We do not live in a neutral, white space; we do not live, die, or love within the rectangle of a sheet of paper. We live, we die, we love within a gridded, partitioned, variegated space, one with light and dark zones, differences in level, stairways, hollows, and bumps; regions that are hard, and others that are fragile, penetrable, porous.
— Michel Foucault
The Chronic Death of the Paper Book
As Kevin Kelly declares in his book The Inevitable, there is a trajectory of technology forming a possible future scene for us. In that world, of the far future, with the technological development of the electronic book, the paper book would be completely replaced by ebook (or screens) in a positive way. The only heritage of the paper book left is its conceptual structure, a bunch of symbols united by a theme into an experience that takes a while to complete. Based on this assumption, this project investigates the related industries, elaborates a fictitious “future history” for them.
It presupposes the whole printing industry, paper making industry, paper book retailing industry, etc are doomed to go down, eventually and inevitably become extinct. According to the principle of Economies of Scale, as the industry shrinks, the paper products would become rarer, but also much more valuable, thus the related services would be more customized and private, until its extinction. As Kevin Kelly says, we cannot know what exactly future will be, but there is an inevitable tendency. This argument could be called The Chronic Death of the Paper Book.
Heterotopian Space
The site of this project is located in the Shanghai Bund Area, the former English Settlement, where several surrounded buildings were preserved as heritage architecture since 1930s. Although their façades are kept intactly, the internal functions shift frequently thought the history. The building nowadays used as Fudan University Dental School and Research Center was designed for Shanghai Saving Society in the beginning, and later was transformed into a department store, then a bank, until it becomes what it is today. Same situation can also be applied on the building just on corner of the following block.
The street scenery composes of, not only the old shanghai signature style of Chinese Art Deco architectural facades with outdoor air-conditioning units attached, but also the complex tangle of electric cables hanging between telegraph poles in front of buildings. All these different and incompatible elements are forcedly put together.
Therefore, according to the six principles of heterotopia, defined by Michel Foucault in Of Other Space: Utopias and Heterotopias, this site could be seen as or “evokes” a heterotopia space. Driven by the Foucauldian concept of the heterotopia, the proposal intents to juxtapose the incompatible spaces which designed for three extracted “slices in time”. For each part, different functions are implemented, since the function of the heterotopian space would shift into a very different fashion, as its history unfolds. By cutting transections from the folded timeline of the fictitious history, the proposal is opened onto its heterochronies.
Art Deco Shanghai
Through the investigation on the site, an interesting unsung history is discovered. The two neighboring buildings next to the site was built in the same time period, by the same architect, Poy Gum Lee. Poy Gum Lee is a Chinese-American architect, who was famous for his Art Deco buildings with Chinese architectural influence, for instance, the New York Chinatown. Both of these two buildings also exude the same characteristic, the mix of Art Deco and Chinese elements.
The preserved façades have become the detached surface of another entity, memorizing the belle epoque of the old Shanghai, celebrating the bygone fashion from another era. Comparing to the façades facing the street, the back faces are much more decayed, neglected. The gaps between the buildings, a space so-called “Yi xian tian” formed, which means, the thin strip of sky in the city lane, an introverted side apart from the glamourous surface. This reminds those temporary surfaces made in set construction for filmmaking. The project also aims to simulate this effect taken place on site, to create a two-faced surface.
Programme
Inspired by the theories mentioned previously, this project offers a mix use of a custom shop for paper products, an ancient paper auction house, and a museum about paper history. Each of these three spaces symbolizes a stage that has taken place in the fictitious history. The staffs become the tenements in the collective dwelling space, in order to create a “isolated but penetrable system”.
The project attempts to create a heterotopian space of illusion, of those nostalgic outcasts, of those sparkling moments in history… escaping from the real world, into “a piece of rectangular paper”, just as Foucault says.
References
Kevin Kelly. “Screening,” in The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future(New York: Viking, 2016).
Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.
Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco. This Is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, trans. Polly McLean (London: Harvill Secker, 2009).
Elain Harwood. Art Deco Britain: Building of the Interwar Years (London: Batsford, 2019).
Alastair Duncan. Art Deco (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988).
Alastair Duncan. Art Deco Complete: The Definitive Guide to the Decorative Art of the 1920s and 1930s (New York: Abrams, 2009).
“Poy Gum Lee,” Shanghai Art Deco, October 8, 2014, http://www.shanghaiartdeco.net/poy-gum-lee/