MASTERPLAN XIAOPU ARTIST VILLAGE ART FAIR DISTRICT

Location: Beijing Xiaopu, China

Program: Studio, Residential, Cultural, Commercial, Park

Status: Pending

Size:  31.383 m2

Budget: withheld

Client: Xiaopu villagers‘ committee

Architecture: Erhard An-He Kinzelbach

Team: Lukas Staudinger

The renowned art village Songzhuang is located close to the 6th ring road of Beijing, a half-an-hour drive east of the city, and only 20 minutes from the capital airport. It is virtually the largest artist community in China, with more than 5000 artists living and working in the area. The village is undergoing an ever-growing expansion of its artist population and therefore has an increasing demand for artists' living and working space.

It was Li Xianting, whom some regard as the godfather of Chinese contemporary art, who initially triggered Songzhuang to become an artist village. He settled here along with a handful of other artists like Fang Lijun or Yue Minjun, who are now world-famous, and who had then, in the early 1990s, been driven out of their Yuanmingyuan commune in Beijing. By the end of the decade, art prices began to skyrocket, international dealers entered the village, and the artists needed a place to exhibit their work. As a result, Li Xianting founded the Songzhuang Art Museum.

Along with the growing fame of Songzhuang as an artist community came a tremendous population increase. On the one hand, mainly young and unknown artists were attracted to move to the community, also due to the still affordable rents and its fairly good location and infrastructure. On the other hand many people, in trying to capitalize on the trend, changed profession to become self-taught painters or sculptors. While similar villages around Beijing had been swallowed by urban sprawl and people lost jobs, many Songzhuang locals have been able to capitalize on the changes by providing essential services to the artists. Some have rented out or even built houses for the artists, while others swapped their agricultural businesses with trading art supplies.

Songzhuang is essentially a conglomerate of several villages with Xiaopu and its approximate 6500 inhabitants (1800 local farmers and 4700 artists, curators, etc.) as its cultural and political centre. The place has been swamped by hundreds of galleries in the past years. Almost every important art dealer from Beijing opened a dependence. Yet, there is very little opportunity for the majority of ordinary artists who simply try to make a living, to sell their work.

Only a minority of the artists is internationally acclaimed, selling work through galleries at very high prices. The vast majority of the local artists, in contrast, consists of fairly ordinary, more or less skilled, and even self-made artists that at present do not have sufficient opportunities to offer their work to potential clients.

Once a year, during the Songzhuang Art Festival, local authorities grant the exceptional permission for people to directly sell their work for the duration of a fortnight in a communal tent or on the streets. It is the success of this annual event that has led to the local government's decision to provide a physical space, an indoor and outdoor marketplace for the local artist community to sell their work, thereby helping them to make a living by offering their work on a regular basis. The local villagers' committee decided to invest in a permanent art exhibition and market hall as the nucleus for a new village centre. In order to make the new centre a lively and interesting quarter on what is currently a peripheral and formerly agricultural piece of land and, on the other hand, to make the project financially feasible, large portions of commercial and gallery programme and artist studios and houses will accompany the art fair hall.

The selected site is divided by a major 50m-wide road exiting the 6th ring road that is to be built to substitute the existing Zhangcai Road running north-south. In addition, two high-voltage lines in north-south and east-west directions intersect on site and form two major unbuildable open space corridors that further aggravate the spatial divide. These ceasures have a strong impact on the site's usability and spatial subdivision.

On approximately 8 hectares of land (122 Mu), around 30.000 to 40.000 m2 are to be distributed with programmes as diverse as the exhibition hall, studio houses, commercial programme and gastronomy, art galleries and open space in the form of a plaza and green areas.

Furthermore, the main plaza of the village, currently located across the street from the villagers' committee building, is deserted and rather unused due to its location and unfunctional setup. The villagers' committee wished to take the opportunity of building the art fair hall to create a new centre and plaza space for Xiaopu. Therefore, the art fair and exhibition hall, in addition to their market function, are also intended to be used for a variety of different village activities ranging from concerts, dance performances to gatherings and presentations.

VOIDS AS AN OPPORTUNITY

The given constraint of the high voltage power lines is such that they define two corridors; one oriented north-south and the other east-west, with no building and only restricted tree planting allowed. In the design process, this restriction was understood rather as a virtue than as an obstacle, in that it naturally guaranteed for large portions of open public space to be reserved to serve the future developments around the area. These exclusion corridors can be understood as preserved areas for public space that precede the development. In addition to providing recreational quality, this open space also has to perform as a connector between the eastern and western parts of the site that are separated by the new Zhangcai Road as well as by these corridors at hand. Hence the open space is carefully differentiated and programmed to complement the adjacent areas: the north-south corridor is mainly organized by recreational and cultural open space (a recreational park and the sculpture gardens in adjacency to the studio houses area and the galleries area respectively); the east-west corridor in contrast is structured and accompanied by commercial and service space (an open air market space for the art fair or other similar activities as flea markets etc. and parking facilities in proximity to the main art fair and exhibition hall).

ICE-RAY PATTERN AS A SPATIAL ORGANIZATION

The traditional hutong structure as an infrastructural organization with a clear hierarchy and sequential access from the street to the alley and finally to the private courtyard is being hybridized with the traditional ice-ray pattern. This hybrid's capacity functions not only as a reinterpretation of the specific hutong organization and geometric adaptation to the givens of the site, it also proliferates differentiation on three different levels while maintaining structural and spatial coherence. The local differentiation takes effect on the following different levels: on the urban level, the ice-ray pattern organizes circulation hierarchies and parcel subdivision; on the architectural level, it is informed by programme and with its parametric shape grammar produces different scales and spatial partition; and finally on a surface level, it materializes facade subdivision, maximizes interior wall surface for hanging while providing sufficient indirect lighting. In the latter it also produces aperture scale variation in relation to programme specific needs.

VILLAGES IN THE VILLAGE

Xiaopu village is one of several villages (Xiaopu, Daxing, Xindian, Lama, Ren, Beisi, Liuhe, Tongli...) that together form Songzhuang. Each former village has maintained its very specific character, yet all together form a new cultural and communal entity. Inspired by this very specific part-to-whole relationship on the larger scale, the masterplan intends to establish a similarly rich ensemble of specific identities of mini-quarters that altogether, yet on a smaller scale, form a unity and a functioning and lively new quarter with very different urban facets.

The distribution of the mini-quarters is structured like an onion. The more public and less noise-sensitive programmes are logically located at the core along the new Zhangcai Road, while the quieter and more private mini-quarters are located more peripherally.

These mini-quarters are the following: The park and plaza, the art fair and exhibition hall, the studio houses area, the galleries area and the commercial area.

THE PARK AND PLAZA

The public open space along the high voltage line axis has four characteristic, differently performing parts: the main plaza, the open air marketplace, the sculpture garden and the recreational park. These four segments complement the adjacent mini-quarters. The recreational park with its mosaic of activity floes and landscape floes caters to the recreation needs of resident artists in the studio houses area. Surfaces like the water ponds, sports fields and meadows intermingle with agricultural crop fields, bush lands, scrubs and grass lands. The sculpture garden offers non-continuous platforms, almost like giant pedestals, that can be used for the permanent or non-permanent display of large-scale artwork by local artists in a prominent spot close to the galleries area. These platforms are dispersed between floes with different kinds of greeneries and also function as park furniture for sitting and pick-nicking. The main plaza is a polyvalent hard-surface public open space that can serve all kinds of activities and events, furthermore it functions as a connector and distributor between the main art fair and exhibition hall and the commercial area on the other side of the new Zhangcai Road. And finally, the open air marketplace has a continuously lifted wood deck surface that generates a complex field to be used as a display and market surface for art fairs and farmers' markets alike.

THE ART FAIR AND EXHIBITION HALL

The art fair and exhibition hall is organized as a continuous open space along a series of platforms that climb up incrementally around a central atrium from the ground floor hall up to a floor height of 8 meters. Along its spatial sequence it accommodates different display spaces, a VIP area, an auditorium and administrative offices. Above the atrium, there is a series of indirect skylights that perform similarly like the entire facade. The latter is composed out of polygonal concrete panels based on the ice-ray geometry. These facade panels are scaled according to the specific programme that the facade is locally serving, and they fold out occasionally towards north in order to allow indirect light to enter the interior. At the same time, the overall interior wall surface is maintained for the hanging and display of artwork during the art fairs. The ice-ray geometry not only subdivides the facade, but also subdivides the ground plane into the sequential platforms that then form the space.

The large central space offers a continuous surface for fairs, markets and gatherings, while the auditorium can be used for seated events. On the ascending platforms more intimate displays or smaller-scale events or exhibitions can take place.

Outside the hall, close to the main parking area and on one corner of the main plaza, there is a pavilion that serves as a box-office for the hall, but also as an information centre for the entire quarter.

THE STUDIO HOUSES AREA

The prototypical studio house unit is organized along a linear programmatic ribbon. One of its ends has one floor and accommodates for the studio programme, while the other has two floors and contains the living programme. Both parts are separated by a service core containing all wet rooms and storage space. Once the prototype is deployed on site, the bands bend at the cores to maximize south-west exposure and in order to adapt to the masterplan organization's circulation geometry. The bend also produces a semi-closed courtyard, which both programmatic parts orient themselves to. Each alley block represents a mini-community and holds a couple of courtyards. The courtyards are primarily private, yet they are intersected by pedestrian pathways that create shortcuts, but also support communication between neighbouring parties that share the courtyards.

The main accesses are from the alleys outside; in the studio programme there are display areas with large windows towards the alleys in order to establish continuous communication in everyday-life between the artistic production taking place inside the studios and public life on the alleys.

THE GALLERIES AREA

The galleries area exemplifies the ice-ray's capacity to perform subdivision also on an architectural level. The blocks hold clusters of three to four galleries that are further subdivided into main space, terrace and service part with offices, restrooms, storage etc. By folding, the skin produces primarily indirect floor-to-ceiling opening slots that maintain maximum wall area for the hanging of artwork. The display spaces are rather neutral and open for flexible gallery use, only intersected by the main stair, while all serving programme is consolidated on one side. The galleries all have either an entrance terrace or a roof terrace for out-door openings events and receptions.

THE COMMERCIAL AREA

The commercial area is located close to bustling Zhangcai Road. Its streets and alleys are exclusively pedestrian. The two-storey blocks hold two units each, back-to-back. There are restaurants and retail units, both have fully-transparent ground floors and less-open first floors. On the ground floor level the full-height glass walls fold inwards. This systematic extension of street space has a twofold effect, it increases the built structures' attraction towards pedestrian flaneurs, and it produces covered and shaded outdoor seating areas for the restaurants and cafes on the pedestrian boulevards.