Alter Studio 2: Architecture Poetry Behind Chinese Classical Instruments中国古乐的建筑之诗

Architecture Poetry Behind Chinese Classical Instruments was a first-year graduate Master Class at the School of Architecture, Tianjin University, taught by Yingfan Zhang and Xiaojun Bu of Atelier Alter together with Christoph Hesse of Kassel, all three graduates of Harvard's Graduate School of Design. The course ran from autumn 2021 to the final review in April 2022, in a joint online and offline format, and was linked to DOCUMENTA 15 in Kassel, where the resulting designs might be shown.

Students began by dissecting an ancient instrument, its structure and the acoustic principle behind it, which carries a particular sense of time and space. That meaning was translated into two-dimensional architectural diagrams, from which an architectural vocabulary was drawn and then rebuilt as three-dimensional tectonics. Of the three scales of architecture, city, building and detail, the studio worked at the scale of construction, using methods and details to compose an architectural poem. Each of the eleven students chose an instrument, among them the guzheng, konghou, pipa, erhu and bamboo flute, and one of two sites: the natural landscape of Kassel, or the Seatopia coast at Qinhuangdao.

The results range from a memorial to the war-surviving architecture of Kassel, built on a slope that holds the ruins of Second World War buildings, to paired places for meditation and looking back in Kassel and Qinhuangdao, and a personal stage for an individual artist. Together with the 2020 and 2022 Tsinghua studios it forms the teaching trilogy that Atelier Alter treats as one integrated practice of making and research.