Muyun Qiu Year 5 PG13 2022

This project seeks to explore how people can cohabit with the heritagised built past, and how architectural interventions on heritage sites that encourage active use can help realise the multiple potentialities of heritage, even if said heritage is politically and historically contentious in nature. It challenges the belief that heritage preservation necessitates the monumentalisation of historical structures.
The project is sited in Yuanming Yuan, also known as the Old Summer Palace, which was destroyed in 1860 during the Second Opium War by the Anglo-French Expedition. Since the late 1980s, the meaning of Yuanming Yuan has been increasingly monopolised by the Chinese party-state for anti-foreign propaganda, in the name of heritage conservation. The way in which the ruins of Yuanming Yuan are curated and consumed has brewed waves of revanchist nationalism that are difficult to contain. As a response, the project proposes to return the ruins of Yuanming Yuan to the local population, allowing people to reconcile with a dark chapter of national history through the adaptive reuse of the ruins.
Informed by the surrounding urban context which contains large numbers of urban villagers, migrant workers and members of higher education institutions, a series of highly localised programmes oriented towards their different yet often overlapping everyday lives are proposed. In the proposed structures, the interventions serve as protective shelters for the ruins, whereas the ruins not only provide structural support, but also become active and integral parts of the inhabitant’s daily lives. By literally dwelling on the past, we embark on a journey to de-monumentalise our heritagised past, so that we no longer dwell on the past.