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This installment, BAM’S RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION

BALLISTIC ARCHITECTURE MACHINE'S “10 YEARS OF DUMB”

After ten years of pursuing almost anything, Ballistic Architecture Machine’s exhibition, “10 Years of Dumb,” offers a chance to reflect on the past in a country manic to forge the future.

BAM developed its design practice by taking any opportunity which came in the door. Over the past 10 years BAM’s admittedly dumb strategy of ‘just say yes’ has led to countless mistakes yet ultimately has resulted in a portfolio of strange and exuberant works with a seemingly incomprehensible breadth, from the design of costumes, parades, building facades, parks, musical events, furniture, to wickless hand candles. As such the exhibition is intended be honest and even show errors in BAM’s logic. Although poised to be one of China’s leading design practices BAM continues along divergent paths pushing farther into the depths of design.

Never estimate the power of stupid... Stupidity is a force to be reckoned with... Life is harder if you’re stupid... Education can’t cure stupid... Human stupidity is a constant... Beauty fades, stupid is forever...

BAM EVOLVES

Ballistic Architecture Machine (BAM) is a design office founded by Jacob Walker, Daniel Gass, and Allison Dailey, three close friends and former classmates, nearly expelled from architecture school for creating installation art. BAM’s early interest in installation work lead them to gravitate away from architecture and towards the field of landscape. However, BAM's evolution towards landscape was not a straight line. While the fields of architecture, art, and engineering receive an enormous amount of attention from designers and clients in China, BAM focuses on all the spaces outside of architecture to create public spaces that integrate the IDEA of nature. It was while working in the office of Martha Schwartz, one of the pioneers of the landscape-as-art movement that the trio began to define their professional agenda.

NATURE IS AN IDEA

BAM believes that the definition of what nature is lies in culture. Among different cultures, views of what nature is, and where it exists, vary greatly. The more we understand differences between our varied definitions of nature, the more evident it becomes that nature is, in fact, an idea. As globalization ties cultures closer together, our varied definitions of nature may become one of the only remaining differences between cultures.

Views on where nature lies, and what the human role is in shaping nature, create drastically different outlooks towards our urban environment, and drastically different understandings of where the landscape lies within that construct. BAM’s retrospective, “10 Years of Dumb,” illustrates through project work how BAM grapples with the culturally diverse ideas about nature that shape our built environment.

PRETENDING IT’S A PERFECT PROCESS

BAM has been in practice for ten years, in Beijing since 2009. Over that course of time BAM’s business and design method has changed and evolved. BAM has been so focused on producing work, and the pace of business in China is so manic, we cannot reflect on work which has been produced, or the circuitous routes we might have taken. For us, BAM’s 10-Year Retrospective provides reflection.

Apart from self-reflection there is a critical aspect behind the presentation of work. Designers, even more so architects, love to represent themselves and their work as a perfect process. This approach to representation is a fabrication, a constructed façade, an artificial reality. BAM stands in opposition to such false identity. Most architects are still constrained by the Modernist belief that work must stand for itself. However, for BAM, projects do not in fact represent ‘the whole picture.’ Our built work is a fraction of the story, a small piece of a larger, unfolding event.

Although many projects are complete and constructed, when viewed through the standardizing lens of contemporary media, or even experiencing them physically, BAM’s projects exist devoid of the conditions that shaped them. BAM’s work is incomplete without the accompaniment of their truthful stories. Good design, like good storytelling, breathes ideas to life. The exhibition “10 Years of Dumb” begins to complete BAM projects by sharing the cultural and emotional contexts from which the work results.

THE EXHIBITION

The Tabula Rasa gallery housed BAM’s exhibition, “10 Years of Dumb,” in a space typical of the 798 Arts District in Beijing: a lofty expanse in an oversized industrial structure. BAM’s show filled every square centimeter of the gallery including space typically relegated to back of house. Three small rooms each contained a unique environment: the Qingdao Garden installation, a movie room entitled “Schizophrenic BAM,” and the Library with BAM’s academic-oriented books and projects. In the main gallery a wall bifurcates the space, creating two rooms: the Landscape Room and the Installation Room. A plethora of projects is organized on the walls with videos displayed on monitors and tables brimming with physical models made in BAM’s office.

At the entrance, the Qingdao Garden installation is a subtle allusion to BAM’s beginnings. The Landscape Room illustrates BAM’s evolution as a practice, while the Installation Room is a tribute to the mayhem and nonsensical path BAM has traveled. In the three-sided, three-story video room is an immersive installation with projection constantly playing out the various ‘sides of BAM.’ In the video a polished propaganda story is used to entice corporate clients; this story is jarringly mixed and blended with BAM’s own fabricated history. The third projection accounts for the daily arguments, confusion, and even rage of battling cultural differences when working to design in China. Tucked away in the back corner of the gallery space is the Library, a quiet space with a bar tender serving whiskey, where people sit and read printed material that BAM has produced since the very start.

A critic of the show proclaimed, “This is not how exhibitions are supposed to be designed.” Perhaps referring to cluttered, non-minimal organization of eccentric work, “10 Years of Dumb” creates a total overwhelming environment of energy, enthusiasm... and at times seems to contain a glimmer of hope for intelligence!