Bert de Muynck on ORDOS100: avant-garde architecture in the desert

2008.04.22

100 architects on a site visit. (All photos by Bert de Muynck & Mónica Carriço.)

Photos copyright www.movingcities.org

On the half-hour drive from the Ordos airport through the empty desert toward this Inner Mongolian mini-metropolis of just over one million, one starts noticing construction cranes filling the horizon. In this town known for its coal and cashmere, located just an eighty-minute flight from Beijing, the local government is building—from scratch and on a plot of 155 square kilometers—a new city for a planned population of 200,000 by the year 2020. The word “unprecedented” is too frequently used to characterize China’s urban development, a blind and uncritical epithet for a country in the throes of change. But here in Ordos, the “ORDOS100” project seems to be challenging the notion that this word has lost all meaning.

The group of one hundred convenes in a Holiday Inn meeting room.

In the so-called “Creative and Cultural Industries District” of this new city-to-be sits a plot of 197 hectares, on which 100 architects from 29 different countries, all nominated by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, will each design a 1000-square-meter villa. If the programmatic spec-sheet is identical (each villa must include a swimming pool, servants’ quarters, fitness facilities, etc.), the architectural responses are anything but. Funded by investment from Jiang Yuan Cultural & Creative Industrial Development Ltd. and Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd., the project is master-planned by the Chinese architect-artist Ai Weiwei and his atelier FAKE Design.

Phase 1 architects place their small models into one big model.

A villa with 100 different rooms, a villa for a narcissist, a new Gourbi Palace, a villa without distinction between inside and outside, a villa with a green heart, a monolith, a villa of different boxes colliding together into one unstable form, a villa defined by the idea of holistic materiality, a villa without a claim on its territory, a villa dug into a dune, a green mountain rising out of the desert. These were a few of the proposals the 28 architects included in Phase 1 of the project presented between earlier this month at a five-day conference in the Holiday Inn Ordos. Returning almost three months after their first visit to site, these architects brought with them with small models and large display panels. On the second day of the conference, they were joined by 72 new colleagues, selected to design the remaining villas. Architects flew to the desert from nations as distant as Chile, Mexico, Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland, Indonesia, South Africa, and the U.S., in what was perhaps the strangest and grandest gathering of building-makers ever convened. All came pursuing an offer to build something in China, an offer that only one of the 100 invited architects could refuse.

Phase 1 architects present their designs to the client and their peers.

A strange atmosphere filled the hotel lobby when on Friday evening the Phase 1 architects couldn't resist planting a miniature model of their proposal into a large jigsaw-puzzle-like wooden model of the site. This act combined the voyeuristic and exhibitionistic drives of architects in a single object that floated somewhere in between architectural competition and showroom. Only once the model was fitted out with these first 28 villas did the scope and intensity of the project become clear: a titillating conflict of creativity, a clash of cultures, a collage city where anything, or almost anything, seems to be possible. Afterwards the architects talked about horror, conflict, and creativity, and started analyzing each other’s models and motives. On one long Saturday these same architects presented and explained their work to client Cai Jiang, Ai Weiwei and juror Wang Shu (of Amateur Architecture Studio and the China Academy of Art). It was a true FAKE festival of forms. In the course of the evening the architects involved in the second phase arrived, warmly welcomed by dinner and designs.

Proposed villa designs for Phase 1.

All gathered on Sunday morning to discuss the project. Soon the room was filled with a strange form of architectural consciousness as the conversation bounced between sustainability, the project, forms, bricks, landscapes, and the architectural ego itself. The discussion was followed by a lottery that determined which plot would be assigned to each of the Phase 2 architects. The next day all architects went off to see the site they would soon (within a year) fill with a villa. Contrary to the cold and snow the first-phase architects encountered when they visited in mid-January, the April sun made the desert shine. After visiting the heart of the new city, we drove to the site. While approaching the site a strange buzz went through the buses: architects always get excited by an empty plot of land they know they will need to domesticate. By now more roads were finished and trees planted. At the edge of the site, the bus stopped and the architects flew out, all running in different directions, touching the sand, taking pictures of dunes, all the while dreaming about the direction this desert could take. Some planted flags (or did someone put them there before?) explaining this act with the same intensity one had when conquering the moon. In the end this wandering came to seem like an act of desert dérive or sand situationism.

The next day, the architects filled an Air China 737 and made the short trek back to Beijing. Then they dispersed, via Norman Foster’s new airport terminal, to every corner of the earth. In less than five weeks, all hundred villa designs will fill the model. This unprecedented five-day gathering of architects might well have been the key objective, besides the commission itself, of the Ordos100 project. Another experiment so total is hard to imagine. No one knows what the impact of the project will be, nor who will inhabit the villas. For now the project remains a desert dream waiting to be turned into an architectural assemblage.

— 文/ Bert de Muynck