2011 (4th) Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Shenzhen)

The Theme

The theme for the 2011-2012 edition of the Shenzhen & hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\architecture is rooted in the very conception of the event, which first appeared in 2005. Uniquely,this biennial exhibition features not only architecture but urbanism, which is rarely addressed in such events. the combination is immensely appropriate, as these two human activities are inseparable even if they are often treated as separate disciplines. throughout history, they have been totally interdependent in the transformation and growth of human settlements. hence, the theme:Architecture creates cities. Cities create architecture.

These simple, axiomatic statements can be made specific without losing their meaning: the louvre creates paris.  paris creates the louvre. however, it is not only monumental architecture that creates cities. in the same way, the brownstone creates manhattan and the machiya creates Kyoto, and vice versa.

The theme represents a relationship between cities and architecture that can be seen as global,especially in terms of contemporary culture. however, the Szh KB looks at cities and architecture in the context of time as well as place. looking at history, it is clear that every city does not continue   to create architecture indefinitely. the reasons for the decline of any one city or cities and their corresponding culture—architectural and otherwise—are usually complex.

However, Jared Diamond—a scientist whose studies have included many different fields from ornithology to geography—has demonstrated that the decline of a great many cultures was preceded by a period of systemic disregard for their environment. as such, the Biennale’s theme could be modified: architecture creates cities and cities create architecture as long as they understand and respect the environmental conditions that support them.

Sustainability + Vitality

The meaning of the word "sustainable" has become distorted in recent years by its usage as a label for selling so-called green products, whether toothpaste, automobiles or office buildings. the ability for our global commercial culture to trivialize such matters may well be a reoccurrence of the attitudes of the disappeared cultures studied by Jared Diamond - the norse and inuit of greenland,  the maya, the anasazi, the indigenous people of easter island, and others.

Developing sustainable practices with regards to energy usage, waste management, and air and water quality are, without a doubt, the greatest challenges to cities and architecture today. Yet, for architects and planners, efforts to make cities and architecture more sustainable must be matched by efforts to make them more vital culturally.

Just as the word "green" has become almost banal through misuse, the phrase "quality of life" has become a pale reflection of what might be called true urban vitality. That vitality is impossible to quantify and only slightly less difficult to define positively. Suffice it to say that, in the context of this Biennale, it does not refer to the size of apartments, the number of cars, or the scale of shopping malls. If we don't readily understand the idea of urban vitality, perhaps that is part of a larger common problem.

As such, the full significance of the Shenzhen Biennale's theme can only be understood in its graphic representation. While the theme itself is rather simply stated, the intended implication of "Architecture creates cities-Cities create architecture" is more complex. Expressed graphically by the Guangzhou design firm wx-design, the two sentences are strung together like a Mobius strip, without a beginning or an end. The implied endlessness intentionally raises the issue of sustainability.

The DNA-like appearance suggests the vital qualities of cities and architecture. In this way, it takes two simple sentences and makes them an aspiration rather than an observation.

Shenzhen

Appropriately, there is a definite focus in the Shenzhen Biennale on the city of Shenzhen itself, one of the world's transformative cities. Recalling a series of shows in the 1950's and 1960's at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an exhibition titled Shenzhen Builds focuses on five major architectural works with significant urban implications. Works by Atelier FCJZ (Shenzhen TV Tower), Coop Himmelb| Jau [The Museum of Contemporary Art and Planning Exhibition), Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas (Terminal 3, Shenzhen Bao' an International Airport), OMA/Rem Koolhaas [the Shenzhen Stock Exchange), and Urbanus (Shenzhen Bay Metro Plaza) are all presented in detail, highlighting their urban genesis and development. Architecture creates Shenzhen. Shenzhen creates architecture.

While the goals of Shenzhen Builds had been presented to the architects, how they each decided to present their work was, in a sense, yet another design problem.

As each architect focused on their work and how it creates the city, another exhibit provides a historical context, addressing broader aspects of Shenzhen's urban culture over the past decades.

Dr. Mary Ann O'Donnell, a research associate at the College of Architecture, Shenzhen University, curated an installation entitled Boom! Shenzhen, which gives playful visual expression to the boring statistics that describe Shenzhen's explosive growth over the last decades in a graphic and threedimensional manner. Topics addressed include the city's Gross Domestic Product, the cost of housing, the intensity of investment, the geological effects of urbanization, and the city's illusive and disappearing history.

Shenzhen's Civic Center, with its over-scaled and underused plaza, is a principal focus of the Shenzhen Biennale. The plaza is the site of a transformative installation by New York architects John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi. Their installation was a maze-like assemblage of thousands of orange traffic cones, the ubiquitous emblem of new building or road construction worldwide. Titled 10,000 Flower Maze, the installation was inspired by the labyrinthine garden of the same name that was designed by the Italian architect Giuseppe Castiglione for the Old Summer Palace just outside the Forbidden City in 1756.

During the opening ceremonies of the Biennale, the maze was taken over by dozens of Shenzhen teenagers on roller skates. In an informal, free form choreographic performance, the volunteer performers skated between, over and around the cones. The largest and most ceremonial of public spaces was thus transformed by a small common object and a typical urban activity that can be found on any street.

The upper plaza of the Civic Center is also a large space, in essence one of the stages upon which Shenzhen's urban theater unfolds. Another project-Ultra-Light-Village-consists of six structures constructed along the axis that connects the main plaza and the Lianhua Mountain Park to the north, passing through the Government Center. These structures were built not on terra firma but on what is essentially the top surface of the structure below. Hence they necessarily needed to be lightweight, which in the context of this Shenzhen Biennale is a virtue, not a limitation. The renowned engineer and philosopher, R. Buckminster Fuller, was an early proponent of the thrifty use of resources in building construction and would provocatively ask his colleagues, "How much does your building weigh?"

The architects chosen to design structures for the Ultra-Light-Village have all demonstrated a clear attitude toward the relationship between conceptualization and building, and how full-scale construction can be used to convey theoretical concepts in a more expressive manner. They are Amateur Architecture Studio (Hangzhou, China), Clavel Arquitectos [Murcia, Spain], MOS [New York, USA], OBRA [New York, USA), Studio UP (Zagreb, Croatia), and Regional Construction Studio led by Wei Chunyu [Changsha, China).

Shenzhen and Hong Kong

While the Bi-City Biennale consists of two coordinated but separated events, it would be a mistake to pretend that the cities of Shenzhen and Hong Kong can be thought of distinct autonomous entities.

The two cities do have different histories, governance and currencies. However, they are part of the Same ecosphere, one that is dominated by the outflows of the Pearl River into the South China Sea.

A key component of the SZHKB is the exhibition Counterpart Cities, which takes as its starting point the fact that water respects no political boundaries.

Based on an exhibition concept developed by Barry Bergdoll, Philip Johnson chief curator for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the project focuses on three sites that all face environmental challenges over the next decades due to both rising sea levels as well as water table depletion. Jonathan Solomon and Dorothy Tang, both professors at Hong Kong University, have adapted the MoMA model to address specific issues relevant to the region and took responsibility for the overall organizational tasks related to the project. Six teams-three from Shenzhen and three from Hong Kong-were assembled to research and provide design solutions with technical support provided by Ricky Tsui and Iris Hwang, of ARUP.

The three Hong Kong team leaders that were selected are Stefan Al, Tom Verebes, and Vincci Mak, and three team leaders from Shenzhen include Doreen Liu, Feng Guochuan, and Zhu Xiongyi.

Shenzhen and China

In addition to the projects focused on Shenzhen and Hong Kong, three projects address critical issues in urbanism in China. It is commonplace now to refer to China as the urban laboratory of the world with its 12 cities of over 5 million population. Curated by Jeffrey Johnson, director of China Lab at Columbia University, and Li Xiangning, associate professor at Tongji University, the exhibition 8 Urban Projects presents a critical view of contemporary urban projects for Shenzhen and from across China. With designs by both domestic and international studios, the exhibition illustrates how China's unique conditions and challenges have generated new urban modalities. Each project has been selected based on a set of critical issues or themes that define the urban project in China today, such as community, lifestyle, identity, harmony, ecology, economy, temporality, and historic etc.. preservation. Additionally, the projects selected are based on their location within a specific spatial condition that characterizes the unique contemporary urban terrain that has emerged over the past thirty years, including the peri-urban, suburbia, satellite cities, the infrastructural and networked, and the existing urban core.

The featured projects and their lead designers are Qianhai (Shenzhen], James Corner, Field Operations; Jiading Ad Base (Shanghai) Yung Ho Chang/Atelier FCZ; Rockbund (Shanghai), David Chipperfield Architects; Hangzhou Shan-Shui (Hangzhou), Steven Holl Architects; Shenzhen Eye (Shenzhen], Urbanus and OMA; Ordos20+10 (Ordos], Fang Zhenning and thirty architectural design firms; XiXi Wetlands (Hangzhou), WSP+ 10 architects and Woods Bagot Asia; and Zhongshan New Information Industry District (Zhongshan), Wu Zhiqiang/Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning & Design Institute.

As with Shenzhen Builds, contemporary urban planning efforts require substantial contextual treatment. While many biennial exhibitions are often characterized by a kind of historical amnesia, 8 Urban Projects is complimented by another installation, Chinese Cities in Two Views. In this visual essay, Dr. Tang Keyang, deputy director at the Center for Visual Studies, Peking University, presents the history of Chinese urbanism in two correlated approaches. In one view, a city might be the sum of all its historical fragments and is often represented by its culminating stage. Observers of such cities usually turn to general typological principles that generate "identikit" of them. In another view, Chinese cities are constantly changing entities with specific causes for their transformation. For such cities the purpose of our show is not only to provide established perspectives of a city but also to examine how it was transformed through time.

The exhibition Urban China / Informal China, curated by Jiang Jun, former editor of Urban China Magazine and founder of Underline Office, and Su Yunsheng, urban planner at Tongji University, presents another overview of Chinese urbanism. Conceived of as a magazine "remixed" in the form of wallpaper, the 35-meters long installation offers a concise narrative of the history of China's urbanization, presented as an ongoing struggle between systems of control and laissez-faire, literally "let it be." The text is primarily two colors —with red representing formal, ordered, or planned governmental decisions, and blue representing informal, organic, or ad-hoc reactions to policies or events. In addition to color distinctions, the wallpaper is organized in three sections from top to bottom, with the top emphasizing national beliefs and policies, the middle highlighting how that impacts city architecture, and the bottom showing the effect on the families and its objects. The numbers correspond to key historical events or ideas that have and continue to shape policies and planning; economic growth; architecture; and unregulated, informal transformation.Informal systems-spatial, economic, and utilitarian-showed their abilities in subverting the highly structured nature of planned Chinese.

China's rapid economic and urban growth is mirrored in the rapid increase in the need for low cost housing as millions of people immigrate to the nation's cities from the countryside. To address the inadequacies of affordable housing provisions in the current market-based real estate development, China is launching a large-scale social housing initiative the central government has completed a planning directive for 10 million units of affordable housing to be distributed throughout the country within the year 2011. Curated by Juan Du, assistant professor and director of the Masters of Architecture program at the University of Hong Kong, 10 Million Units: Housing an Affordable City, brings together government, enterprises, scholars, architects, planners, engineers, developers, and the public to examine the challenges and opportunities of providing low and mid-income housing in the dense environment of the contemporary city. The exhibition presented winning proposals of Shenzhen's "1 Unit -100 Families-10000 Residents Affordable Housing Design Competition". The exhibition also showcased innovative designs and research into the current issues of affordable housing, spanning different stages and scales of intervention ranging from construction details to national policy.

The exhibit is divided in various sections, which were curated by Du Juan and presented with her collaborators: PEOPLE (Bai Xiaoci], IDEAS [Winners of the 1.100.10000 Competition), DETAIL (MIT 10K House Studio), UNIT (Urbanus), BUILDING (Standard architecture), CITY (HKU Urban Ecologies Studio), COUNTRY (Urban China Research Center), CONSTRUCTION [ Zhuoyue Group + Xiepeng Design] and PREFABRICATION [M3house + UAO Creations ).

The Rebirth Brick program was started by Chengdu architect Liu Jiakun in July 2008, following the major earthquake that destroyed much of the city of Wenchuan, in Sichuan province. The project was originally initiated to help local people conduct self-help production and reconstruction work.The basic idea of the rebirth brick is: taking the fractured ruins materials as aggregate, blending the straw as fiber, adding cement, etc., to make lightweight bricks at local factories for the purpose of reconstruction work in the affected area. The Rebirth Brick represents not only the "regeneration" of waste materials, but also the mental and emotional "regeneration" of post-disaster reconstruction.

To highlight both the physical as well as the poetic properties of the Rebirth Brick, the architect Liu Jiakun designed an installation that abstractly represented a rural Chinese house using the Rebirth Brick. The installation reminds us that post-disaster reconstruction involves not only rebuilding structures, but also rebuilding lives.

Global Perspectives

When we say "the world is getting smaller", it usually means that communication and transportation have shrunk what used to be considered great distances. However, if you consider sustainability, the world might be thought of as even smaller still. All of human settlements past and present lie within what might be called the "urbanosphere", the thin layer of the earth's habitable environment. With the towns near the Dead Sea being the earth's lowest settlements [425 meters below sea level] and La Rinoconado, Peru, being the earth's highest (5,100 meters above sea level], the urbanosphere can be thought of as an incredibly thin veneer of habitability covering the planet's surface.

While Shenzhen shares an environmental link with Hong Kong, it is also part of a unique subset of cities around the globe, commonly referred to as "new cities". The creation of ex novo cities is without a doubt one of the most intensive of human efforts in terms of planning, cost, and physical effort. While new cities have been planned and built since antiquity, the scale of such projects in the second half of the 20th century is unprecedented. Given the equally enormous human investment in these projects, an important part of the SZHKB includes an exhibition and research project that looks retrospectively at the successes and failures of new cities around the world. The project's original working title-Cities < 60-underscores the fact that in all of these new cities, the city itself was younger than its older inhabitants.

With the participation of David van der Leer, assistant curator of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Guggenheim Museum, and Rochelle Steiner, dean of the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, the project evolved into two coordinated efforts, both focused on the cities of Shenzhen, Almere, Gaborone, Las Vegas, Brasilia, and Chandigarh. The first of these efforts is a research and exhibition project—6 Under 60-led by a multi-disciplinary team at the University of Southern California involving not only the School of Fine Arts, but School of Architecture [Ma Qingyun, dean, and Stefano di Martino Director of M. Arch Program] and School of Cinematic Arts (Scott Fisher, professor and chair, and Jennifer Stein, research associate). Using traditional research strategies as well as crowd-sourcing and other digital techniques for acquiring data and images, the research project traces each city's development from conception to realization through transformation, with a critical evaluation of both the intentions and the results. At the Biennale, this research is presented through an innovative installation of digital technologies, which allow for easy access through touch screens and group participation through large projections. Rather than a static presentation, the project continues to grow and develop through an online presence.

The second part of the project, titled "...and then it became a city: 6 Cities Under 60" is a more decidedly visual and sensory approach, which reflects the desire to understand the cities from a contemporary vantage point: the cities as they are, rather than as they were planned. Six videographers were selected by David van der Leer for their expertise and accomplishment as well as their proximity to the place and the culture of the cities in question. The participating videographers are: Surabhi Sharma (Chandigarh), Cao Guimarães (Brasilia], Sam Green [Las Vegas), Miki Redelinghuys (Gaborone), Astrid Bussink (Almere), and Wang Gongxin (Shenzhen). The videos are displayed alongside the USC data presentation, as well as on-line. They have also been presented in a large-scale outdoors format for the vernissage and on board an innovative education bus that travels through the city as a mobile classroom and urban laboratory.

The similarities and differences between the Chinese city of Shenzhen and the Dutch city of Almere,have been studied by others. As the installation Allmetropolis makes clear, both areas started their urban development in the late 1970s and both are located in a river delta, adjacent to major international metropolises; yet they have developed, in the view of the curators, in completely different ways. The exhibition was organized by the Go West Project [Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen] to put into perspective the economic, social, spatial and ecological developments of Shenzhen and Almere as a starting point of a research that shows the possibilities and opportunities of using the Shenzhen model in a European context.

As was the original Venice Biennale of 1895, the SZHKB is essentially an international cultural marketplace of ideas, a concept probably most clearly evident in the exhibition The Street. Arrayed in rows of six facing each other, the exhibition consists of 12 installations of work by architects or architectural teams from around the world, in the manner of the landmark exhibition of the 1980 Venice Biennale of Architecture, La Strada Novissima. While diverse in their approaches to architecture and urbanism, all of the participating architects are of the generation that came of age under the growing awareness that contemporary practices of both architecture and urbanism required radical rethinking in light of unprecedented technological opportunity and equally unprecedented environmental challenges.

Working with identical volumes of space, the twelve architects were asked to present work that most addresses the themes of the exhibition in a manner that best expresses their own design philosophies. Each architect had the opportunity to also design a "facade" that identifies their installation and offers the possibility of further describing their work in full-scale. Together, the twelve facades will create a "street", literally reflecting the theme of the Shenzhen Biennale. The twelve participating architects and/or teams of architects are Atelier Deshaus (Shanghai, China);Alejandro Aravena, Arquitecto [Santiago, Chile); Fake Industries Architectural Agonism [New York, USA and Barcelona, Spain); spbr [Sao Paolo, Brazil); SO-IL (New York, USA); J. Mayer H. [Berlin, Germany); Johnston MarkLee [Los Angeles, USA); OPEN Architecture (Beijing, China); Aranda Lasch [New York, USA); MAD Architecture [Beijing, China); Mass Studies [Seoul, Korea); and Hashim Sarkis Studios (Beirut, Lebanon and Cambridge, USA).

The Strada Novissima exhibition featured 20 architects, many of them in their 30's and 40's. Since then, a number have become the leaders in the field of architecture today, including Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry and Arata Isozaki, amongst others. To bring the discussion full circle, Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Museum of Art and architectural critic and curator, interviewed the key figures from that exhibition 30 years ago. Their interviews are presented on monitors adjacent to the contemporary installations, providing a historic dimension. The Presence of the Past Revisited includes participating interviewees by Denise Scott Brown, Frank 0. Gehry, Michael Graves, Allen Greenberg, Leon Krier, Thomas Gordon Smith, Robert A. M. Stern, and Stanley Tigermann.

While urbanism is a profession that is defined by a high degree of technical skill and usually undertaken by large corporate and/or governmental entities, it would be a mistake to think that technocrats are the only ones with important ideas about cities, or that the only way to affect change is through corporate or bureaucratic mechanisms. Inasmuch, various alterative perspectives have been included in the constellation of exhibitions that makes up the 2011 SZHKB.

As people migrate to urban areas in masses, many cities are growing at an unprecedented rate. A majority of these new city dwellers live in informal additions to the urban landscape, often unwanted, neglected or simply forgotten. The Favela Painting Project, organized by Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, seeks to integrate these areas and their inhabitants into society by using art as a catalyst for social change. Their installation documents their success in transforming entire neighborhoods with little other than cans of paint, including Vila Cruzeiro and Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro.

Urbanism as a technical discipline is not only associated with large scale corporate and government entities, it is also packaged as an export industry of the wealthier "developed" countries with the poorer countries being the consumers. Ghana ThinkTank: Developing the First World is a project that stands this relationship on its head, rejecting the idea that the only people with solutions to urban problems are the ones with the capital to profit from them. The Ghana ThinkTank is a network of Third World think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Gaza Strip, Iran, Serbia, Mexico, and in the USA devising solutions for this problems.

Problems are collected in cities in the developed world, then sent to the think tanks to analyze. They devise solutions, which are implemented back in the community where the problems originated.

The results are then delivered back to the think tanks, for post completion analysis. The Shenzhen installation, which was organized by John Ewing, Carmen Montoya and Christopher Robbins, consists of stylized displays constructed of recycled materials and demonstrating each stage of the process.The audience is invited to submit their problems and to help implement the solutions.

International Participation

One of the strengths of the Venice Biennale is the manner in which it is structured. While the principal curator or curators have great discretion over the central exhibits, that voice is variously complimented, contradicted or ignored by an array of exhibits independently curated and installed in the national pavilions or in off-site venues.

In an effort to not only internationalize the Shenzhen Biennale, but to also expand the number of voices involved, various nations and/or prominent national institutions were invited to participate for the first time. Representations from Austria, Bahrain, Chile, Finland, and the Netherlands, accepted the invitation and agreed to present exhibitions.

Architekturzentrum Wien [Vienna, Austria) presented an exhibition entitled Housing in Vienna, Innovative, Social and Ecological, which documents Vienna's history as a leader in the area of social housing. The exhibition not only highlights important architectural works by such significant contemporary architects as Coop Himmelb[|Jau and Jean Nouvel, it also describes the role of housing as an essential component of that city's urban planning over more than a century. Curated by Wolfgang Förster, Gabriele Kaiser, Dietmar Steiner, and Alexandra Viehhauser, the exhibition also included projects by Manfred Wehdorn, Wilhelm Holzbauer, BKK-2, BKK-3, Franziska Ullmann, Lieselotte Peretti, Gisela Podrekka, Elsa Prochazka, and Elke Delugan-Meiss and Roman Delugan.

The installation presented by the Ministry of Culture, Kingdom of Bahrain, appeared in the 2010 Venice Biennale and won the award for Best National Participation. Reclaim consists of three fishing platforms-the informal waterfront structures that used to line the sea and served as lively social spaces before the real estate boom of recent decades reconfigured the city's waterfront.

Interspersed within and among the structures are video screens with interviews with Bahrainis recalling the fishing platforms as a part of the cities social fabric as well as images of the waterfront under redevelopment. The exhibit, which was commissioned by Shaikha Mai Al Khalifa, was curated by Noura Al Sayeh and Fuad Al Ansari and was designed by Harry Gugger and Leopold Banchini.

The Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes (Chile) presented Gimme Shelter!-an exhibition with a broad view of the Chilean experience of reconstruction and urban regeneration after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami, and the recent innovation processes in social housing. The exhibition was coordinated by Cristobal Molina Baeza, the Consejo's coordinator for architecture, and designed and curated by Hugo Mondragon and Sebastian Irarrazaval. The innovative installation was constructed with materials associated with emergency situations: mattresses, water bottles, strings of lights, etc.. The curatorial content, both texts and images of recent Chilean housing projects, were delivered in the form of projections and on digital monitors.

The exhibition representing Finland was organized by Martta Louekari, producer for World Design Capital Helsinki 2012, and included two components. The first is entitled NEWLY DRAWN-Emerging Finnish Architects and served to introduce a younger generation of Finnish architects, their latest projects, visions and ways of working. The work of Hollmén Reuter Sandman Architects, Verstas Architects, NOW, Antinen Diva Architects, Lassila Hirvilammi Architects, Avanto Architects, ALA,AFKS Architects and K2S Architects is presented. The second component, entitled Solution Finland: The Welfare Game, is based on a project developed by a Finnish publisher that challenges authors to address important social problems with original solutions. The Welfare Game is authored by architect Martti Kalliala with writer and curator Jenna Sutela and architect Tuomas Toivonen and proposes solutions to their native country's quandaries, ranging from the practical (rescuing ailing public space through climatization], to the absurd (dividing the country into two interlocking sub-nations:City and Wilderness and the earnest, if far-reaching the repurposing of the country to host the world's nuclear waste).

The Nederlands Architectuur Institut [the Netherlands), under the direction of Ole Bouman, Director of the NAi with the assistance of Jorn Konijn, organized an exhibition titled Housing with a Mission, which consists of housing projects specifically designed for the millions of young graduates of China's education system that are just starting out their careers. These graduates are called "ant tribes". Five architects from China and five from the Netherlands worked together to develop new forms of housing that fit the minimum existing housing requirements in China and the Netherlands and developed a series of hybrid guidelines, all of which were made evident in the exhibition in the form of a three full scale 8m', 28m', and 14m', model apartments. As the centerpiece, the exhibition featured large scale housing projects by the individual architects, based on the hybrid requirements.

The participating architects form the Netherlands are NL Architects, Arons & Gelauff Architects, NEXT Architects, Barcode Architects and KCAP and their counterparts from China are URBANUS, Standard architects, NODE, 0-Office and CAFA University.

Conclusion

Since the opening of the first Venice Biennale in 1895, most subsequent biennial exhibitions around the world have followed the model established in Venice: one part national representation and one part international representation. In addition, Venice also established the precedent of assuring that the process of selecting the participating artists was not too narrowly constructed. All three of these positions are intentionally incorporated into the 2011-2012 SZHKB.

In formulating the exhibition program for the 2011 SZHKB, the intention was to fully explore contemporary urbanism and architecture in the overlapping contexts of Shenzhen, Shenzhen-Hong Kong, China and the world. Moreover, the goal was to create a city-wide event, not just a convention for architects, engineers and other specialists. At the same time, the 2011 Biennale was intended to be a truly international encounter, building on the groundwork established in the previous three editions.

In researching possible participants for the 2011-2012 SZHKB, an informal group of advisors assisted in ensuring that the research was undertaken in as wide a field as possible. This group, which included Ma Qingyun (China/USA], Barry Bergdoll (USA], Andres Lepik (Germany), Aric Chen (China/USA), Kenneth Frampton (USA), Luis Fernandez-Galliano (Spain), Erwin Viray (Singapore/ Japan), Raymund Ryan (USA), Mohsen Mostafavi (Harvard, USA), Stan Allen (Princeton, USA), and Nader Tehrani, (MIT, USA] recommended dozens of potential participants, many of them little-known up until now.

While a well-conceived program is not necessarily a guarantee of critical success, the program that has been described herein is an exercise in urbanism and architecture in and of itself. The theme - Cities create architecture. Architecture creates cities. —can now be seen as it was intended: not a prescription for a specific manner of critical thinking but as a theoretical fabric woven of disparate strands of architectural and urban ideas.