BEIJING, China — November 22, 2021 — CRTKL and Urban Land Institute (ULI) successfully held a Beijing Urban and Architecture Biennale salon event in Xidan The New. Ten experts and scholars shared their presentations and held a roundtable discussion with the designer Xiaoguang Liu of The New.
Yasmine Huang, Associate Principal in CRTKL’s Shanghai office, defined what the “new” part of “urban renewal” actually means — to meet the needs of different lifestyles in cities through certain technological construction or management tools. A designer’s job is to meet different demands through design and spatial means by considering the end-user. Yasmine believes that, compared to the less frequent macro urban renewals, “micro-renewals” are always accompanying the growth of a city. With advantages like lower costs, faster turnover, increased flexibility and wide participation, “micro-renewals” can improve the management and function of a city.
Yen Liu, Principal in CRTKL’s Beijing office, shared his views on breaking the traditional mold of the commercial design practice. When reflecting on the value of traditional commercial floors, Yen explained that when human-centric functions are introduced into the space of high and low floors, (for example — the emergence of air traffic in the future could cause urban streets to be vertically implanted into each space to form a completely three-dimensional block) will the value expression of commercial floors be positively driven by the improvement of their spatial value? Yen believes that the transformation of infrastructure would trigger a reevaluation of innovative floors. He also shared his thoughts on shaping city landmarks, saying he believes a building is an Intellectual Property (IP) in and of itself, which can extend diverse industrial chains beyond it.
At the round table, Xiaoguang Liu, Principal in CRTKL’s Beijing office, said that the purpose of discussing urban renewal and the iteration of commercial design was to understand the mechanism of the occurrence and evolution of a city and commerce as well as the interaction between them. Commercial space and urban space are a pair of contradictions that do not always complement each other. A poorly designed commercial building will have a wide negative impact on the texture, scale and vitality of the urban space. So, against the current background of urban renewal, how should we understand commercial space? Can commercial transformation synchronize with urban transformation? Or, can they learn from and help each other?
“We have discussed commercial buildings as urban infrastructure before,” he began. “The connotation of urban infrastructure should vary with the development of a city and our understanding of a city’s basic functions needs to be updated dynamically. A commercial building is fundamentally significant in function, type and cognitive level. One of the enlightenments is that, under the complicated surface, the design needs to be pulled back to the starting point, and our understanding of ‘form following function’ should be updated by combining basic demands and new functional logic. Today, we are focusing on exploring functions, behaviors and activities — and then we extend to buildings. When it comes to macro urban design or micro life experience, we no longer only understand a city from the perspective of space or aesthetics only, but start to pay attention to its underlying logic and return to the essence and concrete issues of urban space. This is a cognitive progress and an important foundation and precondition for urban renewal,” he said.