Jinhua Architecture Park Opening

After three years of hard working, the city of Jinhua saw on October 20, 2007, the opening of the Jinhua Architecture Park, without any doubt one of the most exciting and high-quality small-urban developments China has seen during the past decade.

Already before the opening, on a Saturday morning at 8.45, the Jinhua Architectural Park has been widely published in international architecture magazines and on several websites. In DOMUS 894 (July/August 2006) Rita Capezzuto explains the history of Jinhua and the planning of the park as follows; “Jinhua is a city in the province of Zhejiang, in the central-eastern area of the People’s Republic of China, about 130 km south of Hangzhou. Including its outlying districts, it has a population of over 4,520,000. The city has an ancient history and a thriving economy based on industry, agriculture and tourism. In 2002 the city’s government decided to set up the Jindong New District in a formerly agricultural zone converted to urban land with high residential and service standards.

For this new development the artist Ai Wei Wei – son of a famous Jinhua poet who has worked with Herzog & de Meuron on several of their projects in China – was picked to design the river Yiwu wharf and a culture park south of the river. Herzog & de Meuron, who are very well known in China due in particular to the Olympic stadium under construction in Beijing, were appointed to draft the masterplan for Jindong and for a shopping centre. Ai Wei Wei later received a proposal from the city council to develop a park and a small museum on a long narrow site (80 x 2,200 metre circa) north of the river. The artist came up with a collective project, and brought in other architects and designers – 5 Chinese and 11 international – to contribute to the realisation of this green area. Seventeen public pavilions have now risen up along this strip of park, mainly utilising local materials: 17 low-budget follies, each with its own architect or designer’s cultural imprinting.�

The park opened in an official style, featuring speeches of locals government officials andfireworks, and was attended by most of the participating foreign architects, flying in from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, The Netherlands, Mexico and the US. Strolling over the site it was clear that still a lot of work needs to be done in order to live up the expectations that hitherto have been raised. Although the pavilions are largely finished, the park itself isn’t. Or let me correct, some of the main ambitions of the park underlying the well-functioning and use of it aren’t finished. The work that still needs to be done mainly consists out of the activation of the territory, as none of the pavillions (exhibition room, tea house, cafe house, archaelogical archives, restaurant, multi media or bridging tea house) had any programs or occupation so far. In that way, the opening was more the celebration of architecture before its occupancy than the experience of what this project might mean in terms of urban, architecture, park and daily Chinese life.

During the symposium on Saturday afternoon a couple of reality-checks and paradoxes emerged, hinting at the time it took, almost three years, to build this park, Ai Weiwei pointed at the limitations of China. It seems that the bigger the building is and the less time is spend on design, the faster one can build and occupy the space. Some of the architects hinted at the paradoxical state that for such a small project it was almost for them impossible to control the building process. This of course had mainly to do with the fact that they were in Europe or America and only sporadically updated about the progress of the project. But despite the difficulties in communicating the follow-up of the construction the results are remarkable, as many posed challenges in terms of the execution of these experimental architectures. The Swiss architecture office HHF explains on their website the following strategy they followed in order to deal with this long-distance uncertainty; “The ‘Mini Structure for Children’ is our first building in China. Considering the difficulties to control the construction over such a long distance, we designed a structure with very few details. Even if the built shape is complex in its geometry, the process of the construction could be described in a very simple way.â€?

As China in its understanding of architecture and urban space is still largely in the phase of developing an own identity the park has the peculiar quality to create the possibility to accept brand new ideas, maybe even the beginning of a new social movement in dealing with architecture through the future use of the park. This kind of architecture, someone even talked about micro-urbanism, could be the next challenge for Chinese architects, dealing with the small scale, focussing on improving daily life and urban culture.

Without any doubt this park is for Jinhua a means to put itself under the worldwide and national architecture spotlights. As such this is not just a story of seventeen follies, but time will tell if this means the start of an equally qualitative architectural and urban development of its surrounding area and if the words of Mr. Chen Kunzhong, Acting Mayor of Jinhua, will be heard as he stated at the opening of the symposium: “These unique and magnificent small and medium-sized landscapes enrich the culture flavors, enhance the reputation and improve the city taste of the city of Jinhua.â€? Only when in the coming years the programming the park and its surrounding will be completed the park will be able to answer early observations that this project would be an attempt to recreate a suburban condition, as hinted at in a piece called “China’s Suburban Folliesâ€? which states the following; “But somehow from the photos of Jinhua, the landscape is less dense and coordinated. Each folly is left alone with its land like the traditional suburb or modern sculpture garden. It is strange how the suburban vision so desired.â€?

After the opening I walked around in the large park, hopping from one folly to the other. Thoughts and visions of people desiring leisure and the possibility that this place would be a future urban park crossed my mind. I thought how future inhabitants would explore these new landscapes, leave their standardized, non-designed urban environments and mingle and escape from daily life into this exciting setting where their minds, bodies and families would engage in stimulating ways with architecture. The condition for them is there, the stage has been set, the opportunity given, the city opened up for it and the architects have done their work.

Ai Weiwei explained his motivations to invite young foreign architecture offices to participate in this project in the aforementioned interview with Hans Ullrich Obrist as follows; “I thought it was important to bring as many talented designers as possible into this project. At the moment China is in desperate need of new ideas, examples of creativity both from inside and outside, and new architectural blood. Conversely, many Western architects are very familiar with architectural theory but don’t get many oportunities to build, so this was a welcome occasion to experiment without having to worry about too many constraints.� The invited architects have indeed brought in new ideas and architectures, some better than other, and created a park that drifts between legacy, promise, challenge, desire, reality and dream.

Pictures by Bert de Muynck and Mónica Carriço

Links:

Photographer, Iwan Baan
http://iwan.com/photo_index_jinhua.php

Ai Weiwei’s impression of the opening weekend on his blog
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_473f90ad01000e4x.html

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_473f90ad01000e4z.html

DOMUS 894 (July/August 2006) – Jinhua Architecture Park, Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Ai Weiwei (download)
http://www.hhf.ch/etc/medialib/hhf/projects/baby_dragon/downloads.Par.0001.File.tmp//Users/herlach/HHF/HE_00_HHF/HHF_WWW/HHF_WWW%20Downloads/WWW_domus/Domus%20Jinhua%20Arch.%20Park.pdf

China’s Suburban Follies
http://www.artsjournal.com/aestheticgrounds/2007/02/chinas_suburban_follies.html