Design Research and Methodology 301-671B
BEIJING MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
______
Submitted by
Jianjun Sun (110148558)
M.Arch 1
Email:
Feb.3, 2003
Thesis proposal: Dialogue with Hutong (alley)
Old buildings have much to teach us about the values and attitudes of ancestors, and their skills in commanding technology. But what we have inherited should not be fetishized: we should approach the past with the same degree of courage as our predecessors, adding our layers of meaning to the ones given to us.
–Architectural Review Comment (June 1999)
During the past two decades and a half, China has undergone a dramatic change, a peaceful but profound transformation since Deng Xiaoping launched the Reform and Open Policy. Under its new policy, Beijing is becoming the economic center of this biggest country in Asia. The 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing also will propel this capital forward, perhaps moving it ahead faster than would have been possible otherwise. And these economical, political and social changes have had a significant impact on the field of architecture, as the country has responded to the need for many new public buildings and facilities: transportation stations, office buildings, cultural buildings, education and health buildings, affordable housing, and more.
Meanwhile, with prosperity Beijing is faced with a tremendous challenge that may bring about the destruction of its traditional street life and humane proportions. Large sections of existing traditional housing and hutongs(alley) are being torn down for these new buildings.
My thesis sets out from the idea of recovering the original technological, spatial and aesthetic nature of existing architecture, with its particular hutong(alley) space patterns, adapting these to its new function. While concerning with the sensitivity to how to construct over the constructed, as well as the lack of gallery spaces and facilities in Beijing, the thesis proposes a Museum of Fine Arts—with a traditional hutong block nearby the Shichahai Lake, Beijing. This museum would be established, in respond to the intriguing typology of the Grand Axis of Beijing and the waterfront of Shichahai Lake, to bridge the gap between contemporary architecture and its heritage buildings, so that intervention into the urban fabric could be kept to a minimum.
Each site has its own specific character that is dictated by location, geography and history. One of the aims of architecture was to reveal the spirit of the site by laying bare hidden traces of place and history.
–Christian Norberg-Schulz
Site
The proposed redevelopment area lies the southeast bank of Shichahai Lake, the west of the Grand Axis of Beijing which terminates at the two magnificent structures, the Bell Tower and the Drum. Since its founding in the 13th century, this triangle district has been popular with its dwellers who served the emperor. It is rich in culture and history. For example, many stories mention the its hutong that meanders between the courtyard houses, Baimi Xiejie, or “White Rice Oblique Alley”, where Zhang Zhidong, an famous politician of Qing Dynasty, lived about one century and a half ago.
However, Beijing’s rapid industrialization has brought about population increase and environmental pollution to the further detriment of this district. Courtyard houses meant for single families have been turned into multi-family compounds. Occasional vacant lots in the neighborhood are taken up by spontaneous settlers. Even a nearby temple dedicated to Fire God has been converted to P.L.A.’s dwellings for its staff. Despite some efforts made by the government, the living standard in the district is still far from satisfactory.
After the successful Beijing bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, the capital city renewed its master plan. According this plan, the land along Shichahai Lake is to be counted as one of 25 Historic and Cultural Preservation Districts, and the Grand Axis is to be re-emphasized in Dianmen Street with traditional public building or green public spaces on its both sides. While providing funds to relocate all residents, the government would make more investment for the renovation, restoration, and rehabilitation of existing buildings. Consequently, the full exploitation of the potentials of this district will be a great challenge.
Proposed Program:
- Entrance
- Tickets
- Reception
- Fine arts history exhibition halls
- Main exhibition halls
- Temporary exhibition hall
- Library
- Administration offices
- Meeting room
- Bookstore
- Auditorium
- Restaurant
- Cafeteria
- Locker rooms
- Storage
- Workshop
- Studio
- Small ferry
Precedents
Education Institute, Zamora, Spain (architect: Manuel de las Casas)
Lying on the north-west frontier of Spain where it joins Portugal, Zamora is one of the smaller Castilian cities, yet it still has a strong historic presence. In medieval romances, the city was evocatively known as la bien cercada (the closed one) on account of its virtually impregnable fortifications. (One notable siege lasted seven months.) Ranged along the sloping banks of the River Douro are the thick-walled, hermetic enclaves of its ancient quarters. The city is studded with simple Romanesque and early Gothic churches dating from the twelfth century, built to consolidate old Castile’s sense of security following a series of victorious campaigns against Moorish invaders.
Inevitably, some of Zamora’s churches have fallen into disrepair and disuse, but their very particular functional and material qualities (combined with the growing secularization of Spanish society) often deter attempts at rehabilitation. This was the challenge faced by the Madrid-based architect Manuel de las Casas, who won a competition to design a new institute for Hispano-Portugrese studies on a site occupied by the remnants of a medieval church. The extreme contradiction between the instinctive urge to preserve history and the demands of a modern educational building might seem hard to reconcile, yet de las Casas has responded to this difficult brief with great sensitivity. His key concern was to restore and enhance the surviving buildings, but these are tactfully brought into conversation with a series of new interventions. These parts are explicitly and identifiably contemporary, but they also preserve a sense of the original complex, like brand new pieces in an immemorial jigsaw.
Set on a slightly elevated site overlooking the River Douro and the city beyond, the early Gothic church and its attendant chapels originally formed part of a larger convent, By the time de las Casas arrived, most of the original convent and church buildings had been lost; all that remained were fragments of the apse of the main church and parts of smaller side chapels.
The L-shaped configuration of the new building organizes and defines the external spaces along the lines established by the original convert plan. Low, horizontal volumes divide the site in two. On the north side a new public garden planted with rows of cypress bushes and plum trees recolonizes ground originally occupied by the nave of the main church, now ling since demolished. A block of three classrooms runs along the south edge of the garden, linked at right angles to the library. Facing east over the garden towards the church ruins, the library houses the librarian’s offices and archives at ground level, with a large reading room above. A glass curtain wall opens up the reading room to spectacular views of the river and city beyond. On the south side of the convent precincts, the new wings enclose a more intimate quadrangle on the site of the old cloister.
Echoing historic precedent, the classrooms and library spill out onto the public garden, while residential rooms (modern versions of monks’ cells) ate grouped around the quieter quadrangle. In the middle of the quad is a smooth lawn, planted with small lime trees, and a restored well. Old and new elements are unified by a flat roof that extends to become a sheltering portico, protecting and framing the ruins.
The new parts explore an elegantly reductive, Miesian vocabulary of linear boxes clad in curtain wall glazing and rusted Corten steel panels. The simple formal language allows the tones and textures of the different materials to be clearly articulated, most expressively between the cream stone of the church fragments and the rusted steel cladding of the new building. The artificially weathered steel also resonates with the eroded stone of the ancient remains, although in the case of the latter, the patina of ageing was the work of centuries rather than chemically induced.
Wherever possible, the existing fabric is gently coaxed back into use, so the old buildings are properly recolonized instead of simply being static scenography. The convent’s former cellar, for instance, is transformed into a function hall, with a cafeteria above. The San Buenaventura Chapel, near the entrance, is restored as a smaller hall for receptions or meetings and its apse reconstructed as a modest entrance portico for the entire complex.
Within the larger Dean Chapel, de las Casas has placed a small exhibition and conference building. Part of the new space is enclosed by a tall glazed screen that appears magically and ethereally insubstantial against the massive stone walls of the chapel. The glass is held in place by very thin steel mullions, a particularly refined piece of detailing that exemplifies the care and tectonic sensitivity evident throughout the project. Light pours into the chapel through wide slots of clerestory glazing. Above, new roofs of stone and steel trace the outlines of old geometries.
Lying to the south of Dean Chapel of another remnant of the original convent, the Escalante Chapel, which has the practical advantage of being able to close off spaces that are not in use. Set against the mystical ruins, de las Cadas’ logical, linear boxes also explore the polarity of the rational against romantic, yet both are affirmed in a scheme which unites the city’s past and present with intelligence, clarity and sensitivity. (By CARLA BERTOLUCCI, from Architectural Review, 1999, June)
Hedmark Museum, Archbishopric Museum, Hamar, Norway 1967-1979 (architect: Sverre Fehn)
If you chase after the past, you will never catch up with it. Only by manifesting the present can you make the past speak. The main architectural concept has been to create a museum which preserves the existing remains of Hamar Bispegard and orhamar barn and makes it possible for the archaeological excavations to function as an important part of the actual museum, in line with the exhibits. The construction in connection with the building of the new museum does not at any point touch the medieval walls and ruins. A "suspended museum" has been created, and this makes it possible to be in a position to understand history---not with the aid of pages of a book---but as it appears in the world of archaeology.
The museum has the following main dispositions:
1. The north-facing wing (the old cow barn) laid out as an ethnographic museum.
2. The west-facing wing (middle wing) dedicated entirely to the Middle Ages.
3. In the south-facing wing is the auditorium,departments for temporary exhibitions and offices for the administration of the museum.
The museum is not limited to the interior of the walls and roof of the barn. With the aid of ramps, its rhythm and traffic are directed so that constant contact with the excavations is also maintained around the building.
The work on the museum on Domkyrkeodden (Cathedral Point) has entailed a continual confrontation with another epoch in time---the Middle Ages.
But the very nature of its transitormess, the tree belongs to eternity---walls belong to history.
The inclusion of the ruins entails an irregularity which at once attracts attention in that it is in contradictory relation to the "precision" of our day.
But gradually this picture changes and you acknowledge that this art of building has a precision dictated by the rhythm of human beings, the formation of the landscape and the movement of the sun, wind, and rain.
The plan of Hamar Cathedral probably appeared one morning in the dew-soaked grass to---let us call him the architect. The drawings in the grass made by his feet provided the dimensions of the building and formed the foundations of a working process which could only be corrected by the resistance of the stones and the temperament of the walls. The result of this building process, in so many ways an impulse of the eye, manages to release a dialogue with your heart and mind. So it becomes a judge of the situation of the day, in which the building has locked itself firmly into organisational forms which totally frustrate and kill all intuitive development. The result is a meaningless primitivism because the necessary proximity is no longer there. The architect no longer responds to our countryside and our concept values. That is why human beings of our day are constantly drifting into places on the earth where human precision is yet to be found. (A+U 1999:01)
Crafts Museum, New Deli, India 1979 (Architect: Charles Correa)
Many of the temples in the past (at Bali, Borobudur, Shrirangam, etc.) are structured around an open-to-sky ceremonial path – a concept which has great potential for our architecture today. This museum, casual and accepting of the artisan’s vernacular, if organized around a cenreal spine which acts like a village street. As one travels down this path, one catches glimpses of the sections that lie on either side. Entrances to – and exits from – each section are easily discernable as they always occurs in the sheltered space under the overhead bridges. Thus one can visit just a particular area, or progress through all the sections along a continuous path. At the end of the sequence, one exits via the roof garden – which forms an amphitheater for folk dances, as well as an open-air display for large terra cotta horses and other such village crafts. This idea of using all the surfaces of the puzzle-box was also developed in our project (1968, unbuilt) for Expo `70 at Osaka. The images of this scaleless non-building echo the old bathing ghats, such as those at the incomparable Sarkhej in Ahmedabad.
The first stage of the Crafts Museum was completed in 1977 and second and third stages are under construction. In these, an old wooden haveli from Gujerat is being integrated into one of the courtyards.( Process: Architecture, Number 20)
Bibliography
Ibelings, Hans (1995), Supermodernism, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam
Kok Meng, Tan (2000), Asia Architects, Select Book Pte Ltd. Singapore.
Treister, Kenneth (1987), Chinese Architecture, Urban Planning, and Landscape Design, Florida Architecture and Building Research Center.
Correa, Charles (2000), Housing and Urbanization, Thames & Hudson, London
Murotani, Bunji (1980), Process: Architecture, Number 20, Process Architecture Publishing Co. Ltd. Tokyo.
Architectural Review, 1999, June, Neil Williams, London
A+U, 1999, January, A+U Publishing Co. Ltd, Tokyo
Bohigas, Oriol (1991), Barcelona :City and Architecture, 1980-1992, Rizzoli, New York
Balfour, Alan (1995), World City, Berlin, ERNST & SOHN, Berlin