3D City: Future China

3D City: Future China
——International Architecture and Art Invitational Exhibition and Cross Disciplinary Forum

After "Shan Shui – Nature on the Horizon of Art", the Beijing Center for the Arts, together with Beijing Vantone Citylogic Investment Corporation, will present "BCA Green Project II" – "Three Dimensional City: Future China". With collective efforts from world's leading architects and artists, national and international experts and scholars on urban planning, city ecology and environment, decision makers from government and enterprises, "Three Dimensional City" is poised to envision an ideal living environment and future urban ecology. The project addresses the depletion of land and energy resources. Not only will it be an enlightening project from which our future urban planning programs can draw inspiration, but also hopes to involve an exhilarating social reformation.

We believe that after the emergence of agricultural and industrial revolutions, there is no choice for our future but eco-civilization. For the first time in 2008, the world's urban population has exceeded that of rural. As the pattern of urban sprawl hits its peak, urban development is facing a bottleneck, putting a strain on natural resources, and pressure on sustainability. With attempts to curb global warming by maximizing its reduction of energy consumption and carbon emission, and efforts to reclaim land that has been invaded and occupied in the chaos of horizontally spreading cities, humanity is looking for ideal future cities of high-density residences living in harmony with nature. Therefore, by presenting "Three Dimensional City: Future China", we are committed to analyzing the subject of how to build a dream city in an area of 1-2 square kilometers with limited material and energy resources to accommodate 100,000–300,000 residences.


Paolo Soleri, an Italian American architect, urban planning theorist, and the father of 'Arcology' (a portmanteau of the words "architecture" and "ecology"), will launch his first exhibit in China and provide a lecture to Chinese audiences. Soleri, now 90 years old, has carried out his great vision of building a self-sufficient sustainable city since the 1960s. In this project, the social interaction and accessibility of an urban environment are fully coherent with sound environmental principles. In other words, it is an achievable utopia, an unprecedented work of art! Recently he has been very concerned about China's urban development and has attempted to apply his "Lean Linear City" model to China. By presenting historical manuscripts, a long scroll of sketches, three dimensional models and films, the exhibition will be a comprehensive display of Soleri's classic theory 'Arcology' and its practice combined with his profound articulation of China's urbanization and his blueprint for China's future city.

MVRDV, an avant-garde architecture and urban design practice from the Netherlands, is one of the worlds most active and influential architectural groups and was honored as being as a watershed of master and experimental architects in contemporary practice. MVRDV is well-known for its philosophy of maximizing the densification of architecture to allow the greatest possible area to be used as green space. In this exhibition, they will bring us to a city occupying "1x1x0.5 cubic kilometers" in 2020. By applying their unique methodology of "data-scape", the city will be grounded in a mass of data particular to China's circumstances, including land distribution and use, population migration, shortage of land, food and water, as well as, its response to climate change. In respect of design, they're also looking for alternative, high-density solutions besides skyscrapers: single buildings that will be connected waving on 'terraced towers', so as to realize their ideal of "beyond scarcity, beyond separation, beyond pessimism and protectionism."

"Three Dimensional City: Future China" is dedicated to creating a platform particular to China to discuss its future urban development. Besides being a contemporary exhibition, the project will invite leading experts and practitioners from the various fields of urban planning, architecture, design, art, energy, engineering, and the social and economic sector to present a creative platform discussing the practice of three dimensional city in China, offering multi-dimensional visions and comprehensive resolutions for future urban development.





An Achievable Utopia
Shi Jian

In modern architectural history, many architects have had the utopian dream of building a "three dimensional city". For example, Japanese architect, Isozaki Arata had proposed a series of plans on "city in the sky" in the 1960s ("Multilayer activities added to spaces above ground while maintaining that exists on the streets, such proposals were named as 'city in the sky'"... "We will expand architecture to urban scale, in the contrary appropriates urban elements into architectural design in order to reshape the architectural form"). The American architect and urban planning theorist Paolo Soleri further adopted an efficient principle of "complex–condense–sustainable" design (arcology) for human living implemented in Arcosanti – an experimental creation out of pure imagination ("Arcology instructs to reorganize the over-expanded city into a condensed, united and three dimensional city, allowing them to continue to sustain the complicated activities of human civilization. This city would be a critical step in the course of human evolution").

If Isozaki Arata's grand urban complex is an "architectural" resolution to the rapid expansion, highly dense urban environment, then Paolo Soleri's desert city–Arcosanti is an alternative experiment in "small scale" in response to contemporary reality, and the analysis performed by MVRDV based on actual data offers visualizations of such imaginations of the future city. Thus, China in a high-speed urbanization era, confronted with many new issues (for example, the overflow of homogeneous spaces caused by high-speed urbanization) and new pursuits (for instance, ecological/energy design, perpendicular/complex communication system, and the making of new urban spaces), is most likely to realize the dream of building three dimensional cities featuring sophisticated combinations of high-rises and certain futuristic qualities.

Three dimensional city far exceeds the working boundary of the "architect" and "urban planner" in the traditional sense. It needs convergence of all social resources, processing to study in depth and integrate extensively the urban elements of architecture, planning, ecology, natural resources, landscape, living and working models and complex network of transportation, and so on–it is an opportunity this era has offered to city builders, allowing utopian dreams of the past to be realized today.