase two can be understood as an elaboration of the techniques developed in Phase One.  Where in Phase One, detached courtyard buildings were connected by elevated walkways, in phase two the walkways thicken, attain program and volume, and the formerly separate courtyard buildings combine into longer configurations. Where the phase one buildings were sitting atop solid stone plinths, the buildings in phase two are detached from the ground plane, floating above the grass and allowing automobile and pedestrian connections to cut through beneath. While there are no courtyards, strictly-defined, in phase two, the switchback shape of the buildings still serves to define space and create a sense of enclosure, often positioned to frame the nearby hill. As in Phase One, the buildings are constructed from a limited set of materials which are combined in different ways to produce an astounding amount of variety.

Where the courtyard typology is split apart or reconnected, the elevated walkways, sunken automobile circulation, and interior paths within each volume serve to create a three-dimensional hierarchy of space that is somewhat disconcerting to the visitor, but must be comfortingly complex to the long-term students as they mentally map the most effective navigation routes through the complex, and find the best places to spray-paint a model or pause for a cigarette.  This elaboration of the ground plane is similar to the “mat” strategy employed at Candias-Josic-Woods’ Berlin Free University, and bears some similarity to the “expanded ground” of Hong Kong’s complex circulation network.

Where the phase one buildings were generally defined by a central spine of classrooms or studios, wrapped with an (occasionally) open-air corridor, the definition between interior and exterior space in phase two is more ambiguous. Exterior walkways clipped onto the facades turn at points and become interior passages; long systems of interior ramps are shielded from the elements only by thick screen walls. The interrelation between circulation space and programmed space is extraordinarily complex, like a thickening and expansion of the courtyards, screens, and covered walkways of Ming-era garden design. Where Wang Shu makes explicit formal reference to tradition – as in the sweeping rooflines that recall temple architecture – it is almost always tempered by a reconfiguration of the traditional experience – as in the walkways that lead visitors along the face of the building, denying an axial approach. The work is less successful where these quotations are merely formal, as in the jagged doorways that suggest chunky, low-resolution versions of classical garden gateways. It is spatial complexity that makes the campus so rich, not the occasional funky window.

Scattered throughout the campus, smaller pavilions abut the larger classroom buildings, and demonstrate a kind of experimental formalism in which Wang Shu and Amateur Architecture seem to be testing the limits, on a smaller scale, of the local contractors’ abilities. These small pavilions are formally ambitious and idiosyncratic in a way that makes the major buildings of Phase Two seem relatively straightforward by comparison.  The architects here seems to be testing and developing their own formal language, which will reappear consistently in subsequent projects like Ningbo’s Five Scattered Houses and Hangzhou’s Zhongshan Lu Pedestrian Street.

Zhongshan Lu Pedestrian Street, 2007-2009, Hangzhou

If the Xiangshan Campus shows Amateure Architecture’s abilities at the scale of a new campus, their work on Zhongshan Road shows their approach to the difficult task of intervening in an existing, loaded and layered context.  Tasked with revitalizing the principal Song-dynasty axis through the city, Wang Shu and company opted for a subtle renovation that transformed the road without discarding history. Over time, Zhongshan Lu had evolved as a heterogeneous collection of styles: Qing dynasty shop fronts nestled up to Republic era neoclassical facades, the street frontage occasionally punctuated with Soviet-style housing blocks and factory lofts. Recognizing that this variety and difference were part of what gave the street its unique character and its aura of history, Amateur Architecture Studio retained most of the existing buildings and limited their intervention to the addition of the occasional pavilion and, – more importantly – manipulation of the street surface itself. Where previously there was asphalt, there is now a roughhewn stone path, sliced by shallow canals. The canals expand into larger water features flanked by planter boxes, shaded by street trees, and crossed by small stone bridges.

The canals are composed in such a way to encourage wandering – the proliferation of bridge connections ensures that one could traverse the street a hundred times and never take the same path. The shallow water ensures safety for the children who can reach down and touch the slowly ebbing stream when they tire of darting back and forth across the bridges. The canals also serve to separate the primary circulation path of the street – down the center – from the secondary – next to the storefronts. While this may have been a contentious issue for shop owners who desired continuous street frontage, the advantage is the creation of pockets of space immediately adjacent to the storefronts, ideal for the setup of a few café tables, or a semi-secure exterior merchandise stand (it’s worth noting that some shop keepers have erected their own bridges – plywood panels that span the narrow canals). The separation of pedestrian flow allows for informal shopping and leisure activities outside the main flow of pedestrian traffic.

The canals also serve to evoke the History of Hangzhou and the Yangtse delta. While Hangzhou was only the capital of one dynasty (the Song), the city was, for most of its long history, a major center of administration and commerce in an economy based on river traffic, located at the southern terminus of the empire-spanning Grand Canal. Cities throughout the Yangtze delta were canal towns, river transport being the primary economic driver for the region. While Hangzhou has lost most of its canals to infill and road widening, the use of canals here is a reminder of a long-remembered past which simultaneously provides an auditory buffer from the surrounding streets, and contributes to a cooling microclimate in summer.

The pedestrian scale of the street is a legacy of its original width, intact thanks to careful negotiation with the planning bureau on the part of the architect, but while the Song-dynasty thoroughfare may have been wide enough for carts and the occasional parade, Wang Shu has introduced pavilions to further break down the scale, and turn the street from a strictly linear axis into something more of a meandering path.

The heavy, tactile pavilions, constructed of rough concrete, traditional wood panels, and reclaimed brick and roof tiles, serve to break down the space into easily perceived segments. While each pavilion is distinct, they share a formal language, and thus the entire length of the restoration project is unified through formal and material associations (much as Parc de La Villette is unified by Tschumi’s red pavilions), each unique, but of a family.

While the manipulation of the street surface into canals, planting boxes, benches, etc, and the protrusion of inserted pavilions into the space of the street serve to create unique small-scale public spaces on a strictly local level, Wang Shu was also instrumental in the creation of a large public plaza at the southern end of the avenue, where the street passes through the old city wall. Immediately before this gate, a large water feature and plaza is framed by a mid-century church and newly constructed hall. Without the small hall, this pleasant plaza would be edged on one side by a massive highway flyover, and though the hall seems to have no specific program, its solid mass is enough to reduce the noise and odor from the street beyond. The old drum tower gate provides a clear terminus for the avenue and an ‘escape’ into the bustling modern city beyond.

Ningbo History Museum, 2003-2008, Ningbo, China

Most of Amateur Architecture’s fame, at least in the West, stems from the Ningbo Historic Museum. The museum has received numerous accolades in the press, mostly focused on the facade, clad with bricks and tiles collected from demolished buildings in the area, laid by construction workers who were free to select and place the bricks at random, in line with contemporary attitudes towards “organic” patterning and randomization. While the bricks are often the focus in analysis and reviews of the building, it’s worthwhile to note the concrete as well – knowing the limitations of materials and techniques is one of Wang Shu’s major strengths, and wherever the façade of the museum tilts out at an angle, the façade is constructed in bamboo-formed concrete, leaving the bricks to the straight, vertical facades, where their tectonic logic is more appropriate (and is, of course, easier to build). While the sustainable benefits of material reuse are basically unquestionable, and the beauty of the building is due in no small part to these striking facades, the museum’s attitude toward history is much more nuanced than a simple recycling of building materials. The real power of the building derives from its form.

The museum is sited in an urban landscape typical of contemporary China: tree-lined boulevards divide the district into distinctly zoned blocks: residential, retail, government.  The museum faces a municipal office building across a wide swath of asphalt, and is backed up against a pleasant (but perhaps oversized) park. The block is ostensibly the town center of a new central business district, but the surrounding blocks remain somewhat underdeveloped, awaiting tenants and activity. The site is a dozen kilometers from the historic center, and the building is seen, first, as a sculptural object in the landscape.

The striking form benefits from this reading: the angular cuts are utterly contemporary, and could easily be the result of boolean operations in any popular modeling program. As a sculptural object it’s impressive, but there is more here than simple formal manipulation. One can imagine a series of diagrams demonstrating how the form is derived from an ideal rectangular volume, cut through with voids where atria are required for interior daylighting, or slashed horizontally where views across the city are desired; the form responding by reeling back and outward from the cuts, vertical facades tilting outward in natural, physical response to these lacerations.

These cuts occur at specific points, apparently along vectors driven by the optimum size and depth of a gallery space, auditorium, or café, but these cuts serve a greater purpose: by slicing away at the ideal extruded form of the building, the architect breaks down its monumental scale, and recreates – on the accessible roof-scape – the human-scale proportions of a traditional Chinese village.

The voids slashing through the building intersect at angles that instantly recall the pitched roofs of local vernacular architecture; the cuts are sized to recreate the scale of pedestrian lanes; the interlocking solids and voids of the roof level create an urban plan (at the scale of pre-modern urbanism), thus referencing and recreating the spatial experience of classical China. While this reconstruction of the classical scale of pre-modern China may be one of the major draws of the museum (as visitors are reminded of what has been lost), a cynic could say that the reconstruction of classical urbanism on the roof-scape amounts to its placing on a plinth – preserved but abandoned – as the culminating exhibit of the Historic Museum’s permanent exhibition.

Meanwhile, the cuts also serve to frame, and call attention to, the buildings of the surrounding central business district. One of the major cuts takes the form of a wide exterior staircase. Read as an auditorium, it places the distant towers on stage, a commentary on the spectacle of China’s rapid urban development.

The cuts are not limited to the roof level, but slice through the interior as well. The plan is generally organized around two courtyards (one interior, one exterior)  but there are also several large staircases cutting through the building, and other smaller punctures in the building volume that operate as a three-dimensionalization of the small courtyards, pathways, and captured spaces of traditional Chinese gardens, allowing multiple paths through the building interior. This recalls Xiangshan, and, as at Xiangshan, the materials – salvaged brick, bamboo-formed concrete, and industrial channel glass – represent a synthesis of traditional and modern sensibilities.

Through material choice and formal manipulation, Wang Shu has created a stunning work, collapsing history through the superposition of styles, and the inventive adaptation of formal strategies from traditional Chinese architecture. As a free-standing icon in a landscape and as an exhibition of a lost pedestrian scale urbanism, the building is at simultaneously a sculptural object and a field-condition: architecture and urbanism, past and present, combined in a fantastic achievement.

Handicapping the Inevitable

When the Pritzker board revealed Beijing as the 2012 venue, I jokingly predicted that Wang Shu would win: the Chinese authorities would surely have some sway in the proceedings, if only the ability to revoke whatever permits secured the venue.

Has the recent global recession driven the Pritzker committee to celebrate elegance and simplicity over flash and gesture? When Peter Zumthor won in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it was seen as a rejection of egoist “starchitects” and a celebration of architecture as a haptic, tectonic endeavor, with materiality and craft as the top priority. Aesthetics were to derive from the raw, natural materials of construction. Forms were to be driven by their local context and cultural traditions. As Kenneth Frampton puts it in “Toward a Critical Regionalism,” this is architecture that can “mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place.” Architects may find inspiration in the “range and quality of the local light, or in a tectonic derived from a peculiar structural mode, or in the topography of a given site.”

Zumthor, the mystical hermit, was the perfect prophet for the new age of austerity. The committee has been on this same track for several years now, as their intervening picks SANAA and Edward Souto de Moura demonstrate: both excellent architects, both tied intrinsically to their local cultures and traditions. In order to continue this trend in 2012, they would need to identify a practice with priorities that favored the tactile over the visual, the experiential over the experimental; those firms that best address Frampton’s call for a Critical Regionalism. There are many great firms tilling this ground – whether by philosophy or necessity – but with the selection of Beijing as the ceremony venue the board made a choice to address the seemingly unstoppable economic juggernaut in the room.

While the rest of the world wrestled with recession, China’s rise continued unabated and foreign architects followed the money. Whether they viewed China as a free, fertile ground where every fantasy could be fulfilled or as a repressive oligarchy whose absolute authority ensured audacity as a point of national pride, they were welcomed, and encouraged to indulge. Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Herzog & de Meuron have all benefited immensely from China’s economic dominance, contributing ambitious, signature works to the country’s rapidly modernizing cities. This image-focused attitude is still prevalent, and architects like Steven Holl still reap the benefits (if not the Pritzker Medallions) of a robust economy and adventurous clients. However, while projects like CCTV, the Guangzhou Opera House, and the Beijing National Stadium are impressive, these iconic forms are representative of an image-focused mentality that is growing less appealing as China‘s growth begins to slow.

Local architects with a better understanding of both cultural context and construction capabilities are – thankfully – gaining prominence. This can’t be a bad thing, as China must seek regionally-appropriate, culturally-sensitive design solutions if it wishes to slow the homogenizing trends that threaten to strip China’s rapidly-modernizing cities of their unique urban character.

So, if the committee felt the need to celebrate China’s rise, but not coronate a vacuous “starchitect” – who would be the winner? There are other excellent Chinese firms, but few fit the “Zumthor profile” (Liu Jiakun comes to mind). Others were either out of the running (FCJZ’s Yung Ho Change was on the Pritzker Jury), or too obviously controversial (Ai Wei Wei’s FAKE Design). The selection of an architect born in Urumqi, educated in Nanjing, and based in Hangzhou sends a clear message: this prize not only recognizes the great work being done in China, but is a validation of the efficacy of the Chinese university system, and a celebration of the government and economic system that makes such great work possible. If the selection of Wang Shu was politically motivated, so be it: it does nothing to diminish the power of the work or the relevance of the firm.

In this “age of austerity,” Wang Shu’s designs represent a vital and promising path forward that doesn’t deny the past. It is a projective austerity – an optimistic recognition of current limits that hints at future potential and provides a clear outline how to achieve it, not instantly but with practice, repetition and the development of easily deployed formal strategies that could serve as a model for architects who base their work on a similar philosophy.

This is where the work’s power really lies: in its ambitious (and ambiguous) synthesis of the contemporary and the traditional. Technology-driven form-making and traditional construction techniques are used in tandem. The attitude toward history here suggests a way forward for Chinese architecture that doesn’t rely (solely) on flashy renderings and iconic forms, but can retain those essential qualities of the historical fabric that make China’s ancient cities so appealing, those qualities most endangered by the rush of modernization.

The recognition of Wang Shu as 2012’s Pritzker Laureate is a welcome and necessary choice if China (and the world) is to recognize the value inherent in carefully-considered, culturally-sensitive work, and build a global design culture based on meaningful intervention, not empty icons. The work of Amateur Architecture points toward the future without abandoning the past, and reclaims China’s great architectural heritage through new synthetic models, new archetypes, and ultimately a new vernacular.

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Many thanks to Addison Godel and Marc Syp for their thoughts on an earlier draft of this essay. Addison has a nice summary of some projects not covered here, and, as always, some excellent photos. (You can find my Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture set here: Amateur Architecture set on Flickr.)

One of the great, if seldom realized, promises of architecture is its capacity to affect change. The best architects seem to have this potential in mind constantly as they structure career-length narratives around the social impact that good design can achieve. While this is often hyperbole, and most projects are driven by functional or economic considerations, there is the occasional opportunity for artists and architects to create purely speculative work, where radical departures from established typologies suggest alternatives to the status quo. In these rare cases, novelty is embraced not for its own sake, but for its potential to generate new archetypes, to provide a glimpse into a parallel world where architecture truly has agency: where design can change society for the better.

Ancient Tree | Christ & Gantenbein AG

While it’s incredibly rare for a single client and a single architect to agree on such a radical – and risky – design approach for a single building, it’s not uncommon for a city, state, or nation to sponsor curated exhibitions, where invited designers are free to experiment in pursuit of alternative prototypes.

This governmental impulse towards experimentation and exhibition can be traced back as far as London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 (if not further), where nations were invited to demonstrate the best of their industrial, scientific, and cultural products. While Britain’s intent may have been transparently propagandistic (given their industrial superiority at the time), the legacy is that every country with the means to throw such a party has had their chance [1], and these exhibitions have indeed produced radical works of architecture that not only introduced technical and material innovations, but demonstrated new concepts of how a building’s spatial configuration can influence the social relation of its inhabitants.

The World Exhibitions have produced the Crystal Palace (London, 1851) and the Eiffel Tower (Paris, 1889), whose structural innovations have had such an incalculable impact on the construction industry. They have produced the German Pavilion (1929, Barcelona) and the Blur Building (Swiss Expo 2002), both radical designs where the ambiguity of enclosure makes us question the place of architecture in the environment, and the role of the individual in society. They have produced the Weissenhof Siedlung (Stuttgart, 1927), credited with popularizing international-style modernism. Temporary or permanent, these structures can have a huge impact not just on the architectural design community, but on society as a whole.

Tea Rooms | Liu Jiakun

With this all in mind, it’s worth looking at the Jinhua Architecture Park (2002-2006). Though not built for a World Exposition, the seventeen structures here share that revolutionary intent (and seem to me to fit in the canon of expo pavilions more than most of the propaganda-halls of Shanghai Expo 2010 [2]). Planned and curated by dissident artist Ai Wei Wei, each pavilion represents a new path forward for architecture, at least in the mind of the designer.

The park seems to be a reinterpretation of a traditional Chinese garden, through an extension of those principles to a massive, linear site. I’ve written before about classical gardens, where the containing boundary seems to determine the density and complexity of the space within, as if each garden designer had a certain number of elements to fit “in the box” and constituent elements were chopped, overlaid, and folded in on themselves when necessary.

In Suzhou’s Garden of the Master of Nets, for instance, courtyards are squeezed down to become mere slots of space, covered walkways peel off from the halls, which seem almost to overlap. Barrier walls are punctuated by screen windows, offering visual – but not physical – connections through four or five layers of space.

In the larger Humble Administrator’s Garden, individual buildings are scattered throughout the landscape, each representing the perfection of the pavilion form, but less complex as a whole. The Jinhua park is an extension of the latter garden type, expanded to the point where each subsequent pavilion is barely visible from the last. Each can exist independently as an ideal prototype (This separation is not caused by distance, necessarily, but by the sculpting of the ground plane into hills and valleys, and the planting of different plant species in different areas. And perhaps due to smog).

Restaurance | FDC

The pavilions themselves vary in quality. Toshiko Mori’s “Newspaper Stand” is all promenade, a ramp seemingly stripped from another project.  Liu Jiakun’s Tea Rooms resemble a field of floating lanterns. Wang Shu’s Ceramic House has an intriguing relation to the ground plane and a unique material palette. The “Restaurant” by Johan de Wachter Architects/Fun Design Consultancy resembles a dislocated fragment of Constant’s New Babylon, or Yona Friedman’s Spatial City.

These are all interesting concepts, but it’s hard to look past the material quality: the vast majority of the pavilions are literally falling apart. Operable wall panels are stuck or broken, doors are locked or rusted shut, wood is beginning to rot, paths are overgrown. The impression is that you’ve stumbled onto the remains of some future society.

Ai Wei Wei’s “Archeological Archive” is one of the few that have weathered well. The concrete form stands in proud contrast to the other decaying pavilions (foolishly made of more than one material). The artist’s skill as a sculptor becomes apparent as one orbits the building, which offers up multiple, often contradictory associations from different vantage points.

From one end, the elevation is an ideal profile: a farmhouse – or a primitive hut – in overgrown grassland. Moving clockwise around the building, you see the profile extrude and elongate into an industrial shed. Further around, there is a sunken plaza, revealing a mirror-image of the “ur-house” and confirming its geometry as hexagonal, an imposed geometric order that can accommodate diverse activities (a formal strategy that should be familiar to students of contemporary architecture).

The sunken plaza may resemble an archeological dig, but I believe Ai Wei Wei wouldn’t be quite so literal. Continuing clockwise, the house profile is reestablished, but undercut and destabilized by the excavation. Reading the pavilion from this cinematic sequence of views, we can conclude that accelerating modernization has literally stripped away the foundation of traditional society.

Herzog & de Meuron’s “Reading Room” is equally rich. The architects have – for years, over a number of projects – been investigating the extent to which a surface pattern can be productive, in terms of expanding the façade to create interior volumes. While the architects’ early work could be characterized as minimalist-post-modern (demonstrating the lasting influence of Aldo Rossi, in projects like Blue House and Rudin House), by the early 90s their techniques had expanded to include patternmaking and graphic applique (these two threads weave together at Ricola Mulhouse, where an exaggerated industrial-shed overhang caps the patterned polycarbonate panels). By the late 90s and early 2000s, they had allowed these graphic applications to expand in scale and extend into the interior. At Prada Aoyama, the diagrid façade is proportioned precisely to accommodate the angle of the staircases, pushed to the exterior envelope, and portions of the façade pattern are extruded through the building to provide enclosure for fitting rooms.

The pavilion in Jinhua is the next step in this line of inquiry, as all interior volumes are created by the extrusion and intersection of the flat, patterned facades. The pavilion retains a rectangular envelope, and one can read each façade as a planar surface. The vestiges of a hexagonal grid are visible, but this initial condition has been heavily distorted. The resulting form is an incredibly complex but immediately understandable, scaled perfectly for climbing. One could easily find a dozen nooks or crannies, ideal for reading (or any number of illicit activities).

Following this project, the architects would go on to complete the Beijing National Stadium, in which the façade pattern expands to encompass the entire zone of support facilities, everything but the bowl. They would later combine their early minimal-postmodern house profile with the technique used at Prada to create the Vitrahaus, in Weil-am-Rhine, where the vestiges of an enclosing envelope are finally abandoned, and the interior-extrusions become self-supporting.

While the formal gymnastics of the Jinhua pavilion are impressive, and the scheme seems to fit perfectly within the architects’ oeuvre, the pavilion is smartly oriented on site to provide “captured views” from within. From various points, the concrete forms frame views out to the landscape and surrounding pavilions: the rare pavilion that directs attention away from itself.

Like Ai Wei Wei’s pavilion, the concrete form of the “Reading Room” has resisted decay relatively well. The other pavilions, however, are deteriorating rapidly. In European traditions, architects aspire to permanence, but what the Jinhua architecture park makes clear is for works of architecture or art to survive they must be continuously maintained, repaired, or rebuilt, or they will vanish into the landscape. We make our pilgrimages to Athens and Rome, but we don’t quite realize the constant vigilance required to keep those monuments intact.  I wonder if it would have been better, in Jinhua, to design for temporality, to plan for demolition and reconstruction, following Confucian traditions of repetition and renewal, building anew each year, learning from mistakes, and building better each year.

Until next time…

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As always, more photos at the author’s Flickr site: Architecture by City: Jinhua.

This essay was cross-posted to the author’s blog on Archinect. For a nice, thorough rundown of the individual pavilions, check out Addison’s post over at Codename Albacore.

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Notes:

[1] I hope to examine the Shanghai Expo, and the role of propaganda a little more in depth in a future post.

[2] Notable exceptions: The Danish Pavilion by Bjarke Ingels/BIG, the Madrid Pavilion by FOA, and the Ningbo Pavilion by Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture.

Guangdong Museum, Rocco Yim

[In December, I helped lead a tour of Architecture students through eastern China. The following posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited. Today: Guangzhou.]

Shamian Island

Guangzhou, perhaps more than any other city, represents the diversity of urban form present in China’s post-colonial cities. From the well-preserved Old Town, the colonial Shamian Island, to the “hanging gardens” of Guangzhou’s elevated highways (which soften the brutal infrastructure of the city, and provide shade for informal businesses below) and the lifeless modernism of Futian, Guangzhou is nothing if not a collection of diverse urban ideas, a kind of living museum of urbanism.

Guangzhou has been a prominent port for millennia (Wikipedia traces the city’s history back to 206 BC, when it was the Capitol of the Nanyue kingdom), but its modern history starts more or less with the Portuguese’ arrival in the 1500s. Long before other Chinese cities were “opened” for international trade, Guangzhou was bustling. Along with Macau, it represented one of the two points-of-entry for foreign traders, but while Macau was ceded to the Portuguese (and, thus, developed an urban form characteristic of European colonies), Guangzhou remained firmly under Chinese (Qing Dynasty) control, and developed accordingly. Foreigners were restricted, first, to the “Thirteen Factories” and, later, to Shamian Island, a reclaimed “sandbar” which became a hub of European influence in the city.

Shamian Island

Today, Shamian island is a quiet, leafy oasis, whose rational grid-layout and neoclassical facades form a distinctive European enclave in the city. The island remains somewhat disconnected from the surrounding streets, due to its physical separation by a large canal and (now) an elevated highway. While tiny compared to the concession areas of, say, Shanghai, the island represents a “pure” colonial urbanism that one can’t find in Shanghai, where mass migration and speculative development led to the emergence of hybrid typologies. Here, stately neo-classical villas prevail.

Just across the canal, Guangzhou’s lively market streets represent an alternative urbanism, with clusters of narrow lanes bustling with activity. These blocks are home to every kind of market imaginable, from fruit stands to traditional medicine shops. Pet shops sell bunnies and puppies on one street, butchers sell skinned rabbits and dog meat one street over. The contrast between these frenetic lanes and the serene boulevards of Shamian island is remarkable – and all available within a ten minute walk.

Elsewhere, Guangzhou is engaged in a process of modernization, a re-development strategy focused on the construction of massive civic squares anchored by impressive architectural icons, but sorely lacking the kind of urban activity one should expect in a city center. The central plaza in Guangzhou’s Futian district is about the same size and scale as Shenzhen’s Civic Center, similarly anchored by cultural buildings, and equally devoid of life.

(I exaggerate a bit: these large plazas are nowhere near as soul-crushing as, say, Tiananmen, but the low-intensity activity can’t compare to the bustling market streets elsewhere in the city. The squares are severely under-programmed, and I see no reason to come back once you’ve seen the Opera House, the Museum, and the Canton Tower. )

While the comparison to Shenzhen is interesting – both were among the first “Special Economic Zones” – it only goes so far. Guangzhou has an incredibly long history, compared to which Shenzhen really was a “tabula rasa.” Guangzhou suffers somewhat from the comparison, if only because we can imagine what was demolished to make room for the new, massive, civic center. Guangzhou had a developed, heterogeneous urban form, where any “modernization” project could be seen as destructive.

Aside from the urban issues, Guangzhou’s central plaza provides a lesson regarding construction quality in China today, and the validity of metaphor as design concept.

Zaha Hadid’s opera house, ostensibly based on the concept of “two stones in the river” is already falling into disrepair, due in part, no doubt, to the complexity of the geometry that would prove challenging in any country, but especially so in China where the speed of the design and construction process makes quality control a significant concern.

The design of the opera house seems unnecessarily complex, and has little to do with the functional requirements of the program, the auditorium volumes only loosely wrapped by the containing envelope, whose tortured forms have no relation to the interior space (compare to OMA’s Casa De Musica in Oporto, Portugal, where the audacious shape of the building is driven directly by the volumetric form of the auditorium).

The Guangdong Museum, by contrast, is constructed with straightforward details, right angles, and a material sensibility that seems appropriate for the local climate and fully within the capabilities of the local contractors. While the “Chinese Box” metaphor may be a bit of a stretch, the array of rectangular gallery spaces around a central atrium seems to make sense for a museum, allowing for lighting control within the galleries, while allowing the quality of light in the circulation zone to vary over the course of a day.

The courtyard typology has precedent in the local vernacular. The functionally-useful metaphor, simple, elegant details, and the typological reference to local traditions combine to make this work of architecture a much more successful design than the opera house it faces across the plaza. These subtle design choices don’t alleviate the problems of the massive plaza, however, and you need to look to other areas of Guangzhou, mentioned above, for the real life of the city.

Luckily, modernization projects have not robbed Guangzhou of its unique character – because other areas of town have been preserved – and their existence only adds to the diverse heterogeneity of Guangzhou’s urban form.

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As always, more photos on the author’s Flickr stream: Architecture by City: Guangzhou.

This essay was cross-posted to the author’s blog on Archinect, Delirious Shanghai.

[In December, I helped lead a tour of Architecture students through eastern China. The following few posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited. Today: Kaiping.]

I don’t have a lot to say about the Kaiping Dialou tower houses: my knowledge is limited to what I’ve read on Wikipedia and gleaned from the UNESCO World Heritage list description: In short, this unique typology developed when Chinese emigrants from Guangdong province (economically-depressed at the time – late Qing dynasty) found work in the United States, Canada, or even South America (working in gold mines, or on the railroads, for instance), and returned home incredibly wealthy, compared to those who had remained behind….

These houses, thus, had to serve dual roles: to project an image of luxury, with newfound wealth and culture represented by ostentatious ornament with a distinct western influence, and to protect that wealth from marauding bandits (apparently a big problem at the time).

It’s interesting to compare these to other Chinese residential vernacular structures. These couldn’t be further removed from the “siheyuan” (courtyard typology common throughout China) whose inward-focused arrangement precludes ostentatious display of wealth. Another fruitful comparison might be the Tulou roundhouses of Guangdong and Fujian provinces – those rammed earth structures that also act as communal housing as well as fortifications. It’s interesting to note that these residential typologies are easily defensible, but I have yet to draw any conclusions from this….

[More photos, as always, on the author's Flickr stream: Architecture by City: Kaiping.]

[This was cross-posted to the author's blog Delirious Shanghai, on Archinect.]

[In December, I helped lead a tour of Architecture students through eastern China. The following few posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited. Today: Shenzhen.]

Shenzhen’s short history is well known: In the accepted mythology, China’s Economic Miracle began here, with the establishment of the Special Economic Zone, that grand urban experiment with market capitalism. This auspicious tabula rasa – not even labeled on maps prior to the 1980s – was surely selected as much for its lack of historical baggage as for as its adjacency to booming Hong Kong. What better place to demonstrate the potential of the new China, free, finally, from imperialist aggressors, war, and the insanity of the Mao era? With no dynastic, imperial, republican, or communist fabric, Shenzhen was essentially a blank slate, free to be shaped into a modern – and specifically Chinese – city.

And over the short thirty years of its existence, the city has indeed evolved into a modern marvel, both in terms of the breadth and quality of the city’s utilities and cultural amenities, but also in terms of historical Modernism: while post-war “towers-in-a-park” urban experiments in Europe and the US are now seen as failures of urban design, in China they have found new life, as the incredible population density makes such schemes both useful and necessary. There is no city in China more Modern than Shenzhen, and it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer scale of the endeavor. Driving down wide, tree-lined boulevards (or sweeping above them on a highway flyover), the extent of the city is overwhelming. The metropolis seems to go on forever, an impression amplified by its linearity, stretching as it does along the narrow swath of land between the hills and the Hong Kong (SAR) border.

It seems impossible that so much could be built so quick; the Party line reinforces this myth: thirty years ago: this was nothing. But of course, this is pure fantasy: the Pearl River Delta has been settled for thousands of years, and the notion that fertile land so close to a major port city would be unoccupied is simply insane. Numerous small villages peppered the region at the time of the establishment of the SEZ, and though many were surely (forcibly) relocated, others have survived and adapted: the “urban villages” of Shenzhen co-evolved with the modern city, and their dense pedestrian lanes, filled with activity (pool tables, majong players, street-side butcher shops, barbers) provide a fascinating counterpoint to the spectacular popular image of China’s miracle city. (Dafen “oil painting village” is a convenient example – as tourists are expected – but may not represent the urban phenomenon at its most authentic).

Whether considering the aggregation of improvised high-rise districts, or the planned modernist homogeneity, the speed of construction is still striking, but Shenzhen’s age is misleading. Though it was built with unprecedented speed, the city did not emerge fully formed from the rice paddies: it developed in stages like any other: scattered agricultural villages gave way to rapid industrialization. Mass housing followed, as did civic amenities and entertainment venues. Shenzhen today is very clearly post-industrial: while Guangdong province remains an industrial powerhouse, Chinese manufacturing is gradually moving inland as second- and third-tier cities follow the SEZ’s economic model. In Shenzhen, a robust service economy is beginning to supplant industry both in importance and in physical space.

The trajectory is exemplified by the OCT Loft project, a renovation of former plants and warehouses by local architects Urbanus. The old factory buildings seem ancient, with crumbling concrete and rusting steel, but this can be blamed more on poor materials and dismal air quality than on the ravages of time: the industrial sheds were built in the early 80s, and have decayed quickly. The architects used a light touch in the renovation, maintaining the older structures where possible, and making only minimal interventions (such as curating a series of murals, or inserting sculptural staircases or entry gates). The result is impressive, and forms one of the only truly comfortable, pedestrian-scale urban environments in Shenzhen (Compare to the impossibly-wide avenues of Futian, or the cramped conditions of any of the urban villages). It’s clear that this “new city” is already in need of restoration- a huge opportunity for urban reinvention.

Urbanus architects are leading the pack in this – through a series of new public plazas that attempt to rethink the role of public space in China. In their Public Art Plaza, for example, the architects mutilate the ground plane, folding it up to enclose an art gallery, punching holes to provide light to underground parking, slashing the ground and pulling it up to form benches and planters. In short, through fissures and level changes, the architects have manipulated the space to the point that it would be impossible to hold any kind of mass rally, and created a public space that is strictly non-hierarchical. Compare this to the central Civic Square, as expansive as Tiananmen (though, granted, with more trees).

While Shenzhen does have its moments of complexity, the majority of city remains homogenous, punctuated by (admittedly) spectacular feats of architecture, from the monolithic stock exchange (by OMA), to the Vanke Center (Steven Holl), to the odd and anachronistic Eiffel Tower and Louvre Pyramid anchoring the Happy Valley amusement park. Ultimately, though, Shenzhen, is more interesting as an idea and an economic model than as a built environment, though the potential to reshape the city is clearly demonstrated in smart new projects by young local architects.

Ascott Maillen Service Apartments, Urbanus Architects

Shenzhen Library, Isozaki

Shenzhen Stock Exchange, OMA

Dafen Oil Painting Village

Vanke Center, Steven Holl

Hua Art Museum, Urbanus

Jade Bamboo Plaza, Urbanus

Public Art Plaza, Urbanus

OCT Loft, renovation by Urbanus

[Originally posted at Archinect. More photos, as always on the author's Flickr stream: Architecture by City: Shenzhen]

City of Dreams

[Note: Over the past two weeks, I helped lead a tour of Ohio State University architecture students and alumni on a tour up the East China coast, from Hong Kong, to Shanghai, and inland to Beijing. The following few posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited…. Today: Macau.]

The original concept for this tour was the study of post-colonial urbanism in China. An ideal, rigorous version of our itinerary would have taken us through Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen , Ningbo, Shanghai … and perhaps the dozen other cities that were home to foreign  concessions in the waning years of the Qing Dynasty and early years of the Republic. In the end, our focus shifted somewhat (to include Beijing, for instance), but Macau remained on the itinerary.

Whatever history may have been inscribed in the urban fabric of Macau, and whatever unique character the city may have possessed in the past, all seems to have been erased today – or overlaid with so many layers of advertising and tourist propaganda as to render it completely vacuous. Take the historic core, that UNESCO-listed town center, comprised of narrow lanes overflowing with souvenir shops (“Portuguese clothes” made in Thailand) and Egg Tart stands (also available at KFC). Formally, the old town center is pleasant enough, and the paving patterns and church facades are reminiscent of scenes from Portugal (or, in my limited experience, old Spanish settlements in the Caribbean), but the overlay of tourist schlock robs it of any sense of authenticity, and it is reduced to a facsimile or simulacra, propped up by the tourist dollar (usually, HKD, as opposed to the local currency, the “pataca”).

The Casinos, by contrast, are refreshingly inauthentic. On the Cotai “strip” (reclaimed land bridging between two formerly-distinct islands south of the Macau peninsula, whose urban and economic planning is modeled on Las Vegas) the Venetian is a clear stand-out. Modeled on – and larger than – it’s Vegas namesake, the Venetian is an exemplar of a new authenticity. The iconic monuments of Venice are conveniently collected in one place: the Rialto bridges across the entry drive, terminating next to the San Marco Campanile at the Doges’ palace. Scenic views can be had from across the “Grand Canal,” before entering the expansive building, where the baroque madness of the entry corridor gives way (eventually) to a (relatively) subdued hall, where lights are focused on tables and gamblers are focused on their games. The canals of Venice are recreated, absurdly, on Level 2, a quick elevator (or: curved escalator!) ride from the gaming floor.

The canal level exists in perpetual twilight: the stores will never close (and it will always be just-about-time for a drink), and the water is a chlorine-blue you’ll never see in Venice. The Venetian, in fact, has one-upped Venice. Why bother with dirty canals, old stone bridges, unpredictable business hours, and long confusing walks through the old fabric when you can have the Venetian, with its color coded retail zones, and clean waterways, where the gaming floor is always just a quick elevator ride away?

Macau is a tough city to “process” and I’m sure I’m missing a lot of the local culture – away from the Cotai strip in the dense neighborhoods surrounding the historic center. But as an eight-hour day trip from Hong Kong, it passes in a tourist blur, denying critique. (More thoughts, perhaps, later, on the role of reproduction/copying in Chinese architecture, but for now, enjoy the Talking Heads’ “City of Dreams” (from “True Stories”), which I couldn’t stop singing after hitching a ride on the free City of Dreams casino shuttle. Completely unrelated, aside from the post-colonial subtext…..)

watch?v=B3RFuJ15U_k&feature=player_embedded

[Cross-posted to archinect, more photos on the author’s Flickr stream.]

Hong Kong is a vertical city, an exemplar of three-dimensional urbanism, and a manifestation of economic forces constrained only by topography. The physical limitations of Hong Kong island combine with a seemingly endless influx of capital to create a city unlike any other, where skyscrapers reach ever-higher, and where the public space of the city extends vertically, forming a porous, expanded ground with unprecedented connectivity between blocks and buildings. The fascinating network of public space in the city proves incredibly challenging to analysis, and provides little framework for designers: the city seems to deny existing typologies while simultaneously generating new ones, providing an inadvertent model for the hyper-dense cities of the future.

While many cities have pedestrian overpasses, in Hong Kong these have evolved into an incredibly complex network of high-speed pedestrian highways, complete with “exits” that return one to the slower, traditional street network. This hierarchical arrangement acts as a sorting mechanism, allowing slower window-shoppers or tourists to wander along the sidewalks, while determined businessmen sprint past above. The skyways, weaving around the automotive circulation, provide the pedestrians with incredible freedom and a near-infinite number of potential routes, but it is the connection to and through enclosed semi-public space that I find most interesting.

I’ve written before about the “expanded ground” and how infrastructural elements such as the Mid-Levels escalators activate the levels above and below grade to an astounding extent (allowing – for example – barbers, tailors, and noodle shops to lease space on upper floors with no apparent disadvantage to business), but where the complexity of Hong Kong’s public space really becomes evident is in the cases where the exterior skyways aren’t sufficient to provide a pedestrian path through the city. This is where Hong Kong’s malls – semi-public retail environments – break away from their US ancestors.

The evolution of the mall typology can be traced back to the ancient agora, of course, but Hong Kong’s malls seem to have evolved from a more recent precedent: those freestanding buildings surrounded by parking we tend to regard as blights on the suburban landscape. The early malls of the United States were developer-driven projects: planned, enclosed environments whose primary design goal was consumption. Their centripetal designs blocked or constrained views to the exterior, and tended to facilitate entry and inward circulation while inhibiting egress.

Some Hong Kong malls certainly do tend to act as a kind of consumerist lobster-trap (see Jon Jerde’s Langham place, where “expresscalators” rocket shoppers to the top floor, where they are forced to “spiral” down past every storefront before exiting at street level), but most are also configured to provide routes through the city, with multiple entries and exists via secondary or tertiary circulation routes that serve as efficient paths through the interior of city blocks. Exterior skyways connect to Hong Kong’s malls at multiple points, above-, on-, and below-grade, and the shortest pedestrian path from point A to B through the city will inevitably run through several distinct retail environments. Where malls in the US (and mainland China, and elsewhere) can be viewed as discrete objects with secure perimeters and clear design intent, Hong Kong’s malls are porous and interconnected. In Hong Kong, the semi-public space of “the mall” forms a major component of the primary circulation of the city.

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[Note: This post inspired by a tour I led of Ohio State University architecture students, up the East China coast, from Hong Kong, to Shanghai, and inland to Beijing. The following few posts will be my brief impressions of the cities we visited…. ]

As always, more photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/evandagan/