On the 27th floor of a 50-storey residential tower in Xiamen, China, Devolution rented a 90-square meter apartment and transformed it into a park. Located within a high-density residential area in Xinglin bay, this project brings back an essential part of public life – the park.
Devolution‘s project takes place in a residential building that comprises 300 families in total. Living in close quarters, the residents can access an atrium park located inside the building. However, before the rise of modern skyscrapers in China, traditional housing usually shared a park nearby. These parks were completely open and free to access and served as an important part of public life. Nowadays, parks are cut into closed, privatized forms, restricting vital access to public and social spaces.
Devolution Park was a short-lived, symbolic project, which survived only a few months. The aim of the work was to convey the extreme privatization of public life, as well as the relationship between private space and public space in modern cities.
Besides the park on the 27th floor, Devolution also cooperated with the new media team SeeekLab to open an online park. Non-apartment people can access this online park through their computers and mobile phones as residents, which is connected to the 27th-floor park in real-time. People can participate in and start another form of public life through the barrages, connecting with computers or mobile phones. It’s based on Internet, anonymous and non-community. You can even imagine a very post-modern image, someone sitting in the park, took out his phone, involved in the Internet public life. The number of people in online park and real park will be counted, and responses to the interfaces of online and real park in real-time.
