ACROSS CHINESE CITIES – THE COMMUNITY

“Across Chinese Cities – The Community”, promoted by Beijing Desing Week in partnership with Souzhou Municipal Government explores approches to planning linked to the development of “communities” as mechanisms that create new system of social, economic and spatial belonging.

The project offers unprecedented look at over 20 cases studies that drawn upon the “emancipating potentialities of commoning” through integrated design strategies which embody new notions of collective identity and thus novel interrelated norms of co-dependence, participation and inclusivity.

In the central location of Beijing Design Week, the Agricultural Exposition Center in Sanlitun, the room dedicated to special projects hosted an installation by Dontstop Architettura on the theme launched by XPORT and Across Chinese Cities for the next Architecture Biennale: Waterscapes and Urban Design along the Chinese Grand Canal. A summary of the projects of the last 6 years and a mapping of the 36 cities overlooking the Grand Canal told visitors about the urban, social, landscape and environmental implications of the new interventions on the world’s largest and oldest blue infrastructure. The installation was accompanied by a seminar attended by professionals and major Chinese institutions dealing with the subject.

The project answers the question “How can design improve the urban environment, the city and our life?”

Red Star Design Park defines a new model for a new lifestyle based on design 4.0, which contains principles of sharing and circular economy and good design practices. The overlapping masterplan: A structure composed of public functions gathered in flexible pavilions, the grouping of a community with different lifestyles that benefits from innovative community services, the design of a large green park.

Across Chinese Cities – House Vision, Collateral Event of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, is described in the Reporting from the front Catalog.

Special edition of the T + A Magazine entitled “Expo as Eco-driver from Shanghai to Milan”.

Architect Michele Brunello contributed with the article “Expolis, A Space-time Journey in Expo Past, Present and Future Milestones.

The Chinese metropolis are the places of development of new urban practices that use Design as a tool for urban regeneration and community building. In this context, the Chinese Design Weeks have developed themselves as big public events of urban experimentation, conceived as a testing ground for all forms of project, a very distant vision from the concept of design linked to the “product” or “services”. The event “A Journey in China Design Weeks” will involve the protagonists of the Chinese Design Weeks network in an innovative and engaging format.

Across Chinese Cities – Beijing is an investigation into the Chinese capital’s spatial program woven into its ‘otherly modern’ project which situates its traces by taking the historical district of Dashilar as a case study. The exhibition looks at processes of continuous adaptation from times present and past which remain paradigmatic for many contemporary cities like Beijing. ACC 2014 is a conversation between built forms and communities around an architecture of resilience and relationships unique to the District area.

Across Chinese Cities – China House Vision is part of the international program ‘Across Chinese Cities’ organized and promoted by Beijing Design Week. The exhibition stems from the House Vision project, a Pan-Asian platform of multidisciplinary research and development started by designer Kenya Hara for Japan in 2013.

Across Chinese Cities – China House Vision features for the first time the body of research so far produced with a team of China-based architects and experts. It addresses the changing role and habitat of architecture practice in today China by rendering manifest the contextual phenomena and research trajectories behind 14 architectural proposals.

Supported by Beijing Design Week, Beijing Tianzhu FreeTrade Zone, Beijing Airport Free Trade Zone and Slow Food China, the “CIAO – Bridge, the common border of creation” is a special project for celebrating the 40th anniversary of Sino-Euro’s formal diplomatic relations. It is curated by DONTSTOP Architettura and has been shown in Milan Malpensa Airport during the Expo 2015 in Milan. The project includes in one intalletion three artists’ works: by Katherine Xiao,Ludovica Anzaldi, Patrizia Piga and beautiful drawings made by children of Venus kindergarten.

“Four Hands” is part of an important project born in 2015 in China, promoted by the Ministry of Chinese Culture and National Base for International Cultural Trade entitled “China Design Round Up” presented for the first time in Italy during EXPO. “Four Hands” exhibition, which took place at the Spazio Otto Gallery, shows the products of four companies, among the most representative of China, considered “traditional craft models”.