Images
Project
Stefano Boeri Architetti China
Location
Shanghai
Year
2021
Client
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Project
Stefano Boeri Architetti China
Partners
Stefano Boeri
Yibo Xu
Project Director
Pietro Chiodi
Project manager
Palace Gong
Project architect
Cecilia Picello
Urban Design Architect
Mohamed Hassan Ali Elgendy
Design Team
Taimuzi Fu, Yitao Huang, Sebastiano Cattiodoro , Lerain Lei, Zhifei Yao
Public Relation Manager
Bijun Zhu
Editor assistant
Maria Lucrezia De Marco
Scientific research
Livia Shamir
Construction Company
Jjingcan Culture
Software development
OAKIOT
Special Thanks to
CHINA ACADEMY OF ART THE COLLEGE OF PUBLIC ART
The exhibition Trees curated by the Cartier Foundation comes to life at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. With more than 200 artworks from nearly 30 artists from China, Latin America, India, Iran and Europe, the exhibition celebrates trees as a source of major aesthetic inspiration for human societies. It also echoes the latest scientific discoveries that shed new light on tree intelligence. Through paintings, photography, videos, drawings and installations, the exhibition brings together the testimonies, both artistic and scientific, of those capable of looking at the vegetal world with wonder. Trees aims to reveal the beauty and biological wealth of these great protagonists of the living world, threatened today with large-scale deforestation.
Among the leading figures at the exhibition also the architect and urban planner Stefano Boeri – and all the collaborators of Stefano Boeri Architetti China – with a vision of the Forest Cities and a kinetic model that tells of their extraordinary potential.
The curator team is composed by: Bruce Albert, Hervé Chandès, Fei Dawei, Isabelle Gaudefroy, Gong Yan; and features other participating artists like Grga Basic, Jake Bryant, Johanna Calle, Alex Cerveny, Ehuana Yaira, John Gerrard, Francis Hallé, Hu Liu, Huang Yong Ping, Fabrice Hyber, Luc Jacquet, Joseca, Kalepi Sanöma, Mahmoud Khan, Cesare Leonardi, François-Michel Le Tourneau, Stefano Mancuso, Sebastián Mejía, Santidio Pereira, Jivya Soma Mashe, Jérôme Schlomoff, Franca Stagi, Afonso Tostes, Adriana Varejão, Cássio Vasconcellos, Luiz Zerbini, Zhang Enli.
For Stefano Boeri Architetti, Trees is a unique opportunity to tell a vision on which the studio has turned its attention in the last years and to bring a narrative of possible urban solutions, in relations to the plant world.
A conversation between Stefano Boeri and the philosopher Emanuele Coccia will introduce the visitors into the relationship between Botany and Architecture. Three ink-screens show how a more complex system can be imagined starting from the principles of Vertical Forest and its applications and developments.
In the background of the installation, a large wallpaper showing how the sum of multiple Vertical Forests – as well as their implementation and application at different scales – can generate a Forest City system, intended as the basic element of a new urbanization model in China. From the Forest City, then, new developments of Forest Archipelago and Forest Constellation are proposed.
In the center a 3x3m kinetic model shows three possible developments of Forest City, in different territories. The natural morphology is altered by the birth of the city, relating the artificial mutation with the natural landscape: a morphology in constant change. Thirty-six kinetic points make it possible to narrate – as shown in the video – different natural realities, from mountainous to desert situations, on which images of the possible developments of the Forest Cities are projected.
