A proponent of simple, authentic architecture, not fancy forms for form’s sake, Mr Ai has overseen some 70 architectural projects, and was a consultant on Herzog & de Meuron’s “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics. Some of Mr Ai’s most memorable writings weave personal history with political and aesthetic principles. For example, his “earliest experience with architecture” took place when his father was sentenced to hard labour and re-education and the family was forced to live in an earthen pit in Xinjiang. “In political circumstances like those, living underground can provide an incredible feeling of security,” he writes. “In the winter it was warm, in the summer it was cool. Its walls were linked with America.” Mr Ai’s father raised the ceilings of this home by burrowing down another 20 centimetres, and he dug out a bookshelf that eight-year-old Weiwei considered “the best”. For these reasons, concludes the artist, “I don’t believe in ideal architecture.”
-Prospero, “Ai Weiwei’s blog: A digital rallying cry” (The Economist)
The architect as public intellectual is in a good position to return information to regimes that have successfully banished it. This character might be the supplier of all those cultural thorns that deny the possibility of purity and innocence. The world does not hold still while architects push through their prescriptions and urgent situations do not become less severe as they wait for their day on the legislative floor. Since the total, the permanent and prescriptive, evaporate in duplicitous environments, a leap into association with utopia might not risk confusion, but may rather be the ideal means to communicate a countering intent. The insertion of information and ingenious invention, if it is to outwit the agility of special stupidity, is of necessity, temporary and partial, but vigilant and renewed.
-Keller Easterling, “The Knowledge” (C-Lab)
