YUNG HO CHANG + FCJZ: MATERIAL-ISM

YUNG HO CHANG + FCJZ: MATERIAL - ISM 2012.09.30-12.02

1966 -1967 Museum, 2012. Courtesy of Atelier FCJZ and Cao Yang.

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YUNG HO CHANG + FCJZ: MATERIAL-ISM is a retrospective glimpse into the work of Yung Ho Chang and his cross-disciplinary architectural practice Atelier FCJZ. The term “material-ism” is based on Chang’s understanding of architecture and design as disciplines ultimately grounded in tangible concerns.

Allusions to Marxism and consumerism nod to a kind of material objectivity and Chinese pragmatism and challenge received notions about icons and symbols.

These concerns are highlighted in the exhibition’s structure, which is organized according to six recurring ideas that have characterized Chang’s practice: inhabitation, materiality and construction, visual-spatial play, redefinition of Chinese space, micro-urbanism, and the greater cultural project. While this exhibition seeks to present the priorities of Atelier FCJZ as an architectural practice engaging the social, economic, technological, and cultural, it is not a trajectory of success. Rather, it is an exploration, objectively informed and subjectively fueled, that seeks to create a space in which the domestic and urban, classical and modern, and practical and fantastical can co-exist – in other words, in which the complexity, fullness, and diversity of humanity can be expressed.

REAR WINDOW INFERNAL CONSTRUCT

BIKE APARTMENT

SAINT JEROME’S STUDY

NOT-SO-IDEAL CITY

INFERNAL CONSTRUCT Six Modules display the construction process

Yung Ho Chang / Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) Yung Ho Chang is Principal Architect at Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, a professor of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University, and a professor and the former Head of the Architecture Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Originally from Beijing and educated both in China and in the United States, Chang received his Master of Architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. He has been practicing in China since 1992, and established Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) in 1993 with Lujia Lu. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including First Place in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition in 1987, a Progressive Architecture Citation Award in 1996, the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, and the Academy Award in

Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.

Together with FCJZ, he has published eight books and monographs, including Yung Ho Chang / Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice and Yung Ho Chang: Luce chiara, camera oscura.

He has participated in the Venice Biennale five times (first in 2000), among several other international exhibitions of art and architecture. He has taught at architecture schools across the US and China, was a professor and founding head of the Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University (1999-2005), and held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard University (2002) and the Eliel Saarinen Chair at the University of Michigan

(2004). In 2011 he became a Pritzker Prize Jury member.

Atelier FCJZ has always believed in the value and craft of design with an emphasis on research and methodology. Since its inception two decades ago, FCJZ has become a multi-disciplinary practice whose outputs range from community to jewelry.

FCJZ received the Progressive Architecture Citation in 1996 for a hillside housing project in Southern China, a WA China Architecture Award in 2004, and a Business Week / Architectural Record China Award in 2006 for Villa Shizilin. Abroad, FCJZ held solo exhibitions of its work at Apex Art in New York in 1999, Harvard University in 2002, Chambers Gallery in 2005, and MIT in 2007. They were also invited to create an

installation in the central court at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2008. The firm has participated in numerous international art and architecture exhibitions and biennials, such as Cities on the Move in Vienna, London, New York, and Denmark; and three times at the Guangju Biennale since 1997. Products and architectural models by FCJZ are in the permanent collection at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Art Museum of China.

BIKE APARTMENT – Inhabiting Design Event. Residence. Lifestyle. Movement. Narrative. Daily Ritual.

Atelier FCJZ believes in architectural intervention that results from keen observations of life’s daily rituals. Such intervention can invite people to relate socially and spatially in extraordinary, yet possible, ways. Witness apartments that double as bikers’ terrain, beacon towers occupied as campers’ cabins, office complexes with multi-level, intimate outdoor spaces for tai-chi, and courtyard homes in which inside/outside transitions are imperceptible – all exercises in designing the experiential among spatial-temporal buildings and urban spaces.

Bike Apartment, 1982-83, drawing for Bike Apartment. Courtesy of Yung Ho Chang.

ENDLESS COURTYARDS –

Traditional Chinese architecture. Courtyard house. Indoor-outdoor relationship. Spatial structure.

A continued interest in yuan (courtyards) has arisen from a deep familiarity with the courtyard h o u s e , g e n e r a t i n g a re - e x a m i n a t i o n o f architectural heritage and an exploration of its appropriation within a contemporary context.

Varying designs of the traditional courtyard house as split, layered, or pulled apart, as well as the central unit of the yuan multiplied as part of an urban expansion system, are some of the ways in which Atelier FCJZ acknowledges and redefines, obliquely, traditional archetypes on spatial, pragmatic, and material planes, and thus forms a continuum between the historic and the contemporary.

Split House, 2002, print for Split House. Courtesy of FCJZ.

Water Front House, 1987, drawing for Water Front House. Courtesy of FCJZ.

REAR WINDOW –Constructing Perception Cinema. Framing. Visual-spatial play.

Atelier FCJZ sees architecture as a narrative tool to conceive what-if scenarios through visual and spatial theatrics – to engage what may be an increasingly everseeing yet never-perceiving world. Through exploring sight lines, vistas, and the viewer’s relationship with the space (as inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window)

Villa Shizilin, 2004, print for Villa Shizilin. Courtesy of FCJZ.

as well as, in one case, using complex reflection to create dynamics of motion, constructed environments and worldviews are questioned as orderly, yet playful, structures serve to heighten perception.

Voyeristic Theater, 1984-88, drawing for Voyeristic Theater. Courtesy of Yung Ho Chang

Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo, 2010, print for Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo, Shanghai. Courtesy of FCJZ.

INFERNAL CONSTRUCT – Experimenting with Building Construction. Hands-on design process. Materials.

Technology. Locality and tradition.

From building walls out of time-honored rammed earth to wielding the structural potential of oft-overlooked materials and structural systems.

In an attempt to close the gaps between ideas and action, low- and high-tech, engineer and craftsman, and tradition and modernity, Atelier FCJZ practices material experimentation and rough prototyping throughout the design process in order to explore new ways of building.

1966-1976 Museum, 2012, print for 1966-1976 Museum. Courtesy of FCJZ.

NOT-SO-IDEAL CITY – Urban Interventions Density. Texture. Micropolis. Urbanism.

Atelier FCJZ's architectural interventions are not necessarily aimed at improving the city, but rather at working with and inside a not-so-ideal city in which efficiency and politics trump environmental, social, and cultural issues. By designing a publishing house’s headquarters as a mini-city, reconstructing the topography of a university complex in a hill-top town, or distributing an advertising office campus into mini-blocks, Atelier FCJZ has pioneered a “micro-urban” approach, in which spatial organization begins from the “inside-out.” Buildings function as integrated living spaces rather than freestanding structures, weaving the fabric of a connected, multilayered, dynamic urban scenario.

An Information Center, 1986-88, drawing for An Information Center. Courtesy of Yung Ho Chang.

SAINT JEROME’S STUDY – the greater cultural project Conceptual art. Interdisciplinarity.

For Yung Ho Chang, the Saint Jerome’s Study has been a model for a design studio and laboratory of ideas that sees architecture as part of a cultural endeavor. The call for such a vision becomes an urgent one as Chang – as part of a generation coming out of the void of the ideologically motivated Cultural Revolution and confronted with a Cultural Transition resulting from a new market

architecture – ranging from product to jewelry, diverse cultural operations and interdisciplinary collaborations have thus been ways to regenerate the architectural practice while shaping contemporary culture in China.

Architectural Jewelry,

St Jerome’s Study, 1987, drawing for St Jerome’s Study. Courtesy of Yung Ho Chang.

Wa Arch Old materials used anew: traditional, flat-lay roof tiles form an archway.

Recycled plastic plant support structures become a tessellated grid.

Wa Arch,