Le chinois ça s'apprend

The History Museum, also known as the Yinzhou Museum, rises, as ponderous as a mountain, in an area of recent expansion in Ningbo, a town in the province of Zhejiang, district of Yinzhou, China. Commissioned in 2003, the building was officially opened on 5 December 2008 after two years of work. Situated on a vast lot measuring 45,000 square meters, the building houses numerous exhibits and relics of the history of the region – from the Hemudu culture to the present day – covering an overall surface of 60 mu – about 303,250,000 square meters. Amateur Architecture Studio designed the work; this firm, headquartered in the ancient capital Hangzhou, was founded in 1997 by Wang Shu and his wife Lu Wenyu. The Ningbo History Museum is a paradigmatic work that melds together expressive research, tectonic experimentation, and knowledge handed down from generation to generation. The museum presents itself as a massive isolated block laid out on a north-south axis.The building is an enigmatic architecture of spoliation stratified with more than two million remnants recovered from other structures: bricks, stones, roof tiles, pottery, a swarm of small artifacts whose styles and colors betray their origins from the Ming and Qing dynasties up to some Tang pieces, more than 1500 years old. The facades were then pierced by small slits in random patterns, created an analogy with certain rock faces with their miniscule niches, a refuge for prayer for hermits and monks. More than in the physical makeup, it is in this care and manipulation of the heritage from the past that the monumental vocation, properly speaking, of the building lies, a Zauberberg literally erected with heaps of condensed time, a time bound to man, made for man, to paraphrase Eugenio Montale. Maximum concreteness and maximum speculative subtlety: the vast surfaces show the communication, the non-disjunction of presence and absence, of “there” and “not-there,” of you and wu: the past retreats and emerges, submerges itself and shines through, is lost and (re)appears “as if it were not there – as if it were”.