Students: Chen Donghua
Tutors: Fu Juan
Project: Real-Time Recollection
School: University of Pennsylvania

The project in located at Liwan, an old town in Guangzhou. It is one of the original cradles to develop the Cantonese Opera in South China. Nowadays, this old town is undergoing a reconstruction by the local government. Ironically, a Cantonese Opera Museum is planned to build on such a brand new site left by the demolition to memorize this traditional culture. When I heard the news, I decided to re-assign a museum project and put forward my voluntary proposal for this old town.

In fact, the site is still full of vitality. You can see the hustle and bustle in the street. You can hear the melody of the Cantonese Opera from the old residential houses.

Such real-time experience of people’s everyday life convinces me that the best memory should come from the real life, the museum should root in the old houses and everyday performance from both professional artists and amateurs.

This proposal does not plan to demolish these old houses for a brand new site to build a mega-machine, which is usually a practical proposal in most realistic cases. Instead, I embed this museum among the old residential houses. The most essential marrow of Cantonese Opera could only be embodied from the everyday life of the common people.

This project works as intensive nodes to stimulate the local community, including the opera culture, public function and space. And in turn, the surrounding old town provides an energetic and various creators, service, working studios, to connect with the museum and extend the life of the whole community. The museum and the town are combined together and transforming from phase to phase.

Disappearance of architectures is not only about the ocular disappearance of interface, volume and scale, but also about the cooperation with surrounding environment, the sharing of public resources and the extension of educational value. So, the buildings should be living together just like mutualistic symbiosis, and only on this layer of meaning, the true disappearance could be realized.