Individual work
Purpose and background
On December 13, 1937, Nanjing was captured by the Japanese army, and the entire city suffered a bloodbath during a massacre lasting a period of six weeks.
Since 2014, the Chinese government has designated December 13 as the “National Memorial Day for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre” to let the world remember history and cherish peace.
With the promulgation of recent relevant policies, the relics related to the Nanjing Massacre have received more extensive attention and protection. However, the scattered distribution of relevant memorial sites and the unstable quality of construction and maintenance of memorial sites have led to the majority of visitors preferring a few well-planned and designed memorials.
Many memorial sites with profound historical backgrounds are rarely visited, of which my research indicates a lack of reasonable planning and design. The walled buildings, the words written on the pages, and the stories of those who have died and those who will soon die would become figuratively ‘invisible’ in the city.
I hope that through this transformation, the history that was not “seen” can be known by more people, in order to make sure the deceased are remembered, and to alert people.
This transformation is based on the planning and design of Nanjing Massacre National Park and is the transformation of an important node of the national park. By evaluating all the memorial sites, I selected three sites with good reconstruction conditions, and finally selected the former residence of Rabe for detailed renovation design.
This site was within the security zone during the Nanjing Massacre and was the residence and office of John Rabe, a Siemens employee. It consists of office buildings, residential buildings and several bungalows, and during the Nanjing Massacre, Rabe dug three bomb shelters in the garden to provide shelter for the surrounding residents.
In my renovation design, I retained the original buildings of the site, demolished the two walls of the former house facing the street, opened the previously closed site, and integrated the city street with the tree array plaza at the open space in the west to enhance the accessibility of the former house.
At the same time, based on the original air-raid shelter entrance site, the three sealed underground air-raid shelters were re-excavated, and water curtains, pits and memorial columns were set up. On the basis of reconstructed air-raid shelters, a commemorative landscape was created, and history was recreated with visual techniques.