Event 2: Shenyang Urban Planning Exhibition Hall

 

Overview model of Shenyang city

 

The Shenyang Urban Planning and Exhibition Hall is dedicated to the current city planning of Shenyang and also takes into consideration the cultural heritage. It combines past, present and future. An interactive city model of 800 square meters makes future become reality. The visitors can influence the action from the galleries by moving single modules and thus create their own image of the city of tomorrow.

The concept of the Third Culture is pretty straight forward to me when I visited the museum. I never thought about planning a city. For me, this is too big a problem. When leaders are planning a city, both technological development and aesthetics have to be considered.  As I visited this museum as an event of Desma9, I brought along questions: how do people consider both science and art when building a city? Is there a conflict between science and art in civil engineering?

The conflict definitely exists. If you ask an artist to plan a city, he or she would come up a plan that everybody appreciates, except for scientists, who would doubt the feasibility of such a proposal. In the museum, such a conflict is everywhere. In the museum, I saw the original design of Shenyang Art Center. The ideal art center was much bigger, and expanded further. However, this plan was altered by architects to lower the risks involved.  This reminded me of the ‘Bird Nest’ national sports stadium in Beijing. The design was appealing, and the bird nest structure provides strong support to the building. Indeed, architecture can be seen as a kind of ‘third culture’. Architects must be both artists and scientists in order to succeed.

 

                                          The original design of Shenyang Art Center

 

In this museum, there are sculptures and drawings, as well as LED screens and video demonstrations.  Art and science co-exist in a harmonious way. What left me the greatest impression was a video scroll, when technology is applied to make a new form of art presentation.

 

                                                                    the video scroll

                                              a sculpture showing the ancient empiral palace

   

Shenyang Urban Planning and Exhibition Hall is beautiful and ‘high-tech’. It showed me that my hometown Shenyang, as a city, is being built and developed by both scientists and artists. The world is to some extent similar: scientists and artists work together to make it thrive.


Citations:
Shenyang City Planning Exhibition Hall, China, 2007, http://www.atelier-brueckner.com/en/projects/developments/shenyang-city-planning-exhibition-hall-china-2007.html