digital

Scripted in Beijing

Since 2004 Neal Leach has been curating an Architectural Biennial in Beijing, exposing the country to some of the most innovative and impressive architecture from schools and architects around the world. This year a workshop in Scripting and Parametric processes was held in conjunction with the exhibition, just another one of those good ideas that Leach is able to make happen. Somehow I manage to persuade my company to allow me the time off and to participate in the workshop. I am curious, can my mind into finally learning scripting (not another new computer program it groans) and how these new techniques will be adopted by the local industry. Can China go Parametric / Algorithmic?
One day before the workshop, my body finally succumbs to the dangers local cuisine. Dumplings on the street or takeway noodles ? I?m not sure which is to blame, but this is not a good start to my trip. Somehow I make it to Beijing and to my hotel, but the day of sightseeing and exploring is replaced by rehydrating and sleeping. In the evening I get out to the Olympics Precinct. I limp home for more water, plain egg noodles and try and squeeze some comfort out my hard mattress and equally hard pillow (see wheat bag).

82 students including 20 other foreigners attend the workshop. The room is an above average size classroom and packed. The main door to the building is closed and it takes me three attempts to find the entry, typical.

The week is augmented with lectures from each of the tutors and key guests, tutorials in the new skill sets, then a small assignment due for the end of the week. Organised by the guys at Node, co-founded by Qiang Chang, Ning Duo, Alvin Huang, Yan Gao and Feng Xu, with interests in digital design in China. Chang, Yan & Feng are directly involved in the workshop, along with, Stefan Krakhof from Fosters HK, Monika Prabhu from Bently, Bittor Sanchez-Monasterio from Archi-Techtonics, and Diego Perez from MAD. All young and up-and-coming experts and designers with international experience in the digital realm. We were organised into small groups within three workshops, each with different brief and software focus for the week.

Early on the sense is that the skills are difficult to grasp, the tutors are too fast in their explanations. Sketchup and 3d Studio max are the dominant skill sets in the class, so this is a long way from what most have come to experience before. For me, I struggle both with a group that has disappeared from the classes and my brain that is accustomed to thinking about parametrics and drawing. I battle error messages and lucidly wake in the mornings thinking of things in code. Is this all part of the process, a matrix type transition from understanding the world of appearances to reading the code that is all behind it? Will I wake in a Neo type transformation and finally grasp it all so clearly?
Not in four days! Our final presentation is tough but fair. We aimed to represent natural complexity and in a lot of cases (especially ours) we fail to get anything that approaches an emergent growth. But for other students, there I optimism. Some have managed to create new things, to think parametrically. They quiz me on where I work, will we use scripting and parametric processes in the future. Is it optimism, excitement with having learned a new tool, or a beautiful nativity to attain the images of complexity we have seen? My painful experiences in parametric design at iaac tell me that it takes more than a week to shift your way of thinking so profoundly, to go beyond the seductive image. Still I am amazed by the enthusiasm that the chinese students display and think this will somehow propel them forward. Wearily we are herded out the front of the school for an official photograph (the norm in china with everything it seems) and onto a bus to take us to the main event.

The Exhibition
In a fabulous old factory building as part of the 759 Art Precinct, we go to the main part of the events, the Biennale Exhibition. A crush waits at the door (again fairly normal for china), we cannot come in until 7pm exactly and the doorman counts down the time on his watch (literally). Enter. There is no alcohol (author sighs). The space is organised with panels on the walls and an arrangement of hexagonal display pods on the floors. There is two MC?s with a pre-written and awkward speeches. Government officials, deans and al concerned give a speech (again typical china, everyone loves a speech). Neal and the curators talk about their respective regions between models dressed in lasercut paper clothes and martial arts performers.

We were told earlier in the week that Matias del Campo was originally to reproduce his pods for the exhibition. However they could not find anyone in the country to do this particular type of vacuum forming in china. The positive arguments for parametric and digital design processes, state its ability to improve construction efficiencies ? to make designs more affordable and difference with little or no cost differences. Looking at these identical hexagonal boxes I wonder if either it was a diplomatic decision so not to favour one exhibit over another or a flaw in the argument of construction efficiencies. Somebody picks up a boithing 3d print and I cringe (its gonna get broken). The display should have incorporated the models and allowed for difference of representation. Maybe its not just the students who are not yet adjusted to a parametric way of thinking, but the local established practices, clients and fabricators. Maybe we all from the west are still taking for granted the shifts that have occurred in the last 10 years whereby buildings like Gehry’s Guggenheim, which once seemed so unique, now seem dated and primitive in its approach and adjusted the building industry accordingly.
As Leach says, even though the Olympic stadium was parametrically designed, it was still built with a hand labour force. The Birdsnest and Watercube are stunning examples of buildings that have benefitted from digitized practise and their implementation in china will surely cause a great wave of influence for the future. However, the arguments about economies are different in China. With such a large population China needs to employ as many people as possible and the uptake of new computer aided manufacturing I think does not have the same economic advantages as in the west.
What will be the lasting effects of the workshop and continued Biennial? This is where the difference will be made. For his part, I feel Leach is akin to the curators of International Modern Art Exhibition bringing art of Europe to America in the early 20th Century. At the time it was seen as an outrage to the established American art culture. Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was considered the ‘rude descending the stair’. In the conference in Beijing after the exhibition some audience comments questioned why are the designs so ugly, so inconsiderate of the human scale In time the American art scene would take on the influences of the European moderns and turn it into their own form of rebellion through Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, etc. In time, I wonder to what direction will the influential designers of china will take.

all photographs by the author

© 2008 we have NO VISION.