The rationale of nature, the root of culture, the order of the form, the good of ethics, the appropriateness of life, the beauty of vision
The Smart Tension of Urban Design
Editor's note
"The Theory, Key Technology and Application of Multi-scale Protection of China's Urban Architectural Heritage" recently won the first prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award. This is the first time that my country's architecture field has won this honor.
The achievement was evaluated as "the first reveal of the inner mechanism of multi-scale protection of urban architectural heritage".
In more than two decades, Wang Jianguo, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor of Southeast University, led the team to gradually establish the urban architectural heritage protection theory and technical system based on the multi-scale continuity of city-block-architectural heritage.
He and Academician Cui Kai jointly led and won this national award in cooperation with seven companies.
The results have been applied to 16 famous historical and cultural cities across the country, 43 world cultural heritages and national key cultural relics protection units, and 114 historical blocks, and significant social, economic and environmental benefits have been achieved.
This award also made us think about some basic questions about architecture and space: What is a good urban design, and what is an excellent architectural work?
In the digital age, architectural design has new dimensions and technological tools at the level of cognition, interpretation, discrimination, and implementation. Academician Wang Jianguo's architectural concepts and teaching ideas provide us with more new wisdom tensions for imagining the future space.
Facing the uncertain world, as a research and teaching team of a university professor’s studio, what we must do first is to become a “lifelong learner” that continues to grow, and to form a “scientific community” that integrates research and teaching. Explore the mysteries of the frontiers of science and achieve continuous advancement in knowledge production and professional practice.
1. Skills building foundation
In the past, everyone believed that architectural design ideas should be drawn first, and then things that can be built.
However, the rapid advancement of computing power in the digital age has expanded people's imagination and design boundaries. Through digital construction and 3D printing, complex spatial constructions that cannot be achieved by traditional design methods can be realized, such as non-linear and random digital generation and construction. .
In this way, architectural design tools and architectural evaluation standards have undergone significant changes.
Today a large number of industrial product-level buildings are exquisitely exquisite and have broken through people's usual cognition and understanding of architecture.
In the digital age, we have new dimensions and technological tools for cognition, interpretation, differentiation, design, collaboration, and implementation of urban design and architectural design creation.
For example, "Industry 4.0", which originated in Germany, has had a profound impact in the engineering world. Its core concept is the Cyber-Physics System (Cyber-Physics System), which means that the digital world and the physical world are deeply integrated.
Life system and machine system can realize initial human-machine interaction, coordination and even integration.
With the advent of parameterization, visualization, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), the "master-slave relationship" between humans and machines has blurred.
For example, in the era of "all things are number" in the traditional graphical statics in recent years, due to the qualitative leap in algorithm tools and visualization, the original restricted part of the method system-"dimension" and "efficiency" have made important breakthroughs. .
The cumbersome manual drawing and step analysis in the past can be completed concisely and intuitively on the computer platform today, and the scope of application has also developed from a two-dimensional structure to a three-dimensional structure closer to the architectural form.
In terms of urban design, through the mining, governance, integration and cross-validation of multi-source data, as well as the artificial setting of the accuracy of data information particles for specific design requirements, people can already initially see the "one effect, multiple causes" behind the urban physical form. The underlying logic of construction mechanism and interaction of various causes.
For the complex giant system of the city, the ability and effectiveness of the "manual intervention" of adjustment and guidance have also been greatly improved today.
I think that there is basically no definite unique solution for understanding the complex giant system of the city. Therefore, the approach of truth is an important law.
Our team used this rule to initially solve the design problem of the interaction of "scene" and "view" based on dynamic random viewpoints in the landscape improvement of the east bank of West Lake in Hangzhou, and obtained the national invention patent.
Like the success that has been repeatedly verified for thousands of years, some of the collective consensus of classic utopias, such as the principles of nature, the roots of culture, the order of forms, the goodness of ethics, the appropriateness of life, and the beauty of vision, are now being generally recognized by the public. The iterative progress of digital technology has provided new possibilities for the final realization of this collective consensus. The "fourth-generation digital city paradigm based on human-computer interaction" proposed by me in 2017 is a new exploration in this direction. .
Good urban design and architectural design should contribute to the livability, habitability, ease of living and sustainability of the urban and rural human settlement environment. Today, ecological ethics based on the "dual-carbon goal" should be added.
High-level creative design is not only an important force that opens up the public aesthetic dimension and promotes the high-quality development of the human settlement environment, but also helps to reveal the construction mechanism of urban morphology and promote the knowledge production of place creation.
For design objects with social, humanistic and artistic attributes, there will always be different evaluations that vary depending on the value orientation, observation perspective, and different groups of people.
However, through more than 20 years of research and practice in urban and architectural design, we realize that with the support of the new data environment and related technologies, urban design is getting closer and closer to "multi-scale, full-chain spatial experience grasping." "The final realization of this vision.
2. Liberal camp
"Liberal Arts" was once regarded as "general knowledge" in the education circle. I don't fully agree with this. It just expresses the number of categories of knowledge and the increase of information bandwidth, but it does not express this "breadth" well. The relationship with complexity does not reveal the "broad and profound" information in "Liberal Arts".
Liberal Arts is usually used more in the context of educational research.
In terms of urban and architectural design, Boya also has similar interpretations and interpretations. Camp environment is our daily design work.
"Bo" means width and thickness, while depth belongs to the technical category.
I understand that "Bo" requires four basic abilities in design work: one is the ability to freely gallop and think about; the other is the ability to empathize and cooperate with different professionals; the third is the ability to distinguish and manage multi-source information; and the fourth is whimsical. Imagination.
"Elegance" is a kind of quality, a kind of connotation and a kind of atmosphere.
As far as urban design and architectural design are concerned, "elegance" is a declaration of a "high sense" with both visual pleasure and in-depth experience.
As a university professor, my first identity is a university teacher and scientific researcher. What I want in my mind is how to do some "real" research and design from the ideal height of "should" as much as possible.
Although a real design requires the courage to face the difficulties of reality and the wisdom of balancing the appeals of all parties, there are also choices of "do" and "not do".
I often think about how to reflect the profound "looking back to history" and the imagination of looking forward to the future in the cultivation of students and young teachers, and to explore the "relatively certain" things in the uncertainty of the future.
Colleges and universities have relatively convenient conditions and soils for joint scientific and technological research through interdisciplinary, cross-professional and cross-industry cooperation. For example, in urban design, in addition to the conventional civil engineering colleges, humanities colleges, and art colleges, the colleges of computer science and information We all have professors and experts who have been cooperating with us all year round.
A very important point is that the teaching studio is not an operating company. We can tolerate more trial and error and retreat, and we can also consider the influence and influence of the “slow variables” of long-term and quality-first on the team. The level of research results are brought about by the studio's insistence on "long-termism" and the large number of scientific trial and error.
Therefore, in addition to the educational concept, "Liberal Arts" can also have a new interpretation in the professional dimension of design. Only those who have the liberal arts qualities and the "as it should" are capable of exploring the unknown, leading the direction, and discriminating the laws of operation in the objective world. The mission of the relationship between "independent variable" and "dependent variable".
Do every design well and create an appropriate place environment. This is what I understand as the "Boya Camping Environment".
3. Go with nature
"Nature Walk" is a comprehensive presentation of design posture, vision and value, including three meanings: one is to follow the natural construction of architectural form, the principle of construction and to maintain the sensitivity of design to natural elements; the other is architecture It can live in poetry, compatible with nature and the surrounding environment; third, the building can be integrated into the landscape, or it can become a scene with a sense of landscape, in order to achieve a result of 1 plus 1 equal to 2 or even greater than 2.
Not only that, nature also determines the climatic and geographical characteristics of a region, and these characteristics form or even determine the local cultural characteristics, that is, the so-called "one side of the water and soil raises the other side."
The establishment and development of human civilization depends to a large extent on the natural environment in which it is located and people's attitudes towards the natural environment.
"The unity of man and nature" and the "community of human natural life" have taken on new meanings today as we enter the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has organized and implemented the "dual urban repair", namely urban repair and ecological restoration, in order to treat "urban diseases", improve the living environment, and transform the urban development mode.
The “Double Urban Repair” promoted the healing of the development wounds left by the excessive demand for nature in the previous industrial era, promoted the urban public service facilities and ecological construction, provided popular public open space and leisure space, and significantly improved the urban population. The quality of the living environment.
In this regard, domestic cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Quanzhou, Jingdezhen, Nanning, and Xuzhou have carried out good practices, and I once summarized them as "creative cities".
"Mountains and rivers are suitable, and nature walks together" is the topic of an academic report I once did.
The “landscape” here refers to a site with a certain geographical and climatic environment. The building should be made more natural, adapt to the natural constraints of the locality, have a dialogue with nature, and express the design of the building at the same time. Positive energy in the natural environment.
Integrating into nature is a way, coexisting with nature is also a way, sometimes it is also a way to create a new order by building itself.
The design should not be path dependent. It must be adapted to local conditions, time conditions, and the specific site requirements and cultural environment to determine how the design should be done.
I have always regarded urban design and architectural design as two sides of one body, or a "continuum" (Continuum).
Many current concepts, such as landscape pattern, looking at mountains and water, blue and green interweaving, three-dimensional composite, intensive development, organic renewal, green livability, place creation, community construction, quality life, etc., have crossed the different spaces of cities and buildings. scale.
Especially after the 2015 Central City Work Conference was held, the work connection between urban designers, architects and urban planners became an organic whole.
I have sorted out the characteristics and advantages of architects participating in urban design work: First, they have the artistic imagination and design capabilities of urban space organization, and are good at grasping the urban visual environment characteristics given by topography, geomorphology, bioclimatic and other conditions; second, in conceptual cities In terms of design and engineering implementation of urban design, architects can play an active and direct professional control role; third, architects are "urban repair", "contextual continuity", "retaining regional environment, cultural characteristics, architectural style" and other genes Direct contributors.
In recent years, many design teams of academicians, masters and outstanding architects have participated in a series of major urban design competitions in China and have achieved good results.
I clearly realize that the professional vision, work ability, and personnel scale of any professor's studio are limited. Therefore, knowledge accumulation, vision expansion, cooperative research and "unloving the past" are very important.
Whether it is scientific research or planning and design, overall and systematic thinking and methodological thinking are often critical.
According to the principle of information theory, in the slightly noisy design competition and scientific research plan comparison scene, if your plan has unique creativity and imagination, it will stand out through the increase of signal-to-noise ratio in the era of information explosion.
Architectural identity with positive social aesthetic guidance is a rare product in the current era, and urban features and architectural works with "distinctiveness" or even "single item" are particularly precious.
Therefore, our team has always insisted on treating each research or design project as a new opportunity and challenge. We all hope that compared with what we have done in the past, we can be advanced in a certain aspect, and at the same time remain right. Opportunity expectation and professional sensitivity of successful vision.
In this way, it may be a matter of course for the development of scientific research and teaching, the cultivation of talents, and the acquisition of design results.
(Author: Wang Jianguo, Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, Professor of Southeast University)