News

POROSITY STUDIO: Para.Site Beijing Car City project

Article released: Friday, 29 July, 2005

[View all Archived News]

China's Urban Development Gets an Australian Creative Boost

Australian creative practitioners are about to face the challenge of a lifetime.  This September a group of motivated art and design students from the College of Fine Arts (COFA) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) will team up with Chinese and Italian counterparts to rethink Beijing's road system and the impact of the automobile on urban development.

This ambitious project, entitled Parasite Car, is more than an imaginative design studio assignment. It’s a real case study involving an actual street in Beijing's CBD. Participating students will work with architects, government central planners and academics from Australia and China. The outcome will be architectural plans reinventing the use of public space and rethinking the role of the car to busy urban dwellers.

The project will be lead by COFA Professor Richard Goodwin whose research and successful creative practice spans decades. In his pursuit to redefine public space in the city, Goodwin has picked many architectural and sculpture awards in Australia and internationally.

Parasite Car will be run through Goodwin’s research institute called the Porosity Studio. Working across cultures and disciplines, Goodwin plans to embrace all manner of exploration within the public space of the city. Parasite Car will likely produce unexpected solutions to the problems of safe, sustainable and effective infrastructure provision in one of the world's largest cities. 

Known for his own radical reinterpretation of both public space and private space, Goodwin's latest project has attracted the interest and committed involvement of several Sydney based practitioners and chosen Beijing lecturers including Professor Xu Fang from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

The Parasite car studio will examine the following issues:
At what point will Beijing collapse under the weight of car usage and production?
How can the car be reinvented to better facilitate transportation flow and public parking?
Can the structure of cars be made more harmonious with future architectural development plans?
How can the architecture of roads and surrounding building structure be improved?

Goodwin believes that artists and designers, including professional practitioners and students, hold a unique creative key that can help urban planners think and work more laterally. He says, "The objectives of the Parasite Car Studio revolve around the realisation that if we do not attempt to solve problems in the city associated with cars, then our public spaces suffer and the city will not survive. The Parasite Car Studio will address the problem on a wide range of scales from rethinking car design itself to the integration of roads and buildings."

The site:
CHAO YANG STREET within the PAN CBD.  The site comprises a 1km street, with two major intersections which include a future freeway. Surrounding building types include the full range from commercial to residential high-rise and Hotels.

Timing:
The Parasite Car Studio will run at the
Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, from September 12 – 23, 2005.