Student Work from Graduate Studio Trip to Beijing to be Part of Exhibition
Fifteen students from the University of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design, including one student from the College of Journalism & Electronic Media, traveled this past spring to Beijing for a long workshop and site visit. Led by Professor Edgar Stach, the students and faculty worked in coordination with students and faculty from Tsinghua and Beijing universities on two urban development projects addressing high-density housing problems. Work from the Beijing studio will be part of the Divergent Convergences Exhibition in Beijing in August.
The UT Student team visited traditional and new housing projects in Beijing and Tianjin and worked on developing design schemes for horizontal and vertical hutongs, the archaic and densely packed original housing centers of Beijing. These new designs would be located in central Beijing, adjacent to several historical sites as well as the famous Steven Holl Building.
Stach also presented public lectures at Tsinghua University and Beijing University about performance architecture, an emerging design paradigm that influences how architecture is conceptualized and produced. The lecture explored current and future developments in performance-based design and covered the topic in nature, architecture and engineering.
Stach received a $5,000 grant from Ready for the World, the international and intercultural initiative established to promote a culture of diversity on campus, to promote the collaboration with the Chinese universities.
The college and Tsinghua University are planning future collaborations.
The Divergent Convergences Exhibition, hosted by the University of Southern California, focusing on Beijing, will collect the work of architecture students and researchers from across the country, produced over the past decade. Projects will range in scale from individual works of architecture to proposals on an urban scale.
More specifically, the selected projects will illustrate the responses of students and researchers to a series of questions critically relevant to Beijing today: How can architecture adapt to a hyper-compressed design and construction schedule? Should ancient neighborhoods be demolished to make way for new construction? Can cities accommodate rapid demographic change without opening up irreparable social rifts? How dense should cities become? How can sustainability be achieved in the context of increased industrial production?
Ultimately, this multiplicity of investigative angles will constitute an in-depth study on Chinese urbanism and architecture in the context both of global economy and local culture.
UT is among 15 other American universities participating in the exhibition, including Princeton, MIT and Harvard.
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