TGS x BIFT | Futureschool Lab with MONO office
In preparation for the final show, TGS is teaming up with architects from MONO Architecture Design and Research Office to run a short lab that will also inform the spatial design of the exhibition.
Lead by Zhao Liqun, the lab is developed in collaboration with 5 students whose final project focuses on developing new tools for envisioning the future of the school, thus prompting new discussion internal to BIFT School or Art and Design around its methodologies and future outlook. Physical and intangible factors and the application of new technologies in spatial thinking will be considered not so much as conduits to the digitalization of education, but as considerations around how its constituencies (students, faculty, external partners) can better communicate and thus how these dialogical interactions can affect the spatial transformation of the school.
In the history of Chinese intellectual debate around the reforming of education, eminent figures from the early 1900s emerge – this history and the present will also find their place in the final exhibition and in the students’ works.
(image: The Southwestern University Campus designed by Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, 1920s)
The lab represents a tooling exercise to inform the final exhibition as a form or Rethinking the Place of Education – or the school as a public space.
Can we reconfigure educational practice by making it adopt a modus operandi proper of festivalism which conjures situational, responsive capacity to contingency and the practical intelligence of hands-on making, with the dialogical, gregarious and speculative nature of collaborative, networked teamwork?
Can the school become a gravitational hearth which knowledge task-forces go back to and depart from, placing at its core sharing, collective facilities around which dynamic more specialized environments of research and disciplinary knowledge orbit by crossing and communicating at need?
A Salon on March 13th will investigate relevant subjects. More soon!
