Universities, as the lighthouse for the sublimation of modern civilization, bears the long-lived mission of rejuvenating the culture and the responsibility of leading the trend. For years, the School of Architecture at Tianjin University has been focused on the important topics of the time in the architecture discipline, such as sustainability of the built environment, preservation and regeneration of the built heritage, and a series of reflective discussions were conducted in historical heritage, design, research and practical teaching.
The exhibition "Ingenuity, Tectonic & Craftsmanship", showcasing five sections including "Great Wall Research", "Reconstruction of Tradition", "Rural Construction", "Smart Construction" and "Teaching Experiment" will be presenting the teaching and research results of the faculty and the students from Tianjin University.
About the exhibition:
Co-sponsored by The School of Architecture of Tianjin University and Urban, Environment and Design (UED) magazine and the 2021 Beijing International Design Week, the exhibition will be held at China Millennium Temple located at No. 9, Fuxing Road, Haidian District, Beijing.
Dates：October 10th. 2021 to October 25th. 2021
Chief Curator：Kong Yuhang
Executive Curators：Zhang Xinnan、 Zhao Wei
Exhibition Layout
Section Introduction
Section: A. Works of the design studios taught by pioneering architects
WEI Na
Emotive Architecture II
——Revitalization of Wangfujing Street Block #277
Wangfujing is a city block with a long history in Beijing. Here is not only the memory of the city during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, but also the history of the development of New China's commercial districts, carrying the emotions and memories of several generations. The 277 area of Wangfujing is a very important part of the Wangfujing area. There are the legendary ancient well of Wangfu, the site of the famous People’s Daily, and the Wangfujing Snack Street which was once famous both at locally and abroad. However, with the development of Beijing as an international city and the ever-changing commercial space, Wangfujing is also facing the need for comprehensive transformation. Today in the information age, digital tools are not only changing our way of life, but also affecting our way of thinking by influencing our thinking logic habits. In the increasingly close interaction between virtual and reality, what should the future commercial space look like? How to revitalize this historic district? On one hand, we need to pay attention to sorting out the long history and find the unique emotional belonging of this area. On the other hand, we also need to have a forward-looking vision and keenly discover the causes of the problems behind the status quo and the potential for a new type of existence. How can the younger generation of designers in the Z era integrate their personal experience into design thinking, and how can they be able to answer this question?
As the second stage of the "Emotional Architecture" course, students not only need to generate a true feeling of the project through the substituting understanding of the location and life, but also need to improve their understanding of the expressiveness of formal language through the training of the course.
Shuhei Aoyama
Rethinking Central Business District —— CBD to C?D
CBD - Central Business District. This concept appeared in the United States in the 1920s and has a history of nearly a hundred years. With the continuous maturity of the central business district model (which drives regional economic development through highly concentrated commerce), major cities have gradually formed their own unique CBD core areas. For example: Manhattan in New York, La Defense in Paris, Shinjuku in Tokyo and Guomao in Beijing, etc. These areas with highly concentrated enterprises, highly complex industries, and highly dense buildings have had a huge impact on the city where they are located and the world. They have become a representative of the real economy. However, with the popularization of the Internet, the emergence of the virtual economy has caused an unprecedented impact on the real economy. From physical hospitals visit to medical consultations on the Internet, from physical currency to digital currency, from traditional cars to driverless technology, more and more industries have been involved in this invisible transformation. So, for the concept of "Central Business District" which seems to be "aging", what kind of changes will it produce in the next 100 years? And what kind of new impact will this change make, to the people who live in it, the surrounding environment, the city, and the world?
DI Shaohua
A Public Portal to a Space Technology Office Park
The traditional real estate development in China has slowed down considerably in recent years. As one of the strategies to regulate domestic economy, the government set a ten year goal spanning from 2015 to 2025 for Chinese technology and manufacture standard to be raised to a higher level. As a result, high technology parks sited in new industrial development zones have become a main urban and architectural typology to be designed and built in the near future. In general the investment in building a technology park comes from three channels - real estate developers, enterprises and the local governments.
The planning regulations for industrial land parcels requires no commercial uses such as shops or retails in an technology industrial park, which resulted in lack of commercial activities in and outside of these parks. Blocks of office parks are separated from one another and become isolated islands without enough pedestrian activities that is key to urban amenity. The studio focused on a 96 mu land parcel that is to be used for a space technology office park. The initiative is to open up the office park to the city and trigger links among different industrial parks would generate a much more lively and amicable urban environment that nurtures creativity needed for research and technology advancement.
Under conditions of urban “emptiness” perceived in the physical context of the site, the studio intends to arouse students’ conscientiousness towards the cultural context of the site, such as the meaning and significance of developing space technology, the erosion of the natural wilderness from rapid urbanization, the social responsibilities of architecture in the times that we live in, etc. Meanwhile, students were encouraged to look into their inner-selves to engage in retrospective thinking, and to intellectualize their instincts and externalize their internal world through the media of architecture.
WANG Shuo
URBAN WILDERNESS · JIGSAW FOR SYMBIOSIS
Beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s, Chinese metropolises, with Beijing-Tianjin, the Yangtze River Delta region, and the Pearl River Delta region as their originators, began a 20-year spree of urban development. This urbanization process, however, did not cover the urban surface evenly with a uniform force. The superposition of uncertainties has turned the spatial production of the urban surface into a kind of "urban wilderness" with various "wild species" flourishing and even proliferating far beyond the predicted direction of the established disciplines.
The site chosen for this course is located in the center of the road network formed by the East 4th Ring Road, East 5th Ring Road, Jingtong Expressway and Guangqu Road, but it is a very special urban enclave. Previous urban infrastructure decay has resulted in this area being separated from its surroundings by six intersecting railroad tracks, and cut into small pieces of varying shapes, some of which are nearly abandoned. Despite the rapid development of the surrounding cities, the area has been left behind.
Amidst the challenges and opportunities of the current era, the original way of life in the city is being rewritten. At the same time, along with the development of Internet technology, various new business models are emerging like a tidal wave. The discussion on the future of the city is moving away from abstract space creation and back to the care of people themselves. How to rebuild the narrative of urban life, how to establish a new picture of social continuity and a new paradigm of symbiotic living, to put together fringe areas like a jigsaw puzzle, from being cut apart by the "urban infrastructure" and left behind by the city, is the focus of this project.
When faced with such an "urban wilderness", how can the young generation of architects push the boundaries of the discipline and embed them in the process of the living experience we want to create? Not only to bring spaces together, but also to share connections with people. Further, this site will explore the possibility of "regeneration" of this base block and extend it to provide a referable path for Chinese cities facing similar situations to get out of the maze.
Section B Rural Construction
Prof. YANG Wei, Prof. HU Yike
The rural revitalization strategy is a strategy proposed by President Xi Jinping in the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. As a cradle for leading talents, Tianjin University has implemented the practice of "construction of aesthetics", "environmental integration", "functional coordination", "benefit sharing" and "industrial development" in rural construction projects to integrate this rural revitalization strategies. To integrate this learning practice into live project-based teaching provides an effective way for talent training.
In 2016, the "Bamboo Regal Domain" was built in the Louna Village, Guizhou Province, focusing on "constructive aesthetics"; in 2017, the "Bamboo Dome" was built in Anji, Zhejiang Province which emphasized more on functions; in the same year, a home-stay was built in the Longdongbao Village, Sichuan. This “Blossoms‘ Cottage Cinema" focuses on the construction of tourism service facilities; in 2018, the "Xiamutang Dance" landscape project was designed and built in the Xiamutang Village, Jiangxi, to promote the development of rural tourism; and meanwhile, a more industrialized construction experiment was carried out through the "Xiamutang Glimmer" project. In 2019, Tianjin University and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design launched the "AHO-TJU International Construction Course" to comprehensively cultivate students' ability from planning, design and construction, and to the later maintenance, operation and management, and the organizational ability to coordinate all parties in the process. Post 2020, the launching of project "R-CELLS: A Lifetime of Healthy and Sustainable Home" in the Desheng Village, Zhangbei County implemented a more practical and proactive perspective which further integrated renewable energy and smart technologies with the development of rural industries and a series of sustainable development issues in rural revitalization.
Section C.Prof. ZHANG Yukun and his team
Great Wall Digital Reproduction
In the past 20 years, Prof. Zhang Yukun of Tianjin University, leading his research team, has been committed to the theoretical study of the Ming Great Wall integrity and the innovation of information technology applications for a long time. Through large-scale and long-term global-full line field research, historical document verification, and independent research of information collection equipment, the space-time pattern of towns of the nine bians along the Ming Great Wall and the functional attributes of its giant system-order belt have been revealed together, forming a "Theory- Method- Technology- Application" of gradual technological links and initially realizing the Integrity digitization of the Ming Great Wall.
The "Ming Great Wall Defense System Spatial Database" and the "Ming Great Wall’s full-line image and 3D database" built by the team have been basically completed, and was displayed for the first time in this exhibition.
The "Ming Great Wall Defense System Spatial Database" established on the WebGIS, including the Great Wall ontology, border towns, pass, post transmission system, beacon transmission system, early warning systems and border trade gates, has realized the visualization of internal system relationships. In detail, firstly, the Great Wall ontology was divided into sub-catalogs of walls, trenches, wall monomers, and external monomers. Secondly, the border fortresses were divided into three parts according to the zhen-lu-bao system, containing the temporal and spatial distribution of more than 1000 fortresses and nearly 30 attributes information per fortress. Thirdly, the postal delivery system were classified into three levels, namely the courier service using boats and horses, the transport system for the supply of food, and the emergency postal stop. Furthermore, the database used virtual and real symbols to distinguish between visible and invisible sites. At the same time, it can also provide time-space information query, display and editing functions. Specifically, the button "Enable Timeline" can display the time-space distribution of military settlements in various periods.
The "Ming Great Wall’s full-line image and 3D database" is the first database of the Great Wall and its neighboring facilities all over the world, which has collected nearly 800,000 photos with the file size about 8TB and completed centimeter-level accuracy of 5,500 kilometers 3D data as well as the point cloud processing of the Great Wall wall. Using image-based artificial intelligence technology and relying on the data set independently annotated by the image library, the reliable mathematical models of building objects, such as enemy buildings and arrow windows, were obtained after many training and parameter adjustments, that was, the image feature "password". The database has a fast and automatic screening function, which can perform statistical analysis on different types of Great Wall objects, providing basic data for Great Wall monitoring, early warning, maintenance and protection.
Section D. Prof. KONG Yuhang and his team
The Reconstruction of Tradition
The reconstruction of tradition is an important and enduring issue, which is interpreted differently in each era. In the current context of cultural renaissance, the mission entrusted to us is to reinterpret ancient Chinese cultural construction concepts, methods and techniques, and to refill the lacking of cultural genes in the localization of modern Chinese architecture. The significance of this exhibition is to generate an architectural space that inherits the ancient spirit in creating the new form.
The independent world in the courtyard is an important carrier of Chinese traditional culture. "Yuan of 3" takes the Jianfu Palace Garden site in the Forbidden City as the ideal base, and includes three different scales of courtyards: "Micro-yard", "Family-yard" and "Social-yard", responding to the different life patterns that may emerge in Chinese families in the future.
The Yuanbaodao Royal River Pagoda is located at the bend of the Grand Canal - Yuhekou, being adjacent to the Yangliuqing Millennium Old Town. It is an example of the integration of "architecture - people - environment". Scheme 1 takes the "Mingtang" as the prototype, translates its internal cross-axis symmetry and orderly hierarchy, and adopts the spatial organization method of pinwheel shape and spiral to build an iconic contemporary building; Scheme 2 incorporates the symmetrical spatial layout of ancient pavilions and uses the four quadrants and the pinwheel-shaped diagram to generate modern forms, continuing the traditional cascading construction method and giving it a contemporary spiritual core. The design inherits traditional construction wisdom, seeks to solve the problem of rootlessness, and establishes a new paradigm with local cultural sentiment and in line with the current view of time and space, in order to clarify the future development of architecture.
