TRAUMATIC IDEOLOGICAL FICTIONAL INTERVENTION

About The Biggest Social Experiment In 20th Century

Location: Beijing, China Program: Paper architecture, Heritage exhibition pavillion 2017

“People who lived on a small alley lived a life that had not changed for 1000 years.”

That is how life in Peking was described by Lin Yutang in the 1920s. The scene that had been kept in Peking for 1000 years has finally changed since the 1950s. After a huge project of urban renewal, the Hutongs (small alley) are broadened to streets for the military parades. The city wall was demolished to be the site of new ring roads. All of this was similar to the great renewal of Moscow in the 1930s. The experts from the Soviet Union prevailed in the debate with Liang Sicheng and Chen Zhanxiang about city planning of Peking which was later in the process of extreme modernization, from the historic royal city of 6 dynasties to the great industrialized capital of communist China.

The ideology of communism makes all the above happen. The modification project of socialism followed the lead of the Soviet Union, which was an exemplary country as a ‘socialist big brother’. Peking Exhibition Center, which my project aims to renovate, was the pavilion to exhibit the Soviet socialist prosperity. It was built in 1954, out of the gate Xizhimen, as a Stalinist tower.

Exhibition Center

The Peking Exhibition Center was essentially a model that hypostatized the spectre of the Manifesto of Communism. In other words, it defines what the communist society looks like. The Exhibition Center was the first modernized building out of the city wall, with a 104 meters high tower and a red star on the top. On the gate Xizhimen, the newly built white tower could easily be seen. The Exhibition Center was the declaration to the old town of Peking. The newly built district after 1949 would be like the Babel Tower in the Holy Bible, consistent and ordered. It corresponds to the ideology of communism, transcending the languages, building the paradise on the earth.

The tower of Peking Exhibition Center could be perceived as the Babel Tower, as same as the Monument Tower of the Third International (Vladimir Tatlin) and the Palace of Soviet (Boris Iofan). Human beings believe that history has been progressing, but when modernity transcends human nature, it becomes terrifying. People launched a social experiment to implement the Brave New World, the constructivist projects, the Stalinist palaces, and the panel buildings. Finally, it collapsed, proving the failure of the utopian projects, mourning for the victims, mourning for the collapsing Babel Tower, and the tragedies of the human being.

The proposal consists of a chapel and a road to redemption. With some renovations of the Exhibition Center, the west part has been kept while the central and the east part are converted. The area of the water which is a part of the old moat extension has been enlarged for the new monument. After the Soviet-Sino split, the Exhibition Center had lost its original purpose for many years, and the east part of the building was out of use. And thus, the renovation project breaks the symmetric form.

The road to the redemption starts from the underground part, extending to the underground of the west part of the building in which there are three separated confession rooms. Between the red tall wall and the building, at the original main entrance hall of the Exhibition Center, a huge red star is glowing. The red star that used to be at the top of the tower, like a lighthouse in the city, is very harsh inside the hall. This is the first glimpse on the sin of the ideology, an intuitive understanding.

Ground Floor Plan

South-North Section

The red walls block the facade, separate the exhibition area and the memorial, lowers into water at the end of the road to redemption. The wall beside the monument is silent with the water.

On the other side of the wall is the industrial hall, the hall located on the center of the building, could be perceived as a fake church under the worship of scientific socialism. A round water pool is at the end of the hall, which could mirror the form of an arch, the structure of the hall. The form becomes an entire circle, symbolizing the ideology, nevertheless interrupted by the red wall. The ideology of communism has failed in the fake church, compared with the real chapel on the water.

At the end of the red wall, there is a tree on the water. The road to redemption is toward the northwest, the direction of the former socialist “big brother”.