Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) is currently the only biennial exhibition in the world that is based exclusively on the set themes of URBANISM AND URBANIZATION. Co-organized by the two neighboring and closely interacting cities of Shenzhen and Hong Kong, UABB situates itself within the regional context of the rapidly urbanizing Pearl River Delta, concerns itself with globally common urban issues, extensively communicates and interacts with the wider public, is presented using expressions of contemporary visual culture, and engages in international and avant-garde dimensions as well as discourses of public interest.
” We tried to imagine a new archetype, an exemplary primary form that transcends any cultural difference and from which more complex forms can be generated and used, in the Architecture of the future, to face the emergency of saving our planet. Our archetype is made of the solid matter of countless objects that were salvaged from landfills or recycled, then packed into ordinary black plastic boxes that serve as construction modules. We are no longer talking of metric modules or golden ratios: what we are inaugurating here is a new relationship based on the ideal measures provided by the resulting material. Rather than referring to unchanging, ontological structures, this new architectural paradigm is determined by contingency. The city discards while at the same time being reborn in a process of self-reproduction, and the very same necessity to reinvent the world “within the limits of our inherited reality” forces us to give a second or third life to buildings or objects, as we used to do in the past.
The image of the building, with its windows shining in the darkness, is multiplied in the mirror walls that surround it, changing our perception of scale and suggesting the idea of a city. The visitors are then invited to follow a path that takes them from that urban, public environment into the private, intimate space of the building’s interior, in an interplay of opposites. Once inside the building, the perspective changes and allows the viewers to discover the exuberant polychromy of the of discarded objects that constitute the very building blocks of the construction. Everyday objects, so familiar and easily recognizable, still radiate the emotional charge that they used to have when they were being used, and which no transformation or recycling can ever disperse. Their value is not only material, but also poetic. This safe place proves that we can and must create a space for well-being from our very own garbage. “