Archinect - Delirious Shanghai

Suzhou Space

2014-09-16T19:30:00-04:00

A long time in the making, I finally got around to running a computational intelligibility analysis on the plan of Suzhou's Garden of the Master of Nets, in an attempt to suss out what exactly makes this - and other chinese gardens - so spatially compelling.

Originally posted on the LMN Tech Studio blog: Suzhou Space.

Before starting at LMN, I lived in China for over three years, where I became fascinated by the classical gardens of Suzhou. These gardens, unique to southern China, are populated by small pavilions and halls, sculpted rock outcroppings, shallow pools, and planted areas, all contained within a perimeter wall and arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner. While a pleasing arrangement of rocks may be enough to satisfy bored tourists, architects and designers find the gardens endlessly fascinating for the way they orchestrate experience, frame space, and create illusory depth in their limited boundaries.

Suzhou’s gardens are characterized by ambiguity of interior and ex...

Shanghai de Lux

2013-10-24T14:05:00-04:00

I was recently invited to write a piece for the AA's "colour research cluster," Saturated Space - "a forum for the sharing, exploration, and celebration of colour in Architecture."

For my essay, I took on nocturnal lighting in Shanghai.

"In Shanghai, light and colour give designers, planners, and policy makers the freedom to present an idealized image of their buildings, their city. Dynamic, animated lights dance through the haze, but hidden by darkness, massive fissures split the sidewalks, the water is undrinkable, and the air is toxic. While the idealized image the city seeks to project is one of uncontested modernity, conditions on the ground (in the harsh light of day) deny this. Architectural lighting is thus instrumental – even essential - in the projection of modernity, and represents a key aspect of Chinese society’s reclamation of agency following a long period of oppression and turmoil...."

Read more at Saturated Space: Shanghai de Lux. Or download the PDF (cl...

Bootleg Aesthetics

2013-04-10T02:50:55-04:00

Life goes on in Shanghai, and I remain so far unaffected by unprecedented PM2.5 pollution levels, the 16,000 dead pigs in the river, or the escalating H7N9 pandemic.

To distract myself from these various apocalyptic scenarios, I've been maintaining a tumblr blog of scanned DVD covers from the local shops. While I started this as a bit of a joke, I've been at it for about six months now, and I'm starting to see trends in the visual language of the bootleg DVD. Oversize fonts, obnoxious colors, anachronistic "action" imagery inserted into period films... overuse of photoshop filters, supplemental imagery from unrelated movies... Paparazzi shots are clipped and overlaid on officially-released posters. These covers become mash-up collages of any and all available imagery. As I continue to populate the blog I begin to recognize the aesthetics of specific bootleg production houses. Many are branded with red eagle, some with an Apple logo. A large proportion feature credits text from ...

业余建筑：一种新的（建筑）方言

2013-03-29T10:29:00-04:00

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 on my website) and worked to get it published in an issue of "The Architect", one of China's top architectural journals, available in shops across the country (and abroad?).

For those interested in reading the essay in Chinese, I've re-posted the full text below. Thanks again, Chen!

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SO...

Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture

2012-02-27T11:36:00-05:00

Congratulations to Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture, recipients of the (just-announced) 2012 Pritzker Prize....

I've been working on an essay on his/their work, but it still needs a few more edits- meanwhile, here are a few photos, and my brief essay on the Ningbo Historic Museum.

This is excellent news. Good to see good work in China get recognized.

Also worth checking out, an old interview with Wang Shu at movingcities.org.

SZ-HK Biennale

2012-02-26T05:44:00-05:00

Not much to say at this point, other than that the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Architecture Biennale was well worth the trip. It's nowhere near the scale of say, Venice, but the quality of the work is right up there (indeed, many of the same firms participating, and a lot of overlap in the curatorial team...).

The most striking aspect of the exhibition, however, is how "open" it is. Making the event free and open to the public was (according to Terrence Riley in a roundtable discussion) a conscious decision, and one that seems to be paying off, as the temporary structures in Kowloon seem to attract both professionals and the general public in equal measure.

Many, many more on my Flickr stream.

Ruins of an Alternate Future (Jinhua Architecture Park)

2012-01-29T11:21:00-05:00

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.

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 ...

CNY

2012-01-27T00:44:50-05:00

That's all. Happy Year of the Dragon from Shanghai.

Guangzhou: Diverse-City

2012-01-24T04:22:00-05:00

[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...

Kaiping Tower Houses

2012-01-15T04:07:00-05:00

[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).

...

Miracle City

2012-01-10T20:51:00-05:00

[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, ...

City of Dreams

2011-12-26T09:31:21-05:00

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...

City of Malls

2011-12-23T05:23:55-05:00

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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 analyze, and provides little framework for designers: the city seems to deny existing typologies while simultaneously generating new o...

12 Cities / 16 Days.

2011-12-05T23:49:41-05:00

(note: this is cross-posted to evanchakroff.com)

As mentioned earlier, most of my free time recently has been devoted to the planning of a two-week architecture tour along the east China coast (and up to Beijing). What started as a Facebook-status "wouldn't-it-be-nice" has turned into a full-fledged study-abroad program, with support and funding from the Ohio State University, and a staff of 6 pulling together building research, writing essays on urbanism, tweaking the schedule, and booking hotels, charter buses, and train tickets.

We'll have a group of 27 people, including current students, faculty, and alumni, with ages ranging from 20 to 70.

What started as a plan to tour the East China Coast (Including all major "Treaty Ports" and the first batch of "Special Economic Zones" gradually got pared down to a more managable set of cities (Links to Blog Posts):

Hong Kong
Macau
Shenzhen
Kaiping
Guangzhou
Jinhua
Hangzhou
Ningbo
Suzhou
Nanjing
Shanghai
Beijing

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Place-holder: Ningbo Historic Museum

2011-10-18T10:05:00-04:00

architect: Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio, 2009

photos by the author.

A few months ago, I took a weekend trip from Shanghai down to Ningbo. The recently completed Hangzhou Bay Bridge (briefly the longest on earth, before it was surpassed by another, elsewhere in China) cuts the travel time down to 2.5 hours (even faster than the new high-speed rail, which connects Shanghai and Ningbo via Hangzhou). I'm constantly amazed by the infrastructure here, which turns the entire Yangtse delta into a huge, networked agglomeration, each city (Ningbo, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Nanjing) merely a node of this increasingly interconnected organism. It gives me hope, too, than while development speeds ahead in Shanghai, the old-China charms of Suzhou and the natural beauty of Hangzhou won't be lost in a sea of towers.

Ningbo has only a few sights to offer tourists, but it's a painless trip, and as a former Treaty Port (with it's own miniature Bund) it offers some interest...

Voyage to the Orient!

2011-10-08T00:42:52-04:00

CHINA ARCHITECTURE TOUR: December 6 - 22, 2011
two week whirlwind tour of traditional, colonial, and contemporary architecture in China!

(Sorry to post this - essentially an ad - here, but I see no better way to drum up interest and get more people involved...)

This coming December I will be organizing an architectural tour up the East China Coast, hitting all major cities from Hong Kong to Shanghai, then traveling north to Beijing. This will be an intense, whirlwind tour - over ten cities in just 16 days - but we will see a HUGE amount; it will be an incredible experience, (and one that would be impossible to organize on your own). (The trip is open to anyone, but preference will be given to practicing architects and architecture students. The trip will be associated with the Ohio State University, and the program fee will count for AIA continuing education credit, and be tax-deductible).

In addition to the trip, we will be writing and constructing a guidebook to the archi...

Delirious Shanghai

2011-10-05T05:53:06-04:00

So, now that Archinect's got a new blog infrastructure, I feel obligated to share some observations on my life and work post-graduation (See previous entries for half-assed observations on life at the KSA).

Long story short, in 2009 I moved to Rome. In 2010 I moved to Shanghai. It's a fascinating city - and a great place to be an architect. I've been thinking about putting together a treatise of sorts on Shanghai (Shanghaiism?) for some time now, posting fragments of theories on my own website (http://evanchakroff.com), but I've never really allowed these scattered thoughts to coalesce into anything concrete...

I hope this new community blog platform (and the "guaranteed" audience that comes with it) will give me the impetus to reformat/edit/copy/paste/resurrect some of my old thoughts about life/architecture/urbanism in Shanghai, and, of course, continue to write about this city - a city that seems to reinvent itself every year.... a city that seems to evade analysis and refl...