Fake Industries

As part of the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, the architecture studio Fake Industries Architectural Agonism was invited to participate in the exhibition The Street. Curated to evoke of the famous 1980 Venice Biennale exhibition La Strada Novissima—which launched furious debate over the Postmodern movement—this show invited an international roster of 12 architects in their 30's and 40's to design 12 facades in their own architectural language, as well as an installation of their work.

Surrounded by façades with aspirations of originality, the studio decided not to design yet another sensitive and beautiful frontage. "We deeply believe, however, that the world is full of architecture—more or less interesting—and we do not wish to add more," Fake Industries remark. "Instead, we advocated for a reconstruction of architectural imaginaries that have been forgotten, destroyed, overlooked or dismissed. The rapid and unquestioned naturalization of certain sets of issues within the field, and the destruction of others, urges reexamination as a necessary provocation for disagreement that could lead to disciplinary advances. In a time when the bursting of the real state bubble has lowered the construction rate, when a credit crisis hinders funding for building, when rampant foreclosures render useless more design, when architecture's intelligentsia delve into preservation as an attempt to grow without expansion, when global civilian revolts reclaim the right for dissensus, in this time, we argued that the only way to proceed is through Agonistic Replicas."

The studio then proposed a modus operandi based on the salvation of architecture in danger of extinction: "the rebuilding hazardous architecture destroyed for political reasons; the re-imagining this generation's domestic dreams, annihilated, as they were, by the credit crisis; and the rewriting those passages of architectural history that have been tendentiously discarded." Proposing a project for each of these three categories, Fake Industries rebuilt the façade of artist Ai Weiwei's studio—infamously built and immediately demolished by the Chinese government—, presented a collection of Domestic Dreams in the form of four architectural designs and thirty models displayed on a table, and showed a film portraying the orgy of construction and destruction that took place in the time between La Strada Novissima in Venice 1980 and The Street exhibition in Shenzhen 2011.