Extra Large: Dimension inContext

FAN Ling with TANG Hung Fai

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Extra Large: Dimension in Context

46 m 41.6 m

FORM: Tian Zi Grand Hotel

CONTEXT: Oil Lamp Building

Tian Zi Grand Hotel is rather more figural than figurative. The form of the building is a group of three enlarged idols, which respectively represent happiness (fu), social position (lu), longevity (shou). This building is a decorative shell that wraps a generic hotel volume. It stands deep inside a residential area in the suburbs of Beijing without much commercial access or urban exposure. The building’s conspicuous literalism has garnered it unexpected fame.

The Empire State (New York) has the Empire State Building, Guzhen, a lighting manufacturing city, has the oil lamp building.

The town specializes in manufacturing lighting fixtures and features, with more than 5,000 factories and 60,000 laborers. The oil lamp bulding is 254 meters—100 times the scale of an actual oil lamp. It will be a museum that documents humanity’s quest for light against darkness.

Location: Suburbs of Beijing Dimension: 41.6 meters tall (Statue Liberty: 46.02 meters) Program: Hotel

FAN Ling with TANG Hung Fai

381 m

254 m

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Location: Guzhen Town, Zhongsang Dimension: 254 meters tall (Empire State Building: 381 meters) Program: Museum

DEPTH: Cave Hotel

40m GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

CAVE HOTEL

100m

>100m

FAN Ling with TANG Hung Fai

The Cave Hotel is sited at an abandon mining field, 100 meters deep and more than 100 meters wide. For the past 50 years, the cave has been a stone quarry. After mining stopped, the quarry filled with rainwater. A developer is now trying to change this abandoned industrial landscape into a five star Cave Hotel, 65 meters below the earth’s surface. The project is designed by Atkins Architects.

ENERGY: Oil Depot

2.6km 0.022km 2

Location: Shanghai Dimension: 100 meters depth Program: Hotel

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2

The Shànshàn Xiàn Oil Depot is the largest oil depot in China with an area of 2.6 square kilometers. This oil field is as large as 11 Manhattan city blocks (0.22 square kilometers each). It stores 8,000,000 cubic meters of oil to supply the east of China and to secure oil supply during emergencies.

Location: Shànshàn Xiàn Dimension: 2.6 square kilometetrs (Manhattan City Block: 0.022 square kilometers) Program: Oil Storage

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630 m

VERTICALITY: Guangzhou Television Tower

CONNECTIVITY: Hang Zhou Bay Bridge

A tower is always a visual anchor for a city. The Guangzhou Television Tower, 630 meters tall, is the next icon and visual reference that witnesses the city to reach its climax in the pass thirty years. The tower’s tremendous vertical dimension hosts a whole range of programs including an observation deck, restaurant, cinema, and exhibition area, among others. It will accommodate up to 30,000 visitors daily. The project is designed by Mark Hemel, who is a studio tutor at the Architectural Association. This is his first built project.

Hang Zhou Bay Bridge is a new regional connection between Shanghai and Ningbo. The total length of the bridge is 36 kilometers, more than 1.5 the longitudinal distance of Manhattan Island (21 kilometers). This bridge will provide six expressway lanes in two directions, with an estimated traffic flow to reach 52,000 vehicles daily.

36 km

Location: Guangzhou Dimension: 630 meters high Program: Sightseeing attraction Reference Image: Manhattan Midtown

FAN Ling with TANG Hung Fai

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Location: East Sea, China Dimension: 36 kilometers long Program: Infrastructure

Ling FAN is an architect practicing in Beijing. He is currently Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at Central Academy of Fine Arts. Ling Fan received a Bachelor of Architecture from Tongji University (2005) and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University (2007). He has published in Abitare, Architects, Domus, Pidgin, Time + Architecture, Grand Design, and others, and is currently a regular contributor to Abitare and guest editor for Time + Architecture.

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TANG Hung Fai received his BSC (Arch.) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and worked as a part-time instructor and research assistant after his graduation. He is now working as an intern for Atelier FCJZ in Beijing.

Ling FAN, Jonathan D SOLOMON, with Yung Ho CHANG, JIANG Jun, Jeffrey JOHNSON, Ted KANE, Eri SAIKAWA, Shi JIAN, WANG Jun, ZHANG Xin

The Cloud in the Clock: A Fabricated Dialogue on Beijing

PUBLIC SPACE: Century Avenue

6m

44.5m

4m 8m 3m

31.0m 24.5m

6m

CENTURY AVENUE

PARK AVEUNE

WALL STREET

Century Avenue is an urban phenomenon. To embrace the new century, a number of Chinese cities have built iconic boulevards named “Century Avenue,” or renamed their existing key roads “Century Avenue.” Century Avenue is never so important for the transportation network, but always imbued with some iconic meaning. In the case of Shanghai’s Century Avenue, a 100 meter wide and 5,500 meter long street that connects the Oriental Pearl Tower with Century Park, two famous tourist sites in Pudong. The Avenue diagonally splits the urban fabric to explicate a radical bisect from the old, and to represent the courage to break from dogma. It has a section profile based on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, with a wider pedestrian lane on the north side to let the people enjoy more sunshine. However, the walkway is blocked by a thick line of greenery from the surrounding residential area.

Location: Shanghai Dimension: 100 meters wide, 5.5 kilometers long Program: Infrastructure

FAN Ling with TANG Hung Fai

This is a fabricated dialogue about a city missing its dimensional fabric. Instead of establishing an original critique, 306090 sets out this provocation as a scratch line to stretch between different points on the same trajectory (urbanism, architecture, real estate, urban culture, policy, economy, and environment) heading as far as possible in either direction to map an architectural and political genealogy of urban China in the past decade. From the comments of a group of participants with diverse roles in the transformation of Beijing over the past decade—architects, developers, researchers, journalists, and policymakers—306090 presents this constructed conversation. Of course it neither begins nor ends, you can cut in at any moment.

Jonathan D Solomon: In his 1987 text “City, Image, Materiality,” Fumihiko Maki contrasts the hierarchical order of the clock with the homogenous vapor of the cloud. Observing the changing fabric of postwar Tokyo, he proposes that the state of the contemporary city approached the latter. Maki’s understanding of an architectural operation in this context, which became a foundational tenant of the aesthetic of fragmentation, was to imagine buildings of clocklike parts in cloudlike assemblies.

While Maki’s formulation, the city as a fragmentation of functional but disassociated pieces, belongs to another era, the clock and the cloud remain relevant measures of the city, if in new ways. Beijing in 2008, for instance, is much like an inversion of this condition, a city of cloudlike, vaporous parts afloat still in a clocklike hierarchy. Like Tokyo in the 1980s, Beijing is a city that has undergone an extraordinary recent transformation. The context and the consequences of these changes must

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point us in a new direction. Tell us about Beijing. How does it look like a clock; how does it see like a cloud?

Jeffrey Johnson: What I find amazing about Beijing is that it has throughout its history experienced perpetual transformation—politically, dimensionally, culturally—yet throughout this time it has been able to maintain symbolic stability. To use the terms of your introduction it has moved with the fluidity of the cloud but has kept the functionality of the clock. Beijing is a capital city par excellence, holding that position consistently, albeit sometimes shared, for nearly 1000 years (aside from a brief period during the Republican Era). Even in its contemporary condition, where transformation is occurring at an unprecedented pace, Beijing still maintains this duality of stability and flux.

Shi Jian: I look at Beijing as a cultural schizophrene: On one hand, I mourn the disappearance of its history, on the other hand, I am stimulated by its rapid transformation; On one hand, I feel the need to record the old city as it fades out, on the other hand, I can appreciate newly erected urban spaces. I am living in the center of Beijing and I am a witness to how the city grows every day; I relentlessly criticize the chronic illness caused by rapid urban expansion, yet I personally enjoy the reality of these new spatial dimensions.

Can I describe these paradoxes as conforming to “cloudlike” or “clocklike” dimensions? I do not know if it is necessary. Here in Beijing, there is an elasticity between appearances and hidden rules, desperate struggle and robust survival coexist, the suicide of new urban space games up with creative strategies for urban regeneration…All these overlaps and contradictions in the present are more interesting to me than the question of an urban future. The evolution of Chinese architecture and urbanism just does not follow an existing pattern.

These fields now seek their own rules, an action which constitutes a critical act of discovery, research, and action. Beijing is discovering its own critical dialog.

Jeffrey Johnson: Contemporary Beijing is essentially defined by its ability to continually change all the while maintaining a fixed center. Under normal circumstances the contradiction of stability and change should create conflict. Stability necessarily rejects change, while change can only occur by agitating that which is fixed.