xport – beijing design week

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.

Spices have been interpreted as elements with heterogeneous and multi-sensory features, able to generate new tactile, visual and perceptual experiences. Therefore the architecture looses its figurative limit and becomes a perceptual and emotional space in constant evolution. A knowledge journey through a sequence of ‘experiential zones’, with tasting points, installations, technological displays and events, revealing, how different cultures cultivate, prepare and use spices in food, medicines and socio-cultural rituals.

Across Chinese Cities – Beijing, Collateral Event of the Venice International Architecture Biennale was awarded by ADI in 2015 in the Communication Design section.

DONTSTOP architettura, together with a group of architects and architects, has set up a work group called Archimacao with the aim of intervening on the Macao building, the new independent center for arts, culture and research in Milan.

In line with the broader vision of Macao, which sees cultural production as a common good, the project was illustrated in a public debate. Archimacao renounces the aesthetic dimension in favor of a programmatic and procedural dimension. An incremental project that aims to put Macao in a position to imagine and realize as many uses as possible of space over time.

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.

At the same time of the launch “Domus Urban stories”guide, it is a collection of fifteen exceptional memoirs of the culture, architecture and design world. Domus takes a picture as relevant as ever of the present day Milan, of its past and the sensations that it provokes, with an exhibition designed and conceived by DONTSTOP Architettura.
The section on the ground floor was a counterpoint to the description on the first floor about the locations represented by the section of driving and visions of the future – the “Milano Next” – 15 special contributors involved for the occasion by Domus including Kuzuyo Sejima, Jasper Morrison and Maurizio Cattelan.

“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”.

The exhibition design for the opening cerimony of Beijing Design Week 2012 at the Beijing Millennium Square it develops in a linear way and includes 3 big gates that distinguish the different thematic areas passages. The main theme of the exhibition is the relationship between city and nature, represented in the graphics designed by Yellow Office.