&#39;Building a Future Countryside: China Pavilion at the 2018 VAB&#39;

Joel Robinson

'Building a Future Countryside: China Pavilion at the 2018 VAB'

2018, World Sculpture News

Philip F. Yuan, Cloud Village, 2018, recycled plastic, in the exhibition Building a future countryside (Pavilion of China), 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Photograph: Joel Robinson. Building A Future Countryside Rebuilding villages, towns, and cities in China in a new era of change offers architects and artists refreshing opportunities to create new physical forms. In China now, as countryside development increases apace with urban changes, many questions arise about the need for such changes and their effectiveness. Not all changes are good, but that has not deterred capitalists from scarring the rural land in search of “economic growth.” By Joel Robinson R ecent exhibitions about Chinese architecture are more likely to have focused on the rapid urbanization of the country, on the construction of its megalopolises. This year, China’s participation in the Venice Biennale of Architecture (May 26–November 25, 2018) spotlighted the role of design in rural development instead, in an event called Building a SUMMER 2018 Future Countryside. Apart from the will to show a lesser-known part of Chinese architectural culture to the world, what might explain this shift in attention? Curated by the eminent critic and historian Li Xiangning, this took place in the Magazzino delle Cisterne (Tanks Warehouse) of the Arsenale. This is the city’s former shipyards and armories, where several national pavilions that do not have a spot in the Giardini della Biennale are to be found. Other than in a very general sense, it was not apparent what this exhibition had to do with Freespace— the title and overarching theme of the 2018 Biennale, curated by the Irish firm Grafton Architects (Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara). Instead, it developed six themes of its own—namely, WORLD SCULPTURE NEWS 49 production, tourism, community, culture, dwelling, and future. Although banners suspended over their approximate areas of display designated these themes, it was often the case that projects related to two or more of them. O verall, the exhibition offered visitors a picture of the rapid development of China’s countryside; this is said to be unparalleled in other regions of the globe, and increasingly at odds with an age-old image of a bucolic agrarian life that had persisted through the Maoist era. In the gardens (Giardino delle Vergini) outside the Tanks Warehouse, a large installation pointed to the changes that are in store for China’s countryside. This is the work of Philip F. Yuan and Archi-Union. Cloud Village, as this was called, was a vast digitally fabricated pavil- Atelier Deshaus, Model of Xinchang Village’s Central Kindergarten (Tianquan County, 2017), at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Photograph: Joel Robinson. ion made of recycled plastic; it purported to distil the spatial essence of the rural set- functions. Under the theme of produc- infrastructure and logistics more genertlement, the spirit of its communal spaces. tion, for instance, Zhang Lei’s Wood ally, are enabling the countryside to move It complemented a display indoors called Kiln Bingding (2017-2018) in Qiancheng away from production to market-oriented In-Bamboo: The Robotic Future of the Village (Jiangxi province) revives the and service-based economies. Such Countryside. Here, Yuan’s team presented dying heritage of kiln building in the developments are breaking down China’s a model of the roof—an undulating infin- renowned Jingdezhen region, which has otherwise strictly regulated urban/rural ity knot in plan—of a cultural center that been making high-quality ceramics for apartheid, violently embodied in the resiis part of its Bamboo Craft Village. As of over two thousand years. dency registration system (hukou). Right 2018, this has been partially realized, on Another case in point is Xu at the entrance to the warehouse (just a piece of land near Daoming, in Sichuan Tiantan’s (DnA Architects) renewal of across from the installation of In-Bamboo: province. Photographs and plans of it the Shimen Bridge, responding to the The Robotic Future of the Countryside) were mounted on the adjacent wall. theme of community. Evoking the Wind was a large wall drawing called Taobao While Cloud Village explores the and Rain Bridges of the Dong People, Village, Smallacre City (2018). This is one possibilities for new electronic technolo- her new wooden pitched-roof pavilions of the highly intricate and colorful largegies in supporting development of a kind (completed in 2017) atop the pre-existing scale wall drawings that have become that is still rooted in traditional rural spa- masonry bridge help to connect—sym- the trademark for Han Li and Hu Yan of tiality, the buildings at the Bamboo Craft bolically as well as physically—two vil- the Beijing office Drawing Architecture Village draw on vernacular construction lages on either side of a river in Songyang Studio (DAS). methods and materials to generate spa- (Zheijiang province). Taobao Village, Smallacre City tially innovative environments. These At the other end of the spectrum (2018) depicts an imaginary place, paying various kinds of tension—i.e., between were displays that explored how the tribute to American architect Frank Lloyd past and present, heritage and invention, arrival of the Internet, and advances in Wright’s visionary concept of Broadacre local craftsmanship and City (1932)—a suburban global connectivity—were agrarian utopia—for an quite pronounced in a age when rural commulot of architectural works nities all over China are seen here. After all, as transmuting into ‘Taobao the curator’s statement Villages.’ The latter is acknowledges, it is the a term coined by the sentiment of xiangchou e-commerce conglomer(i.e., nostalgia for the rural ate Alibaba Group to deshometown) —identified ignate urbanizing clusters with a modern Chinese of online retailers benefitliterary tradition—that ing from capital flow norengenders the idyllic view mally only seen in cities. that architects and urban If Wright looked forward professionals have of the to the ‘disappearing city,’ countryside. wanting to save humanity The poetics of from the pathologies of xiangchou were most urban density, this project tangible in projects that captures an inverse trend Installation of the exhibition Building a Future Countryside, showing exhibits in the foreground, resuscitate historical or and, in the background, Rural Urban Framework’s An Old-New House: Recycling in China, i.e., the disaptraditional architectural the Rural (2018), at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Photograph: Joel Robinson. pearance of the village, 50 WORLD SCULPTURE NEWS SUMMER 2018 due to its rapid growth and urbanization or its absorption into megalopolitan sprawl, resulting in the so-called ‘urban village.’ Incidentally, some of the projects here seem out of place, given how a rural village context for them never existed. What, for instance, is the Lianzhou Museum of Photography (2017), squeezed into a dense metropolitan area by O-Office Architects, doing here? Or, for that matter, how is Cidi Memo iTown, a steel-and-glass office complex raised on the edge of Beijing’s fourth east ring road in 2016 by Atelier Lyu Yuyang, relevant? If such examples were included as a way of reminding the visitor that clear-cut distinctions between the urban and rural are increasingly fuzzy, this was unfortunately not very clear. Or were they meant to demonstrate how architects can fashion semi-enclosed oases resonant of rustic communal spatiality within—and indeed against—the urban sprawl around them? B y contrast, other projects exemplified the new connectedness of China’s countryside. Designed in 2016 by Zhang Lei (AZL Architects), the Shitang Internet Conference Centre in Jiangning (Jiangsu province) is a multifunctional space evoking something between a greenhouse and commune auditorium, with its timber saddle roof propped up on slender posts. Others suggest the renewed attention to social and educational spaces, such as Atelier Archmixing’s Huashu Rural College, Studio and Library (Zhouchong Village, Nanjing, 2015), converted from two farmhouse bungalows, or the revival of local cultural and religious practices, like Atelier TeamMinus’s Jianamani Visitor Center (Qinghai province, 2013), built after the 2010 Yushu Earthquake for Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims. Several cases of post-disaster rebuilding were extolled here. One was Atelier Deshaus’s Xinchang Village Kindergarten (2017) in Tianquan County, built following the 2013 Lushan Earthquake, in the form of a courtyard surrounded by nine terraced ‘houses.’ The 2008 Great Sichuan Earthquake necessitated the Yangliu Village Reconstruction (Min River Valley), overseen by Hsieh Ying-Chun and Rural Architecture Studio from 2009 and Jintai Village Reconstruction (near Guangyuan), carried out by Rural Urban Framework or RUF (Joshua Bolchover and John Lin) in 2014. Both were achieved through local collaboration, using native expertise, vernacular forms, and sustainable materials. The latter have since become models of humanitarian architecture, helping their communities return to life. Building a Future Countryside showed a wide range of works, including agricultural communes, industrial factories, and tourist amenities. Happily, xiangchou was more of a curatorial concept here, and few of the projects indulged in an uncritically romantic view of China’s rural landscape. Yet, the exhibition might be criticized for sidestepping the crises of our ‘urban century’ and not asking whether all the industrial development being celebrated here is necessarily such a good thing. Is it that the capitalist urbanization of cities now looks so bad that we need to have our gaze turned away from it, or worse, that we now need to move on to rubbishing the wide-open spaces in between, driven as ever by delusions of economic growth? The displays may have been enthralling, but tougher questions about sustainability were watered down. ∆ Joel Robinson is a contributing editor for World Sculpture News and Asian Art News. He is based in London. Zhang Lei, Model of the Wood Kiln Bingding (Qiancheng Village, Jiangxi Province, 2017–2018), at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Photograph: Joel Robinson. SUMMER 2018 WORLD SCULPTURE NEWS 51

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'Building a Future Countryside: China Pavilion at the 2018 VAB'

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