PUBLIC-THROUGH-PRACTICE
FutureLab 2021, West Bund Dome Shanghai, China
The Wenzhou-Kean University Michael Graves College, so named after the prolific late twentieth-century American architect, industrial-designer, and educator (a Professor of 39 years), Michael Graves (1934–2015); as well known for his populist products— famously the Alessi 9093 kettle (1985)— as for his delightfully heart-felt low-brow architecture. A modernist defector, Graves is credited with the first major built-work of postmodernist architecture (POMO), a condition spectacularly produced, consumed, and reproduced in China. Graves’ own house, in Princeton USA, known as ‘The Warehouse’, is not only a house, but also a ‘laboratory’ and ‘archive’; a repository for his drawings and models, furniture, design-objects, books, and art (and opening soon to a visiting public as a house-as-museum resource for education). The Wenzhou-Kean FutureLab 2021 exhibition ‘Design: Public-through-Practice’ borrows this idea of house-as-museum, and here exhibits its own archive of design drawings, models, furniture, objects, books, and art (the work of the students and faculty of architecture, industrial-design, and graphic-design).
We may appreciate and question in contemporary design culture, particularly in China, postmodern characteristics of coexistence and hybridity, and also replication. Wenzhou-Kean is a joint-venture that exemplifies a coexistent hybrid; and so follows this exhibition, replicating at 1:1 the famous Michael Graves ‘Warehouse’ Library— tall bookcases conceived as colonnaded ‘buildings’ facing each other across a ‘street’— and here coexisting and entangled with the ‘rooms’ of a Wenzhou village ‘open-house’ of metal frame, also at 1:1. The experience of ‘Design: Public-through-Practice’ is one of intriguing and simultaneous juxtaposition. To join a part of America (curriculum) to a part of China (context) is to make something entirely ‘new’ (Wenzhou-Kean).
The exhibition ‘Design: Public-through-Practice’ explores a design school and its public-practice of design and design-education; through its studios, its practice-based research and scholarship, and its public lectures and talks. Work includes architecture students’ 3D-printed ‘tiny-houses’, designed for an international industry competition; graphic design students’ UI/UX design prototypes and promotional videos; ‘Infrastructure and Landscape’, a collection of essays and the first book of the Wenzhou-Kean School of Public Architecture; digitally fabricated plywood stools inspired by traditional Chinese craft; and a prototype for a ‘Bat-House’, the result of an interdisciplinary design collaboration between architecture and biology faculties and students. The exhibition was designed as ‘pre-cycled’ (meaning designed to be constructed then deconstructed, then constructed again); its final iteration is a permanent installation within the newly constructed Wenzhou-Kean University School of Architecture and Design building (Ge Hekai Hall), where it will continue to be a ‘Michael Graves Warehouse’ house-as-museum public-archive of the constantly evolving work of the school.
Credits:
David Vardy (design and curation) and various professors and students of Wenzhou-Kean University School of Public Architecture