Beijing Design Week

Sees architects launch 'micro-interventions' in one of the capital's oldest neighbourhoods. But are their good intentions having the right effect?

Mobile logos … an itinerant graphic design service is one of the projects launched in Beijing's historic Dashilar neighbourhood this week. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/Guardian

A plastic fan whirrs above a mountain of tripe, keeping hungry flies away, while pancakes sizzle on a hotplate across the street. A tricycle cart laden with coal careers around a corner, narrowly missing an elderly resident taking his caged songbird out for a stroll, while a construction worker sits on the corner, slurping noodles from a bag. It could be any other day in the hutongs of Beijing's Dashilar neighbourhood, but this week something is different.
Down the lane, a cloud of golden discs erupts from the rooftop of one courtyard house, spilling out to form a canopy above the street. Coloured concrete stools dot the roadside, while giant cushions shaped like roast duck and fresh sushi fill a shop window. A taxi trike trundles down the road, providing not transport but a mobile logo-design service. Beijing Design Week (BJDW) has arrived, and it's brought the “pop-up” concept to one of the Chinese capital's oldest communities.
“We see these projects as a kind of urban acupuncture,” says Beatrice Leanza, the Italian director of this year's festival, who has worked in Beijing's contemporary art world for the last 10 years. “We are proposing micro-interventions in the area's empty buildings as tests for what could happen here.”
As part of the Dashilar programme – one of BJDW's three hubs across the city – two derelict courtyard houses have been taken over by Zhang Ke of Standard Architecture, who has built a clustered treehouse structure of glass-fronted rooms in the open courts, accessed by a series of ladders and ledges, that poke up above the rooftops. With crisp planes of plywood limboing between century-old beams, it is a prototype for how the site could be developed. Zhang describes it as “ultra-small scale social housing within the limitations of super-tight traditional hutong spaces,” which would be part of a mixed-use scheme with restaurants, bookstores and bars.

Parasitic pods … Micro-Hutong prototype by Standard Architecture. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/Guardian

A few doors down, the golden fabric discs signal a proposal by the young Beijing studio, People's Architecture Office, for a “courtyard plug-in” – a plan to insert prefabricated living units into existing houses, leaving the original structures intact. With plumbing, heating, insulation and wiring built-in, the modules would require minimal excavation to bring the leaky, draughty buildings up to habitable standards. The trial project on this site will see these pods bring a library for the local community and a startup business incubator.
In any other context, such installations might not be remarkable, part of the current trend for “meanwhile” uses on vacant sites. But what comes as a surprise is to learn that these projects have been initiated and endorsed by the municipal government – which only a few years ago had the entire district in the sights of its bulldozers.
“There has been a radical shift in the perception of how this neighbourhood should be developed,” says Neill Gaddes, a New Zealand architect who for the last three years has worked for Beijing Dashilar Investment Limited (BDI), a subsidiary of the state-owned Guang An Holding, tasked with upgrading the area. “There is a real push towards improvements and adaptive reuse, rather than wholesale demolition and rebuild.”

Plug-in hutong … a display of a proposal by the People's Architecture Office. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/Guardian

The shift has been spurred in part by the disaster that is all too visible just a few blocks east. In the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games, a vast swathe of Qianmen, a thriving commercial district for the last 500 years, was razed and replaced by an inflated Disneyfied version of itself, a process that saw local businesses forcibly displaced by big-name brands dressed in pastiche facades.
Extending outside the old city walls, south of Qianmen gate, in a knotted delta of diagonal lanes, the area had been a lively centre of trade and illicit pleasures for centuries. From the 1500s, brothels clustered between restaurants and theatres, opium parlours lurked beneath lodging houses – a thrilling underworld that lured even incognito emperors here.
If party officials come today, it would be to stock up on Rolex and Zara, or maybe guzzle a Happy Meal. Extending south in a monumental ceremonial axis, just below Tiananmen Square, now stretches a polished open-air mall, where outlets of Nike and Starbucks, Costa and McDonalds, stand behind pantomime costumes of swooping roofs encrusted with gilded signs and lurid mouldings.
Billboards declare the project is “respecting the city texture and recasting the historical view,” as well as “restoring history's cultural pulse”. But walking the street today, it feels a vapid gauntlet through which replica trams now ferry tourists back and forth from H&M to Häagen-Dazs.

Beijingbrandalism … The Rolex store towers above the remade Qianmen shopping street. Photograph: Will Clayton/flickr

It is the most visible example of what has happened in numerous pockets of the old city over the last 10 years, as neighbourhoods have been demolished and rebuilt in the name of heritage preservation. From the shopping street of Nanluoguxiang near the Drum and Bell Tower in the north, to the alleys around the Sichahai lakes, the areas designated for historic conservation have been transformed into zombie recreations of themselves. Elsewhere, crumbling courtyard houses have been wrapped in neat jackets but their squalid innards left unchanged, adding a flimsy tourist-friendly veneer to give a picturesque backdrop for lucrative hutong tours.
But in Dashilar, things seem to be going in a different direction. Home to around 55,000 people over a square kilometre, it is one of the most densely populated parts of Beijing – six times the average density. It is also one of the most convoluted in terms of property ownership, with only around 10% of buildings in the possession of the state-owned developer, with the rest split between work units and private owners – a situation further confused by multiple sub-letting and the proliferation of illegally built structures within and on top of courtyard houses. This has seen the built fabric of the area rapidly decline, with little maintenance and upkeep of the properties due to both unclear ownership and ongoing uncertainty about demolition.
“I'm longing to move out,” one elderly resident who has lived here since the 1950s tells me. “But the amount of compensation they are offering is far too little for me to find anywhere else to go.” It sounds a familiar story, one that in the past would have ended with forced eviction. But changes to property laws since 2008 have made it harder for developers to expel residents, putting more power in the individual owners' hands to demand higher prices. As a result, residents now compete with their neighbours to be bought out at higher rates, which is making Dashilar an increasingly divided place. But the deadlock has a unexpected upside.
“This stalemate is providing an opportunity for the area to develop in a slower, more beneficial way,” says Gaddes. The initial failure of the Qianmen redevelopment – which was plagued with vacant units due to inflated rents – gave the government cold feet about rolling the same plan out across Dashilar. This hiatus gave BDI time to commission the “nodal” Dashilar pilot strategy, developed by local architect Liang Jingyu from 2011, which would facilitate several model projects in strategic locations across the area – and show existing owners how investing in their properties and businesses could help turn a profit and improve the area. “We're trying to change the conversation from people holding out for compensation, to wanting to invest and stay in their own community,” says Gaddes. As the leader of the local Xicheng municipality puts it, these pilot projects should be “like twinkling stars that grow by themselves”.

Beijing Design Week introduces the Dashilar neighbourhood

One such twinkling star comes in the form of Lin Lin, the director of Jellymon, a creative agency based in the neighbourhood, who recently sold her flat in London to buy a 10-year lease on an art deco factory across the street from her studio in Dashilar.
“I'm planning a holistic up-cycling experience,” she beams as she leads me through her building site and up a ladder, in sequin-studded platform heels, to the first floor, which she wants to transform into a cocktail bar. Down below will be an organic supermarket and restaurant themed around re-use. She is presenting the concept at BJDW by hosting a performance banquet, in which every piece of a pig is used in what she calls a “fusion of fine dining, taxidermy and product design."
Many locals turn up to watch the surreal occasion, happily stuffing chunks of the pig into bags to take back home. It is hard, however, to imagine how many of them will frequent Lin Lin's organic food shop when there is a heaving farmer's market around the corner selling food for a fraction of the price.
A project that looks a little more sensitively calibrated to the needs of locals is proposed by French designer Matali Crasset a few streets away. Dressed in a red harlequin outfit and sharp bowl haircut that gives her the look of a children's entertainer, she has taken over a factory building for the week to run workshops with local schoolchildren to imagine what the space might become.

French designer Matali Crasset plans to transform a disused factory building into a community play space. Photograph: Matali Crasset

“I was attracted to this building because it has the potential to act as a public route, linking the two streets either side,” she says as we walk through the building where she plans to install a “forest crossing playground,” an undulating ramp dotted with cabins and greenhouse spaces. For now, she has daubed bright graphic patterns on the walls and built some temporary furniture, but if the plans go ahead, it could be a useful social space for parents to bring their children in an area that lacks such community facilities.
While well-meaning, many of the projects in the area seem to have mis-fired. Italian designer Luca Nichetto has installed a number of coloured benches, designed to be moved and flipped to act as stools or tables, inspired by watching locals move their stools into shady spots along the streets. Yet their heavy concrete construction means they can barely be lifted – instead, some clever residents have taken them apart and are using their cylindrical legs as plant pots.
Hong Kong-based designer Michael Young has been commissioned to design a new public toilet, with a curvaceous white-tiled shell that will arch over the new loos like a space-age pod. It looks nice enough, but inside it will house four conventional western cubicles, negating the fact that the current open squat-toilets serve a key social role, where people chat between knee-high partitions.

A Dashilar resident looks on at Luca Nichetto's concrete stools from the comfort of her own chair. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/Guardian

Speaking to residents who have witnessed the Dashilar project evolve over the last three years, there remains an understandable suspicion about the developer's motives – with the precedent of Qianmen all too fresh in the memory. Some question why they would be seeding designers and new businesses in the area, if not as a form of cultural-led gentrification, with the ultimate aim of attracting a more upmarket resident. Others are more hard-nosed: the incremental improvement of the neighbourhood makes demolition less likely, and thus threatens their chances of being bought out. Many would happily see the place razed if given the means to move on to better conditions – and they are not blind to the fact that these crumbling lanes represent some of the most expensive real-estate in Beijing.
He Shuzhong, founder of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre – which recently wrote a furious letter to the RIBA condemning Zaha Hadid's Galaxy Soho mega-mall for destroying an area of hutongs – has little time for the Dashilar plans, seeing the nodal strategy as no different to what happens elsewhere, only disguised in more palatable rhetoric.
"The developers want to be seen as gentlemen who understand the local history very well," he says. "But at the same time, they are trying to make Dashilar high-end, with new, bigger, brighter buildings. They despise local residents and the non-wealthy and want to move them all out."
"It is also difficult to distinguish who is the development businessman and who the local government officer," he adds. "They are almost a compound body – they are developers when they need to make money, and they are government officials when they need the power."

Out in the cold … Taiwanese architects Open Union Studio are camping on the rooftop after local residents refused them access. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/Guardian

The conflict between the project's ambition and the reality on the ground is brought into no sharper focus than at No 30 Yaowu Hutong, where Taiwanese practice Open Union Studio has set up camp.
“We wanted to create a social space that the community could share,” says architect Hai Teng, showing me around a series of wooden house-like frames he has erected on the rooftop, overlooking a courtyard filled with a jumble of jerry-built out-buildings, where six families totalling 15 people currently live. “The neighbours here are not so friendly to each other, so we wanted to make a space that they could use together.”
The architects were originally intended to occupy the empty first floor level of the building, which extends along the streetfront in a long glazed gallery, for up to two years. But when the downstairs residents caught wind of the fact this space was going to be unlocked, they said they would move in themselves and stop the practice from taking up residence. As a result, the designers are now on the rooftop in two temporary tents. “If we stay here and get to know them, we hope they will change their minds,” says Hai. “Most architecture and design exhibitions waste so much money, so we wanted to do something useful.”
Bert de Muynck, a Belgian architect who has carried out extensive research on the Dashilar initiative with Mónica Carriço at the Moving Cities think-tank, has mixed feelings about the outcome so far. “It is a brave attempt to do something different after the failures of places like Qianmen,” he says. “People criticise those developments for creating twee stage-sets for tourists – but we have to be careful Dashilar is not just creating another kind of 'authentic' stage set for designers.”
Full story click here