LOOK INSIDE: The Story of a Section

BEFORE THE TRANSFORMATION

18 DEC 2017

THE STORY OF A SECTION

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BEFORE THE TRANSFORMATION

12 DEC 2017

THE STORY OF A SECTION

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BEFORE THE TRANSFORMATION

13 APR 2018

THE STORY OF A SECTION

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BEFORE THE TRANSFORMATION

8 MAR 2019

THE STORY OF A SECTION

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

BEFORE THE TRANSFORMATION INTRODUCTION

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ARCHIVE A BEGINNING THE PROJECT [19 — 21 December 2017]

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— The lonely sketch — The WeChat message — The site visit — The working dinner B PRODUCTION AND EXCHANGE [4 — 15 January 2018]

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— The converging form — The last deviations — The final presentation

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H BEYOND CONTROL [9 July 2018 — 31 December 2019]

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— 3D model as control avatar — Debate on the construction design — Farewell to Shougang

— The construction of a multisite team — The presentation at Shougang — The dinner at the embassy C ORGANIZATION OF THE ATELIER [24 January — 16 February 2018]

G THE PROJECT THEATER [24 May — 5 July 2018]

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SYNOPTIC ARCHIVE Camilla Forina

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CREDITS

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COLOPHON

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AFTER THE TRANSFORMATION

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— The construction of a working protocol — The production of internal exchanges — Outreach to the Department of Architecture D OPENINGS OF THE PROJECT TEAM [20 — 22 February 2018]

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— The workshop with the design professors — The reworking in four diagrammatic scenarios — Two design versions E PARALLEL DESIGN STRATEGIES [23 February — 13 April 2018]

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— Interaction with technical expertise — Assessment of the design workshops — Stop and go — Plan B F HONING IN ON A SOLUTION [14 April — 22 May 2018] — The organizing committee — The informal meetings — Consultants

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INTRODUCTION

Michele and Edoardo have done an architectural project for an Olympic site. Alessandro and Giovanni have written a book on theory of design practice. Together, they work in a department of architecture of a polytechnic university, in contact with experts in various engineering disciplines. This condition faces them all with the same problem: the recognition of architectural design as a scientific activity, or at least as an activity subject to cumulative knowledge, transmissible and capable of innovation.

What works against them is an idealistic representation of architectural design, which views that discipline as a purely speculative and creative activity, involving the symbolic representation of its own world. This attitude toward design forces architects to remain alone: to produce their creations–beautiful or ugly, as the case may be–without being able to interact with the forms of technical expertise capable of translating ideas into reality. In short: this separation between idea and reality pushes architects into a corner, where they are doomed to tell stories without being taken seriously. When Michele and Edoardo talk about their project with Alessandro and Giovanni, they do not make reference to ideal entities, and they do not view the material conditions of feasibility as secondary factors. Instead, they describe strategies, the modes with which they have been able– or not–to gain approval of a certain design choice, to get beyond or to avoid a certain obstacle. Their narrative moves crosswise between the symbolic and the technical-bureaucratic dimensions, just as architects do when they are not on stage, and are instead discussing things with colleagues and friends.

A dialogue on design practices, then, leads to the ambition to write this book, narrating the process of gradual definition of a project in an applicable form. To tell the truth about the project is difficult, not only because there is the risk of offending someone, but also because the reality of the events and 14

documents produced during the course of the action undermines the self-image of the designers themselves. Delving into the processes of design definition, we may discover–for example– that the author of the project is not actually quite as authorial as he thought he was; that the decisive choice that has oriented the design was not experienced or interpreted as such at the time; that an obscure material agent has not been just an agent.

The project coordinated by Michele and Edoardo for the Politecnico di Torino is a significant one: the transformation of the Big Workshop of the Shougang Oxygen Factory as part of the industrial reuse project propelled by the XXIV Winter Olympics held in Beijing 2022. This is part of the Olympic Big Air masterplan coordinated by Professor Zhang Li of Tsinghua University, and his practice TeamMinus Studio in Tsinghua Architectural Design and Research Institute (THAD).

The extensive production of work materials, as well as the quantity of exchanges between China and Italy that were required to complete the project, make this a particularly suitable opportunity to delve into a concrete case. The importance and complexity of the initiative lend themselves to the function of a field of experimentation of those categories of design experience, which in the book by Alessandro and Giovanni (Teoria del Progetto Architettonico, 2017), had still remained on a general plane. The objective of making design practice transparent is nothing new. While abundant literature exists on design practice as the result of authorial intentions, there are fewer works that concentrate on design practice as the result of a network of production. A network that does not involve only the head of the author, but also the hands, many prostheses (drafting table, computer, telephone, social networks, etc.), and the entire wide collective dimension that acts, in various roles, on the pathway that leads from an initial design sketch to the construction of THE STORY OF A SECTION

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a building. While the literature on design practice seen as the implementation of an idea has its origin in art criticism, and is mainly oriented toward gathering the secrets of the author (which, however, in spite of all efforts, remain closed up in the head), the literature on the project as the result of a system of exchanges has a prevalently ethnographic matrix, seeing the designer-author as one of the many parties involved in the design process.

With respect to these studies of design practices, the attempt to describe the project of transformation of the Oxygen Factory explores a third direction. From studies on authorial practices, this book absorbs the recognition of the unavoidable individuality of the case and the complexity of its symbolic dimension, which cannot be analyzed through exclusively quantitative tools. From the studies on practices of design production, on the other hand, it takes the implicit relational paradigm, whose analysis focuses not so much on the role of the subjects as on their action, and it takes the objective: which is not that of revealing the secrets of the author-subject, but that of describing the movements of the project-object.

Unlike these latter studies, however, the book does not place itself in an exclusively descriptive perspective, as happens in the finest ethnographic tradition of design practices. Instead, it applies an eminently operative outlook. The story narrated in the book is not the report of an analyst external to the action, but–instead–the reworking of a project diary: a text containing a stratification of ambitions, enthusiasms, disappointments, and fears experienced by the designers during the course of their action. Describing the action does not have a purpose on its own, but can serve to enable more effective action in the future.

Taking this functional position, the project–or, more precisely, the various phases in which it manifests itself over time in the form of drawings, writings, social network posts, public presentations, INTRODUCTION

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journeys, and contracts signed–is viewed on a par with a strategy: a series of operations conducted with a purpose in mind.

To shift the fulcrum of the study from the origin (the value to be translated into form, in the implementation of the project) to the effects (the achievement of the purpose) enables us to identify the value of the project not prior to its making, but during the course of action: in the ability of the project to be effective. The book The Story of a Section: Designing the Shougang Oxygen Factory attempts this path, seeking to describe in the most analytical and realistic way possible how the various project documents have gradually constructed the conditions of their efficacy. The book narrates successes and failures, the tools and strategies that prove to be effective, and those that turned out to have weaknesses, with the objective of an abstract perspective, and of learning something from this experience.

To tell the story, reference has been made only to the documents materially produced for the project: drawings made by hand, technical drawings, sketches, files, contracts, consulting.

No planes have been considered other than those inherent to the adopted strategies: the story does not reveal what inspirations or images could have been in the minds of the designers, but analyzes the inscriptions that have led to the materialization of their intentions. Therefore, the object of study, as is reflected also in the graphic design of the book, is exclusive what can be found in the materials archived during the course of the project. The analytical ambition of this description has its risks.

The implications connected with the production of a design are potentially infinite: it has therefore been necessary to identify a form of selection of the archival materials, in such a way as to foster a controlled, measurable line of interpretation.

We have established that the narrative be guided by a single THE STORY OF A SECTION

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type of drawing, which during the course of the project turned out to be the most effective tool of interaction through which to discuss, evaluate, and move forward with the design. The Story of a Section is the story of the various forms assumed during the course of the project by the cross-section of the Oxygen Factory.

A section that in two years of collective design work, starting in 2017, has been produced in over 300 different versions.

One way to use this book is to rapidly leaf through its pages while gripping the corner at the upper right, to see a fast sequence of the entire design evolution of the section: the appearance and the disappearance of solutions, the fleeting life of certain hypotheses and the continuing presence of others.

Another way to use the book is to read it, to delve into the crannies of the design strategies described and their implications: grasping, as happens in any strategy, inclusions and exclusions, detours, evolutions, dead ends. Reading the book should enable you to enter into the outlook of the designers, and to draw more abstract conclusions from their experience.

Finally, parallel to the project narrative, a counter-text is contained in the footnotes, with the aim of offering a theoretical framework that can be useful for reflection on how the practice described can be transmitted and replicated, within the possible instances of the work of architectural designers in a global world.

INTRODUCTION

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E na Room team, given the necessity of consulting on the structural feasibility of the project. Having already had the possibility of considering the conditions of intervention, the structural expert points to the need to have more information on the foundations, prompting the China Room team to make an official request to the Chinese colleagues and the owners of Shougang. This request leads to many consequences.

ASSESSMENT OF THE DESIGN WORKSHOP Turin, 28 February – 5 March 2018 — China Room, Castello del Valentino But what happened after the first workshop, and what has influenced the atmosphere of uncertainty hovering over the second university session? First of all, the

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China Room team, after 20 and 22 February, revised the results discussed in the departmental workshop: on that occasion, the main design proposal was confirmed along general lines, and there was agreement on the need for its further development. In the days immediately to follow, however, the pressure increased due to the approach of the Beijing meeting on 6 March, prompting the narrow group to observe the proposal with greater severity. Taking stock of the situation, the two days of the workshop were useful above all to formulate a more intense debate around the drawings, rather than to propose new hypotheses. The narrative of the so-called “mortal embrace” was acknowledged as having a clarity of synthesis that would be able to order the successive design choices. Establishing the fact that the historical value of the factory did not lie in its ordinary constructed parts, but in the extraordinary void to which they give rise, made it possible to place all the necessary functions inside a large new structure

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that would wrap the eastern side of the factory, therefore dividing the project into two distinct parts: the existing void, and the new, full portion. This clarity of the image, which the section produced on 28 February clearly embodies [ 138 — E ] also relies on a specific rhetoric: the embrace, in fact, is defined as “mortal” because it reduces the remains of the existing factory to an empty simulacrum.

This figurative synthesis, however, will not suffice. In the days following the workshop in February, the first doubts regarding the true efficacy of this design clarity begin to surface in the China Room team [1].

Ardeth is titled “Bottega. Ecology of Design Practice.”

The term “bottega” indicates the nucleus of production of design documents, the place in which the inscriptions are constructed for use in the exchanges (see Archive C, note 5). The definition comes mostly from Latour and from the way he describes the “laboratory,” the place of scientific experimentation, which inherits its consistency from the craftperson’s workshop, but also from the “office” and the “academy”: "Different traditions converge and combine in the laboratory. Its first forerunner is the crafts workshop… ; there, the materials of the world underwent a metamorphosis. …In the field of medicine, biology, physics, architecture, of optics or the arms industry, the craftsman always comes prior to the engineer, while the scientist follows at a distance. The situation would be overturned later, in the 19th century, but only for certain trades. …The Encyclopédie of Diderot is still, rightfully, amazed by this.” For Latour, the office is instead the closed location in which “intellectual technologies” are elaborated, while the academy constitutes the framework of legitimation of every discipline, “placed under the protection of sovereigns and thus not explosed to the overly pressing, burdensome and arbitrary demands advanced by other communities, be they commercial, religious or political in character” [B. Latour, Cogitamus, (2010; Suhrkamp Verlag: Berlin, 2016), 85, 112-13, 117].

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Leaving the interior of the factory completely empty, in fact, makes it difficult to insert all the square meters required by the clients. The oblong form of the levels of the new structure is almost entirely occupied by the circulation system, seriously reducing the served spaces.

The need to increase the thickness of the wing of the new structure, reaching the size of 10,000 sqm, limits the possibility of bringing natural light to the interior. The spaces of the basement and the addition on the roof of the existing factory, which represent essential elements in the “embracing” function of the new structure, are difficult to reach and not simple to utilize. In an attempt to solve each of these issues, point by point, the China Room team ends up dismantling the narrative of the enveloping structure, and hybridizing the image of the mortal embrace. The revision of the design proposal in this case is the result of internal discussion, not of interaction with others. The core group intervenes on

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[1] The already mentioned issue no. 2 of the magazine

E the documents, reformulating the scenarios in an autonomous way, and applying stricter criteria than those of the workshop discussion, where the exchange took place for the most part at a level of discourse, without specific verification.

The vertical boundary between full and empty, whose foremost value was metaphorical, is challenged in relation to the required amount of square meters, leading to configurations that gradually moved toward greater occupation of the internal portion of the building, almost to the point of saturation [ 146 — E ]: although single sectors are left empty throughout the longitudinal section. Furthermore, acting on the suggestions received during the workshop, the existing façades of the factory are replaced, one by one, by new façades for higher performance, leaving only the structural skeleton visi-

PARALLEL DESIGN STRATEGIES

ble. With the demise of the scenario of the void for the interior of the factory, new functional assignments are opened up: on 3 March a large portion of the ground floor is drawn as a large playground/skate park, which reshapes the ground to echo the artificial hills designed

by TeamMinus for the area of the park, extending on the western side [ 148 — E ].

By eliminating the possibility of assigning value to the internal void as a historical presence, the thrust of conservation shifts to certain individual elements of the existing building: the tower, the mezzanine, the overhead crane, the steel roof trusses (which, however, as we shall see, could not be fully conserved). The result of this process of coming to terms between the clarity of the initial narrative and the compliance with the conditions of necessity raised by the various needs of

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[ 150 — E ] quantity, layout, and technology is a complex configuration that is summed up in the project sent to Beijing on 5 March, in preparation for the meeting on the following day. The cross-section [ 150— E ] [ 151— E ] [ 152 — E ] still contains traces of the original clarity, but at the same time it stages many smaller stories of particular solutions developed for the specific parts.

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At the end of this revision conducted inside the core group, it is no longer easy to trace the discussions from the workshops back to a recognizable figure in the section. Looking at these drawings, one might see traces of the discussions on “structural honesty,” on “composition of fragments,” on the (rhetorical) necessity of distinguishing figures in categories, to make one solution more intelligible and “logical” in relation to another. The configuration that will be submitted to the clients is rather a hybrid, in which reasons of tactical control of the

E be presented as an alternative without denying the previous work. The design choices have the aim of responding to the need for a solution that may be more reassuring from a constructive viewpoint, but without completely dissolving the ideas that have been gathered across the process.

Certain distinctive elements of the “mortal embrace” solution vanish, such as the basement level and the circulation block to the east of the existing building. Others remain, or are transformed: the empty shell of the internal section is transformed into specifically placed extrusions; the mezzanine level continues to determine the sequence of the internal spaces; the empty nave is completely filled in order to provide the required square meters of floorspace. Some features, on the other hand, are totally new: the ground floor of the existing factory is occupied by the vertical circulation systems, in such

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a way as to support the upper levels; an external circulation solution also appears, attached to the existing structure to connect various points of the masterplan.

The date for submission of the new version to Beijing is set for 13 April, at the time of the Venue Development Operational Review (VDOR) in which TeamMinus will take part on 14th. On 11 April the China Room team is still at work, to construct a double dossier, where the two project solutions are presented and compared, using the same number of materials. Michele is already in China and knows that the same drawings produced for the VDOR will soon be utilized for a meeting with the Winter Games Organizing Committee and the clients, the date of which is still unknown to him. On the morning of the 14th, while he is in the Province of Shandong, he is urgently called back to Beijing. The next morning it is time to present the dossier with the two scenarios, and for the first time the presentation takes place with the presence of the Organizing Committee and the Number 2 executive of Shougang Co.

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After the design brainstorming, a new section is ready in three days. It is undoubtedly a distant relative of the “mortal embrace” section, but it certainly tells a different story. Now the leading role is no longer played by the empty shell, but by the friendly little houses that peek out on the roof. They are now assigned the function of sustaining the new promise. And, as by now we are starting to learn, after a period as protagonists they too will fall short. Michele is left in doubt as to whether Li already knows this in advance, but this notion does not arise in their conversations.

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5 APR 2018

H walking along the Oxygen Factory: Michele suggests to Sophia the idea of extending it to cover the playground, but it seems that no more leeway exists in this sense.

At best, it is possible to take photographs of this situation in progress, to try to reproduce the perspective of the renderings made in the previous months, in pursuit of a resemblance to what was imagined and designed in the past. In spite of the detours and shifts away from the original project, the drawings that during the design process passed before the attentive, affectionate gazes of the China Room team have been experienced as their own. Through the drawing and re-drawing of the single solutions, each designer has been able to gain in-depth familiarity with those materials, to the point of identifying with them. Now, on the other hand, in the construction phase, the reasons why the worksite proceeds in a specific direction seem to be unknowable.

The building seen by Michele now has a life of its own.

BEYOND CONTROL

Michele doesn’t know that this will be his last visit.

A few days later, on 22 December, with Edoardo he is in Shenzhen for the opening of the Biennale. The whole China Room is concentrating on the preparation of this event, the result of work conducted in parallel with the Shougang project, at least from July 2018. On 31 December 2019 Edoardo is still in Shenzhen: the South China Morning Post reports on a “mysterious form of pneumonia” that has struck the city of Wuhan. In a few days the Biennale will be closed to the public due to COVID-19, and the Shougang worksite will be off limits, even for the designers of TeamMinus, for many months. People are already talking about the postponement of the Olympic Games, but in the months to follow the construction proceeds, as can be gleaned from the increasingly rare communications that reach Italy.

The efforts and aspirations of the Shougang project are interrupted here, in this suspended movement:

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the building remains there, impassive, marking the distance between the myriad of drawings, exchanges, and meetings that have surrounded it for two years. Its fixed presence, partially eroded by time and partially reconstructed, remains aloof, unperturbed by so much agitation. [10]

[10] See Rafael Moneo, The solitude of Buildings, Kenzo Tange Lecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 9, 1985.

[11] Our story comes to an end here, but that of the building continues: at the time of printing of this book, its construction has almost been completed, and the last of the test-events prior to the Olympics, slated to begin on 4 February 2022, is about to be performed.

IG THAD

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Perhaps it is only at this point that along the long, arduous episode we have outlined [11] it becomes possible to grasp the different scale of existence of architecture with respect to the contingent trajectories of a project, from which the building–in what is nearly a collateral process–seems to emerge, almost with indifference. [ CF, RM 310 — H ]

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Inspection at the construction site

15 JAN 2018 Beijing DT, CO, CL Plenary presentation of a dossier containing a model of the existing condition and two design proposals

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19 DEC 2017 Beijing DT, Co Second inspection at the construction site

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B 4 – 23 January 2018

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2 JAN 2018 Turin DT Design meeting

SYNOPTIC ARCHIVE

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22 JAN 2018 Beijing/Turin DT, Co Receiving masterplan materials

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15 JAN 2018 Beijing DT, Co, Cl Receiving structural drawings

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22 JAN 2018 Beijing/Turin DT, Co

C 24 January – 19 February 2018

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24 JAN 2018 Turin DT Design meeting

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Signing a letter of intent

AFTER THE TRANSFORMATION

26 SEPT 2021

THE STORY OF A SECTION

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→ SHOUGANG IS ONE OF THE FOUR VENUES OF THE XXIV WINTER OLYMPIC GAMES, BEIJING 2022. IT HOSTS THE DISCIPLINE OF THE BIG AIR THANKS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DEDICATED SKY JUMP, DESIGNED BY ATELIER TEAMMINUS AND THE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AND RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY.

AFTER THE TRANSFORMATION

8 DEC 2021