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ORO Editions Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design Gordon Goff: Publisher www.oroeditions.com info@oroeditions.com

Author: Maria Paola Repellino Foreword: Michele Bonino and Francesca Governa Afterword: Lu Andong Book Design: Maria Paola Repellino Translation into English: Erika Geraldine Young Managing Editor: Jake Anderson

Published by ORO Editions

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-954081-27-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying or microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher.

Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Ltd. Printed in China.

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. The Department of Architecture and Design (DAD) of the Politecnico di Torino has financially contributed to the publication of the book. The research was carried out in the China Room and the Future Urban Legacy Lab research centres.

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CONTENTS

Foreword Michele Bonino and Francesca Governa

Introduction

20 21 23 26 31 34 38 43

The development of cultural and creative industries in China The policy discourse on the cultural industry in China The creative industry as an economic and urban driver Clusters for creative industries The creative industry and the real estate market Architects at work: new generations tackling creativity Spaces and materials Architecture for the city

51 53 56 63 68 68 74 80 86

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CREATIVE CLUSTERS Collecting icons The prototype. 798 Art Zone The model shaped on site. M50 Art District Mosaic pattern M Woods Entrance Revitalisation Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art Iberia Centre for Contemporary Art Minsheng Museum of Modern Art

97 99 111 118 118 124 130 136

Shifting scales Scaling down. iD Town Scaling up. Jinling Art Museum Variations on measure Legend Town Now Factory Creative Office Park Dahua 1935 Renovation of Kunming Rubber Factory

145 148 157 164 164 170 176 182

Bounding borders Enclosure. West Village Disclosures. OCT-Loft Renovation Wall shapes 77 Cultural and Creative Park Beijing Cidi Memo iTown Renovation of Wuzhen Beizha Silk Factory Yuyuan Road Redevelopment

190 191

Afterword On responsive experimentalism of contemporary Chinese architecture Lu Andong

198 200 208

Acknowledgements References Figure credits and list of abbreviations

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INTRODUCTION

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The promotion and development of creative industries has played a crucial role in the economic transition that has seen the manufacturing industry shift from “Made in China” to “Created in China.” In the past decade this has led to the explosive growth of creative industries and their physical transposition into cities: highly specialised companies in the cultural sector have grouped together as “creative clusters” in well-defined urban environments. Often located in former industrial zones, these creative clusters have proved to be a successful way to enhance abandoned real estate in major cities. Injecting new ideas into old factories has ensured their immediate reuse and transformation, which in turn has gradually increased land value. As a result, new real estate investments—shopping centres, multifunctional complexes, recreational and residential structures—have sprung up either inside or around these areas, re-enhancing urban environments not always centrally located. Hundreds of creative clusters—arts districts, cultural areas, media bases, incubators and parks for creative industries, or fun mills—still continue to proliferate and trigger real estate enhancement strategies by reinventing important city districts. Architecture plays a key role in these sites. It has to ensure that the spaces involved are suited to the new functional, hybrid and time-variable programmes. Sophisticated architectural aesthetics have to not only underscore the superiority and uniqueness of the sites, but also exhibit and promote new images as well as renew identity. To satisfy the increasing demand for comfort and entertainment it has to create the conditions for a “well-being” in the city; by providing new leisure spaces for residents and users it also has to promote both the quality of physical space and the quality of life in the immediate urban environment. In terms of sound public-private investment, architecture must ensure rapid construction and maximum profits thanks to the immediate leasing of spaces and the gradual revaluation of the real estate in the area. Although the architecture of creative clusters is important, the physical features and aesthetics of creative clusters have not yet been fully assessed. The buildings and the consequential urban spaces have not been thoroughly studied even though they have innovative and often unusual features compared to the morphologies and typologies they introduce into a city.1 This book will focus closely on these spaces, starting with specific architectures that will be examined using an open-minded approach. How can we interpret them? What are the economic, political and design mechanisms used to build and legitimise them? What city concept is designed and built in these spaces? Can we identify recurrent features, general issues, and compositional orders and logic? To answer these questions this study will directly examine several architectures, considering them not only as documents worthy of an in-depth study due to their importance as an architectural artefact, but also as “footprints” to assist in the comprehension of the broader political ambitions and cultural and socio-economic transformations that are shaping and transforming physical space by imbuing it with new uses and meanings. This viewpoint is an opportunity to narrate places, projects and processes within

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71% of these areas was inside the city (Feng, Zhou, and Wu 2008). The 2008 Olympic Games held under the banner of environmental sustainability speeded up the trend. Between 1999 and 2005 the percentage of production sites inside the Fourth Ring Road dropped from 8.74% to 6.6% after 900 hectares of industrial areas were abandoned (Feng, Zhou, and Wu 2008). Despite the fact that the decentralisation of industrial activities is partly due to the goal (and requirement) to reduce environmental pollution in urban centres, “the main reason for the move was the increase in land values and its impact on government revenue” (Gao, Liu, and Dunford 2014, 8). Other key factors were: the reduced cost of renting these spaces; their central position (that included advantages in terms of accessibility, connection, services, and visibility); the big, flexible size of the structures that provided the space required for the new functional programmes; and the aura of a glorious past. As a result urban regeneration and the adaptive reuse of existing heritage has become one of the most debated hot topics. Compared to the development of new vacant areas, or indiscriminate operations to replace the old fabric, sensible reuse practices of the built environment as new creative centres is an effective way to limit urban expansion, safeguard the territory, and preserve and reactivate physical and cultural heritage.

THE CREATIVE INDUSTRY AND THE REAL ESTATE MARKET The first prototypes of renovated old factories and warehouses appeared in the late nineties, well before the authorities established specific policies.9 The drop in profitability of numerous state-owned enterprises (SOEs) after the economic reforms of the eighties made the revenue from land development much more appealing. As a result the companies that owned industrial sites began to rent spaces to individuals or real estate promoters who acquired the leasing rights of these areas in the hope of maximising their future value.10 Encouraged by the popularity and consumption-driven success of artistic centres such as the 798 Art Zone in Beijing and M50 Art District in Shanghai (see p. 56–67), government bodies began to grasp the transformative potential of these areas and gradually recuperated their leasing rights; they also restructured internally to create semi-public companies to which they entrusted the control and management of a site.11 In December 2006 the municipal government of Beijing officialised the first ten “cultural and creative clusters” in the capital; they include the Panjiayuan Antique Market, the now famous 798 Art Zone, and large complexes such as Zhongguancun Creative Industries Pioneers Base, Songzhuang Art and Cartoon Zone, Huairou Film and TV Base, and the Beijing Cyber-recreation District in Shijingshan District. A second season of renovation projects was the result of sophisticated real estate strategies promoted chiefly by developers and investors who wished to take advantage of land price appreciation and the local government’s support of creative industries. So while there were less vacant lots in the urban fabric, real estate investors, land-owning companies, and local authorities united to convert former factories into “creative” areas thanks to generous incentives by the local government. Private developers drafted a series of artistic schemes in which art galleries and workspaces for artists and designers were included in commercial projects. One emblematic example is the Today Art Museum (TAM) founded in 2002 by the real estate investor Zhang Baoquan (Antaeus Group) in the new Pingod complex in Beijing.12 The former brewery was initially redesigned by the architect Chang Yung Ho as a sales office for the apartments. The architect Wang Hui later converted the building into a private nonprofit museum promoting contemporary Chinese art. The museum

8. City Master Plan of Beijing 1982–2000. Industrial layout in the urban area of Beijing in the early eighties (illustrated in blue) (BMIUPD). 9. City Master Plan of Beijing 2004–2020. Industrial layout in the urban area of Beijing in the early twenty-first century (illustrated in grey) (BMIUPD).

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COLLECTING ICONS Many of the places abandoned by production have not been part of a unitary transformation project or general plan. Their transformation occurred bit by bit, incrementally, and often emulatively: first several spaces, then, in a similar manner, neighbouring spaces. It primarily involved big industrial sectors with self-sufficient work units where groups of medium-sized buildings with simple volumes stood next to big anonymous industrial structures. These complexes, with their heterogeneous architectural objects and diverse morphologies, were built at different moments in time. The individual projects added on to an ensemble of fragments all tried to achieve a characteristic formal timbre, thereby ensuring a certain distinctive protagonism. The result was a collection of objects, each representing a different idea of renovation and conservation. The goal was to let the compartment “explode” within a limited environment rather than “hold it together” using some form of homologation of the parts. One emblematic example is the well-known story of the 798 Art Zone (also known as Dashanzi Arts District). The former military factory north-east of Beijing became an internationally-renowned centre of artistic activities, art academies, exhibitions, and events linked to creativity in several sectors. Today it looks more like a theme park. The increasing popularity of creative clusters was exploited to gradually turn this site into an economic model based on commercial and recreational services. New art galleries, foundations, institutes, and private museums are springing up in the area and old abandoned structures are being restored thanks to the rapid growth of the art market.1 Today, 798 Art Zone is made up of countless fragments, physical and temporal spaces that continuously clash, are aligned and rearranged. One can get lost in the 798 Art Zone, a labyrinth of often sophisticated projects and increasingly incomparable situations that explore new formal solutions, functional distributions, and typological hybrids. It is here that Vector Architects reshaped the old industrial volume of the M Woods museum, delicately wrapping it in a metal mesh, while for the Cube Art Museum, Zhu Pei investigated the principles of versatility of space and fluid distribution and developed a broad range of spatial configurations. The transformation of the Panasonic factory as the seat of the Minsheng Museum of Modern Art, on the other hand, provided the architect with a chance to review the traditional typological museum model and also study a new morphology of contemporary exhibition spaces. Instead OMA’s renovation for the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art—UCCA, and Approach Architecture Studio’s project for the Iberia Centre for Contemporary Art, propose an experimental use of building materials and techniques, contaminated by the silent influence of parametric design and digital innovation. This method was also used to develop M50 Art District—M50, one of the first creative clusters in Shanghai; it stands out in an increasingly deliberate manner along the cultural corridor of private museums, art centres, galleries, and artists’ studios that have revamped the abandoned industrial factories

17. 798 (DAS).

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and warehouses in the West Bund. The iconic interventions grouped along the Huangpu River have carefully combined old industrial infrastructures with new, concise, and powerful projects, including: the Long Museum West Bund and the West Bund Art Centre by Atelier Deshaus, the West Bund Museum by David Chipperfield, the Yuz Museum by Sou Fujimoto Architects, the Tank Shanghai by Open Architecture, the Fab-Union Space by Archi-Union Architects, and the Yangpu Riverside Public Space designed by Original Design Studio. Within these boundaries the architectural project merges forms of exhibition, reflecting the client’s explicit requests, and focuses chiefly on achieving aesthetic elegance and enhancing the surfaces of the facades by materially treating the envelope. To a greater or lesser degree, the project adds a new layer, a second architectural skin (a soft metal mesh, a wavy glass geometry, a new red brick wall, a subtle reflective cladding, etc.); this skin establishes a more purposeful relationship with its internal functions, spatial organisation, and building systems. Old rough walls mix with sophisticatedly treated portions, making their envelope’s surface three-dimensional, vibrant, and sculpted. This attention to detail is part of an elegant approach towards the materials’ poetic expressiveness; it involves the plan of the buildings, the layout of the interiors, and even the design of the furnishings. The projects re-elaborate the memory of the site: industry is interpreted not only as a stage set and tangible heritage to be preserved, but as a reference image to define the materials and construction of the new projects. Based on a research focusing on aesthetic form and materiality, these architectural objects display their uniqueness in order to exhibit and promote the urban image of the public institutions or private entities that have financed them. The goal of the project is to achieve spectacular, out-of-the-ordinary effects by using different architectural techniques and solutions to attract and instantly convince visitors and investors. The end product is a space that is not a homogeneous, anonymous space, but one which is dense and rhythmic: a space made up of uninterrupted exceptions. As a result, the transformation of the complex emerges thanks to hubs and new centralities reciprocally chal-

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47-50. Approach Architecture Studio, Iberia Centre for Contemporary Art, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 2007–2008. The industrial buildings before the renovation (AAS, 2007). View of the building site (AAS, 2008). View of the building site, facade construction (AAS, 2008). Elevation and plan (AAS).

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85-86. Liu Kecheng Studio, Jinling Art Museum, Qinhuai District, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, 2011–2013. The architecture and its surroundings (C-LKS, 2013). Floor plans: ground-floor plan; 4.3-metre elevation plan; 7.4-metre elevation plan; 12.5-metre elevation plan; 17.5-metre elevation plan (LKS).

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20m

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128. Jiakun Architects, West Village, Qingyang District, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, 2010–2015. Inner courtyard (AE-JA, 2015).

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138. Urbanus, OCT-Loft Renovation, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, 2003–2012. General overview (WQ-URBANUS, 2012).

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