Urban Border Volume 39
‘Urban borders’ is a well-known theme in art, architecture, and urbanism, but when a city’s existence is entirely based on it, it becomes interesting to explore the theme anew. The 2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen presents an extensive survey of border conditions and border realities inside and outside Shenzhen’s terri tory and demonstrates how one specific border, the industrial park Shekou where Shenzhen’s history started, can be a catalyst for future development. 2
A City in the Making Arjen Oosterman
UABB in Context 6 9 10 12 14 22 26
An Urban Biennale Huang Weiwen interview Notes from the Planning Department The Biennale as Catalyst Zhang Yuxing interview Border Aware Li Xiangning and Jeffrey Johnson interview The Future in Historical Perspective Ole Bouman interview Shekou Re-Launch Zheng Yulong interview UABB in History
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Shenzhen Bordercity
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44 Laying Siege to the Villages: Lessons from Shenzhen Mary Ann O’Donnell 48 Implantation City Yang Xiaodi and Yin Yujun (Projective Architecture Office) 52 Forms of Enclosure in the Instant Modernization of Shenzhen Adrian Blackwell
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58 Da Lang Fever Linda Vlassenrood 64 Roaming along some Borders: Archis RSVP 66 From Kun to Xian: 2030 Shenzhen, Balance Is More! Doreen Heng Liu (NODE Architecture & Urbanism) 70 Standard Line of Expression Liu Guangyun 72 Cities Between Cities Chen Zetao (FCHA) 76 2047 HKSZ Metropolis: The Forbidden Zone Chris Lai (D-Office) 78 The Rewritten Architecture Dai Yun 80 SZHKSMZ – Special Material Zone Droog & TD architects 84 The V&A in Shenzhen Corinna Gardner Border Conditions Beyond 90 94 96 102 110 116 120 122 124
The Rose Island Archive Joseph Grima and Tamar Shafrir (Space Caviar) Breakwater: Mediterranean Port Cities Rafi Segal and Yonatan Cohen Portraits from Above Rufina Wu and Stefan Canham China’s Hukou System Harry den Hartog Chinese Cities in Africa Daan Roggeveen and Michiel Hulshof Factory Towns of South China Stefan Al Museum of In-City Village Zhang Xiaojing and Chen Zhou Landscape Wall Ni Weihua Liquid Boundaries: Notes from the UK Pavilion Jeremy Till
Value Factory 128 Towards a Value Factory in Ten Steps Ole Bouman 131 Museum of Modern Art 132 São Paulo Architecture Biennale 133 MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism 134 MAXXI Architettura 135 Studio-X 136 Het Nieuwe Instituut 138 Berlage and Volume Laboratorium 140 Office for Metropolitan Architecture 142 Droog with TD Architects 144 The Value Farm 146 Museum of Finnish Architecture 147 Victoria & Albert Museum 159 Colophon
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Arjen Oosterman
It’s rare that a city’s birth certificate survives, but here it is: a map of Hong Kong full of marks and notes. It is an intriguing document, but our attention should go to the upper left corner, where in the ‘white space’ of mainland China the Shekou peninsula is encircled as the new harbor and industrial location of what was to become the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone; conveniently situated and easy to control. The map with personal marks and handwritten notes makes history tangible. It all started with an idea and a location. When a group of Dutch architects visited Shenzhen in 1997, the city was well underway – an urbanized area reaching from Shekou in the west up to Yantian in the east and beyond. A long ‘ribbon city’, draped along the border with Hong Kong. An impres sive model showed the new center – the Futian district. Today it’s the location for the city’s major administrative functions, but at that time it was still a wasteland. None of the visitors believed that the model served more than a promotional purpose. The distance between the notion ‘city’ as we knew it and what we encountered was simply too big. For a westerner, it was a fascinating, yet totally dystopian experience: driving for hours through urbanized areas of various densities and heights, with abundant empty spaces in between, possibly reservations for future development, but just as likely areas that hadn’t been touched by planning at all. Any sense of centrality or gravity was missing, although densi ties around Luohu, the old border crossing with Hong Kong, were higher than elsewhere. At the time, Shenzhen was internationally rec ognized for its big numbers. Its phenomenal growth rate and speed of development tickled the imagi nation. While Rem Koolhaas lectured about the speed of production in the Pearl River Delta – stunning his audience with calculations indicating that an archi tect in that area would have less than eleven hours to design a whole skyscraper – we were confronted with this practice for real. Inside a Shenzhen school of architecture, looking out a window, my eye was attracted by five apartment towers in the distance. They looked quite similar to a graduation project I had just seen. Asking the Dean about it I couldn’t stop myself saying: “That student didn’t go far for his inspiration”, pointing at the towers outside. “On the contrary”, the Dean replied, “those towers were built to his design after he graduated”. While young archi tects in the west would be really happy to have a villa extension or five row houses as first assignment, here a thirty floor multi-tower apartment complex seemed to be the norm.
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Returning after sixteen years, the city has matured. The 1997 model was for real, the proposed center did materialize, and also on a more general level the city has become more normal, a bit easier to relate to. Easier, not easy, since structurally the city is an intricate patchwork of historic relations and autonomous developments, held together by the main road structure and metro lines. It is mind-boggling to realize that in a city of fifteen million, almost every building or piece of infrastructure is 35-years old at most. But looking around, there is a growing sense of history, a mix of older and newer, of well-designed and improvised parts, of decay and renewal that creates a sense of place. And here the new story begins. Shenzhen was produced by borders, by drawing a line and defining a zone of exclusion. Yet its aim was and is to mediate between territories and in the long run to do away with the borders altogether – the Hong Kong border is to expire in 2047, finally integrating that territory uninterruptedly into the Pearl River Delta megalopolis. The city was created and built as a tool for a purpose, a production and prosperity machine, a commodity; now it faces the challenge to stay subservient to this political-economic agenda or start working on its own reality. Should the conclusion be that once this goal of balancing developments inside different parts of China (Hong Kong being one of them) and of China with economically more developed parts of the world has been achieved, Shenzhen can be discarded, dis solved like the inner border with China was gradually dissolved? To move away, follow the money, follow capital on its search for better profit, like factories in Shenzhen already do, moving to cheaper labor countries like Vietnam? Or should we conclude that Shenzhen has been animated successfully, that it has a soul that deserves fighting and caring for; a soul that will become more profound with age? Asking the question is answering it. At least Shenzhen’s planning department did, when they launched this Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\ Architecture (UABB) in 2005. At first this may have looked like a branding operation. To make Shenzhen visible on the global cultural scene, a biennial seems the effective thing to do. Other port towns did. Rotterdam was not known for its cultural climate, nor was Liverpool. It is something to work on, with minor investment a lot can be done. The UABB could also be seen as the application of a by now well-known and tested redevelopment formula, deployed in almost every larger city in the world: attract a creative class of small entrepreneurs by offering empty industrial building stock for next to nothing, and witness a cre ative industry blossom, transforming the industrial production economy into a postindustrial service econ omy. One could even argue that the UABB is a local affair, that Shenzhen is taking care of its own problems and uses the biennale as a tool to experiment and
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A City in the Making
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kick-start redevelopment. All this can be said and all this is not untrue. But it is fascinating to witness this transforma tion of an urban condition, the growing awareness and will to give direction. Shenzhen is redefining its attractions, is rede fining the way to go about it too. Potentially it is an example for other cities in China and beyond. That makes this UABB interesting on an international scale. No need to compare this biennale with Venice for instance; it is a different animal. In Shenzhen there is something at stake. The bigger plan is to syn chronize with Hong Kong, the urgency is to reinvent the economic formula based on labor-intensive indus trial production and upgrade to a service economy, the challenge is to create a city that sustains such transformations. Up to now the city could deliver demands, and accommodate needs. Now it has the chance to transform into something more permanent, more sustainable. That quest starts with this fifth UABB\Shenzhen, presenting an inventory of phenom ena and an experiment with space. As its creative director Ole Bouman put it aptly: the biennale as risk.
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Map of biennales around the world Source: biennialfoundation.org
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UABB in Context
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UABB
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Ole Bouman interviewed by Arjen Oosterman
For his contribution to the UABB, Ole Bouman deliberately chose to avoid showing images of architecture. Instead, the architecture of the Value Factory itself became the exhibit – a giant Float Glass Factory, which once supplied the many skyscrapers across Shenzhen with their curtain walls, and now sits desolate and abandoned. Bouman and his partners want to give the building a new life and trigger redevelopment in the area. His task as curator was thus to find renewed meaning and use for the structure and put on a show that could ultimately lead to its transformation. It’s a tricky endeavor no doubt; the biennale as risk.
Arjen Oosterman Why are we here? Ole Bouman Let’s try a threefold answer. The UABB has,
since its beginning, a high ambition to present Shenzhen as a progressive and innovative city. We are continuing that tradition now with two teams of international cura tors. That’s the first reason to come to Shenzhen. The second reason for why we’re here in Shekou is: This year’s UABB theme ‘Urban Border’ has been defined by the academic committee to touch upon a new urban topic and to make the biennale substantial and not just a festival. So ‘urban border’ was the driving aim to find a new location close to the urban border. And that matched perfectly with commercial and economic dy namics to do new things in Shekou in the post-industrial city of Shenzhen. For a long time it was Shenzhen’s ultimate ambition to be the best and fastest growing industrial city in China – a great arrival city, but also rich and giving many people a chance to get a better life. It was really a place that was ahead of its competitors in China. Now Shenzhen also wants to be competitive with Hong Kong. Actually it is not only about competition, Shenzhen is also antic ipating the historical synchronization that will take place between these two cities and two systems. So that is also an interesting angle to take into account. We are in Shekou because Shekou is very well positioned in relation to Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. The third response to why we’re here in the industrial zone of Shekou, and why we’re dealing with industrial heritage, is even stronger than the previous ones, historically. Shekou was the first industrialized zone of Shenzhen. For that it can be called the cradle of modern China. That is no exaggeration – it is really what people acknowledge as the starting point of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘opening up to the world’ policy. So also in terms of heritage it is important to understand why we’re here. And since this idea to revive the biennale as an urban catalyst was so strong, it was obvious that using this energy of competition with Hong Kong, using this energy for a new chapter in Shenzhen’s post-industrial history, using this dynamic of taking a strategic look at Shekou, in the end Shekou became the location. Having said that, one can also start to put into perspective this urban border issue: yes, Shekou is at the edge of Shenzhen, and as an industrial zone for many people it is a border condition, but if you think historically, if you think economically, if you think geopolitically, it is not really an urban border. I combine the urban border condi tions that are physical, with Chinese and world historical centrality. Which can also be perceived rather quickly. The centrality and border issue in its combined impact is a fantastic ingredient for an overarching narrative. AO And how did you research this thematic condition with your curation? OB Understanding the situation was really step one.
It was also the first step to explain the background. That was laid down in a brief text I wrote called ‘Biennale as risk’. It is a plea not to consolidate reputations and
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The Future in Historical Perspective
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present these to the world, but to really take a risk and take the idea of ‘urban catalyst’ more seriously. But that’s still theory, a narrative you can start with. In reality it is, as far as I’m concerned, about intervening in reality: To demonstrate what can be done at the urban border rather than give a presentation about the urban border. My client is the UABB and the Municipal Planning department, but my partners are the owner of the site and also to an extent the District of Nanshan, who deal with the infrastructure. At one critical moment, with Nanshan and the owners, we decided to step ahead and make true the whole claim that this could be an urban catalyst, that it could be a real physical intervention. So the owner, China Merchants, was first the main sponsor and now you can say they are the main investor. For them, the Biennale was at first mainly a marketing tool to get Shekou on the map. I worked in particular with Mr. Zheng Yulong from China Merchants and he had a vision to do more, to rely on the creativity that flows in and help realize the prop ositions that came with that. That was the step from concept to strategy. The next step is an important one: to go from strat egy to a real plan. And the plan was to present the build ing as foreground rather than background, to transform the building as a show in itself. An important question that followed shortly was: who should be the first users? I approached world famous institutions with the question: can you do something performative in Shekou, not just display? For that I gave them an address in Shenzhen as the most literal expression of this idea. So not a space, a room to show ‘OMA’ or ‘V&A’, but an address to work from. Having an address also implied to have residents in the factory, making these content partners citizens of Shenzhen rather than visitors to the site. This all is creat ing reality as a test phase; a ‘trial version’. This was all challenging, but most of our time is still going into activating it. You have to prove the point in many different ways. When the building is done, you can’t just sit back and relax because then there are no users. So my claim to the biennale organization was that I wanted to organize at least more than one hundred events; that there is a program almost every single day of the biennale. It is crucial for the concept and to prove the point.
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AO Learning from Shenzhen. OB A fantastic proof of the point that this can be an
experimentation zone. The third point to be proud of is that it has been seen; it’s been perceived by media and many individuals as a new way to host a biennale event. Having said all that, I’m modest at the same time, because it only starts now. It is still just a showcase. It’s not yet a running institution embedded in the continued urban planning of the area. And that is still of course the idea be hind it, that it becomes part of Shekou’s redevelopment. AO But there are signs that that may happen. OB They’ve invited me to think further about urban
curation. There are students who would like to be members of the second generation of the Value Factory Academy. There are new partners knocking on the door. There are ideas to bring this biennale to Venice. There is a lot of follow up already. But the whole idea has always been to be relevant to the urban reality. And that needs more time. AO Based on your experiences here, do you see this as a viable development tool? OB Personally, as a historian, I’ve experienced that you can still combine urbanism and culture in a cynicismfree context to genuinely create a better city and a better society. The fact that you’re invited as curator not just to come up with an interesting show, not even with an interesting urban concept, but to come up with a histor ical narrative… when was the last time we saw that in the West? It is quite exceptional. AO One can also describe this biennale as a consecutive series of acceptances. First to accept the idea that keeping the buildings as industrial heritage is important; next that this kind of programming is interesting and instrumental for a redevelopment process. So what is the next ‘hurdle of acceptance’? OB The big hurdle for this project is the same as the hurdle for China. To get it accepted so that the entire growth machinery is no longer just about GDP; that the entire accountancy system is not only about reckoning with individual achievements. To switch that button – to understand that there are other notions of what quality of life is – is very hard. But a new horizon is needed.
AO It is January 2014; the biennale is ongoing. Looking where you are now with this project, what value do you think you’ve realized so far?
AO A problem might be that it is difficult to get this message across, now China is still in the middle of this first transformation, from a peasant and worker society into a middle class society. ‘Time is money, efficiency is life’ clearly pays off for the millions.
OB We delivered a whole range of facilities. The build ing has it all. It is a full-blown design and architecture institution; it can work. It needs further repairs and refinements, but in its pilot version it already has the complete repertoire. I call it the ‘default setting’. I’m also very proud of the range of activities that substantiate this claim that the factory can be an active hub. There is an ongoing interest to do something. In three weeks, we’re going to do the first LA Biennale in Shenzhen. Los Angeles is testing its first biennale in Shenzhen!
OB Chinese society is successful in providing material culture, but you’re right, another 250 to 400 million Chinese are expected to reach that level in the next decade, so that project hasn’t yet been completed. But 400 million have already reached that status. And they are confronted with smog on a daily basis, for instance, making them aware that there are other qualities in life to strive for and be concerned about. So what is needed is a storytelling that says reaching middle-class levels as a society is not the end; that society hasn’t reached its full potential.
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UABB in History
2005 Shenzhen: City, Open Door! Curator: Yung Ho Chang Venue: OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT, south area of OCT Loft) Projects/exhibits: 82 Academy forums/events: 9 Visitors: 30,000
2011 Hong Kong: Tri-ciprocal Cities: The Time, The Place, The People Curators: Gene K. King, Anderson Lee Venues: Kowloon Park and Hong Kong Heritage Discovery Centre Projects: 56 Academy forums/events: 12 Visitors: 150,000
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2009 Shenzhen: City Mobilization Curator: Ou Ning Venues: Shenzhen Civic Square; Shenzhen Wan Avenue; Yitian Holiday Plaza Projects: 64 Academy forums/events: 13 Visitors: 60,000
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2007 Shenzhen: City of Expiration and Regeneration Curator: Ma Qingyun Venue: OCT Loft, north area Projects: 138 Academy forums/events: 44 Visitors: 70,000
2007 Hong Kong: Refabricating City Curator: Wang Weijen Venue: Central Police Station Compound Projects: 70 Academy forums/events: 14 Visitors: 80,000
2009 Hong Kong: City Mobilization – Bring Your Own Biennale Curator: Marisa Yiu Venue: West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade Projects: 80 Academy forums/events: 12 Visitors: 70,000
2011 Shenzhen: Architecture Creates Cities. Cities Create Architecture Curator: Terence Riley Venues: Shenzhen Civic Square; OCT Loft Projects: 60 Academy forums/events: 30 Visitors: 150,000
2013 Shenzhen: Urban Border Curators: Ole Bouman; Jeffrey Johnson & Li Xiangning Venues: Former Guangdong Float Glass Factory (Venue A); Old Warehouse at Shekou Ferry Terminal (Venue B) Projects: 135 Academy forums/events: 104 Visitors: more than 150,000
2013 Hong Kong: Beyond the Urban Edge; ‘The Ideal City?’ Curator: Colin Fournier Venues: Ekeo, Kwun Tong Pier, North Point Pier, Oi! Projects: 91 Academy forums/events: 75 Visitors: 70,000
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Dongguan
Huizhou
Longgang Bao’an SECOND BORDER Pearl River
Daya B
Dapeng Bay FIRST BORDER
Hong Kong
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Shenzhen Bay
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Shen zhen Border city
Daya Bay
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Implantation City Yang Xiaodi and Yin Yujun (Projective Architecture Office)
Urban territory, occupied by different social groups within the city, has a great variance. However, there are certain areas that are not divided physically but are still segregated by an intangible boundary. For instance, the edge between the rich neighborhood the Fifth Courtyard and the urban village surrounding it, or the roof garden inside the Kingkey 100 and the edge of Meilin Yichun and the social housing beside it. This idea of segregation is rooted deeply in the consciousness of social groups. When confronting such intangible borders, a group might hold various attitudes: from defensive, to provocative, to aggressive. This proposal is to stimulate the spectator to rethink specific urban phenomena and the relationship between segregated spaces by revealing the facts and images behind them.
Market project Comparing urban villages before and after transformation, we can see that the street space in a system of centralized property rights versus a decentralized one is fundamen tally different. Village streets contain vibrant businesses, but due to their distributed property rights and compe tition with other businesses in a limited exterior space, it leads to street disorder and a lack of good spatial quality. Is there a new device to maintain the vitality of the street but keep the city clean and tidy? By establishing a gridded market, we can split the street space into a series of organic groups, and through a variety of urban furniture, form a varied outer space that is still consistent as a whole. A canopy can be opened to create a microclimate on the street and creates a sequence of opened and closed spaces. The furniture beneath the canopy can respond to different service functions and be combined into different forms. By inter vening with these light devices, the street space becomes more sequential and generates more possible public activities.
川菜 chuan cai
湘菜 xiang cai
斜撑 �架
原始�面 Wall
�� Structure
加建 Addition
�索
拉索
原始�面 Wall
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加建 Addition
立柱
原始�面 Wall
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新平台 New Platform
新平台 New Platform
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加建 Addition
新平台 New Platform
The Cuisine project, implanted in the Old Town with a simple framework, allows different restaurants to have a flexible exchange zone.
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Cuisine project Cuisine is a significant factor in the expression of a local population. China has eight major local cuisines and countless combinations between them – even the kitchen layout and seating arrangements have different charac teristics. Restaurants and their dining areas are indic ative of a demographic makeup of the city. For example, in Shenzhen – a city of immigrants – we can see that restaurants from Hunan and Sichuan regions are just as present as Cantonese restaurants. Food as an important demographic characteristic lets us imagine a scenario implanted in the Old Town where a simple framework would allow different restaurant models to have a flexible exchange zone.
粤菜 yue cai
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廊餐 Corridor Dining
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Linda Vlassenrood
Shenzhen is currently upgrading its industry; this results in empty factory buildings and huge demographic changes within the migrant popula tion. It also implies a transition from a blue-collar to a white-collar society. Shenzhen’s economic success is based on cheap labor. Nonetheless, bluecollar migrants are considered to be both problematic and vulnerable. But do we really understand and appre ciate the economic and social value of the current generation of migrants in Shenzhen? ‘Da Lang Fever’ is a story about the potential of a selforganizing migrant society in the neighborhood Da Lang. It showcases the empowering nature of bottom-up activities for migrant workers.
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Da Lang is a migrant neighborhood of 500,000 people located in Longhua New District just outside the border of the former Special Economic Zone. Da Lang became an official sub-district of Longhua in 2011. It had grown randomly and now consists mainly of urban villages and factories. Like many other districts in Shenzhen, Da Lang wants to upgrade and modernize its manufacturing industry and urban infrastructure. Da Lang Fashion Valley, an area in the north of Da Lang, represents one attempt to attract creative industries, while simultaneous road-widening projects are literally ‘opening up’ Da Lang. Despite all efforts, Da Lang still faces the absence of a cultural life for workers and a serious lack of public facilities. Leisure patterns are rapidly changing in China. The demands of second-generation migrants are markedly different from the previous generation – most of whom have returned to their hometowns: they come to the city to make money, but also to develop themselves, learn new skills and find better jobs. More than fifty percent of the migrants in Da Lang are between 20 and 29 years old. Born after 1980, they belong to the second gener ation of migrants in China. In Da Lang only 8,200 people are officially registered, which means that 491,800 of these migrants belong to the floating population; almost half of the population arrived unaccompanied in Da Lang less then one year ago and roughly twenty-five percent stay between four to five years. The Da Lang government wants to create a more sustainable society by facilitating educational programs and leisure activities. To accomplish this, the Department of Cultural Affairs has been installing a cultural infra structure over the past couple of years for volunteer organizations and individuals. They subsidize a commu nity service center with seventeen full-time workers that support five volunteer teams who are responsible for education and leisure activities. Xia Donghai was the leader of one of these teams named Little Grass. In just a few years, Xia extended the group of volunteers from several people in 2007 to a current membership of more than 3,000. The volunteers organize different kinds of activities: they give directions in the metro, help elderly people, but also organize dancing and dumpling parties. The Da Lang government is currently renovating the run-down Qian Zhen Girls’ School (1891) for educational purposes. It has also organized the ‘Da Lang Star’ sing ing competition since 2010. The competition provides a stage for talented young people and music fans. In the past four years, more then 2,000 migrants have partici pated in the competition. The event is hugely popular in the district and many people gather for the 39 qualifying rounds and yearly finale with twelve participants. Local enterprises sponsor the event. Labor Square, built in 2007 as an entertainment area for the local inhabitants, plays a crucial role in these activities. There are several parks and other squares in Da Lang, but Labor Square is by far the biggest and most popular. Little Grass has its information station on this
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The Labor Square plays a crucial role in the bottom-up activities in Da Lang. The government built it in 2007 as an entertainment area for the local inhabitants.
Photo: Fabian Koning
Photo: Da Lang Government
Photo: Da Lang Government
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The “Yang Taishan” performance team consists of young volunteering migrant workers from Da Lang. They sing and dance especially for young migrant workers on cultural events all over Da Lang District.
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The Little Grass volunteer workers union currently has 3.000 members and friends.
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Global middle classes are growing, materials are becoming scarce and waste is increasingly abundant. Meanwhile mainstream industry is based on mass production and mass consumption. The Shenzhen Hong Kong Special Material Zone envisions a future economy in which com panies see the material restraints and growing demands as an imaginary challenge for innovation. The industrial zone features a spectrum of thriving businesses based on existing, emerging and speculative initiatives.
SZHKSMZ – Special Material Zone Droog and TD
A++ – EVALUATES AND CERTIFIES ALL MATERIAL REUSE
Mining phones for all their precious parts. Concept: Waag Society / FairPhone
Concept: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
INVENTORIZOR
HAIR FACTORY
Tracking your material habits to reduce your shopping.
A salon that makes jewellery with cut hair.
Concept: Droog and TD
Featuring: Hair necklace by Kerry Howley, 2011
Concept: TD
E-INTERIOR – DIGITALIZES THE INSIDE OF OUR HOMES
PLAY SHOP
Satisfies your shopping addiction. Concept: Droog Lab and TD
READY MADE ARCHITEC TURE – PROVIDES ARCHI TECTURE WITHOUT BUILDING SOMETHING
Electronic wallpaper will sharply reduce the usage of materials, while design possibilities increase to an unprece dented extent. Compa nies like E-Interior are already prepared for these future challenges. The young start-up com pany has just developed its first prototype for a room fully covered with electronic wallpaper.
Newly founded archi tecture company ‘Ready Made Architecture’ takes the stance that no new buildings are necessary since there is enough empty volume to be re designed. As a result, very little construction material is needed. ‘Ready Made Architec ture’ is simple and the results are astonishing.
Concept: TD
Concept: TD
OFFCUTS
Products made of factory leftovers. Concept: Droog Lab
SHAPE SHIFTERS
Facebook for products. Share and customize. 3D printing not required. Concept: Droog Lab
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SYNTHETIC LAB
Biological plastics made of engineered synthetic organisms.
URBAN MINING
A++ is a newly estab lished institute that will rate all products accord ing to their material use. Companies with poor ratings might have to fear waning consumer confidence along with economic consequences now that insurance taxes will be linked to the A++ rating system.
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SOLAR SINTER – USES SUNLIGHT AND SAND TO PRINT PRODUCTS IN THE DESERT
SHOP
RARE
Supplying material grown from bacteria cellulose.
With Solar Sinter Markus Kaiser is not healing but burning. More precisely he is burning sand in the desert. Sand and sun are the main ingredients for his 3D printing device that can literally sinter out any shape of the Sahara sand.
Enables the free exchange of things.
Jewellery mined from discarded phones.
Concept: Stefan Schwabe
Design: Markus Kaiser
Concept: N55
Concept: Droog Lab
WE FIX
A one-stop-shop specializing in creative repair. Featuring: New Kintsugi repair kit by Humade and Woolfiller by Heleen Klopper
BIOMATERIAL
2ND HAND
BIOCOUTURE
CLEAN GRAFFITI
The largest, most special ized chain of second hand stores in the world.
Fashion made of biobased materials.
We offer material-free communication.
Concept: Suzanne Lee
Featuring: Graffiti Network
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Concept: Droog Lab
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10KG – AN INSTITUTION THAT RATIONS 10KG POLYBLOCKS FOR ENDLESS RE-PRINTING INTO ANY SHAPE
Initiated by Justin McGuirk and promoted by the Material Party, the 10kg polyblocks are soon to be introduced. The utopic scenario entails the rationing of 10kg polyblocks that can be endlessly re-printed into different shapes. If there are no roadblocks to the proposal, every one will get a block, and the world might soon be released from all material pressure.
WASTE WATCHERS
Outfit your house without buying new products. Featuring: Calorie stairs by Koning, Maniette, Piirmets, Vervest
Concept: Justin McGuirk
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Restaurant menus and table accessories – The menus and acces sories collected in various areas of Shenzhen show how restaurants adapt – in their dish options and sometimes even with visual design elements – to give migrant residents a taste of home. Graphic designer Huang Yang thinks the regional diversity of Shenzhen’s population is best reflected in the city’s culinary offerings. A large portion of the city’s workforce moved here from other parts of China. With few family ties, many eat out on a daily basis. Nearly every Chinese restaurant, regardless of their advertised regional specialty, serves some dishes from Hunan and Sichuan, the homes of a significant portion of Shenzhen’s migrant residents.
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‘Time is Money, Efficiency is Life’ sign – ‘Time is Money, Efficiency is Life’ reads this sign, found in an abandoned factory in Shenzhen by Teng Fei and Tu Fei, partners at Old Heaven Culture Communicatoin. This motto was first seen in the Shekou area of Shenzhen in the 1980s, and spread across China informing public debate about the changing economy and its effects. China in general has stood for very rapid development in recent decades, but the concept of ‘Shenzhen Speed’ puts this city at the heart of that effort. Used SIM cards – Mobile phones are ubiquitous in Shenzhen and for migrants to the city they are the primary means of staying in touch with families left behind elsewhere in China. For architect Juan Du, usage data in Shenzhen is of particular interest as it points toward the significant ‘floating population’ unaccounted for in governmentprovided statistics. The official inhabitant number of 14 million is much lower than that suggested by others. As Du points out, ‘according to data released by China Mobile, one of two telecommunications prov iders in Shenzhen – active mobile phone users in the city amount to 20 million.’ This information she says ‘really implies the hidden realities of Shenzhen as dynamic and unprecedented in terms of its scale of informal urbanism’.
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Oil painting and business cards – Dafen Village is a part of Shenzhen that is reaching international pop cultural status. The market there sells the work of painters specialized in accurate copies of old master paintings of all ages and sizes. The designer Hao Zhenhan has worked with these artists on his own design projects, and is fascinated by this culture. He suggested the business card of a Dafen painter, explaining the amazing range of services provided by these multitalented painters, and the method of contacting them: email and websites are out, the QQ social network or a direct phone contact is the only way to get in touch. The painting chosen is a Dafen Village copy of Café Scene by Night from a painter who, among other things, specialises in van Gogh.
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Ren Jue, an anthropologist and sexologist, Chen Yandi, founder of the Shenzhen City Shou Qian Shou Worker Center and Guo Jiawei, a graphic designer, have chosen objects that reflect the role that women’s bodies play in the economic development of Shenzhen. The bras come from Shenzhen ‘factory girls’. One bra is made with plastic supports, the other has no wire support at all, meaning that they are not picked up by factory metal detectors at security checkpoints, so female workers are able to avoid invasive (and possibly abusive) body searches from male security guards.
Metal-free bra and non-underwired bra
Photo: Stefan Canham
Portraits from Above Rufina Wu and Stefan Canham
Self-built settlements on the roofs of high-rise buildings have been an integral part of Hong Kong’s history for over a half-century. Rooftop structures range from basic shelters for the disadvantaged to intricate multi-storey constructions equipped with the amenities of modern life. Rufina Wu and Stefan Canham utilize the tools of an architect and the tools of a photographer to document rooftop communities on five buildings located in older districts in the Kowloon Peninsula, slated for redevelop ment by the Urban Renewal Authority of Hong Kong.
1956
Building 1, Sham Shui Po District Dating from 1956, Building 1 is an example of Cantonese-style shop houses found primarily in Southeast Asia and Southern China. Designed with the harsh tropical climate in mind, this building type is characterized by high ceilings to allow greater indoor air circulation, and verandas to provide shade and shelter from rain. When built in rows along a street, the cantilevered upper storeys protect pedestrians from the elements. A number of Hong Kong’s remaining shop houses, some dating back to the pre-war period, can be found in the Sham Shui Po district. Only half of what was Building 1 remains – it has been severed by the new residential development on the adjacent lot. The remnants are simply waiting to be demolished. All the regular flats are empty, only the rooftop units and the ground floor hardware shop remain occupied. A single, unguarded staircase leads up to the roof of this 4+2 storey building. Five rooftop huts, ranging from one to two stories high, sit on 100 square meters of unconsumed roof area. Three rooftop households are documented.
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Cynthia Akatsa, president of Great Wall Apartments owner’s association, Nairobi: ‘You should buy a house. Our parents never taught us we could own a house.
Construction workers, Kenya Commercial Bank Head quarters, Nairobi
Construction worker, UAP Tower, Nairobi The air is better than back home!, Nairobi
Great Wall Apartments phase 1, Nairobi
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Site manager Yang working on the Great Wall Apartments phase 3, Nairobi
People in Nairobi’s Kibera slum all buy shoes made in China
Kenya Commercial Bank Head quarters, Nairobi, under con struction by contractor Wu Yi
Chinese class, Confucius Institute, Nairobi
No experience needed to work for this Chinese company, Nairobi
Advertisement, Nairobi
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The African Union building, designed in China, built by China, paid by China
Beijing Road, Nairobi
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Construction site, Addis Ababa
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Local workers at the Huajian shoe factory earn 250 RMB/month, Addis Ababa China has built more than 60% of the larger roads in Addis Ababa
Light rail construction site, Addis Ababa
Site manager on a construction site of the light rail project, Addis Ababa
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Construction began in January 2009 and involved 1,200 Chinese and Ethiopian workers.
No better way than a highway to express your friendship, Addis Ababa
Office of China Seventh Railway Group, Addis Ababa
The new light rail system in Addis Ababa will have 2 lines and 41 stations
China Jiangxi Coorperation, Addis Ababa
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V&A 快速回应征集
BERLARGE 偶像建筑大师班 VOLUME 特邀参与活动
OMA 营造方式研究
MOMA 急速扩张的大城市： 不均衡发展与干预措施
MAXXI 才华绽放
MIT 工业建筑作为 一种解放力量
MFA 再次创造 （录像）
DROOG 深圳香港特别物质区
STUDIO X pop up studio-x shenzhen
THE NEW INSTITUTE 由我们创造， 工厂
SAO PAOLO BIENNALE 改造
价值工厂学院（9个房间） L+CC 异境恐惧症
HKU 香港／深圳 城市旅行
SDC 熔合
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INTI 火热大浪
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Value Factory
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Towards a Value Factory in Ten Steps 1.
From an economic to a culture zone – Thirty years ago, Yuan Geng got a chance to set up a socio-economic experiment, establishing in Shekou the first industrial park in China while pursuing social and political reforms. The Guangdong Glass Factory in particular belongs to this earliest moment in Chinese modernity. Therefore, this is an important place of history. Now, once again, Shekou can become a laboratory for future change in the Pearl River Delta and China. And this time it is not industry but creativity as the main driver for change. Welcome to Shenzhen’s Special Culture Zone.
2.
From sponsor to investor – The factory is property of China Merchants Group, a company with a long history. They pride them selves on being a pioneering force for China. This company was supposed to be a sponsor of this Biennale. But why would the owner just support financially, if they can also invest and be the first to make a Value Factory for real? So the sponsor became an investor.
3.
From background to foreground – When it comes to biennales and other festivals, very often venues are there to provide a back ground for the program people come for. It is the facility. This time the container has become content itself. To cherish existing qualities, to provide a wonderful architectural tour, to re-set and re-charge an almost timeless construction, can be seen as a key component of the show.
4.
Doing almost nothing – To put a building at the forefront does not mean that the entire repertoire of architecture needs to be deployed. On the contrary. When you find so many existing qualities, one shouldn’t do much to capitalize on it. What you will explore is a piece of industrial heritage at its best. Its timeless qualities are kept in their glorious presence. A low budget could nicely coincide with an ambition to celebrate what is already good.
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Value Factory match-making – Doing almost nothing as an individual designer can very easily be seen as a sign of laziness or aesthetic minimalism. Therefore, we did ‘almost nothing’ together, with a group of about fifteen young international architects, who were able to dissolve their desire to leave their personal mark and merged their skills in a collective creativity of all sorts.*
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Value Factory Studio – To direct this Biennale implies meeting many challenges: a remote and derelict place; a very short lead time; a fierce competition; and still a desire to present something sub stantial for Shenzhen, for the neighborhood, for the design disciplines. It is creativity unfolding, and so it will do in the future. There we set up a Value Factory Studio as its latest guise, ready to take your questions and work for you. We want to run the Value Factory as a true demonstration of times to come.
8.
Value Factory Academy – From preserving unknown beauty and turning it into a new experience to producing exciting new forms; from pondering Shenzhen’s future to focusing on technical details and meeting people face to face, this project provides a unique learning experience in creative leadership. It is an exper ience we want to share with many. Therefore we founded the Value Factory Academy.
9.
Value Factory public program – You can change a building, set up new institutional roles and start a school and an office, but first and foremost you need a public program to make sure people will get the proof of the pudding. Countless events including performances, seminars, dance events, fashion shows, speeches, plays, and harvest parties give witness of the factory’s vitality.
10.
Connecting Road – Nine steps towards a Value Factory, clearly recognizable while exploring the Value Factory campus. But to get there, one has to travel along the Connecting Road from city to urban border, through the Shekou Industry Park and its potential future sites of change. As the Value Factory has revived the power of architecture by re-animating its machine hall, its warehouse, its silo, and its outdoor green, its visitors will find on the road towards it, how much more is waiting for ideas and courage to follow suit. This fifth UABB is The Value Factory’s first window. Let it be its demo version. Let it be its reality check. Ole Bouman, Creative Director * The design group consisted of: Zetao Chen, Anssi Lassila, Pedro Rivera, Lua Nitsche, Jianxiang He, Ying Jiang, Doreen Liu, Milena Zaklanovic, Marc Maurer, Teemu Hirvilammi, Shantanu Pored.
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Value Factory program partners – Once the glass factory had been preserved and its qualities celebrated, time had come to find the proper ‘residents’. We found them by selecting a few international institutions, all with clear ambitions to transcend their brands by doing new things in China: museums, architecture centers, design labels and design offices – all keen on substantiating the factory itself, by making value on the spot. As a group they demonstrate how this Value Factory in the future can be repositioned.
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Uneven Growth, Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities Museum of Modern Art In 2030, the world’s population will be a staggering eight billion people. Of these, two thirds will live in cities. Most will be poor. This profoundly unbalanced growth will be one of the greatest challenges to be faced by societies ever more connected across the globe. Assuming the need to expand the responsibility of leading art institutions to new understand ings of impending cultural change, Uneven Growth, the third iteration of MoMA’s Issues in Contemporary Architecture series, invited architects to reflect on how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can address rapid and uneven urban growth.
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International teams of researchers and practitioners located on five different continents have been paired to seek and produce projects that, through design scenarios, disclose this debate to a wider audience, while they will suggest changes in the roles that architects and urban designers may assume in the near future vis-à-vis the evolution of cities. As such, participating ‘collaboratives’ were invited to Shenzhen to expand on their ongoing work, to challenge current assumptions about how to design for the inhabitants of major urban enclaves, and respond with a tailor-made proposal that reinvents our ways of thinking about the relationships between formal and informal, bottom-up and top-down, everyday or specialized takes on urban development.
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Curator: Pedro Gadanho Participants: Adekunle Adeyemi of NLÉ; Antón García-Abril Ruiz – Poplab; Constantin Petcu of Atelier d’architecture Autogérée; Bradley Samuels of Situ Studio; Gregers Tang Thomsen of Superpool; Juan Dafydd Jones Alenar of Inteligencias Colectivas; Kazys Varnelis of Network Architecture Lab; Miguel Robles-Durán of Cohstra; Pedro Rivera of Rua Arquitetos; Rahul Srivastava of URBZ; Rainer Hehl of Mas Urban Design ETH; Valérie Portefaix of Map Office
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Contributors
VOLUME Independent quarterly for architecture to go beyond itself
Stefan Al is a Dutch architect, urban designer, and Associate Professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Adrian Blackwell is an artist and urban designer. Together with Jane Hutton he contributed a project to the Land/Slide: possible futures exhibition at the Canadian pavilion of the UABB. Ole Bouman is the former director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute. Prior to joining the NAi he was the editor-in-chief of Volume. Stefan Canham is a photographer based in Hamburg, Germany. He focuses on the representation of alternative spaces – islands of untidiness – where small communities resist cultural hegemony. Chen Zetao is an architect at FCHA, a Shenzhen-based architecture firm. Yonatan Cohen is Cambridge-based architect and urbanist. He is cur rently a researcher at the Social Computing group in MIT’s Media Lab. Droog is an Amsterdam-based design company that creates cutting edge products, projects and events around the world in collaboration with designers, clients, and partners. Corinna Gardner is Curator of Contemporary Product Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Joseph Grima and Tamar Shafrir lead Space Caviar in Genoa – a design research collaborative operating at the intersection of architecture, technology, politics and the public realm. Harry den Hartog is the founder of Urban Language and Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Tongji University, Shanghai. Huang Weiwen is the director of Shenzhen Center for Public Art and Shenzhen Center for Design. He is also the chief executive officer of the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture organizing committee. Michiel Hulshof is partner at Tertium, an Amsterdam-based office for strategic communication. Daan Roggeveen is the founder of MORE Architecture and curator at University of Hong Kong/Shanghai Study Centre. Together they the lead the Go West Project. Jeffrey Johnson is an architecture professor at Columbia University and founding director of the China Megacities Lab. He is co-founding principal of SLAB architecture based in New York City. Chris Lai is a Dutch-Chinese architect. In 2006 he co-founded DOFFICE in Rotterdam, and since 2007 has moved his office to Shenzhen. Li Xiangning is a professor in history, theory and criticism at Tongji University College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is also guest editor of Time+Architecture. Doreen Heng Lui is principal at NODE architecture and urbanism, a small design firm in the Pearl River Delta region in China. Liu Guangyun is a Chinese visual artist who was born in 1962. He has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Himalayas Art Museum and at the National Art Museum of China. Ni Weihua is a photographer living and working in Shanghai, China. Mary Ann O’Donnell is an anthropologist by training, who contributes to projects that re-envision Shenzhen and its urban possibilities. Rafi Segal leads a practice that encompasses design and research on both the architectural and urban scale. Segal has taught architecture and urbanism at MIT, Harvard, Columbia, and the Cooper Union. TD Architects was founded by Theo Deutinger – an architect, writer, and designer of socio-cultural maps. His work has been published in various magazines including Wired, Domus, and Mark Magazine. Jeremy Till is an architect, educator and writer. He is Head of Central Saint Martins and Pro Vice-Chancellor, University of the Arts London. Linda Vlassenrood is Programme Director at the International New Town Institute. Linda worked as a curator at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) from 2000, serving as Chief Curator from 2008 to 2011. Rufina Wu is a Vancouver-based architect and researcher with a passion for documenting the informal in contemporary cities. Yang Xiaodi and Yin Yujun are co-founders of Projective Architecture Office. They are currently based in Shenzhen, China. Zhang Yuxing is Department Chief of the Urban Design Division at the Urban Planning, Land & Resources Commission of Shenzhen Municipality Zheng Yulong is the general manager of the Land, Economy, Planning and Development Department of China Merchants Shekou Industrial Zone Co, Ltd. Zhang Xiaojing and Chen Zhou are artists living and practicing in Guangzhou.
Editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman Contributing editors Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley Feature editor Jeffrey Inaba VOLUME is a project by ARCHIS + AMO + C-Lab + ... ARCHIS Lilet Breddels, Brendan Cormier, Jeroen Beekmans, Joop de Boer, Merve Bedir, René Boer, Anais Massot, Kai Vöckler – Archis advisers Ethel Baraona Pohl, Thomas Daniell, Joos van den Dool, Christian Ernsten, Edwin Gardner, Bart Goldhoorn, Rory Hyde, César Reyes Nájera, Vincent Schipper AMO Reinier de Graaf, James Westcott C-Lab Jeffrey Inaba, Benedict Clouette, Maria Broytman, Sean Connelly, Helen-Rose Condon, Jillian Crandall, Phillip Denny, Aditya Ghosh, Mana Ikebe, Julia Kim, Brigitte Lucey, Yutaro Muraji, Katharine Okamoto, Hugo Olivera, Corinne Quin, Frédéric Schnee, Susan Surface, Brandon Wagner – C-Lab advisers Barry Bergdoll, Gary Hattem, Jiang Jun, John S. Johnson, Lewis H. Lapham. Materialized by Irma Boom and Sonja Haller VOLUME’s protagonists are ARCHIS, magazine for Architecture, City and Visual Culture and its predecessors since 1929. Archis – Publishers, Tools, Interventions – is an experimental think tank devoted to the process of real-time spatial and cultural reflexivity. www.archis.org AMO, a research and design studio that applies architectural thinking to disciplines beyond the borders of architecture and urbanism. AMO operates in tandem with its companion company the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. www.oma.eu C-Lab, The Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting is an experimental research unit devoted to the development of new forms of communication in architecture, set up as a semi-autonomous think and action tank at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. c-lab.columbia.edu VOLUME is published by Stichting Archis, the Netherlands and printed by Die Keure, Belgium. Editorial office PO Box 14702, 1001 LE Amsterdam, The Netherlands T +31 (0)20 320 3926, F +31 (0)20 320 3927, E info@archis.org, W www.archis.org Subscriptions Bruil & Van de Staaij, Postbus 75, 7940 AB Meppel, The Netherlands, T +31 (0)522 261 303, F +31 (0)522 257 827, E volume@bruil.info, W www.bruil.info/volume Subscription rates 4 issues: €75 Netherlands, €91 World, $99 USA, Student subscription rates: €60 Netherlands, €73 World, Prices excl. VAT Cancellations policy Cancellation of subscription to be confirmed in writing one month before the end of the subscription period. Subscrip tions not cancelled on time will be automatically extended for one year. Back issues Back issues of VOLUME and forerunner Archis (NL and E) are available through Bruil & van de Staaij Advertising pr@archis.org, For rates and details see: www.volumeproject.org/advertise/ C-Lab administrative coordination Margel Nusbaumer General distribution Idea Books, Nieuwe Herengracht 11, 1011 RK Amsterdam, The Netherlands, T +31 (0)20 622 6154, F +31 (0)20 620 9299, idea@ideabook.nl For North American Distribution: Disticor Magazine Distribution Services, 695 Westney Road South, Suite 14 Ajax, Ontario, L1S 6M9, Canada, T +1 905-619-6565, F +1 905-619-2903, W www.disticor.com ISSN 1574-9401, ISBN 9789077966396
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