053 - 20|05|08
OUT THERE: Out There: Architecture Beyond Building
11th International Architecture Exhibition
Directed by Aaron Betsky with the collaboration of Emiliano Gandolfi
Padiglione Italia at the Giardini
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MAP OFFICE [Gutierrez + Portefaix] presents:
Underneath: Life with the Continuous Monument of China
Essay by Ilka & Andreas Ruby
The title of this work references one of the signature projects of architettura radicale, “The Continuous Monument, An Architectural Model For Total Urbanization", presented in 1969 by the Italian group Superstudio. Their Continuous Monument was a negative utopia exacerbating the problematic turn that modernist architecture and urbanism had taken at the end of the Sixties – evoked in a sublimely threatening megastructure that is suspended over the ground, scaleless, endless and ready to consume the world.
Portefaix + Gutierrez superimpose Superstudio’s project as a conceptual reference on a piece of infrastructure which is an apt example of what the Italian architects were targeting with their critique. The Guangshen Superhighway is a 123-km-long highway that connects Guangzhou and Shenzhen. It creates the link between container terminals on the sea and countless factories inland, which produce the “Made in China”-commodities for the rest of the world. And it is the central traffic artery of the Pearl River Delta (PRD), one of the hothouses of the Chinese economy, which is more and more becoming one continuous metropolitan corridor and home to a population of 40 million people (which is equal to the population of Spain, but accommodated on less than a 10th of Spain’s land surface).
In Chinese urban development infrastructure is often built first, whereas the city is meant to settle in afterwards, which was the case here as well. Thus, when the Guangshen Superhighway was opened to traffic in 1994, it must have been a rather solitary structure. To stir development, its 21 interchanges were equipped with commercial buildings plugged underneath the elevated highway. Intended to house a blend of urban programs such as commerce, office, factory, and dormitory, most of these structures were however abandoned shortly after their completion. The plot of using infrastructure as urban incubator did not work out; what happened was quite the inverse. To house the growing population of migrant workers employed in the booming industry of the region, massive housing development started to fill up the blank territory on either side of the highway. With this urban congestion pressing from the sides, migrant workers living close by discovered the space underneath the highway. Appropriating it with a wide variety of more or less informal programs, they endowed the space with a genuine urban energy that one never sees on the painfully neat renderings of Chinese Cities, nor, for the most part, in their built-up avatars.
As the only large sheltered space available in the greater urban perimeter of the highway, this bandstadt plaza became the natural asylum for all kinds of public activities that did not find a place anywhere else in the neighboring housing districts: there is a large open market, where you can buy anything from vegetables to electronics. Informal arrangements of plastic chairs furnish the space like a public living room; people eat their meals prepared at the many instant kitchens around (finally a food court that deserves its name) while watching DVDs or TV programs showing on walls of monitors framing the space sideways. Other sections of the space are crammed with an army of snooker tables. The air is animated by a zillion of smells, the bright neon lights at night and a cacophony of music, all of this vibrating underneath the roaring traffic noise of the highway above, which also provides support for lighting and electricity. Suddenly we see the dystopia of Superstudio reconfigured: The „evil“ highway that had colonized the urban landscape is counter-colonized by the city, or by the very energy that makes a city. The monster of modernism that Superstudio could only reject and condemn is here tamed and reincoporated into the city by a Chinese art de vivre, that understands urban space first and foremost as a matter of performance, rather than representation. Produced by actions and exchanges, this fleeting city consequently escapes conventional representation. Try to find it on Google Earth. All you will see is a highway.