Alter Studio 3: How Can Art Save Cities?艺术如何拯救城市？

How Can Art Save Cities? was the second Master Class that Xiaojun Bu and Yingfan Zhang taught in the third year at Tsinghua University, in spring 2022, together with Christoph Hesse, visiting professor at the University of Kassel. It ran in a joint online and offline format and ended with a final review in April 2022.

Urban renewal is a long-lasting topic in architecture, yet traditional strategies often leave industrial, single-function or culturally thin cities in need of a new engine. The studio asked how art can become that source of power. Students redefined a city from the metaphysical context of art, drama, music, literature and philosophy, and looked at the three scales of city, architecture and detail through art, seeking breakthroughs in the way things are built as well as in the way cities are renewed.

The work began with an artwork: the performance Das Brakteatenstuck by the German artist Boris Nieslony, shown at the eighth documenta in Kassel. Students analysed its underlying structure and the formal potential and industrial narrative behind it, then built models and drawings from it. The twelve students' projects include a revitalisation of industrial relics, a library of voids set between the old and new city, and a theatre of twin towers that bridges the fractured memory of the city. Guest critics included David Grahame Shane, David Gersten and Christian Kuhna.