The “Capital Iron and Steel Company” Goes to Venice: Why It’s There Is More Interesting Than the Show Itself

Using the history of the “Capital Iron and Steel Company,” it carries abroad China’s resolve to remake its heavy industry — and a complicated nostalgia for it.

Venice is made of bridges, palaces, churches and exhibitions. From the air the city looks like a fish with its tail swishing east. The Church of Santa Caterina sits on the fish’s back, in the northern part of the island.

In late September, a flat-topped box of more than 100 square meters nearly filled that church. Xu Lili, co-founder of the Venice exhibition-design company WE EXHIBIT, said clients for everyday shows never stop coming, “but projects this big — there are only a few a year.” The build alone took her team ten days.

The exhibition has a long name: “Achievements in the Urban Renewal of the Shougang Site and the No. 3 Blast Furnace Museum.” The No. 3 Blast Furnace Museum is due to open on July 1, 2019, under the name “Shougang Museum.”

“For design institutions, artists, architects and curators around the world, Venice is a place you have to go.” Sun Peng, spokesperson for the EMGdotART Foundation, was stating what everyone already knows.

But that does not explain why something as vast as China’s “Capital Iron and Steel Company” should turn up in a place like Venice.

CCTN Design, the architecture firm working on the redevelopment of the Shougang site, is the force behind the show. Bo Hongtao, CCTN’s chief architect and one of the exhibition’s curators, knows how to frame what the project means: “Renewing heavy-industrial heritage counts as an important part of our development over the next ten or twenty years.” On CCTN’s website, “urban renewal” comes second under “Featured Projects.” In this moment of “transition from building new to working with what exists,” it is “a very hot topic.”

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A blast-furnace model 1.55 meters tall, 3D-printed to the precision of a movie special-effects model, stands at the church entrance. Chen Yijie, who runs the model shop Zhuiyunzhe, said it was expensive — “about the price of a car.” His assistant spent the three days before the opening repairing damage from the shipping. Visitors can lean in and study the workings inside.

Further in are a display room, a media room and six rooms furnished down to the last detail. Enamel mugs, Pearl River cameras, parallel rulers for drafting, large embroidered banners, blue-gray work uniforms, the washbasins people used on late-night shifts, a glass-fronted cabinet in a living room with a desk clock inside — these period objects strain to add up to a real room, like props on a film set.

In an activity room modeled on a workers’ club, Fei Jun, the designer in charge of the multimedia, made a video of a game of Chinese chess, projected onto a chessboard set into a tabletop.

In a short story written for the exhibition, the writer Jiang Fangzhou lays out the gap in outlook between two generations: she invented a father who is a Shougang engineer and a son who becomes a theoretical physicist. The exhibition is built on that story rather than a true one; even the family photographs on display were shot with actors. Even so, Jiang Fangzhou found it hard to show generational and historical change through installations alone.

After interviewing several older Shougang workers, Bo Hongtao said, he realized they had no private self apart from the company: “I am Shougang, and Shougang is me.”

On either side of this huge installation is a run of display boards explaining how the Chinese design firm CCTN came to take part in remaking Beijing’s Shougang industrial zone. CCTN’s most creditable work is the design and renovation of several individual buildings and support facilities inside the Beijing Shougang park — projects credited with bringing fresh life to the century-old site while preserving part of its history.

Sun Peng, spokesperson for EMGdotART, a Chinese foundation established in Venice, therefore takes the show to be, at bottom, an architecture exhibition.

The chief curator, Wang Zigeng, wants more than that. He hopes the immersive effect he worked to build will let visitors “take in, in an orderly way, a typical scene of Chinese work and life in the 1980s” — “a collectivist way of living.” Wang Zigeng was also the historical-architecture and environment consultant on the film Hidden Man.

The immersive detail is friendliest to visitors who lack the background. But how you read the show still depends on how much you know about one stretch of history, and about what the show intends.

An essay by the independent writer Anna Battista is enough to show how curious and how confused foreign visitors were. She wrote that the installation inside the church resembled the cabinets of curiosities fashionable among European nobility centuries ago. The blast furnace, hard hats, drawings and control-room monitors in the collection suggest that this particular cabinet’s theme may have something to do with industry.

What is familiar enough to Chinese visitors may be a challenge to foreign ones. Then again, it is hard to say how much young Chinese visitors actually know about collectivist life and the ideas behind it.

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2019 is Shougang’s hundredth year.

In 1919, the Shijingshan Iron and Steel Plant was founded at Shijingshan, at the western end of Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. In 1967 it was renamed the “Capital Iron and Steel Company.”

Beijing was never an industrial city, but by 1978 Shougang was one of China’s eight big steelmakers. Its peak came in 1994, when it made 8.24 million tons of steel, the highest output of any steel company in the country. Within a few years that figure was no longer worth mentioning: Baosteel, in Shanghai, was already past 10 million tons by 2000, and produced 35.4 million tons of pig iron in 2008.

What finally decided Beijing to move the steel plant out of the city, though, was winning the bid in 2001 for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Bad air and gray skies became urgent and public at the time, and this industrial zone in the middle of the city was blamed for the city’s air quality. It later became part of the effort to “relieve Beijing of functions not essential to the capital.”

Part of the plant moved to Qinhuangdao, in Hebei province, in 2006 to make wide, heavy plate, and a new site was built at Caofeidian, also in Hebei, in 2014. Some workers went with it; the rest were reassigned. Back in Shijingshan, the 8.63-square-kilometer park was the largest single parcel of developable land in western Beijing, and it needed a new plan.

At first the redevelopment went badly. The Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning & Design began putting forward proposals around 2005, and plenty of project teams and firms took part — and plenty dropped out. “There was no core IP. Everyone knew it had to be redeveloped, but nobody knew exactly how,” Bo Hongtao said. Cheng Taining, CCTN’s founder, was one of the first five academicians on the expert panel for the Shougang site’s transformation.

The turn came in 2014, when Beijing won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. In March 2016 it was settled that the office campus for the Beijing Winter Olympics organizing committee would be built inside the Shougang park. To the planners, the Olympics were a rare, enormous “IP.” There was no more back-and-forth; everything went onto the schedule. CCTN’s design for the organizing committee’s offices became “the first project in the Shougang redevelopment with a real timeline.”

CCTN went on to design several more projects inside the Shougang park, among them the General Administration of Sport’s winter training center, the Winter Olympics Big Air venue (with its Shangri-La hotel) and the No. 3 Blast Furnace Museum and the facilities around it.

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CCTN had planned to bring this work to a collateral event at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Next to the official Biennale, which matters most, collateral events are an extra, generous opening the organizing committee offers artists and architects: they are open to application and chosen by the Biennale’s artistic director rather than named by the committee, but they still carry the official Lion of St. Mark.

Marino Folin, chairman of the EMGdotART Foundation and former rector of the University of Architecture of Venice (IUAV), was the curator of that collateral event. Last October he invited CCTN into a group show about urban renewal. Besides the Shougang park, the group show was to include five other small urban-redevelopment projects.

The application was rejected. Neither Bo Hongtao nor Sun Peng knew why. Bo had assumed the subject would resonate easily, since urban renewal in Europe “started twenty years before ours did.” They quickly decided to stage a show of their own instead. It would still run alongside the Architecture Biennale, which would draw more attention, but it would have nothing to do with the Biennale — an independently curated exhibition.

The new show would present the Shougang park redevelopment alone. “It’s big enough on its own,” Bo Hongtao said, relaying Marino Folin’s view.

At the opening, an invited architect said much the same. Amnon Rechter, who heads the Israeli firm Rechter Architects, had redeveloped a commercial district in Tel Aviv a few years earlier. That was no small job either, but he looked startled to learn that the full redevelopment of the No. 3 Blast Furnace, including a public parking structure, covered about 50,000 square meters. “Something that size needs to find a Chinese method,” Amnon Rechter said in his remarks — a line clearly not in the speech he had prepared.

Alberto Cecchetto, a professor in the urban planning school at the University of Architecture of Venice who worked on the renovation of the Venetian Arsenale, was struck by the scale of the Chinese project, and by how its fate had been settled in advance: while everything else was still blank, a function like “Winter Olympics office district” was already fixed.

Bo Hongtao later told QDaily that this is the classic difference between European thinking and the Chinese model. In Europe, redevelopment is usually incremental and tentative.

In Beijing, by contrast, “the changes at Shougang are tied to major public events, major cultural events” — they are “industrial restructuring at the national level.” In redevelopment of that kind, from the top down, the architect’s part may be overstated. When they take on an urban-renewal project, it is less that architecture revives a district than that a state order arrives on schedule.

A design editor who attended the opening said architects in Beijing bring the project up often. “What do architects think of the design?” “They don’t talk about it that way. They’re just envious. They think it’s a great project, and that whoever got it would have done well with it.” The editor asked not to be named.

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In redeveloping the Shougang park, Bo Hongtao kept the No. 3 Blast Furnace, which he believes is Shougang’s “spiritual totem.” In the future the totem will be visible from many points in the museum. Judging by the renderings, the best view is out through the open dome of the circular still-water courtyard in the underwater exhibition hall. On a moonlit night it would look both worn and solemn.

In the summer of 2016, once CCTN decided to turn the site into a museum, it was settled that Shougang’s chronicle would be carved into the wall at the museum entrance. A specially designed “wall of honor” would be filled with the names of Shougang employees. The architects believe “they shouldn’t be forgotten.”

On the question of whether to hold such an exhibition at all, Shougang showed the caution of a large state-owned enterprise. CCTN Design was the more eager party throughout. When CCTN proposed showing in Venice, Bo Hongtao said, Shougang’s managers did not even know how much the Venice Biennale counts for.

The same went for how the show would be put together. The curators had planned to write the stories of eight Shougang employees, but the company worried about whether those stories were complete or typical enough. In the end the curators used invented characters and an invented story. Wang Zigeng said this borrowed from Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence: in the novel, Pamuk uses an imaginary museum to bring back old Istanbul and one long, fierce attachment, and after the book was published the Museum of Innocence was actually built.

Predictably, the finished show never produced an echo that complex. Fiction here was simply a shortcut, which let them make “him” do whatever they wanted. Pointing at old photographs in a storage locker, Bo Hongtao explained that the character they designed liked photography; this invented engineer was also given a part in the original design of the No. 3 Blast Furnace, which supplied a reason for the blast-furnace drawings in the drafting room.

Everything in the exhibition was vetted: the embroidered banners, the certificates of merit, the newspapers pasted on the walls, the words on the open pages of books. Newspapers from the early 1980s still carried traces of “class struggle” and the names of certain leaders; they were “more afraid of being misread by foreigners,” Bo Hongtao said. Shougang also advised cutting back the family sections of the show.

Some of the company’s managers objected that Shougang’s most glorious period was the mid-1990s. The architects and curators argued that even a backward period can be worth missing. What they cared about most, though, was whether they could easily produce a visible contrast with the present and stir that nostalgia — and the 1980s worked better for that.

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No one from Shougang came to the opening, even though Fu Xiaoming, deputy general manager of Beijing Shougang Construction Investment Co., Ltd., was the first person to appear in an official video playing on a loop. The architects described both the video and where it fell in the program as a “compromise.”

But Shougang paid 70% of the cost of the Venice show. The whole thing came to about 7 million yuan, including 2 million yuan in extra shipping, rent and taxes for staging an exhibition abroad. The other 30% was covered by the Shougang Design Institute and CCTN, though how they split it was not disclosed.

Whatever comes of this show and of what follows it, CCTN’s reputation stands to gain. Bo Hongtao is thinking about persuading Shougang to bring the exhibition home afterward. An international show usually becomes a bright line on an artist’s or an architect’s record, and wins them recognition faster at home — but Shougang does not see it that way. The company plans to reuse the materials from the show, but not to rebuild the huge installation.

In the Catalog of Prohibited and Restricted New Industries in Beijing (2018 Edition), issued by the Beijing city government on September 26 this year, the 2014 “Opinions on Advancing the Transformation, Adjustment, Construction and Development of the Shougang Old Industrial Zone” was praised for having “made an outstanding contribution to the formation and development of old industrial cities.”

The exhibition runs at the Church of Santa Caterina in Venice for more than a month, until October 31.

Cover image courtesy of CCTN Design.