-
Architects: Atelier GOM
- Area: 375 m²
- Year: 2024
-
Photographs:Xiaobin Lv, DONG Image, Yang Chen
-
Lead Architect: Zhang Jiajing You Lizhong
Text description provided by the architects. Origin - For some reason, the Art Zone on the West Bund of Shanghai was to be demolished, and MOA Studio of Atelier GOM was among them. Almost at the same time, the curator of the Migratory Bird 300 section of the Aranya Theater Festival in Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province, invited GOM to design a temporary building for artists' activities and exhibitions. Since the area was comparable, Atelier GOM was prepared to dismantle the key components of the MOA Studio on the West bund of Shanghai and transport them to Aranya for assembly, completing a performance art of migratory birds in flight, as well as a grand funeral for the entire West bund Art Zone. Since the previous space was called the Museum of Distraction, the name of this time will be MOA Museum of Distraction（MMD for short).
Demolition - The MOA studio of West Bund is a steel building nine years old, and the structural form consists of several classical curved trusses, as well as peripheral common trusses plus other structural elements, and is partially two-story. The building envelope is made of lightweight materials such as PC panels, sandwich panels, fiber cement panels, and wood panels. We did not have the right to demolish this house, and to keep it relatively intact for return to the government for demolition, we could only remove a few items from the structure's interior while still ensuring its stability. The building components that were eventually removed were the curved steel beams, the exterior doors, the old door panels of the perimeter wall, the steel staircase in the lobby, the wooden staircase in the office, the nine-piece installation, the solid wood floorboards, the ceiling mesh and convex mirrors, the corten steel steps, some of the handles, the corrugated metal perforated panels, the signature wall, the iron chairs, the metal curtains, and so on. And the final date for all of it to be removed is June 17, 2024, after it is returned to the government.
Construction - MMD utilizes a steel and canvas exterior envelope that is not completely enclosed and can just keep out most of the rain. The second-floor slab was partially constructed with wood shipped in from the sea, while most of it was sourced locally. The time available for construction is only ten days in total, so a lot of on-site steel processing is done in advance in the factory and then assembled on-site with the steel structure shipped from Shanghai, and the column foundations on the beach are made by deep embedding of steel plates. All kinds of cloth used for building envelopes are ordered in advance in Taobao according to the pre-designed drawings. To create a stronger connection with the original building, we also used a large number of the most characteristic PC panels of the original building. To accommodate possible video exhibitions, we made a closed room on the first floor and a closed room on the second floor, which was the real appearance of MOA before it became an office. The completion date of the MMD is the day after the demolition of the MOA in West Bund, June 18, 2024, in time for the Migratory Bird 300 countdown ceremony.
Exhibition - Before the construction, there was a preliminary plan for the exhibition, which went through some modifications later. Overall, the semi-open space, like MMD, is still adaptable for the exhibition. The main contents are glass art, video installation, photography installation, VR, sculpture, etc., as well as various performances and workshops during the process, and there will also be impromptu facade paintings produced during the 12 days of existence. One of the photographs is a wet plate by Shanghai-based photographer Su Shengliang, taken one month before the demolition of MOA in West Bund.
Happening—Migratory Bird 300's slogan is "It's Happening," so for 12 days, there will be a lot of unpredictable things happening. There will be all kinds of improvised behaviors and activities, and even local changes to the building are possible. After the 12 days of existence, the curators would like to let MMD continue to fly, that is, to be reassembled and moved to other art activities, perhaps to the desert or grassland.
