The Homeopathic Urban Design Method in the Urbanization Process of Chinese Cities and its Relationship with Traditional East Asia Thoughts

Transcription

1 UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress O-0564 The Homeopathic Urban Design Method in the Urbanization Process of Chinese Cities and its Relationship with Traditional East Asia Thoughts Jin Qiuye *1 1 Professor, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, China Abstract The modernization of Chinese cities always means rationalization of the old urban space. In this process, some of the traditional characteristics, regarded as lack of infrastructure or symbols of outmoded lifestyle, has been systematically erased. Things changed with some interesting practice of recent years, for example the design work of Huang Shengyuan and Liu Jiakun. They either use the existing urban conditions, or create a new urban environment in line with the situation of Asia, thus retain the original vitality of traditional urban space. this paper defines it as Homeopathic Urban Design and give a detailed analysis on this new urban design concept that conforms to the original urban form, spatial logic and life style of East Asia. It also reviews the relationship between this method and the thoughts of ancient Chinese. It argues that nature is still the basic power of space generation and is considered the loftiest aesthetic ideal of East Asia. This paper attempts to inquire into this newly developed design method through analysis on the representative design works, and try to preserve more urban identity in the process of the modernization of Chinese cities. Keywords: Homeopathic Urban Design; East Asia tradition; natural situation; townscape; urban vitality 1. Introduction: traditional East Asian construction thoughts The thoughts of Homeopathic Urban Design, or the construction attitude of conforming to the power of the situation, is supposed to be originated from the ancient Chinese philosophy. As was saying by Laozi: The highest virtue is like water. Water is the softest, but it can penetrate the hardest. In ancient Chinese thoughts, the power of the situation is called Shi, and to act homeopathically means to follow this Shi other than confronting it, just like the water. Man should not create things only according to their own rules; he should also follow the rules of the nature. Through this, the man-made products, including buildings and cities, are created partly by the invisible hands of the Nature Creator. They are considered to be livelier and richer than the pure human creations. In his art critic On Painting of the Water, the greatest artist Su Shi of Song Dynasty said: the running water must go with the forming and twisting of the rocks of the hill. Giving forms according to the natural force. * Contact Author: Jin Qiuye Professor, School of Architecture & Urban Planning Beijing University of Civil Engineering. & Architecture. No.1 Zhanlanguan Road. Xicheng Dist. Beijing, China Tel: (86) jinqiuye@vip.163.com UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress 1

2 Though he was mainly talking about the paintings, it is applicable to all kind of artistic behaviors. To follow the natural force means to observe patiently and to catch the opportunity accurately. By borrowing natural affluence and flexibility, the Chinese art forms have some non-linier complexity, largely different from The same kind of thoughts can be frequently found in living room and garden construction in ancient China. The great garden designer Ji Cheng of Ming Dynasty argued in the beginning of his famous mythological book Yuanye: the gardener's skill resides in his insight in perceptiveness and ability to borrow. When building a garden, the designer always borrows the topographical undulating, the plants and the hydrographic system from the original terrain, rather than wiping them off arbitrarily. In big scale city constructions, conforming to the original condition means accessing the hills and rivers closely and arranging carefully, without imposing a man-made geometrical order onto the natural domain, as the Modern city planner always do. 2. Contemporary Practice of Homeopathic Urban Design The natural terrain has extremely rich details, if put to good response, urban form must be rich and delicate. European cities evoke special sense of depth with straight streets, central plazas and geometrical axis, whereas in the densely populated East Asian cities, the streets scale is small, and the city image in general is like layered peaks in the traditional Shanshui paintings. Other than the monumentality created by Western cities, the unban atmosphere in East Asia is always full of vividness. [Fig. 1] Fig.1. Zhang Zeduan, Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival. Part. The picture shows the atmosphere of ancient urban neighborhoods in East asia. Northern Song Dynasty (12 Century) cm wide, cm long, color on silk. Imperial Palace museum, Beijing. China's urban modernization is often accompanied by the rationality of space form or man-made order, and some of the traditional spatial features were regarded as the lack of infrastructure and the symbol of the backward lifestyle, and were systematically erased. In recent years, some exploratory works have emerged, either by using existing urban conditions or by creating new urban environments that match the state of Asian cities, retaining or extending the original urban vitality. An interesting case is a restaurant named "Deyunju" in Shunde, Guangdong. [Fig. 2] It is not a masterpiece of some well-known architect, but a casual transformation of the restaurant owner. It was built in a typical City Village of China, which means the leftover areas in the urban context due to the fast-developing pace and is a common in urban areas in China, lacking unified planning, infrastructure and standard material conditions. But on the other hand, it to some extent contributes to this area a continuation of the East Asian traditional city characteristics. The owner of the restaurant was first obtained the right to operate a small area. He did not demolish all the chaos completely as people always do, but made some additions on the basis of the original, like extracting the courtyard, finishing the uncompleted walls, and repairing the broken roofs. Then he divided different zones functionally, and connected each part by open halls and corridors. Later, through merging nearby courtyards, the restaurant grew up, and became a highly intricate entertaining complex. There are no axis control and space composition in the general sense. The courtyard is full of aesthetic conflicts and special accidents that brings to the user a great sense of freedom, turned to be a rich, graceful place with complexity 2 UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress

3 borrowed from the original natural terrain. Fig.2. Deyunju, Shunde, Guangdong Province. Photograph by Jin Qiuye, January This complexity derives from the comprehensive acceptance of the City Village as the initial condition of the new environment, just as the garden designer making use of the natural terrain. In this way, they turned the shortcomings into advantages, so as to obtain the geometric nonlinear characteristics that can hardly be acquired by logical deduction. Moreover, by inserting landscape elements such as plants, corridors, waters and accessories, the tedious sense of pure building shape was neutralized while the new environment filled with optical richness as can be seen in a real garden, thus the messy and the chaotic systematically turned into variety. It is reasonable to believe the city s long-term interests can be protected if we taking such areas as initial conditions for the future rather than wiping them all off arbitrarily and brutally. What s more, it seems that the traditional townscape could be restored to some extent by recalling traditional environmental construction ideas and methods. After all, the unique unban atmosphere and the everyday-life vividness in East Asian cities are unique and intriguing. If Deyunju is some occasional results of spontaneous development, then the Taiwan architect Huang Shengyuan's work in Yilan represents an initial effort to seek the image of the local urban space. Huang Shengyuan locked his own career in Yilan, a small city with a population of no more than 500,000, with special consideration. It can be seen as an urban space suture work, difficult, delicate while hardly be aware of. Yilan has the typical characteristics of East Asian cities: complex and diverse, lacking organized planning, with some significant spontaneous growth characteristics. Modern transportation facilities and public buildings almost cut the original street system into fragments, and the landscape is also disorganized. Huang Shengyuan s work is just like plastic surgery: by bone grafting and stretch suture, the broken city spaces are patched up. He respects the existing situation, never carrying out excessive operation or unified treatment, emphasizing the slow traffic space connection and the formation of hotspots of important public space, so that the new part and the old part of the city blend together seamlessly. This work is not like the architect s but like a craftsman s: sculpting the city in accord with its original shape, preventing it from losing all its virtues in the modernizing process. Fig.3. Jinmei plank road, Yilan, Photograph by Jin Qiuye, June A good example is Jinmei plank road, Yilan, [Fig. 3] It is a cabled pedestrian bridge linking the slow transporting system on both sides of the Yilan River. As a "parasitic" structure on the original reinforced concrete viaduct, it is made of an interlace of wood, steel, galvanized grid and other materials, deliberately UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress 3

4 showing a sense of randomness like wild plants, melting into its surrounding scenery harmoniously. The walking process is full of randomness and accidents, with the ever-changing width and the small niches appearing unexpectedly, just like walking in a city full of spontaneously built strange structures. This is a kind of "natural growth" aesthetics, and the urban structure of East Asian cities and even other parts of Asia seems to have some similarity with natural life systems such as woods, ponds and grasslands until modern times. On the one hand, these cities lack obvious visual uniqueness; on the other hand, they differ greatly with each other due to the initial conditions on which they are generated. Huang Shengyuan's work bypasses the excessive consideration on individual buildings and geometrical forms of modern architecture, paying more attention to the street atmosphere, spatial relationships and walking experience. Through this way, he adds a soft inner surface to the city, and the method is completely homeopathic: taking the present city as natural terrain, preserving, continuing and utilizing its naturally formed space language. [Fig. 4] As can also be seen in Huang s unique pavement design. Fig.4. The Pedestrian Linkage designed by Huang Shengyuan. Cf. Field Office, Huang Shengyuan. Pedestrian Linkage to the Riverside Park, YIlan City, Yilan, Taiwan, China. World Architecture, May. 2009, P.34. Chinese architects have been trying to update their architectural thinking that is rooted in East Asian history and philosophy thoughts. They try to build a new relationship with the environment. Architect Liu Jiakun may have provided us with some clues. His design work "West Village" in Chengdu is a huge complex with an area of about 42,000 square meters, with a total construction area of about 135,000 square meters. The site used to be sports venues and entertainment facilities, which stimulated the architect's Imagination. He created a huge building on three sides of a large, diversified courtyard, with a runway stand in the air on the other side of the square. 182 meters long and 137 meters wide, the building is a beyond all question a big monster. Its rough appearance and surface made by recycled building materials left an unfinished impression on the users, like all those buildings of low quality and poor condition in the past 30 years throughout China. But It could make people think of Le Corbusier's ideal mega-structure in Algiers, especially its long, linier mass with corridors on both sides. Its unmodified façade toward the inner courtyard allow people to do modifications to some degree, making a scene common in badly managed residential districts. This is not an empty courtyard, on the contrary, it is filled with a variety of facilities and activities. There are traditional tea party, fashionable flea market, intense sports competitions and easy joggings. West Village accommodate all kind of things, just as the city of Chengdu itself, even all the streets of the Chinese community. The bamboo and ditch pond in the middle of the yard bring a village-like elegance, warm and hearty, reminiscent of a pastoral scenery as also can be seen in projects like Wang Shu's Xiangshan campus, Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, where the crops, willow and egrets brought a literati ideal of the rural village, whereas the atmosphere of West Village is more 4 UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress

5 mundane, more of contemporary daily life. The architect deliberately retained the roughness of the site, reminiscent of the traditional Chinese artist who kept thinking highly of the synthesis of the delicateness and elegance (Yan) with the dullness and clumsy (Zhuo), the arts of reconciliation between elements both opposite and complementary, just like nature itself. [Fig. 5] In the "West Village" design, Liu Jiakun offered his personal answer to an intractable issue: in the contemporary city scale and productivity conditions, with the absence of material references and context associations, how to borrow design language from the environment and to realize the complexity and expression of natural features? From the morphological point of view, West Village is not different in essence with other large scale modern buildings. The difference may reside in its deliberately reserved half-out-ofcontrol state. From inside the courtyard to the elevation image, the building seems just like an empty frame or stage, and users have full freedom to set the secondary sets to fill in it. In this sense, Huang Shengyuan s construction activities are also either redundant or insufficient, with its half-out-of-control state coming before the construction process. If we take the spontaneous formation and the city reality lack of rational control as natural, we either build in virtue of this, or leave the empty to induce potential. No matter in what case, the built environment will have a natural atmosphere, which can not be achieved by industrial aesthetic or geometric perfection. Fig.5. Scene of the courtyard of West Village. From Jiakun Architect website: Maybe this new urban design concept can be summarized as "Homeopathic Urban Design". It is different from the negative attitude toward development and changes by the historical protectionism, and also different from the overall reorganization in the name of the development. On fact, it is an urban development concept that conforms to the existing city form, space logic and life style. Perhaps it is not novel at all, but has in some way been continuing for thousands of years, only temporarily suppressed in modern times. Its main point is to regard construction activities as an extension of environment, and to integrate the complexity of nature into the artificial environment by conforming to the environment, containing a certain degree of the accidental and the uncontrollable. This is far from the modern concept of mathematical clarity and geometrical purity, which emphasizes only totally precise control. 4. Conclusion: The Meaning of Homeopathic Urban Design During a visit to Geoffrey Bawa s buildings in Sri Lanka, architect Liu Jiakun discovered an interesting fact. Paradise Road the Villa, built in 1980s, has very beautiful surroundings except adjoining to a railroad. Every day and night, there are trains passing by with roaring. For architects, the usual means is to build a high wall to shield the train. By doing so, the sound and the vibration was partly avoided but would still cause trouble to the customers, even strengthen the bypass of the train as a negative factor of the environment. Bawa raised UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress 5

6 the courtyard level up gradually toward the track level, with a lower retaining wall separating the courtyard from the outside world. Whenever the red train passes, the resting or swimming guests in the courtyard will stop to watch, thus the train has become part of the courtyard landscape, bringing unexpected shock and vitality to the entire settings. The architect's wisdom is evident in the use of ingenious architectural techniques to turn environmental defects into irreplaceable advantages. We now can conclude that the Homeopathic Urban Design method derives from the Conforming to the power of the environment thoughts in East Asia. In this concept, human and their environment are always an organic whole. People never solve problems through "isolation", never create a completely isolated inner environment, and never appreciate the beauty of pure abstraction. In this way, man-made environment does not emphasize the extreme purity, but is similar to the natural which behave as no style. We could summarize the design features in concept of Homeopathic Urban Design as follows: 1, Emphasizing on environmental relationships rather than specific building; 2, Taking plants, terrain, water, and existing buildings as raw materials that can be put to use without discrimination in the construction process; 3, Constructing in a lightest and simplest way, with the least interference on the environments. 4, Emphasizing on the cultural quality of environment rather than the technical performance. Architecture only provides a general framework, leaving room for spontaneous and accidental construction activities. After all, the most important is the " power of the situation, or so called Shi, which can not only be the topography, plants, climates, water, and the initial conditions of various constructional and environmental behavior, but also be the rules and demands of construction behaviors under certain historical conditions, including economic and political factors. Architects must be extremely sensitive and modest to what is going on, and stop playing the arrogant role of the incarnation of the Nature Creator, serving as the servant of the power of the situation " instead. We may suggest that such an attitude is in itself the meaning of "nature". Nature is not on the opposite of man-made world, or the system made up of flowers and trees and wild animals, but is a mechanism of everlasting movements including human activities. It is characterized by incomplete control, or controlled spontaneity. By tolerating and adapting the accidental and spontaneity, changes keep happening, and designers express these changes other than perpetuity. This attitude may count for the richness and vitality dating back from ancient times of East Asian history, as will be the natural law behind our urban design method for the future settlements. References 1) Lo Shih-Wei. (2003). Timescape by Architecture: Building the Local Taiwan in Recent 20 Years. Architectural Journal. (04)2003, p.04 2) Laozi. Tao Te Ching. Chapter 8: The highest virtue is like water. 3) Ji Cheng (2012). Yuan Ye. 2 nd ed. Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press. p.47 4) Jonathan Hay. (2010). Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. p.55 5) Niu X. and Lu J. (2010). Chinese Ancient Thinking of Astronomy and City Construction. Huazhong Architecture, (03)2010, p ) Sun H. and Liang J. (2003). Analysis on the Internal Structure of Fangli Units of Chang an in Tang Dynasty. City Planning Review, (10), p.67. 7) Su Shi. (2012). On Paintings. Jinan: Shandong Pictorial Publishing House. p.58 8) Zhang Zao. (2015). Writing West Village Basis Yard. Architectural Journal. (11)2015, p.60 9) Zhuang Shen. (2015). An Alternative to Open the City: A Work Session on Urban Research towards Contemporary Shanghai. Time + Architecture. (05)2015, p UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress