quare id faciam?

Old and new in the Forbidden City

November's Metropolis includes a thoughtful article (subscribers only – but email me if you'd like to view) on some of the story behind reconstruction of Jianfu Palace Garden, a subcomplex of Beijing's Gugong, the 178-acre Forbidden City or Palace – well-known today as a tourism destination. The original Jianfu, 'nine ornate structures arranged in an intricate maze of walkways, courtyards, and gardens', was built for imperial pleasure in 1740 and burned down amid the instability of the early Republic of China in 1923. The reconstruction, begun in 2000, is a project of the People's Republic initiated and made possible by a non-profit arm of Hang Lung Group, a Honk Kong-based developer.
 
The head of the Hang Lung organization, China Heritage Fund, is American-educated Happy Harun, and a primary architect on the project, interestingly, is a friend of hers brought up in both Chinese and U.S. settings, New York-based Calvin Tsao. It's Tsao's perspective that makes the Metropolis article particularly interesting reading, for me. Some weight is given to his articulation of the project's attempt at a rapprochement "between ... Modernist sensibility and ... respect for the culture of ... ancestral land, between interpretive impulses and the need to preserve" in the building of a new Jianfu that's part finely crafted replica in profuse, densely colorful imperial splendor and part contemporary architecture, also finely, even apparently traditionally, crafted but emphatically simple in detail and muted in color. The division is straightforward: exteriors are 'restored' and interiors 'new'. It should be noted that in spite of the author's attention to the thought given to this effort to reveal old by way of new, new in old, though, it's the gorgeous authenticity-driven replicated exteriors that get by far the best photo treatment – an easy editorial preference to understand, perhaps. I can't help wishing Tsao's restrained interiors, which in places, at least, seem to have their own constructional beauty, were allowed more page in order to illustrate the ideas the article particularly seems to turn on.
 
The marriage of contemporary and traditional apparently resulted in considerable part from budgetary necessity; to build palace buildings at a consistent level of restoration craftsmanship inside and out would have been financially extravagant, and perhaps, for securing proper materials and labor, simply impossible. One aspect of Tsao's insight, though, seems to have been to recognize another kind of necessity in the intertwining of old and new, old in new, as a reflection in culture of human transiency and time-dependency. "Tsao cites the Italians’ success in inserting modern interiors into ancient buildings as a model for preservation. 'Rather than severing themselves from their history, they know what is temporal and what to preserve,' he says." But what's significant is that this knowing "what to preserve" doesn't seem to be for him a matter of being able to argue some return on investment with regard either to the building's 'museum-piece' aspect or to its 'public structure' aspect, but rather a matter of building's part in formation of societal consciousness and identity. "'It's important to sift through the details of historic architecture to understand what part of its DNA you want to take with you,' he says. 'And that DNA is not about swooping roofs or gilded columns, it's about human interaction.'" Here, I think, is an architect's viewpoint worth some dwelling on.

A two-paragraph summary of the Jianfu project from Architectural Record is here.

There's more on Happy Harun's role, with additional detail on the restoration process, here.

Something of an overview of current Forbidden City restoration can be had here.

posted by paul bowman @ 1:14 AM