Sometimes, the biggest architecture firms are also the most courageous. Take Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with its gutsy SOM Journal (an annual publication in which outside critics evaluate the firm’s designs). Or Perkins + Will, with its revolutionary database of hazardous materials, which can’t help but alienate some manufacturers. And now Cannon Design has curated an exhibition, UnMade In China, about projects for Chinese clients that were never built.
The show’s progenitor is Mike Tunkey, a Harvard-trained architect who has been visiting China since the early 1990s and opened Cannon Design’s Shanghai office in 2006. In 2008, he traveled to Ordos, Inner Mongolia, with the firm’s plans for a performing arts center, expected to anchor a new arts district in the provincial Chinese boomtown. The building was never constructed, which is the fate of at least 100 other buildings by western architects in Ordos, and countless more in other parts of China, where booms and busts and changes of direction are part of the landscape. No wonder, says Tunkey, when he and other young American architects get together over beers, the conversation often turns to the projects that didn’t happen.
Two years ago, he began planning an exhibition about such buildings, with the support—both financial and moral—of Cannon Design. Architects such as Nader Tehrani of the Boston firm NADAAA, Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam of Atlanta’s MSMEA, and Ben van Berkel, of the Amsterdam firm UNStudio, agreed to talk about their unbuilt projects. The resulting show (which includes models, renderings, and video interviews with participating architects) opened in Shanghai’s ide@s Gallery in April; was seen at Beijing Design Week in October; and is now headed to several U.S. venues (check unmadeinchina.com for announcements).
Tunkey spoke with RECORD from his office in Shanghai.
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