TRAVELLERS AMID STREAMS AND MOUNTAINS
Wenzhou-Kean University Campus Main-Gate, Wenzhou, China
Wenzhou-Kean University is an integration of a Western curriculum and a Chinese context. Architecture can be a frame (to look through rather than at) and a portal (as a painting), through which the imagination may engage landscape. Chinese landscape painting is a tradition of representing the exchange and integration of opposing poles as an ideal; a dynamic harmony painted ‘through’ nature, as a medium. The Main Gate of Wenzhou-Kean University is conceived as a contemporary shan-shui-hua; a ‘landscape-of-technology’; with elements and relationships of traditional painting and classical gardens transmuted, as a new nature of utility, artifice, ethic, and symbol; a nature of rock-lighting (solar) and drainage lakes (sustainable- drainage-system), steel and glass (recycled); both something utilitarian and a landscape of the mind. The project is conceived as a synthetic integration of East and West; of a tradition of Western high-concept and a tradition of Chinese relation to nature; practically inclusive and reflective of those who will move ‘east-west’ between its canopy and ponds; passing and exchanging, these figures; Wenzhou-Kean’s ‘Travellers amidst Streams and Mountains’.
The history of gates, in the east and the west, begins with the necessity to form openings in defensive walled structures separating zones. The history of Chinese buildings is one of walls and gates (land and water gates); from courtyards, to walled gardens, to walled cities, to the Great Wall; and from gated work-compounds to todays gated residential compounds. In the ancient settlements of China, a walled, gated, and zoned morphology created a type of linear public space where people gathered to meet, wait, and trade, along lanes and around gates. In the modern era, a campus gate became more a symbol and landmark, open and transparent, less a separating structure. After 2019, the public health crisis closed boundaries to movement, and gates became again check-points and places of public gatherings (as had been the case historically). Today, a campus main gate is a symbol and a landmark as well as a ‘place’ of pause, to wait, to meet, to pass.
The Main Gate of Wenzhou-Kean University is the principal point of entry and exit for vehicles and pedestrians to the Wenzhou-Kean University Campus. With a planned population of 7000 students and 400 faculty, the main gate will be a place of significant public density with requirements for safety, security, lighting, shelter, vehicle management, and way-finding. Together with a design that resolves the various technical and utilitarian aspects of the secure and safe movement of vehicles and people, the design brief has as its principal task the requirement to make a symbol and landmark, to give direction and meaning to the university as a project and institution, for the benefit of all who are to pass and who may identify through its image. Western coordinates, eastern geomancy: ‘More than a billion people in the world today claim intellectual inheritance from ancient Greece. More than two billion are the heirs of ancient Chinese traditions of thought. The philosophies and achievements of the Greeks and Chinese of 2500 years ago were remarkably different, as were the social structures and conceptions of themselves. The intellectual aspects of each society make sense in light of their social characteristics.’
Wenzhou-Kean University is a project for which ‘difference’ is foundational; a western curriculum and a Chinese context. The design for the campus main gate finds an analogous representation, through systems of geometry, for east-west difference and for a polar of mind and body, curriculum and context, as an intellectualization of the university project made physical, to be experienced as a synthetic nature of a ‘landscape of technology’.
The universities ‘Western curriculum’ is represented geometrically through the deductive drawing of a single line of Western Cartesian geometry; an axis precisely connecting two coordinates (or values), that of the coordinates of Wenzhou-Kean University Main Gate and Kean University campus; a perfect logical and ideal line drawn across a projected plane (a Web Mercator map of the world); the straightest line (mental), not the shortest line. This is the line for the new section of fence and it represents an ‘alignment’ intellectually with a Western curriculum.
The universities ‘Chinese context’ is represented geometrically through the influence of Chinese geomancy as related to Chinese classical garden design; placing, articulating, and synthesising elements of both ‘garden’ and street-furniture, informed by patterns, principals, and concepts aesthetic and cosmic of harmony in relation to nature; a geometry of ideal composition rather than ideal form, relational pattern and nature rather than the abstraction of line and shape. Essentially a geometry of integration and synthesis, proximate and synthetic.
A campus gate in the contemporary sense is a utilitarian place of high energy and movement, with the noise of roads, the danger of vehicle movement, and the stress of a barrier check-point. The idea to create the Main Gate principally as a ‘place’, is met by the antidotal idea that this ‘place’, to wait and to meet, would be ideal as a ‘garden’, of a type. The necessary utilitarian elements required of security, safety, and way finding; such as fence, bollard, artificial lighting, signage, and guard building; are transmuted as ‘elements’ of a classical Chinese garden, simultaneously natural and artificial. For example, the security fence is a screen of ‘bamboo’, the parking bollards and artificial lighting are ‘rocks’, the guard building is a garden ‘pavilion’ of traditionally formatted brick (glass brick), the drainage system and signage are a ‘waterfall’ and ‘lake’ with ‘bridge’.
The ancient Chinese believed the ideal environment for human habitat was amidst the harmonious works of both nature and humans. Artifice was part of how nature was ‘designed’ (the construction of artificial rocks and lakes for example). Nature was to be composed and even manufactured; an artistic idealisation; elemental, impressionistic, and aesthetic. The Chinese classical garden may be considered as the painterly composing of a harmonious ‘integration’ as a representation of a balance of nature, city, and society.
Our age is one of technological supremacy over landscape; a supremacy arrived at through science and technology, research and education. Our age is also one that recognises the need for a new age, for an ecological and environmental rebalancing (of technology and ethics). Nature may be reintroduced to architecture, conceptually and artificially, as well as materially, and renewable technology itself may become that new ‘nature’. The project is to be made almost entirely from recycled material; recycled glass, recycled steel, recycled masonry, natural cork (the fence seating), and is solar powered. This idea is to engages science and high-technology materially, through an integration, pragmatic, with Chinese classical garden aesthetics and culture.
Credits:
David Vardy, Xu Jiayi