Heading to Beijing Design Week this holiday? These 10 events are worth a look

At this year's Design Week, the phrases heard most often were "old city revival" and "core functions of the capital."

Beijing Design Week is past its halfway point. This year's theme is "Tribute to Life," and nearly a thousand projects in culture, creativity and design are running across 42 satellite venues around the city.

Compared with design weeks elsewhere in the world, Beijing's has always stressed function. "Old city revival" is one of its main themes.

Over these 10 days, the old hutong districts of Xicheng will see what is probably their busiest stretch of the year, and the scale of participation grows every year. This year, joining Dashilar, Baitasi (the White Pagoda Temple), Shichahai and Tianqiao, the Fayuan Temple historic district has become a satellite venue too, with more than 40 events tied to its renewal plan.

Baitasi remains the focal point. The Beijing Urban Master Plan (2016–2035), released in September 2017, changed the official word for the city's historic core: out went the term that carries a hint of "outdated and due for replacement," in came the term that treats age as heritage. The plan states plainly that "hutongs and courtyard houses inside the old city will no longer be demolished." For Dongcheng and Xicheng, that marked a shift from mass demolition and relocation toward whole-area preservation and the restoration of the historic cityscape. Fuchengmennei Street, where Baitasi sits, is one of the last low-rise residential quarters left in the old city, and it was designated a key planning zone — a "test field" for old city revival. The "Baitasi Regeneration Plan" first appeared as a key project at Design Week in 2015, with the eventual goal of turning the area into a cultural district.

Dashilar started earlier and is more commercial; Baitasi, by contrast, is a densely populated old residential quarter. To preserve the hutong culture of old Beijing, entire courtyard compounds here have been emptied out, with plans to relocate 15% of the population and clear 15% of the courtyards by 2020. Some of the emptied courtyards are now museums, others reading rooms, and all of them are on show at Design Week as evidence of what the plan has achieved.

Last year the Regeneration Plan's keyword was "new neighborly relations," and it asked, from an architect's point of view, how design could take part in remaking the hutongs. This year it follows the Master Plan's line of development and runs under the theme "Warm City Action 2018," which introduces the idea of community-building and enlists local residents. Hutong public spaces now hold an old-object upcycling installation called "Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk," a "Shared Micro-Garden" project and neighborhood parlors — producing, for the visitor, a sample of neighborhood life that looks almost too good to be real.

At the opening ceremony, the organizing committee said Design Week would stay close to the capital's strategic positioning and focus on Beijing's "decongest, clean up, upgrade" campaign. Besides moving people out of the center, that also means moving out markets, merchants and some schools and hospitals, all classed as "non-capital functions."

So how does design help push this along? In Zhongguancun's Dongcheng Park, Design Week has launched a new model community this year — the "Qinglong Cultural Innovation District," built jointly with Copenhagen, this year's guest city of honor — in the hope of speeding up work on the city's sub-center.

The opening ceremony also singled out several other goals: passing on and renewing China's traditional culture, coordinated development across Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, and supply-side reform paired with an upgrade of the service sector. Individual design projects, and the plan of Design Week as a whole, are all tied to these national policies.

To answer the call to "pass on and renew," Design Week added a section on intangible cultural heritage design this year, along with two new prizes: the Traditional Craft Design Award and the Service Design Award.

The schedule accordingly carries many hands-on events built around intangible heritage — Shichahai's "Intangible Heritage Creation Festival," for one, and a traditional crafts exhibition. But like the heritage crafts themselves, and for the same reasons, these events struggle to interest young people, however much work has clearly gone into them.

Trying to meet so many urban development goals in two weeks is plainly ambitious, and it has also left the calendar cluttered with forums and events. Product showcases, award competitions and academic panels are mixed in among them, which makes finding something to your taste harder than it should be.

Design Week peaks over the National Day holiday. Here are 10 events and exhibitions, each distinctive in its own way, that we think are worth a look.

The Sound of the City: Don't Forget Your Headphones

Musicity is a multimedia interactive music project founded by the British DJ and producer Nick Luscombe. It invites musicians from different countries to write pieces based on the character of a city's buildings.

This time the Musicity team has come to China and worked with Beijing Design Week to make tracks for seven landmark buildings. To unlock a track, you have to go to the building itself and open the "Art of Britain" Musicity mini program on WeChat.

The seven landmarks are the Baitasi Regeneration Plan, the Fusuijing Building, the Baitasi Hutong Art Museum, Zhihua Temple, the Serpentine Pavilion Beijing, Beijing Fun and Damochang.

After December 31 the mini program will switch off its location feature, and anyone online will be able to listen to the music anywhere, anytime.

Dates: September 22 – December 31 Location: Multiple sites across Beijing

Delicious Design: More Than Just Eating

This year's theme at Design Week's 751 venue suits the season: food. Nearly a hundred exhibitions, forums, events and interactive installations are spread across the whole park.

The Embassy of the Netherlands, one of the organizers, has put together a series of shows called "Full Dutch Spread: Appetites Awakened" on the third floor of the Fashion Corridor in Building A18. It brings in Dutch art collectives — Creative Chefs, the Open Food Lab, a 3D-printed food project, Mirror Food — to show what food can be beyond three meals a day, and to let visitors understand the people and relationships around them through the senses.

From 2 to 4 pm on October 2 and October 4 there are also two artist workshops, Temporary Plate and Rediscovering Tofu, open for registration.

Dates: September 26 – October 5 Location: 751 Art Zone

City Spirit: An Archive Exhibition of Contemporary Public Design: Community Experiments From Around the World

In the open floor of an old factory building, archives of public design projects from 30 cities around the world go on display together, among them projects from the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan and India, as well as from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The show is divided into six sections, including public space design, public facilities design and urban renewal. The exhibits take in text, photographs, video, models, diagrams, objects and historical documents, so visitors can see from several angles how design with public value changes the relationship between residents and their city.

Dates: September 19 – October 6, 10:00–18:00 (last admission 17:00) Location: The Name of the Rose Art Center, 798 Art District

The Large Public Art Installation Tape: Its First Time in China

Layer on layer of tape, wound and wrapped, throwing out tentacles in every direction, with an inside like a huge translucent cave. This is Tape, a large public art installation and one of the main works in "The Power of the Everyday," a pop-up art project curated by K11's north-district art museum.

Its design team, Numen/For Use, is based in Europe and makes installations that intervene in a space, building complicated structures that look like stage sets. Tape is their best-known work and has been shown at more than 30 major venues around the world.

Visitors can crawl inside Tape and take in, the way a child would, a space made of nothing but tape and rebar.

Dates: September 26 – October 5 Location: Central Plaza, Yonghe Building

Time Out Global 50th Anniversary Cover Design Exhibition

Time Out is a magazine about city life, founded in London in 1968 and now 50 years old. For this retrospective it has picked 50 covers from those 50 years — a way to look at the history of cities through a magazine's covers, and to see how a magazine with a point of view has shaped the way cities look.

Dates: September 22 – October 7, 2018 Location: North Hall, F3, Quanyechang, Beijing Fun

Shichahai and the 24 Solar Terms Art Exhibition: Listening to Nature Whisper at Shichahai

Twenty-four natural and cultural sites around Shichahai are matched to the 24 solar terms of the four seasons.

The 12 chosen views are Qianhai, Houhai, Xihai, the Bell and Drum Towers, Wanning Bridge, Silver Ingot Bridge, Guanghua Temple, the garden of Prince Gong's Mansion, the Mansion of Prince Chun, Baihuashenchu Hutong, the Lotus Market and Yandai Xiejie.

There are also 12 historical figures: Guo Shoujing, Guan Hanqing, Li Dongyang, Mi Wanzhong, Nalan Xingde, Weng Fanggang, Soong Ching-ling, Guo Moruo, Mei Lanfang, Lao She, Yu Dafu and Wu Guanzhong.

The scenery of Shichahai and the essence of the 24 solar terms are distilled into single artworks and objects with warmth in them — feeling carried by words, the heart reached through things — to give the seasons that have passed a form you can touch.

On show are posters, illustrations, photographs, animation, carved and painted works, audiobooks about the 24 solar terms, sculptures and journals, in forms ranging from graphic design and installation to products, artworks, video and audio.

Dates: September 30 – October 7, 9:00–18:00 Location: No. 10 Xihai Xiyan (Xihai Art Museum)

"Book-Scented Yangmeizhu, Reading Dashilar": The Scholar's Bookshelf

Yangmeizhu Xiejie, a Beijing street with a bookish, scholarly air, will host exhibitions, salons and a knowledge market.

The "Scholar's Bookshelf" Exhibition

Experts and scholars from ten fields — epigraphy, Manchu studies, linguistics and bioengineering among them — have been invited to show their bookshelves, so that visitors can learn about their subjects and their lives, and see how scholars of different ages, genders and nationalities think and reflect through reading.

Dates: September 28 – October 7, 2018 Location: No. 60 Yangmeizhu Xiejie

Knowledge Market — Researchers' Knowledge Party

Literature, physics, mathematics, the study of cultural relics. Here you can talk with scholars and feed your endless "100,000 whys" curiosity.

Dates: October 1, 2018, 14:00–17:00 Location: No. 8 Cha'er Hutong, Micro Yuan'er

"Sound Book of the Old City": Everyday Old Beijing, Up Close

Around Baitasi the fabric of the old city has survived fairly whole and fairly intact. But as more migrants arrive and people come and go more often, contact inside the community has thinned out.

The Sound Book of the Old City takes its cue from the well-received Little Lon immersive exhibition of archaeological finds at the Melbourne Museum. By rebuilding scenes of daily life you can touch, and adding hands-on experience of old Beijing life, it hopes to draw attention to the social value of Beijing's traditional courtyard compounds.

The event includes a memory room, small games, workshops and the exhibition The Most Beautiful Xicheng: Heritage Buildings You Didn't Know About.

Memory room and games: drawing on classic literature, the Sound Book of the Old City rebuilds the interiors of old Beijing courtyard houses from three periods — the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1990s — and uses sound, color and smell to reach the senses and wake sleeping memories. Visitors can also play a riddle game and find, in the answers, the beauty of daily life in each era.

After the exhibition come sessions in traditional Beijing crafts (handmade books, seal carving), where you can feel what craftsmanship actually means and what old Beijing handiwork is worth, and take home a keepsake of the visit.

Mini Book Research Society: October 2, 14:00–17:00; October 7, 14:00–17:00

Traditional Seal Carving: October 1 / October 5 / October 6, 10:00–17:00

Film Investigation Bureau, "A View Through the Skywell": A Film Photographers' Exhibition

Building on Baitasi's idea of "regeneration," Design Week wants to "remake" the way images are looked at and shown. This time the courtyard skywell becomes the place where images enter the conversation.

Co-curator and film photographer Liu Qiang will take part in shooting and developing film with anyone who joins. The event puts low-carbon travel into practice: participants walk the hutongs around Baitasi and use a film camera to find the beauty of life there.

Dates: September 26 – October 7, 2018 Location: No. 32 Gongmenkou Sitiao, Xicheng District

"Smart Tower Plan 2.0": A Hutong Treasure Hunt

At last year's Beijing International Design Week, the same creative team ran the "Smart Tower Plan" hutong puzzle game at Baitasi, and it drew a strong response.

This year's game is set in the "Xicheng Secret Agent Intelligence Bureau." Players who accept the mission have to work through layers of puzzles on their mission cards, visit different Design Week exhibitions, and finally defuse the crisis, save Baitasi and collect the grand prize for finishing.

The design folds in the Design Week exhibitions at Baitasi as well as the daily life of the community, setting up many levels and tasks. Community notice boards, the stone carvings beside courtyard gates, the handles on front doors — all become clues hidden in the hutongs, waiting to be read.

"Smart Tower Plan 2.0" lets people get to know a historic cultural district while playing a game, and see all sorts of odd and interesting Design Week exhibitions along the way.

Dates: September 26 – October 7, 10:00–15:00 Starting point: Inside the Lu Xun Museum

The cover image is the static main poster of 2018 Beijing International Design Week. The cover image and the images in this article come from AD518 and the WeChat accounts of the Beijing International Design Week satellite venues.