The Department of Education of Jiangsu Province awarded Bachelor graduate Li Shaokang a second prize in the annual Jiangsu Province Final Year Project Awards for his 2017 graduation project entitled A Palimpsest of Old Shanghai. 

The Jiangsu Province FYP Awards are not discipline specific, and thus competition is against many hundreds of Final Year Projects conducted in disciplines with an undergraduate degree.

Given the fierce competition, and considering that XJTLU can nominate only two projects per year in total and across all disciplines for this prestigious award, XJTLU’s Department of Architecture is very happy to report that this is already the second time that an XJTLU Final Year Project in Architecture was awarded by Jiangsu’s Department of Education, with 2015 graduate Wang Siyao winning a third prize in 2016.

Li Shaokang has already received other awards for his Final Year Studio project. It was previously awarded an Outstanding Coursework Award at the 2017 National Architectural Education Annual Symposium in Shenzhen, China, as well as a Best FYP in Architecture award by Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. 

The project was supervised by Associate Professors Claudia Westermann and Aleksandra Raonic, whose Framing Indeterminacy brief guided year 4 architecture students in an experimental approach to developing a new architecture of participation and exchange for a site located in Shanghai on the west bank of the Huangpu River, around 800m southeast of the historical Bund. The brief linked the students to the Fun Palace Futures general theme that had been launched by the Royal British Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in honour of the architect Cedric Price and the artist Joan Littlewood.

A Palimpsest of Old Shanghai

Li Shaokang Final Year Project “A Palimpsest of Old Shanghai” captured an understanding of indeterminacy by translating a Chinese shadow play into a series of conceptual models and drawings, and subsequently into architecture. The Chinese shadow play recomposes characters and stories. In a similar manner, story fragments overlap and interlace in the multi-universe of the proposed architecture. It blurs the boundary between time and space and generates new stories. As an homage to Cedric Price - some of the fragments have been developed as mobile units of exchange. They can disconnect and reconnect, and are destined to travel around the world.

The proposal provides a framework for various activities, such as reading, meditating, performing, exercising, and communicating with nature and art. The spaces are mixed and intersected. They contradict prediction. Improbable combinations of activities initiate novelty. Users and inhabitants create their own palimpsests of stories and characters. In the infinite mirror of the proposed architecture, past, present and future become one. 

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