A proposal: sunken temple at Fuciao Village

This work models an existing folk temple 80 km west of Shanghai and its relationship to the earth. The stacked newspaper represent the 200 meters of layered soft sedimentary soils beneath the temple. Like the read newspapers, each strata of the modeled earth has expired and is buried by what the next day brings. Only this past year, an additional two meters of earth has been added around the temple for flood proofing. The half buried temple is cut into the stack of newspapers. The sunken artifact registers the abrupt recent extrusion of the earth, the original ground plane shared with the dismantled village it once served, and its place within the greater geologic depth of the site. The sunken temple is the site of the masters thesis.

The Wusong Corridor

from Jeffrey Cheng on Vimeo.

The Emerging 1 hour Mega-City

Population Growth: When speed, not geography, define the boundaries of the metropolis.

Non - Place

Marc Auge believes that our times, what he calls supermodernity, is responsible for a particular type of place or what he describes as non-places. He argues that the non-place are the places in transit we increasingly find ourselves in. These are not places designed to accommodate a social awareness. Instead, they only service an immediate means, what Auge define categorize as transport, transit, commerce and leisure. They are the airports, train stations, highways, casinos and even supermarkets.

Auge argues that non-places are fundamentally different the places of modernity of Jean Starobinski, Charles Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin. Places of modernity were able to accept a version of the past in a present that "supersedes it but still lays claim to it" (61). To Auge, supermodernity has created non-anthropologic spaces where the individual is unable to recover the past. As such, non-places hold no memory. They are loyal to the ephemeral and fleeting present only. They are neither "relational, historical or concerned with identity" (63). Places that are relational, historical or concerned with identity are "listed, classified, promoted the status of places of memory" (63). They are subject a death by museification and preservation.

Still, one element identified much earlier by Walter Benjamin holds true, that of solitude. The non-place, is shared with nobody but oneself. The blurred landscape from the speeding car is unrecognizable, and history and culture, the stuff that connects us with each other, also blur. The only thing a passenger in non-places can see and hear is himself, and their fellow passengers, as freed from the landscape and disoriented as the viewer himself.

“a person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver. Perhaps he is still weighed down by the previous day’s worries, the next day’s concerns; but he is distanced from them temporarily by the environment of the moment. Subjected to a gentle form of possession, to which he surrenders himself with more or less talent or conviction, he tastes for while - like anyone who is possessed - the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing.”

What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of himself, but in truth it is a pretty strange image. The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fat that it echoes millions of others...The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nore relations; only solitude and similitude." (83)

Auge, Marc. Non-Places: An introduction to Supermodernty. London: Verso, 1995.

Temple to Water - plan

Topography of Terror, Berlin

memory & architecture at the limits

Topography of Terror refers to the activities within Gestapo and SS in Nazi Germany, and the actual site of the headquarters out of which the two institutions operated. The building was ravaged by war, and remained largely grown over ruins largely forgotten until the 1980's. Within the last three decades, as many ideas competitions were held for a museum on site. These included Peter Zumthor's widely published winning entry that remains unrealized. The struggle to find a suitable architectural solution for the site reflects a wider coming to terms with a horrific past. Topography of Terror provide rich ground for the study of how architecture might remember the past while negotiating a future, and shifting position of architecture as an enabler of these goals.

2008 first place winners, Ursula Wilms, Architektin BDA. Their scheme was realized and opened in May, 2010

2008 second place winner, Kraus + Kraus Architekten

The masterful 1992 proposal by Peter Zumthor

In Review: The Interdisciplinary prospects of reading 'Yuan ye' by Stanislaus Fung

In his essay, The Interdisciplinary Prospects of Reading 'Yuan Ye,' Stanislaus Fung seeks to free a classic text on classical gardens of its modernist moorings (rationally driven) to include a Chinese epistemological reading (phenomenologically experienced). He begins with a careful deconstruction of the treaties title, Yuan ye, literally garden smelting. Fung attributes the unfamiliar imagery in the title to the smelting of bronzes, or in fact any artistic endeavor to produce not objects of representation, a signifier for metaphysical meaning, but the actual presentation of metaphysical reality. For this purpose, Fung refers to the work of Roger T. Ames, "In our tradition [western], image in the vernacular combines the notions of perception and imagination, where the mimetic, representative, figurative and fictive connotations of image are derived from the ontological disparity between transcendentally "real" world and the concrete world of experience. The absence of such ontological disparity in the Confucian model will mean that the image is the presentation rather than the representation of a configured world at concrete, literal and historical levels."

Fung continues by expanding the reading of Yuan Ye as he dose with the treatise title, by including epistemologic differences between Modernism, Post modernist critique and classical Chinese thought in architecture and garden making (p.223). Discussions on

The essay traces broadening perspectives on garden making offered since Siren Oswald's and Maggie Keswick's primarily aesthetic considerations to more recent interests in experiential derived meaning. Discussion on differences in ways of knowing in the East and West deepened by the notions of theory and practice are especially successful in unlocking meaning in Chinese classical gardens. Fung writes that "in contrast with classical Western epistemology where 'knowing' assumes a mirroring correspondence between objective world and subjective representations, Chinese knowing is participatory, creative and performative, indicating 'an unwillingness to allow for the separation between theory and praxis and between fact and value." (p. 221).

By articulating layers of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approaches to Yuan Ye, Fung unseats the adoption of Yuan Ye as celebrated manual for garden design. Instead, the essay invites an experiential or 'lived in' reading of the text, in keeping with its classical Chinese epistemology. The essay also takes from Augustin Berque and David L. Hall, who suggest that the phenomenological aspects imbedded in classical Chinese are alive in Post Modern view in "looking beyond the modern landscape, and proposing the 'reintegration of the worlds of art, science and morality' ." (p. 215) Ultimately, The Interdisciplinary Prospects of Reading 'Yuan Ye' not only enriches the possibilities for reading Yuan Ye, but advances the study of classical Chinese garden as a particularly fertile pursuit for not only designers in contemporary China, but a to all critics of a technologically driven world.

Stanislaus FUNG. The Interdisciplinary prospects of reading 'Yuan ye.' In Studies in the history of gardens & designed landscapes: an international quarterly. v. 18, 1998.