Mountains beyond Mountains | Jiang Jun

The 14th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, which opens to the public from June 7 through November 23, 2014. The organizers are pleased to announce that Mr. Jun Jiang has been appointed curators of the Chinese Pavilion following a public call for proposals. Themed as “Mountains beyond Mountains”, China Pavilion will be designed by a numbers of the most established architects, designers and research professional, corresponding to this years’ title “Fundamental” chosen by Rem Koolhaas. Unlike the previous exhibition which architects display their own design, this time the Chinese Pavilion establish a cooperative framework based on one theme. It will be a hologram of China’s architectural practice and research that shows many difference aspects including the scholarly design of a traditional garden. There are three teams of architects designing the exhibition space with graphic designing team, artist and Lighting Design Team; three types of materials and structural systems are to be applied to build the space and corresponding detailed architectural elements such as site base, the main structure and courtyards; those elements will work together to demonstrate a mutual-reinforce-and-restrain model of Chinese philosophy in an architectural way. Therefore we can stay align with Koolhaas’ scheme of making an event on architecture rather than architects. By making space the manifestation of content and content an insight of the space, space and content are correlated in the China Pavilion in that content provides an explicit timeline of China's 100 years' of architectural thinking (dual theme threads), while space presents an implicit theme of Yi Xiang (imagery-scape) through the history of Chinese architecture. As for the exhibition content, an ideological sway between Formisn and Functionism of 100 years' Chinese architecture with a latent clue of "extracting the Yi (Imagery) out of form" will be presented to the audience. This interconnectedness of the exhibits enables the China Pavilion to break through the discrete pattern that it used to be trapped in. Previously the China Pavilion has been a collection of individual architects’ installation work. This year we will put more effort in creating the correlation between exhibits and make the whole exhibition present the feature of the real urban-social interaction. Therefore we can stay align with Koolhaas’ scheme of making an event on architecture rather than architects All the national pavilion will engage a single theme – Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 .Rem Koolhaas has stated: “Fundamentals will be a Biennale about architecture, not architects. After several Biennales dedicated to the celebration of the contemporary, Fundamentals will focus on histories – on the inevitable elements of all architecture used by any architect, anywhere, anytime (the door, the floor, the ceiling etc.) and on the evolution of national architectures in the last 100 years. In three complementary manifestations – taking place in the Central Pavilion, the Arsenale, and the National Pavilions – this retrospective will generate a fresh understanding of the richness of architecture’s fundamental repertoire, apparently so exhausted today.” Chinese Pavilion interprets as Reconciling Modernity. In the exhibition, the conflicts that once went almost ideological are to be emphasized. Meanwhile, from a broader historical view, the capacity of Chinese civilization to dissolve or even assimilate the foreign impact is also deserves strengthening. In addition to the “first half” exhibition which is designed by the whole exhibited team, one of the highlights is about the “Second half “exhibition -series of activities based on the 4 topics Sheng-Zhang-Shou-Cang (Sprout-Growth-Restraint-Reservation) from June to October. These activities will be co-curate with our Strategy Partners-Excellence Group and UABB（Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture） for "conspiracy • symbiosis" exhibition within exhibition and other international academic forum. By then, China will usher the next climax following the opening ceremony. Curatorial concept of Chinese Pavilion Vitruvius has talked about in his Ten Books on Architecture, that architecture is an imitation of the nature. He applied the natural ratio of human body into the measuring and scaling of architecture and concluded an order of human body structure ratio pattern. This series of form, ration and scale-related order have been concluded as the Fundamental Principle of western classical architecture Interestingly, traditional Chinese, who have worshipped that Tao Models Itself after the Nature, also emphasized on imitating the nature in their architecture. However, they never simply took the Formal scale and ratio of nature. Instead, they did it through abstracting the Image (Yi) out of the flow of energy in nature at a micro level, and sensing the Tao of all things' generation and restrictions in a macro scope. In a nutshell, the divergence of the western and oriental understanding towards fundamental principle lies in the different bases behind their beliefs, where it is geometry, mathematics and science in western culture and philosophy and metaphysics for the Chinese. With the discordances in fundamental principles, it might be rather procrustean to align Chinese architecture to the science-based central exhibition theme. Thereby it inevitably will result in compromising a lot of the Chinese features, which is vividly described in a Chinese saying -- to cut one's feet to fit the shoes. By doing so people always get to a (pseudo) conclusion that it is the differentiation of national forms. However, this could hardly express the immanent value of Chinese architecture system which on the one hand is self-consistent, on the other hand keeps a high accordance with the universal value of Image and Tao. Therefore, the Fundamental relying on which China has been reconciling modernity will be demonstrated. The curator translates this term into Genben, meaning Root in Chinese, so as to convey the meaning of making the authentic order. This translation also helps to distinguish the Chinese Fundamental from the quantitative western Fundamental and hence it can provoke a richer and more thorough understanding of architectural fundamental.( Rem Koolhaas) Tao is regarded the supremacy in Chinese philosophy, which does not mean the ultimate height, but a relative one that can be well illustrated by the imagery of Mountains beyond Mountains. The Chinese philosophy contains the art of managing the dynamics through a relative stillness or quietness, and dissolving the form into imagery. The ostentatious modernity is consequently reconciled into its own culture. The imagery of Mountains Beyond Mountains allows an unrestricted imagination, which is also the spirit of Chinese vision. The exhibition space would be arranged with a fractal “ longitude ” of Jia-Cheng-Guo-Tianxia  (household-city-state-nature), as well as the “latitude” of dimensions – Sheng-Zhang-Shou-Cang (Sprout-Growth-Restraint-Reservation). Specifically, we are to absorb modernity in a Sprout-Growth manner that is to enhance the modular prefabrication and tectonics by adopting the new materials and technology. At the same time we are to reconcile modernity through a Restraint-Reservation strategy. Lastly the graduation and household-city-state-nature and the variation and veilunveil-access-change can be used to manage the growth of the courtyard-house pattern.。Thus the spatial part of the China Pavilion can be separated into four parts – Framework, Partition, Courtyard-House and Garden, which can also be interpreted as Bone, Skin, Body and Breath of entire space. Furthermore, with respect to different utilities of the Pavilion, we can differentiate the space into Display, Content, Event and Curatorship areas, which act as the pavilion’s Flesh, Blood, Essence and Soul. The curator would translate the topic “Absorbing Modernity” to “reconcile modernity”. Koolhaas once used the term Generic City to describe the result of obliterating national characters by excessively applying the globally uniform language of modernity. This observation has implied a consequence of absorbing modernity -- it is in fact not a process of national characters absorbing modernity; rather, it is modernity that has been excluding the national character. Modernity leads to a universal convergence. Actually it is not the first time that Chinese architecture has converged to a global uniform over the past one hundred years of absorbing modernity. At the same time the flux requesting national characters and vernacular character has never disappeared. Modernity, therefore, is reflected as the contradiction among social, political and cultural dimensions. The rather doctrinal traditional form on the one hand is an easy visualization of culture into spatial experience. On the other hand, it could not manage the economic, social and political conditions in a society going through modernization. At the meanwhile, even in the most ideological environment, we should still find a few cases not constrained by the form-function dichotomy. This progress can be the content of the national pavilion, which I would interpret as Reconciling Modernity. In the exhibition, the conflicts that once went almost ideological are to be emphasized. Meanwhile, from a broader historical view, the capacity of Chinese civilization to dissolve or even assimilate the foreign impact is also deserves strength.