Hi Archinect!
In a week and a day I'll be en route to Beijing for my one month trip to Beijing, Shanghai, and a number of smaller places in between. The trip is funded my my alma mater, McGill School of Architecture, with the only condition being that I bring back materials to hold an exhibition when I get back.
I've printed 4 x 6" cards with the time and date at thirty-minute intervals for the duration of my trip (1680 cards, for 35 days from July 25 to August 27), and will use these to document the experience. The result will be a wall, 12' high by 35' long, in McGill's exhibition room, gridded with cards, left blank for whatever times I was sleeping but otherwise filled with sketches, doodles, and the occasional text. Then, either during the exhibition or before it, there will be a projection showing one card at a time in half-hour intervals, so that my trip will be re-produced at a 1:1 temporal scale, over a period of 35 days.
That's the plan. I've never been to China before, and I can't wait to eat (and draw) noodles and Peking Duck in Beijing, dim sum and crispy chicken in Shanghai, and bamboo shoots in Anhui province. Oh, and of course, the architecture!
Thanks for reading! I hope you're enjoying your summer, whatever adventures it brings for you this year.
Lian
This blog was most active from 2009-2013. Writing about my experiences and life at Harvard GSD started out as a way for me to process my experiences as an M.Arch.I student, and evolved into a record of the intellectual and cultural life of the Cambridge architecture (and to a lesser extent, design/technology) community, through live-blogs. These days, I work as a data storyteller (and blogger at Littldata.com) in San Francisco, and still post here once in a while.
5 Comments
Try to get used to tea. No tea, no Chinese culture.
This reminds me On Kawara's "I GOT UP" series.
Your postcards are destined to be a great piece already (and not because of kawara's postcards.)
Have fun! I'm already looking forward to seeing the exhibit. I love the real-time projection idea.
don't forget to call me!
Thanks for the comments, all!
@ Orhan Ayyüce, thanks for the reference! I wasn't familiar with Kawara.
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