unMade in China Exhibition

ide@s Gallery, Shanghai | 2012

Collaborators Ron Henderson, Richard Hsu, David Giuliano; CannonDesign Shanghai

Trees (no trees, only bracing)

For the exhibition, unMade in China,12 international practices active in China were invited to exhibit their un-built or abandoned Chinese projects as a celebration of those almost-spectacular, missing projects from the last decade.

The Henan Province Observation Tower is a tall, slender frame that is stabilized by timber buttresses that emerge out of the forest and the river. This braced structure grows out of research of horticultural practices in China where juvenile trees are braced by poles and ancient trees are supported with crutches to secure brittle, aged trunks and branches.

The observation tower is situated in a bend of the river and affords extensive vistas up and down the river from a lofty prospect. The location of the highest observation level was mapped and that point was “cast in the air” and the project investigation was focused on how to both support that point and gain access to it. “Could we design a building that was unstable and could require buttressing? It’s a kind of medieval problem. We have such aspiration but we can’t hold the building up.”