KOHLER · Design Shanghai Global Design Conference

ART, CULTURE AND NATURE

It’s wonderful to behold the development of China’s architectural and design culture as expressed through the design of cultural buildings. In the last few years some of the world’s most spectacular and compelling architecture has risen across the country, and we take pleasure in presenting a handful of those projects. We also take great pleasure in identifying and exploring the smaller, more modest schemes that still show a deep-laid love and respect for the natural world while addressing the needs of communities for artistic and cultural activities.

China’s natural beauty is, like everything else in the country, on a vast scale, and the variety and diversity of the responses to it from imaginative and ingenious architects and designers are a pleasure to investigate. We also take the opportunity on Day One to examine how some of the basic tenets of modern sustainable design practice – design for disassembly, circularity, for example - are being put into place in one of the world’s most creative and visionary communities.

REGENERATION, REPURPOSE, LEGACY AND NATURE

A key point in understanding ‘modern sustainability’, that is, a developing philosophy and practice of design which engages with the long term implications of carbon reduction, alternative energies and the other imperatives of ‘green design’, is that ‘sustain’ means to keep something as it is. But we need to move forward, to understand our role in making the world better, not preserving the status quo.

How to make use of existing resources, how to generate new functions for redundant structures and materials, how to meet the new needs of communities with what we already have – this is regeneration and repurposing, breathing new life into old things that a few years ago we would have happily abandoned. Waste becomes a resource, not something to be discarded. This ties into both urbanism and ‘ruralism’ – as the populations of the world migrate into cities, we find our love of the natural world and the benefits we can derive from it become ever more important. How to bring the country into the city? There are many creative minds at work on this huge question, and today we are lucky to celebrate them.

THE BIOSPHERE, THE TECHNOSPHERE AND NATURAL MATERIALS

As our overall theme says, the voices saying ‘Sustainability is no longer enough’ are now many and varied, from all sectors of the architecture and design industry. On Day Three we explore what happens when we treat nature not as a resource, but as a collaborator; when we design to give back to the natural world, even to improve upon it. Here is where we look at biomimicry, the design philosophy that repeats (as far as possible) the structural phenomena of the natural world, where architecture is itself a living process. But we must also understand and engage with technology, which threatens to run out of our control.

In fact the biosphere and the technosphere are the two key elements defined by William McDonough, the co-author of the groundbreaking ‘Cradle to Cradle’ philosophy. It shows how much our attitudes and practice must continue to change. Twelve years ago at Design Shanghai we talked about ‘redesigning design’. Now we are privileged to feature projects and discussions which work towards a whole new understanding of what that means.