cityofsound

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Day three

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Opening ceremony, World Design Congress 2009: Day one and day two. Written at the time, last October.)

The third and final day of the conference - for me at least - and the sky in Beijing is cool, grey and damp, shrouding any memories of the clear blues and crisp shadows of the opening day. The air itself seems thicker, somehow.

The air quality here is usually bad, at least by the standards of Sydney, say. There’s a Twitter feed of Beijing air quality, which paints a fairly clear picture. (Intriguingly though, it’s from a measuring station atop the US Embassy, which is not far from a motorway and whose daily reading at 1900 hours catches the end of rush hour. If I were China, I’d feel that this, and the Wall Street Journal’s Beijing Air Quality widget might be a none-too-subtle form of propaganda. There is a difference in measurement too, with the US figures measuring different pollutants to the Beijing sensors.)

However, it occurs to me later that it’s also possible to too easily connect the way the sky looks with air quality issues. Beijing (and much of Eastern China) has always have been subject to a misty atmosphere, as much ancient Chinese visual media attests.

There’s no doubt, however, that the air quality can often by filthy. By the end of an afternoon spent walking over the city, I’m suffering for sure. However, there’s also something genuinely fascinating, even thrilling, about the air and the particular conditions it creates, as Bryan Boyer described after his first visit to Beijing, when he was similarly breathless (pun intended.) The way the immediate environment fades in the near distance, everything feels tantalisingly out-of-reach and the city itself seems as if it could simply continue for ever, as if beyond the edges of the map.

“As a visitor it's pathetically easy for me to put aside the sad reality of the pollution and its long-term effects on the people who live there. For the moment I'm in thrall with the incredible optics of a city that is so vast it yields the potential for, but ultimately denies, infinite vistas with vanishing points in every cardinal direction. These forever-boulevards literally choked by smog are tragically beautiful with something akin to the sad sadism of foie gras. In so many ways, Beijing is the foie gras of cities: ethically complicated but undeniably exquisite. It's a city that any kid who grew up with video games already knows: the Z-buffer culling of distant objects to reduce render time is exactly what dense smog produces. Successive layers of massive buildings and leafless trees rendered as increasingly pale outlines encapsulate you in a little sphere of existence, your own little microcosm of the endless city, as if seeing the whole thing at once would simply require too much processing power from your human brain. Please upgrade your buffers before you visit the city of the future Beijing has vanquished the vanishing point. What's next?” [Bryan Boyer, Of This We Are Sure]

That’s exactly right, and I too am that careless visitor entranced by the chilly fug enveloping everything around me in a beguiling poisonous embrace. I do later feel the visceral effects of being outside in Dashanzi all afternoon, but early this morning the atmosphere is simply intriguing.

Interestingly, Steven Holl, in the excellent Urbanisms: Working with doubt (Princeton Architectural Press), describes this an entirely different way. He talks not about the Z-buffer but the Z-axis, reclaiming the section for 21st century urbanism, and about “multiple horizons and vanishing points” in Beijing. He nimbly side-steps (or ignores) the failed ‘streets in the sky’ model of mid-20th-century housing projects and instead proposes that the “Z dimension of the development of buildings in section has overtaken the planimetric. The section can be fifty times more consequential than the plan, especially in metropolitan centers such as Manhattan, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.”

Referring to Linked Hybrid (of which more later), and in suggesting it directly “responds to the real pressures of rapid urbanisation”, he writes:

“All architectural works are in some way urban works; they either deny or affirm the potential of the city. The metropolitan density of the twenty-first century asks for a further spatial affirmation in the vertical and the diagonal. A diagonal rise by elevator through overlapping spaces of a modern metro station yields an open-ended spatial sensation. The limited conditions of linear perspective (from planimetric projections) disappear as modern urban life presents multiple horizons and vanishing points.” (Steven Holl, p.25 of Urbanisms)

But as interesting as this strategy is, driving from the Chaoyang District to CAFA on this grey morning, the vanishing points vanish rather than multiply.

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Victor Margolin: The politics of survival, the potential of data display

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Day two. Written at the time, last October.)

Victor Margolin was up next. Writer of numerous books, and he did focus on sustainability, and very directly.

In fact, after an introduction which sets the scene in terms of industrial development leading to climate change (probably not something many needed in the room, but you never know), he stressed the importance of COP15, and stated the need for “greater transparency” about the direct and indirect “causes of climate charge”. He noted that “environmental problems are global not just regional/local” and that there was a broad “public mistrust of companies, and of organisations to act in the interest of citizens.”

The “result” of this, as he sees it, is a “demand for more information on the one hand - and improved products and systems on the other .”

We’re engaged in a “politics of survival”, a “politics of protest.” As such, he sees a “new role for the graphic designer”. That there is a latent “demand for graphics and visual displays to help people understand condition of the world - (to create) explanations of what is happening on the planet as a result of human activity ...”

 

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Zhu Dake: "Consumerism, authoritarianism, inconsistency, harmony and modern China"

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Day two. Written at the time, last October.)

Based at Tongji University, where he is a professor at the institute of cultural criticism, Zhu Dake might be an example that the public intellectual in China has a little more leeway than is often characterised in the West (see also this interview at Danwei.org). His speech centres on the balance, or tension, between authoritarianism and consumerism that China is facing - or encouraging, depending on how you look at it - and features some subtle critique of both aspects of that balancing act. I’ll reproduce it in a bit more detail here (though please excuse any inaccuracies due to my typing or the translation at the time.)

He starts with Mao's legacy; since the second round of reform and the “opening up”, China has been engaged in consumerism and late stage capitalism, he says. So a curious hybrid between consumerism and authoritarianism has led “to a specific spatial logic in China.” These two systems “inconsistent yet they coexist with seeming harmony”.

He then shifts to talking about china (as in porcelain, china-ware), which “can be traced back a long way” and how “china transformed into China”.

Here, he starts to outline the danger of over-use of specific cultural symbols - not only china, but also the overuse of the colour red, which he calls a “visual disaster”. Red, he points out, is “representative of authority, just like the wall of Forbidden City”. It represents “conquer and warning to the general public.” (He shows some photos of the reddish outer wall of the Forbidden City.)

 

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Day two

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Opening ceremony, World Design Congress 2009: Day one and National Centre for Performing Arts. Written at the time, last October.)

After the sunshine, blue skies and glamour of the opening day, the morning of day two of the ICOGRADA World Design Congress at least has the courtesy to be grey. And after the spectacle of the National Centre for Performing Arts, today the bus takes us from the hotel to the main conference venue of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).

CAFA turns out to be an even more interesting venue in many ways, as I get to know the college over the next few days (again, thanks to Yuan for showing me round, and through a few of the classrooms.) But over and above just being in a working college, this place also indicates how Beijing is raising the bar through design, as the stunning college museum is an Arata Isozaki building. Neither of my colleges in the UK even had a museum, never mind one designed by Arata Isozaki.

More on the college later, but straight into today’s talks. I’m attending the stream called ‘Balance’, largely as that’s the one in which I’m speaking, but the various talks prove to engaging and stimulating either way.

 

 

 

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Opening ceremony

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Day one and National Centre for Performing Arts. Written at the time, last October.)

(Waiting for the opening ceremony in the main hall, I chat to Tavs Jorgensen, a smart designer/thinker/teacher/researcher from Autonomatic, at University College Falmouth, UK. He’s researching “3D digital production” i.e. design practice and new forms of fabrication.)

The opening ceremony does not disappoint. Significant dignitaries from the Beijing Municipal Government, the Peoples’ Republic Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Education are the distinguished guests, and line up on stage with the studied repose of the effortlessly powerful, sitting opposite the artfully articulated lectern occupied by Yang Lan, a super-chic Chinese TV personality, entrepreneur, millionaire, 'China's most beautiful woman' ... and our host for the day.

The presence of those senior officials at this opening ceremony is incredibly significant. To Western eyes disaffected by political leaders who'll turn up to the opening of an envelope, it’s important to pause and reflect that this is a quite extraordinary statement of intent from China, and Beijing. Their presence is a tacit approval for a theme that would instantly become clear - that China is interested in augmenting its position as workshop of the world by also becoming creative studio for the world.