BEIJING, February 28, 2013 (City Weekend) — We ride our bikes and stroll, eat and drink in them and occasionally worry about their future, but few of us are engaging as deeply and intimately with Beijing’s hutongs as Marcella Campa and Stefano Avesani, a pair of Italian architects taking the hutongs as both their muse and their focus of study and investigation since 2005.
“We use our work to discover the city where we live,” Marcella says. “We show people something, but get something back, in terms of the relationship.”
Marcella had a dream of extending her graduate project on microurbanism to a project to protect Beijing’s ever-disappearing hutongs, which she and Stefano describe as “cities within a city.” So they took to the hutongs, taking measurements and talking to people living there about the changes they were witnessing, but two weeks later, they might return to the same area and find that things had already altered.
“Dimensions, measurements, surveying,” Stefano says, “doesn’t work in Beijing. Maps are kind of out of date.”
Realizing it would be too complicated to approach the city government with an official project, they decided to pursue their findings from sociological and artistic angles instead. Thus, Instant Hutong was born, a project that would give rise to other artistic ventures examining microurban interactions, representing the massive changes happening in the backstreets and finding ways to “map” areas so dense with people, lanes and structures that traditional maps simply cannot depict them with any detail.
Our favorite project is their Urban Carpet series. After drawing eight maps of 1-square-kilometer areas that are home to about 30,000 people, including Nanluogu-xiang, Dongsishitiao and some lesser known hutong neighborhoods, Marcella and Stefano gave the cloth maps to a “lady in the countryside who makes tapestries” using the same technique employed to make propaganda artworks in the 1970s.
Though the tapestries made their debut in the neighborhoods they represent, they have also been shown around town and at exhibitions around the world.
Their latest project, 120 km, takes Marcella, Stefano and their 5-year-old son to villages in Shandong, where they survey villages amid the government’s push to urbanize the countryside.
But Beijing residents hoping for a chance to interact with Marcella and Stefano, as well as Beijing, will get their chance in April, when the duo will host design workshops in which participants will be able to make and take home TOORCI lamps.
The spherical lamps—made largely of badminton birdies—would make a perfect addition to any space in Beijing, even a modern high-rise.
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