Ningbo’s newly completed Central Business District (CBD) belies its status as one of China’s oldest cities. The austere downtown landscape is the equivalent of architecture’s white-washed wall: a place of erasure, forgetting, and dubious progress. With the completion of Wang Shu’s Ningbo Museum in 2008, however, the Ningbo of the present is confronted by the forgotten landscape of its not too distant past. A craggy mountain of a building inspired by the region’s natural topographical features as well its unique crafts and architectural traditions, the Ningbo Museum is not simply an obligatory nod to a past quickly receding into obscurity. Neither is it a static monument whose purpose is to freeze history in place and capture it so that it may be set aside. It has the peculiar effect of something that is, in Wang Shu’s words, “half nature, half manmade,”1 something which is half living, an animated assemblage. It is this quality that allows it to combat the rise of what Rem Koolhaas famously termed “The Generic City,” a modular city of space without time, devoid of history and life itself.2 Arguing that this phenomenon is especially pronounced in Asian countries, Koolhaas ends his seminal chapter by pronouncing the city dead and saying we might as well “leave the theater.”3 This paper will argue that the Ningbo Museum calls us back into the modern architectural theater Koolhaas abandoned, applying a constructive approach in the face of the city as void. This is accomplished through a radical architectural patchworking project which finds meaning in the fragmentary. Uniting the realms of nature and culture, as well as past and present, Shu’s work foregrounds an idea of architecture as assembly, an assembly of place, voice, history, and heritage.
The Ningbo Museum sits in a plaza fringed by utilitarian government buildings. Newly constructed skyscrapers loom in the background (see fig. 1). In China, skyscrapers often foreshadow more skyscrapers to come. This has been the case since the first major land reforms of the mid-80s began to shift China towards a market-driven economy, a time during which Neville Mars claims “the Maoist dream of collective ownership was auctioned off in bits.”4 The rampant growth and urbanization that followed produced staggering figures: 23 new cities built annually in both the 80s and 90s.5 Such projects represent the paroxysm of 20th century Western modernity as Chinese architects zealously copied the most efficient aspects of Western architecture to create, in Wang Shu’s words, “huge, strong, shining, smooth, high tech, symbolic and monumental public buildings, and commercialized high-rise residential apartments.”6 Indeed, at the time of the Ningbo Museum’s construction, a forthcoming development of high-rise apartments was soon to hasten the city’s total transformation into what Mars terms a “slick city,” a place where any natural aberration or idiosyncrasy has been expunged in favor of the smooth and lean.7
In Koolhaas’ terms, the slick city is part and parcel of the Generic City, an urban environment that “is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability.”8 There can be no history of the Generic City because whatever does not fit within the latest and purest conception of functionality is simply destroyed with little afterthought. This phenomenon is described similarly in Walter Benjamin's well-known “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Concerned with what he considers a barbaric negligence toward history, Benjamin argues that “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”9 In an interview, Wang Shu describes how such a failure of recognition was manifested, in the case of Ningbo, as a problem within Chinese society’s conception of modernity itself.10 Citing the anger of some Ningbo residents upon learning Shu’s unorthodox structure would sit in the midst of the space most emblematic of the city’s progress, Shu argues that the modern should not entail simply the effacement of the old. Rather it should involve the careful inclusion of the old in an expanding repertoire of techniques. And so, in what Shu referred to as a “no memory area,”11 he began to construct a history museum from the fragments of the region’s own demolished history so that the residents might recognize themselves in their past.
Shu went about accomplishing this in the most literal sense. The newly minted city of Ningbo was not so long ago a grouping of 30 villages. All were razed, leaving “nothing but rubble” according to Shu.12 Rather than accepting what Koolhaas would term these “jackhammers of realism”13 and treating the cleared area as a blank canvas, Shu employed a long-standing local construction technique in creating the museum’s outer walls. Wa pian qiang, meaning clay tile wall, involves repurposing collected debris and piecing it together again, forming new walls from the ones that once stood in their place.14 The method was traditionally used by local craftsmen to cope with frequent typhoon damage, but is used here to shore up against a different kind of storm. To understand the nature of this storm, we can again turn to Benjamin's Theses. In his famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting, Angelicus Novelus, Benjamin terms the abstracted figure of an angel the “angel of history.” He imagines that the angel stares aghast at what others see as the onward tracking of history and sees only disaster piling wreckage upon wreckage. Though the angel wants to restore what has been lost, there is a storm which has “got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them”15 He stands as sole and passive observer, helpless against the tide of destruction that Benjamin identifies as the storm called progress. He has no choice but to be dragged along into the future so prized by society at large, a future revealed here to be no more than the logic of forgetting.
The Ningbo Museum rises as rubble reconstituted but it does not do so by turning back time as the angel so ardently wishes. The museum could be pictured not as constructed toward the past but, instead, toward a different future. Tackling the enormity of this project meant involving the very local craftsmen who were inheritors of the wa pian qiang legacy. Shu reports that since the relatively recent apotheosis of Western architecture in the Ningbo area, many of the craftsmen had already forgotten the technique and had to be retaught.16 Grass roots type work is important to Shu's process which he says “starts from small-scale experimental structures, until a design and construction method for larger-scale structures can be clearly defined and established.”17 The result of such painstaking research and collaborative preparation is a communal architectural patchworking clearly visible on the building’s facade (see fig. 2). Colorful, interwoven patches of gray stone and orange clay tiles salvaged from the debris of the destroyed villages are punctuated by more ancient specimens, bricks which date from the Ming, Qing, and even Tang dynasties, dating from between 400-1500 years old.18 A vision of aggregative building like this one departs substantially from the Generic City, which Koolhaas compares to an incomplete sketch, observing drolly, “The archaeologue of the 20th century needs unlimited plane tickets not a shovel.”19 By this he refers to the lack of depth in modern architecture, an institution which has come to espouse a thin spreading as opposed to a complex layering, resulting in a “dig” that turns up only the “document of its evaporation.”20 Patchworking architecture and thereby history means, instead, dealing in layers and overlap, creating a striated city rather than a slick one.
Scholars Jiang Jun and Kuang Xiaoming also take up the theme of archaeology in their critique and expansion of Koolhaas’ concept of the Generic City.21 For them, it is the interplay of time and space in an architectural context that lends depth to what otherwise becomes flattened space without time. Their alternative to Koolhaas’ catch all phrase is a “taxonomy of Chinese cities,” a system which they claim is also an “archaeology of time.”22 They reinsert the dimension of time, that is history, into their analysis of so-called generic Chinese cities, an aspect pointedly neglected by Koolhaas. Asserting that “macro-planning,” or a nationally standardized top-down version of planning, has always been an integral part of Chinese urban history, Jun and Xiaoming go on to define four different major phases of Chinese history during which this has remained constant. Whether under feudalism, colonialism, communism, or the current post-communist era, the history of Chinese urban politics has been a dynastic one. Indeed, Mars describes how for thousands of years, cities in China played the role of outposts, “perfect beacons of power” meant to maintain control over a vast empire.23 Outlining the taxonomic cartography of the modern Chinese city, Jun and Xiaoming capture this ancient precedent in imagining “a hyper-system of cities,” interconnected for political purposes by a generic spatial structure.24
Historicizing and politicizing the Generic City allows for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms which produce generic cities globally. Though the Generic City may have effaced its own history, it can still be viewed from the historical standpoint of a politically fashioned phenomenon. It is this perspective which allows Jun and Xiaoming to modify Koolhaas’ conflation of the Generic City with the tabula rasa. For them, generic cities actually act as the “counterforce of the ‘tabula rasa Modernism,”25 meaning they espouse a more cyclical action of destruction in order to construct and construction in order to destruct. The Western concept of the tabula rasa does not capture the added dimension of a uniquely Chinese understanding of time as cyclical. In this complex cultural amalgam, ancient Chinese thinking, which holds that “the relationship between the old and the new is symbiotic,”26 warps the traditional Western idea of a chronological or linear temporality. If we imagine time here as curved, then we can understand that Jun and Xiaoming bring to bear an additional fourth dimension upon the third dimension of archaeological depth that time brings to space. This fourth dimension consists not only of time layering space upon space but also time upon time in an equally destructive and creative system of recurrence.
We can sense the absence of this type of understanding in Koolhaas’ writing through the subtle schism in his definition of the Generic City. Though he uses the same terminology throughout, Koolhaas identifies two types of Generic Cities: the European city which has been so corrupted by late capitalism in the form of tourism so as to become the Generic City, and the Asian city which, fundamentally ahistoric, was never anything other than the Generic City. Using the colonial logic which first equates history with humanity and then strips the colonized of its history, Koolhaas describes the convergence between the Generic City and Asia as “a seeming contradiction in terms: the overfamiliar inhabited by the inscrutable.”27 Here, Asia and Asians as lump sums, indeed generic categories, are aligned with the unknowable and unsignifiable in a way that only something outside history could be. A similar logic prevails in his repeated denigration of the Generic City as aspiring to “tropicality,” abandoning the European model of a city that gravitates around a center, of city as “fortress,” in favor of an open, sprawling model of city as “mangrove forest.”28 In an environment where memory, nature, and life itself has been subordinated to architecture, where architecture appears as a colonizing force on the natural and historic landscape, we need Jun and Xiaoming’s conception of “overwritten times and mutated Zeitgeists,”29 rather than the colonial slant Koolhaas applies to a linear temporality which has itself become generic.
The Ningbo Museum not only layers and interweaves various Zeitgeists or phases in the region’s human history, but incorporates the added element of its natural history. The building as a whole is designed to resemble an enormous mountain (an important symbol in Chinese culture and mythology) to the effect that it catalogues the displacement not only of people, but also of the natural landscape in order to make room for the modern cityscape. For Shu, the city should not represent a triumph over nature, but a communion with it. In addition to the incorporation of natural forms into the larger form of the museum, a second technique for fashioning the building’s exterior shapes the walls alongside the patchwork of wa pian qiang (see fig. 3). Called zhu tiao mo ban hun nin tu,30 it involves not a revamping of old regional building practice, but a novel method of allowing nature to leave its mark, quite literally, on architecture. Moulding the concrete walls with bamboo canes, Shu and his team soften the otherwise stark and unyielding appearance of a material closely associated with modernity, progress, and efficiency. Concrete’s utilitarian flatness in another iteration becomes the ideal material for impression, for capturing whatever comes into contact with it before it hardens, whether it's an errant foot stepping on wet pavement or natural forms fossilized in a man-made structure. In this way, the Ningbo Museum is not only inspired by nature but interacts with it as though in dialogue, an active style of reanimation as opposed to passive recollection.
Benjamin closes his Theses with the idea of a crystallized “monad,” a configuration of isolated times, places, moments, and images previously separated within the continuum of what he calls “homogeneous, empty time,”31 a concept similar to linear or generic time. For Benjamin, the work of historical redemption is done by harnessing “jetztzeit” or now-time rather than treating time as an empty unit of measure. It is something akin to the Benjaminian monad, an assemblage pregnant with meaning, that Shu creates in patchworking nature, human history, and memory through the medium of architecture. Where the Generic City is fractal and, according to Koolhaas, is the outcome of “an endless repetition of the same simple structural module,”32 the Ningbo Museum combats the modular with what could be termed the “monadular,” a constellation of significant fragments of Chinese history, tradition, mythology, and identity salvaged from the rubble of progress. In Shu’s eyes, this is nothing less than poetry. Denison and Ren describe how this view demonstrates Shu's close affinity to the Chinese literati tradition and old class of ruling intelligentsia.33 Indeed, referring to the unique techniques used to treat the museum’s outer walls, Shu claims such experimentation to be “a materialization of this abstract poetic expression,”34 linking art and architecture in a specifically Chinese context. Channeling this tradition means rejecting the linear time of progress in favor of the cyclical time of redemption. Through this act, however, the traditional cyclical temporality of ancient Chinese thought does not remain in its original form, but is transmuted into something hybrid, something patchworked.
Work like this, the work of “blasting open the continuum of history” in Benjamin’s terms,35 challenges Koolhaas’ assertion that the exponential character of human growth “implies that the past will at some point become too “small” to inhabit.”36 The Ningbo Museum stands as evidence that history is not a finite substance. For Shu, the stakes of this stance are enormous. Not only does the integrity of the architectural profession hang in the balance, but more importantly, people’s capacity to “make judgments about value in their daily lives” is at risk.37 This connects the aforementioned project of assembling a different future to larger ethical concerns as the very shape of human thought is shown to be influenced by architecture. Shu laments that, recently, professionalism in the field means a disregard for the immense responsibility this entails. In order to “strip the future of its magic” in the Benjaminian sense,38 the future mythicized by progress, and restore humanity to a dehumanized architecture, Shu advocates the pursuit of “delightful living”39 rather than efficient living. Forged by a delight in history, nature, and human creativity, the patchwork mountain of the Ningbo Museum faces the typhoon of progress and does not bow to it.
Figure 1. The Ningbo Museum and the surrounding Ningbo Central Business District. (Brendan McGetrick, “Ningbo History Museum,” Domus, 3 March 2012, http://www.domusweb.it/en/from-the-archive/2012/03/03/ningbo-history-museum.html.)
Figure 2. Wa pian qiang patchwork on the outer facade of the Ningbo Museum. (Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, “The Reluctant Architect: An Interview with Wang Shu of Amateur Architects Studio,” Architectural Design 82, no. 6 (2012): 122-129).
Figure 3. The wall on the left fashioned using the zhu tiao mo ban hun nin tu building technique faces the wall on the right, which is created via wa pian qiang. (Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, “The Reluctant Architect: An Interview with Wang Shu of Amateur Architects Studio,” Architectural Design 82, no. 6 (2012): 122-129).
Notes
1. Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, “The Reluctant Architect: An Interview with Wang Shu of Amateur Architects Studio,” Architectural Design 82, no. 6 (2012): 122-129.
2. Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” S, M, L, XL, (U.S.A: Monacelli Press, 1995), 1248-1264.
3. Ibid., 1264.
4. Neville Mars, “The Chinese City: A Self-Contained Utopia,” Architectural Design 78, no. 5 (2008): 41.
5. Ibid.
6. Denison and Ren, “The Reluctant Architect,” 128.
7. Mars, “The Chinese City,” 42.
8. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1250.
9. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Reflections, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
10. Brendan McGetrick, “Ningbo History Museum,” Domus, 3 March 2012, http://www.domusweb.it/en/from-the-archive/2012/03/03/ningbo-history-museum.html.
11. Ibid.
12. Denison and Ren, “The Reluctant Architect,” 124.
13. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1252.
14. Denison and Ren, “The Reluctant Architect.”
15. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257.
16. McGetrick, “Ningbo History Museum.”
17. Denison and Ren, “The Reluctant Architect,” 124.
18. McGetrick, “Ningbo History Museum.”
19. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1263.
20. Ibid.
21. Jiang Jun and Kuang Xiaoming, “The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling,” Architectural Design 78, no. 5 (2008): 16-21.
22. Ibid., 20.
23. Mars, “The Chinese City,” 42
24. Jun and Xiaoming, “The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities,” 19.
25. Ibid., 19.
26. Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, “Transgression and Progress in China: Wang Shu and the Literati Mindset,” Architectural Design 83, no. 6: (2013): 43
27. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1250.
28. Ibid., 1255.
29. Jun and Xiaoming, “The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities,” 20.
30. Denison and Ren, “The Reluctant Architect.”
31. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261.
32. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1251.
33. Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, “Transgression and Progress in China.”
34. Denison and Ren, “The Reluctant Architect,” 126.
35. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262.
36. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1248.
37. Denison and Ren, “The Reluctant Architect,” 128.
38. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 264.
39. Denison and Ren, “The Reluctant Architect,” 128.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Denison, Edward and Guang Yu Ren. “The Reluctant Architect: An Interview with Wang Shu of Amateur Architects Studio.” Architectural Design 82, no. 6 (2012): 122-129.
Denison, Edward and Guang Yu Ren. “Transgression and Progress in China: Wang Shu and the Literati Mindset.” Architectural Design 83, no. 6: (2013).
Jun, Jiang and Kuang Xiaoming. “The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling.” Architectural Design 78, no. 5 (2008): 16-21.
Koolhaas, Rem. “The Generic City.” S, M, L, XL. U.S.A: Monacelli Press, 1995. 1248-1264.
Mars, Neville. “The Chinese City: A Self-Contained Utopia.” Architectural Design 78, no. 5 (2008): 41.
McGetrick, Brendan. “Ningbo History Museum.” Domus. 3 March 2012. http://www.domusweb.it/en/from-the-archive/2012/03/03/ningbo-history-museum.html
