As we are entering 2021 after a year of anxiety and uncertainties, what are your expectation for our future? The UN75 survey reports that most people around the world hold greater optimism for the future: “Globally, many more respondents believe people will be better off in 2045 than today (49%) compared to those who believe people will be worse off (32%).”
This year, architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, has been granted to Grafton Architects, a Dublin-based architectural firm mainly ran by female partners Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. For the first time ever in its 42-year history, due to the constraints set by Covid-19 global pandemic, the organizers of the Pritzker Prize decided to use Livestream the award ceremony. Having reached the end of 2020, ArchDaily has summed up what current and previous Pritzker Prize winners have accomplished during this turbulent year.
In recent years, with the accelerated urban development of public spaces in China, public washrooms have been assigned numerous new roles. Designers have come up with a variety of proposals which suggest turning public washrooms into a place where social gathering can be redefined, and temporary stay can be more engaging. Although the scale of public washrooms is significantly smaller than that of any other type of architecture, Chinese architects have been working innovatively on fitting the public washrooms into the changing social contexts. Below are a few examples that demonstrate some current architectural experiments with public washroom design in China.
Sigmund Freud, the author of “The Interpretation of Dreams” and the founder of Psychoanalysis, once argued that, “A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfillment in the creative work.”
As our cities continue to grow and expand rapidly, there has been an increasing demand for architects and craftsmen to build houses more cost-efficiently under tight deadlines. Modular architecture has been introduced as a concept which involves assembling multiple pre-fabricated modules on site to create a working unit. By joining similar elements together in various ways, modular architecture allows for more flexibilities in design and standardized repair.
For centuries, Hutongs have been recognized as one of the most treasured types of vernacular housing in China. Witnessing the cultural and historical transformation in Beijing ever since the Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368), the name Hutong is derived from a Mongolian word that means ‘water well’. In fact, this term was given to small streets that originated during the Yuan Dynasty when the emperor attempted to organize the urban fabric in a grid-like pattern in order to manage properly property ownership and to form an efficient transit system.
According to the United Nation’s “The World’s Cities in 2018”, it is estimated that, “by 2030, urban areas are projected to house 60 percent of people globally and one in every three people will live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants.” Also, between 2018 and 2030, it is estimated that the number of cities with 500,000 inhabitants or more is expected to grow by 23 percent in Asia. China, as the largest economy in Asia, with a GDP (PPP) of $25.27 trillion, is expanding rapidly, both economically and demographically.
With more and more migrant workers coming into the bigger cities in China, it has become increasingly difficult for workers to find an affordable place to live. Some people decide to move away from urban centers and bear with the lengthy commute time, while others are seeking creative design solutions to transform their home into a tiny, functional space to meet their daily needs.
Constrained by a lack of transportation and resources, vernacular architecture has started adapting the distinct strategy of utilizing local materials. By analyzing projects which have successfully incorporated these features into their design, this article gives an overview of how traditional materials, such as tiles, metal, rocks, bamboo, wooden sticks, timber, rammed earth and bricks are being transformed through vernacular architecture in China.
Over the past two centuries, cities in China have multiplied and expanded on a large scale, under accelerated urbanization. Mass demolition of the old city fabric, occurring everywhere, is leaving industrial debris and fragmented cultural artifacts buried forever, under shiny new skyscrapers. As old Chinese cities are collapsing and new urban centers are outspreading, a part of the city was lost, the old demolished landscape. Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, the first Chinese citizens to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, responded to this past-present relation by working with recycled materials and traditional know-how. In the following, we explore some of this couple's renowned works such as Ningbo History Museum, Ningbo (2008), Xiangshan Campus of China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2004), and Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum (2005), to examine his humanistic approach to the city.
