PROJECT 2:// The Shanghai World Trade Organisation Affairs Consultation Centre
VIDEO:// laoximen proposal overview + perceptive courtyard examples
A proposal for a walled trade complex in Laoximen, central Shanghai, accumulating in the “Shanghai World Trade Organisation Affairs Consultation Centre”.
This is intermingled with entrepreneurial market space for budding Shanghainese traders, who are granted haven in an enterprise zone which Allows the WTO an overview from the roots of current Chinese commercial Trade - an overview required by the WTO for constructing trends in china, for The monitoring of counterfeited goods, and of course, as a bustling welcome for foreign - ambassadors to the WTO, and commercial operations in China.
Laoximen is a busy, bustling area of Shanghai; the site is surrounded by multi-carriage way roads and towers of office and commerce. The site is currently empty (recently demolished) and walled. Three exits for the Laoximen underground station exit directly onto my site, making it a very central, prominent feature of the topography of Laoximen.
Trade has for a long time been a feature of Chinese society (documented several thousand years earlier than it was in the West), and so it is fitting that a site which embodies trade, should also educate and entertain both the Shanghainese public and the international delegates. For this reason, the site boasts an architecture recreating the famous ‘Along the River during the Qingming Festival’ scroll – often called the ‘Mona Lisa’ of Chinese art for its accurate description of Chinese trade in the 11th century.
The divisions of the WTO and market spaces are divided into fragments relating the scroll and placed around the site to fashion courtyards, much like a traditional Chinese Garden. The delegates and public can then journey to their destinations within the site by passing through a series of fragments recreating the famous scroll. For example, The Division of Industrial Analysis portrays a vision of the cargo boats from the scroll, and is also where the lorry park is hidden, for distributing products around the site. Another example could be the bridge spanning the road between the two sites, which, whilst also being an active bridge, is also an illusion of the Rainbow bridge, and also an archive and library of Chinese Trade and WTO correspondence.
To recreate the scroll, however, I developed a technique for ambiguous depth perception based upon concave/convex relationships. In Chinese scrolls, they employ a shifting perspective so that each individual object is correct in the eye of the beholder. On my site, this is also true; using an inverse shape of what would normally be expected, the object appears to rotate as you move around it, shifting its perspective at a must faster rate than in ‘reality’.
This alternative perception of reality is also a metaphor for China’s reputation within the world (and specifically the WTO) as the home of fake products – by housing an alternate perception in the home of the WTO, it underlines the WTO’s challenge of stamping out fake products – as one struggles to see the true form of the courtyard illusions on the site in place of the fake perception. Questioning our perception of reality beyond the needs of a trade organisation.
The idea of the enterprise zone extends far back into the history of Shanghai, when it was once divided into concessions – with each colonising western nation ruled an area of Shanghai (such as the British, Dutch and French Concessions) with each concessions having separate laws, and even separate power plugs). The enterprise zone within my walled site is to benefit Shanghainese traders; they are given stalls around the site at discounted prices and with reasonable tolerance on the goods they sell in return for the data gained by the WTO on the market research.
The site embodies trade in its bureaucratic form (of WTO issues), in its active commerce (of market traders and stalls), and from a traditional perspective (in the perception of the Chinese Scroll).
