Global Architecture China 08 | East Gallery

May - June, 2008

This year’s China Global Architecture was based in hutong fabric of the central city, just steps from Ghost Street, Beijing’s food street, and on the newly opened line 5 of the subway. Classes and workspace were located across the street from our hotel at Beilab, the artist in residency space of Theatre in Motion, a Beijing experimental dance and theatre company. 

The curriculum consisted of two courses. The first Hungry Urbanization: Eating Beijing was a research course focused on an understanding of contemporary urban issues in China as well as a detailed study of the food systems in the capital, through a series of lenses from production, consumption and distribution, from both its social / cultural to its environmental / physiological dimensions. The course was taught by Adrian Blackwell and Xu Jian, from the Sichuan Polytechnic University and was structured as a collaboration with professor Meng Yue of Tsing Hua / UofT and her literature students from Tsing Hua University. 

The second course was divided into two charrettes: the first, 13th line Superlinearity, was a collaboration between Daniels’ Adrian Blackwell and Moving Cities, an urban research platform based in Beijing, directed by Bert de Muynck and Monica Carrico. This charrette examined the commuter rail line on the northern periphery of Beijing through the lens of three primary systems: circulation, productive landscapes and new forms of work. The second charrette, Yangzi Delta 2020 urban sponge, was taught by Adrian Blackwell in collaboration with Xu Jian and Tong Lam of the University of Toronto’s History department. It consisted of remaking the famous Song Dynasty scroll painting: “Along the river during Qingming Festival” for the year 2020. The project functioned as an investigation of the Chinese in-between city region for the southern trip to Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai.