AGORÀ Talk / Learning from China / Chapter 04
The Symbolic Structure of ‘Site’ + ‘Rite’
A Mnemonic System That Reflects the Rural World
The lecture
The source introduction is headed “The Symbiotic Structure of ‘Site’ + ‘Rite’ — A Mnemonic System That Reflects the Rural World”. The recorded presentation uses “The Symbolic Structure of ‘Site’ + ‘Rite’” as its title.
The specific “locality” mode of the mountain settlements in the rural region of Southwest China, and the “ritual” habits structure of the unique community of the local people.
From the presentation
The lecture is titled “The Symbolic Structure of ‘Site’ + ‘Rite’”, with the subtitle “A Mnemonic System That Reflects the Rural World”.
The presentation includes Cuishuba Yi Cultural Center under the heading “Highland / Chasing-Fire”, bringing the building into a discussion of ritual and memory.
Haobo Wei
Speaker / West-Line Studio
Haobo Wei is Chief Architect and co-founder of West-Line Studio, professor at Tiangong University and Guizhou University, postgraduate supervisor at Chongqing University, Special Allowance Expert of the Chinese State Council, an expert of the Experts Committee of the Architectural Society of China, and a juror for WAN, UNI International, and the Rethinking The Future (RTF) Global Architecture & Design Awards, among others.
Haobo Wei established with West-Line Studio the basic working mode of “Commune by regional ties + Geopolitical Order + Public Life Mode + Compound Construction”, providing a way to explore the protection of human ways of living within subcultural communities and the development of contemporary symbiotic growth.
Among the prizes won are the 2021 Civic Trust Awards — International Award; 2019 WAN Awards — Architect / Practice of the Year, Gold; 2018 LEAF Awards — Best Public Building; 2018 German Design Award — Architecture, Gold; and 2018 A+Awards — Architecture in Stone / Concrete, among others.
Learning from China
AGORÀ Talk: Learning from China aims to be an opportunity for encounter between Western and Chinese cultures, overturning the usual intellectual relationship: Western culture will listen to the Asian one, first trying to understand, and then asking questions in order to understand better what Asian culture has to say about itself. This exercise will also be useful for Chinese guests, who are trying to develop a new architectural / cultural identity at this historic moment.
Therefore, the event stands as an educational opportunity both for its premises and for its format. The guests will prepare five lessons specifically for this occasion, and their purpose will be to educate participants on the issues that are driving contemporary Chinese architecture.
China has been, and still is, a place of architectural experimentation where different realities coexist, from hyper-dense urbanisation to rural villages. Currently in China new issues are taking shape with which we must necessarily engage, especially in a globalised world that sees Chinese influence becoming more and more prominent: the phenomenon of New Towns, the search for a national architectural language that distances itself from Western influence, the recent tendency to reject new anonymous megastructures, and the approaching green turn in architecture. The source describes China’s urbanisation rate as 58%, presenting a living laboratory that can be used as a litmus test for understanding how we will live together, and showing how the contemporary model of the city is moving towards the East.
Magazine context — How Will We Live Together?
In the last period we have been called to reinvent our way of life, our daily life, our social behaviours and, also, the places of living.
The theme of issue Number 07 of AGORÀ magazine, taken from that of the seventeenth Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Hashim Sarkis, today more than ever has taken on new values and meanings. “How will we live together?” It is a question that we all asked ourselves during the lockdown that marked the epidemiological emergency we are still fighting today. This question, between June and September 2020, has changed. From “how will we live together?” it turned into “how are we living together?”. In a way, the question we asked ourselves during the lockdown was answered in the months of summer freedom, but at the same time it changed into a new question saturated with anguish and fear. Today, all of Italy is under restrictions due to an enemy that is severely hurting the whole world. An enemy that attacks on every front (political, economic, social, etc.) and that makes us ask, once again: “how will we live together?”
The virus is proof that we are all united and connected. We learned that we are ready to upset our lives, to accept very heavy restrictions in favour of the common good. We learned that physical distance and social distance are complementary but not the same thing; that the jobs indispensable to society are often those without any protections (shop assistants, porters, riders, etc.); that we need to reformulate the urban contract stipulated between women and men and the environment; that living together also includes nature; that “one is worth one” is a lie; that we need others to survive; and that reality can overcome dystopia. We also learned many other concepts that you will read in this publication.
Probably, until autumn 2021, we will continue to live in a semi-quarantine situation. It will be a psychologically devastating experience, so profound that the city as we know it will change drastically. However, like any traumatic experience, it offers the possibility of understanding what the problems of the previous condition were, in order to change them. This event marks the end of the twentieth century, of a certain type of city, economy and society, in favour of something totally new, of which we do not yet know the name. Either everything returns as before, with even more desire to produce, to have fun, to attack the planet, or nothing will be the same as before, including the way we will live together!
Editorial: Duccio Prassoli and Marco Grattarola. Cover: Samuele Pellecchia, “How Will We Live Together?”, Milan, 2021.
Original documents
Original pages and presentation captures. Select an image to enlarge.
Source note
The English text has been transcribed from the archived AGORÀ pages and set as readable webpage text. Dates, roles, awards, statistics and forecasts belong to the original publication. The original screenshots are retained below for reference.