This book is an experiment on constructing a text starting—exclusively and strictly—from the materials of an architectural project. As in an archive, it contains all the documents produced by the design team, which become the only sources of a text that allows the reader to generalize the project’s contents and reflect on its process. An extensive masterplan is transforming the abandoned industrial area of Shougang, on the outskirts of Beijing, into one of the venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics Games. Within this process, the China Room, as a research center of the Politecnico di Torino dedicated to urbanization and architecture in China, was involved by Tsinghua University in the transformation of the former oxygen factory into a visitor center, working on industrial memory as a lever for a renovation of the existing site aimed at the overall sustainability of the masterplan.
The book overviews and analyses the most important steps that transformed initial design intentions into a defined proposal, passing through different solutions, changes, debates, and negotiations among the different stakeholders called into action along the whole process.
