When and why did you establish the Graduate Center?
The Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University (Beida) was established in 1999 and classes were first offered in 2000. I have always valued the importance of research in architecture and the ideal research platform has always been the one that is built upon interactions between practice...
Vittorio's family-given name is Qun, but his love for and knowledge of Italy have led him to adopt this very Italian sounding name.
Our meeting with Vittorio is at his interior design atelier in Beijing, where he has been working for eight years now, especially for nouveau rich Chinese families whom he furnishes with many Made in Italy products.
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Concept artist, painter, sculptor, designer, and calligrapher, Huang Rui is one of the founders of Le Stelle, the first avant-garde group in China. Founded in the eighties, the group challenged the strictures and prohibitions of officialdom against the creative freedom of artists.
After living in Japan for ten years, he is now back on his home tur...
Are Chinese artists then destroying the past to design the future?
…we're creating the future so that we may redesign our past.
Ai Wei Wei...
In 1990 Lorenzo Fiaschi together with Maurizio Rigillo and Mario Cristiani opened the Galleria Continua (www.galleriacontinua.com) at San Gimignano. The idea behind the Gallery was to get ancient art, which is so pervasive in this city, and contemporary art on speaking terms with each other.
In fifteen years the Gallery has carried on pioneering t...
Realism, cynicism, tradition rejected yet yearned after and sought for. These would appear to be the catchwords characterising the latest, burgeoning generation of Chinese artist and the first to have been seen in Europe when Harald Szeemann brought a small party of these new artists to the Venice Biennale in 1999.
They then looked to us a bit p...
The architect Alessandro Mendini can truly be said to represent Italian design at its best. Founder of the Alchimia group, he now also holds top commissions from abroad, with clients such as Alessi and Swatch, and enjoys high academic and scientific standing. Mendini belies the prevailing stight-fistedness when it comes to sharing knowledge. He's i...
With a population of one billion three hundred million inhabitants, a gross domestic product that's continually risen over recent years, and demand growing at an annual rate of nine per cent, it is no wonder that China has drawn the attention of large and small entrepreneurs and business persons from all over the world. Judging from the enthusiasti...
Eugenio Perazza is a tireless explorer, always one step beyond the here and now with a gaze ever turned forward to the upcoming future. A seven-second intuition twenty-nine years ago is all it took for him to decide to revolutionise his life. That's when he started experimenting, turning designinto his mission. In 1976 he establishes Magis (www.mag...
It's fairly apparent by now that China's economic standards will soon be on par with those of the West. Actually, some observers reckon they'll soon have overtaken Western standards. To be sure, it seems safe to predict that Chinese enterprises will soon be commonplace among the echelons of high international financial power. Lenovo, the Chinese co...
The meaning of colour evolves in parallel with culture.