Beijing Design Week
北京国际设计周
Urban Dialogues: Beijing-Copenhagen was KADK’s contribution to Beijing Design Week 2018, Asia’s largest architecture and design event. Following cities such as London, Milan, Amsterdam and Barcelona in previous years, the City of Copenhagen was the 2018 guest city with the larger exhibition and program entitled Living is Giving.
Urban Dialogues: Beijing-Copenhagen was a collaboration running from February until September 2018 between the Urbanism and Societal Change program at KADK’s School of Architecture and students and faculty of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Beijing. The KADK group visited Beijing in March and September, while CAFA students and faculty visited Copenhagen in April.
Collectively, the work explored what forms of cross-cultural learning and experimentation might be possible if conventional one-directional interactions are expanded in favour of more open two-way dialogues and exchange.
How might such an exchange and transfer of local conditions, expertise, and conceptual and cultural approaches, as well as representational formats, support an open creative field of cross-pollinated spatialities, atmospheres and expressions, across and between two cultures – without erasing characteristics of each culture?
The exhibition consisted of drawings, videos and objects – the centerpiece of which was a 25m long model of spatial interventions on six different neighborhoods across Beijing. The model was conceived as a hybrid between the 2-dimensional narrative surface of the traditional Chinese scroll, and the partially flattened 3-dimensional space of the classical European frieze. Evoking the anamorphic distortion of Eisenman’s House X project, the resulting 2.5-dimensional object explored a space of dialogue between model and image; but also between space and narrative; and west and east.
KADK Students
Simon Balotis, Archie Cantwell, Cameron Clarke, Meggan Collins, Beatrice Danielsen, Hugh Diamond, Ananda Ehret, Elaina Keppler, Fredrik Lindahl, Ulrik Montnemery, Mathilde Lo Nielsen, Jana Possehn, Linnéa Rönnquist, Martine Seedorff, Rosalia Svendsen, Cuong Tran, Bianca Zaharia, Maja Østermann
KADK Teachers
Urbanism and Societal Change: Christine Bjerke, Deane Simpson, Carlos Ramos Tenorio, Tina Henriette Christiansen (project leader)
Photography
Cameron Clarke