This article is from WeChat official account:one (ID: yitiaotv), author: Cheng Qing, Editor: Chen Zaiwen, the original title of” most popular people of Chengdu on schedule, “head Figure from: the authors provide
The Chengdu architect Liu Jiakun born in the 50’s was called “Brother Kun” and “Uncle Kun” by his younger generations. The Chengdu West Village courtyard he designed and built, with a building area of 140,000 square meters, resembles a giant “hot pot” in appearance, but looks Like unfinished. Liu Jiakun has also heard young people use the words “I’m here in this unfinished building” to make appointments on the phone.
A bird’s-eye view of the West Village Courtyard. Photography: Chen Chen
Xicun Courtyard Frontage Street Photography: existing buildings
But gradually, this place has become the most popular public place for citizens in the west of Chengdu. Takeshita hot pot, rooftop track, square dance resort, creative market… men, women and children can find fun here, and the surrounding rents increase. By 40%.
Liu Jiakun builds houses. He is good at integrating cultures and customs and people’s needs from different places into buildings seamlessly. Although the built buildings often look “rough” in appearance, they can always grow with nature and live with the locals after five, ten, or even longer periods of time.
Weekend market in the West Village compound
Baseball training class in West Village compound
In the fall of 2020 after the epidemic eased, Yiyi went to Chengdu to meet Liu Jiakun, play basketball with him in the backyard of the new studio, listen to him chatting with his old painter friend He Duoling about art, and even at the Xicun compound designed by him Here, it captures the leisurely life that Chengdu people have recovered after the epidemic.
Chengdu architect Liu Jiakun
Liu Jiakun is a native of Chengdu, but probably because of his ancestral home in Hebei, he has a cool stubbornness that is not easy to find in Sichuanese, and his face that doesn’t often smile is usually serious and cold. Someone described Liu Jiakun’s building as “virulent”. When I first saw Liu Jiakun, they found that these two words are also very suitable for him.
But when he started to talk, he flowed out of Chengdu’s easy-going, chatting with cold jokes, using his own words, “Mengsao”.
On the first shooting day, Liu Jiakun took us to see two studios under construction in the Blue Roof Art District. This will be the place where Jiakun Architects will hold exhibitions and activities in the future. In the final stage, he must go to the scene to discuss many details with the workers. After work, he took out a basketball from the trunk of the car, and the photographers who shouted a piece accompanied him to play a few rounds. While layups, he joked to the young people like: “I was injured, you can’t hit me!”
Liu Jiakun thinks that he can come here more in the future, and the museum of his old friend He Duoling is next door. He planned a vegetable plot, planted trees, and built a basketball court in the backyard. He turned the second floor of the studio toward the best place, installed long windows, and kept it as a cafe.
It’s just that everyone in the studio is used to Yulin’s office.
In the office of Yulin, Chengdu with director Wenders (right)
In 1999, before the concept of “independent architect”, Liu Jiakun opened his own office. The office is located in an ordinary commercial and residential building in Yulin, Chengdu. When entering the community, the guard room must open a rusty iron door. The office is on the sixth floor of a commercial and residential building. The entrance door is hung with bells bought by Liu Jiakun. Everyone comes in and out, and Qingyang’s bells rang.
Liu Jiakun’s room is in a corner of the second floor of the transfence floor. The desk and wall are all hand-drawn drawings of his architectural projects, but the bookshelves on the front and back of the desk, at first glance, there are many more literary works than architectural books. The door was always open, and the three Chinese idyllic cats in the office strolled in comfortably, jumped on the desk, and looked out the window for a while.
As the meal is approaching, the strong hot pot flavor drifts into the community from the street restaurants. As a native of Chengdu, hot pot is Liu Jiakun’s love. During the epidemic, trapped in isolation, Liu Jiakun had to cook at home by himself. The first meal when things got better was to find a relatively open hot pot restaurant on the roof to celebrate the birthday of He Duoling and other old friends.
For basin, Sichuanese and hot pot, Liu Jiakun has his own hot pot philosophy:
“The Chengdu Plain is surrounded by high mountains. The locals’ lives in the basin are surrounded and surrounded, and they have a basin consciousness. The hot pot is the same. It is actually a large container, which can hold everything inside. It is also very inclusive.”
Xicun Compound Photography: Existing Architecture
A 140000㎡ “unfinished building”, Chengdu people love it
In the Qingyang District to the west of Chengdu, Liu Jiakun built a huge “hot pot”, covering an area of about 70 acres in the West Village compound.
Take us to stroll around in the Xicun compound. Liu Jiakun drove his mobile phone and camera all the way to record the various “bamboo lives” that Chengdu people quickly recovered after the epidemic: a lively weekend market in a long strip of courtyard, resting in front of the entrance porch The little girl jumping on the platform, the young man taking selfies with the hollow brick wall of the compound as the background, the kid playing baseball on the center court…
Xicun compound is an urban complex. Apart from no houses, it has almost no unexpected functions. More than 70 acres of land are surrounded by streets, houses are built around the streets in a circle, and various shops are settled.
Stadium photography: existing buildings
In the middle is a large open space, there are three courses, one large and two small.
Long-shaped Cizhu Courtyard Photography: Fang Ziyu
The staircase platform becomes a hidden small courtyard under the bamboo forest
There are also large and small yards and corridors full of bamboo, where people can dance square dances, play mahjong, eat hot pot…
Overhead runway photography: existing buildings
The total length of the track that rises from the ground and circles the roof is 1.6km, and thematic mini-marathons are held regularly.
There was an influx of more than 9,000 citizens on the roof to walk and run in one night. The management was very nervous, afraid of safety accidents, and locked the roof track on weekdays, and opened it when there were activities.
Square hot pot shot by Liu Jiakun
Because of this, Liu Jiakun often said that the Xicun compound is a hot pot that is “anything can be thrown in”, but it is not a round pot, but a square pot with lattice. Kind of.
He took a special photo of a square pot, which was put together with the top view of the West Village compound, saying that the square grid is the small courtyard in the compound.
Citizen activities in the West Village compound
There are more than a dozen residential areas around the West Village compound, but originally there was only one golf course, several tennis courts and a swimming pool on this piece of land. They occupy a large area and have high operating costs, but only serve a few people.
It was Du Jian who commissioned Liu Jiakun to design the Xicun compound. He is a good friend of Liu Jiakun for more than 20 years and an entrepreneur with sentiments and ideals. As the chief planner and owner of the West Village, Du Jian hopes that the completed building will not only reflect the local spirit of the Chengdu Plain, but also reflect contemporary urban life. Before commissioning, he read the novels and architectural essays written by Liu Jiakun carefully again, and finally confirmed that his candidate can only be Liu Jiakun. This decision proved Du Jian’s architectural vision and urban ideals.
Liu Jiakun, Wenders and Du Jian on the roof track of the West Village compound
The architects of Jeju Island, South Korea eat hot pot at Jizhuyuan
In 2016, the Xicun compound was completed and put into use. It has been more than four years now. The Chengdu Cultural Circle organized activities in the compound, and foreign friends from other places came to visit, which made Liu Jiakun run here many times a year.
The German director Wenders and his wife came to sneak around, the architects from Jeju Island in South Korea had hot pot under the bamboo forest in the compound, and the Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima had tea here.
Nearly 30 kinds of bamboos have been planted in the Xicun compound: Ci bamboo, pink bamboo, bamboo, purple bamboo… “Meet the happiness index of Chengdu people: life under bamboo,” Liu Jiakun said.
At the beginning of the design, Liu Jiakun did not pre-set the activity scenes in the compound, but based on the approximate number of people who will gather and move, framed venues of different sizes and shapes, and made some concrete lengths of different heights. Stools, bar counters, steps, as to how to move around and how to use them, all freedom is left to the citizens.
Compared to specific designs, he cares more about whether these public spaces can really be used:strong>
“It is not a question of space, it is a question of rights. There is a square and a forest, but people are not allowed to move there. It is not called a public space, right?”
People moving under the entrance porch of the West Village compound
This issue has caused discussion in the practice of many large public buildings:
Herzog and De Meuron(Herzog&de meuron) visited Beijing before designing the Bird’s Nest. They saw the veranda of the East Gate of the Temple of Heaven Beijing citizens who voluntarily gather together to sing, therefore designed an empty corridor around the building at the bottom of the Bird’s Nest. It is hoped that even if there is no competition, the citizens will be able to relax, play, and sing… The real center corridor is designed, but the bird’s nest will charge you. The tickets blocked the citizens from going to the event.
Paul Andrew(Paul Andreu) when he conceived the National Theatre, he hoped that the winter pool would attract children to skate on it. The arc becomes the constantly changing abstract picture above the underground corridorcase. However, in the final realization of the pool, a water circulation system was introduced to ensure that the water surface would never freeze in winter to prevent getting up.
The installation “Man Mountain and Sea of People” based on the Xicun Courtyard was exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale
This is actually the rights issue that Liu Jiakun said. The formation of his own keen “civic architectural consciousness” is related to his early experience in architecture in Tibet.
In 1984, Liu Jiakun, who worked at Chengdu Architectural Design Institute, was selected to design the Mass Art Museum in Tibet. There, the scenes of herders singing and dancing around the fire, riding their guns on horseback, not only touched him, but also made him alert: the design he brought with him was just clever, and the herders had their own lifestyle system. “You can’t just stop at me designing an object. Architecture must first have a close relationship with people.”
With this idea of designing and building houses, Liu Jiakun has gained a lot of true fans from non-architectural circles. Within ten minutes of filming with a piece in the West Village compound, he was recognized by fans and asked for an autograph and a group photo.
Fang Lijun, an old friend of the painter, commented, “Many architects I have come into contact with are actually enemies of mankind. Many architects are working on a shell, and Liu Jiakun is working on a whole. What he considers is the whole human feeling. “
The street elevation of the West Village Courtyard
“The master is among the people”, the master follows the migrant workers to change construction standards
In the one or two years since its completion, the Xicun compound has always been described as “unfinished buildings” by surrounding residents. On the side of the Xicun Courtyard Street, Liu Jiakun heard the young man use the words “I’m here in this unfinished building” to meet on the phone in Rio.
It was called “unfinished building” because Liu Jiakun gave up decorating the facade of the building and just built a skeleton for the shops that settled in: “It’s like making a bookshelf, and each book has its own performance.”
The main structure uses locally grown bamboo as a template to pour fair-faced concrete, and the external walls are directly built with porous bricks without any whitewashing. Even the railings of the outer corridor are steel bars directly drawn from the concrete fence.
In the West Village compound
The texture of the bamboo glue template of the West Village Courtyard. Photography: Existing Architecture
Many of the bricks used are environmentally friendly materials developed by Liu Jiakun-recycled bricks. After the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, Liu Jiakun personally went to the disaster area and saw many buildings that had collapsed due to the earthquake. He led local workers to use these ruined materials as aggregates, mixed with cut wheat straw as fibers, and added cement, Sand, make new bricks and build new houses. After that, Liu Jiakun expanded the concept of recycled bricks. The waste from house demolished in the city is the raw material of recycled bricks.
Using materials according to local conditions and constructing according to the construction skills of local workers is the “low-tech strategy” Liu Jiakun has adhered to for many years.
External stairs and overhead runways are the favorite places for young people to take photos
The “unfinished building” in the early residents’ mouths, the Xicun compound, is now the top card of Chengdu’s “net celebrity building” in various mobile phone check-in software. This effect is also beyond Liu Jiakun’s preset:
“When I started designing, I thought that older adults would like it better, and I’m not sure if younger people would like it., I just do the design that I think is the best, and I do it only if I want to be likable, but I can’t do it well. “
But when the conversation changed, he added another sentence wittyly: “It’s better to study the girls’ preferences first. If the girls like it, the boys will follow.”
Liu Jiakun at the construction site of Blue Roof Studio
When traveling to Japan more than 20 years ago, Liu Jiakun personally touched the works of Maki Fumihiko, Isakishin, and Tadao Ando. He wrote words and exclaimed: The huge technological gap between these works and Chinese architecture at the time made him excited and Lost.
Now I’m talking about construction skills with Liu Jiakun, asking him whether he has narrowed or made up these huge gaps through years of running-in with the workers, but he gave another idea:
“Building a house in Sichuan has a slow pace and has its own fun. In terms of exquisiteness, the skills and local character of the workers naturally do not support this matter. No matter how hard you work, you can’t achieve absolute exquisiteness. The original aesthetic rules should not be formulated in that direction.”
Zhejiang Wenli·Songyang Sanmiao Cultural Exchange Center Photography: Existing Architecture
When it comes to building houses in the Jiangnan area, Liu Jiakun will change the construction standards for workers:
In Songyang, Zhejiang, he used continuous crimson weathering steel corridors to create an open and traditional exquisite garden in the once-declining old city block;
Suzhou Imperial Kiln Brick Museum Photography: Existing Architecture
In the imperial kiln gold brick museum in Suzhou, on the corridor of the museum, he let the waves of the river reflect on the fair-faced concrete wall of the bamboo formwork demoulding, with the agility of the south of the Yangtze River:
“The craftsmanship of Jiangnan workers is to be more meticulous and precise. First of all, they can do it. Second, if you don’t let them do this, they are also worried.”