Under Repair: Can Architecture Mend Places?
Thursday, 21 April 2022

An ANCB symposium taking place on the occasion of the Aedes exhibition Jinyun Quarries – The Quarry as Stage to investigate the effect and meaning of architectural processes for landscape and place development.

Video by Reframe

Chinese architect Xu Tiantian will talk about her strategies for new uses for small, abandoned quarries in the mountainous landscape of Jinyun County in Zhejiang Province, China. The rugged and hard-to-access region now provides a stage for cultural and social activities, and simultaneously strives for ecological improvements and new economic perspectives for the rural population. The pits, provided with new functions, have become part of a public infrastructure that puts historical aspects extending back over a thousand years as well as the everyday culture heritage in a new context. Together with an interdisciplinary panel, Xu Tiantian will discuss the question what role architecture can play in the sustainable repair or "healing" of landscape and places. Which strategies can produce new spaces of opportunity and stimulate new economic developments by protecting the identity and the character of a specific area? The symposium will help investigate what architecture can do to invent concepts for a confidence and identity of places, created with the right balance of the new and the vernacular.

PROGRAMME
Welcome
Hans-Jürgen Commerell, Director, ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory, Berlin

Introduction
Xu Tiantian, Director DnA_Design and Architecture, Bejing

Panel Discussion
Kerstin Faber, Project Manager, IBA Thüringen, Apolda
Christoph Hesse, Architect and Founder, Christoph Hesse Architekten, Korbach/Berlin
Vicky Richardson, Head of Architecture, Royal Academy of Arts, London
Xu Tiantian, Director DnA_Design and Architecture, Bejing
Moderator: Ágota Révész, Center for Cultural Studies on Science and Technology in China, TU Berlin