“The Project of Documenting DB” exhibition opens

On October 20, “The Project of Documenting DB” exhibition opens on the ground floor of Design Building at XJTLU. The exhibition has been curated and designed by XJTLU’s architecture student magazine GRID and will be held until November 17.

This exhibition attempts to synthesize what the architecture student magazine, GRID, has reflected, shot, designed and written in 2021 with a common focus on DB. The discourse and everyday architectural teaching and learning that occurs in DB forms an important thread in the development of the Department of Architecture, with DB becoming an important motif of XJTLU.

“I’m very glad about what our students do in the GRID, and I’m looking forward to more activities from them,” says Professor Gisela Loehlein, Head of the Department of Architecture, “it’s an ability to communicate more with others, and an ability to continue the memory of the building.”

The student magazine GRID was established during the pandemic in 2020, and was created for the students to critically reflect on who they are and where they are going, says Dr Jiawen Han, supervisor of the GRID team.

“Today’s exhibition is also part of the student magazine’s efforts in figuring out what kind of built environments have shaped them, and whether DB building has nourished their identity,” she says.

For Qiaodan Liu, the Chief Editor of GRID, what they are doing in this exhibition is, in essence, deconstructing the Design Building, full of physical partitions, into its basic forms and using them to reconstruct an ‘Imagined Community’ of the Design Building.

“These small units are a kind of separation or isolation that restrain our imagination of the different possibilities that we could be connected - and then we recompose it,” he says, “Now, everyone, no matter the technicians or teaching staff or the students, we all step out of our small spaces, and get together for this one particular reason for Design Building.”

A film - a reflection on the relation of bodies and space with a focus on DB - will be released during the exhibition, and the creative pieces made by the GRID team will be published after the exhibition’s opening as well.

By Yi Qian

Photos by Yiyang Wang, Ruofan Lin, Yuzhen Fu, Renjie Kan