Can-TONE-se MUSEUM

In my third year studio, I developed a Cantonese Museum project focusing on the evanescent local language, which discusses language as a cultural carrier to retain and communicate in a city. Cantonese is a beautiful language. We can feel the relationship between the language and its rooted urban space when walking in Cantonese alleys.

I imagine that the promotion of Mandarin in China and the rejection of local language will lead to a cultural crisis. Eventually Cantonese will become an endangered language that only exists in a museum.

Museum Design Srudio
Site:Guangzhou, China
Tutor: Daxing Yu
(yudaxing@126.com )
Individual Work
Autumn 2016

BACK TO ALL ARCHITECTURES

Places that are memorable are necessary. We need to think about where we are and what is unique andspecial about our surroundings so that we can better understand ourselves and how we relate to others.

- Donlyn Lyndon

01 Cantonese in Canton

Canton, also named Guangdong, is a province in South China, on the South China Sea coast. Cantonese is a variety of Chinese spoken in Canton. It is the traditional prestige variety and standard form of Yue Chinese, one of the major subgroups of Chinese. The central region, which is also the political and economic center, is populated predominantly by Cantonese speakers, though the influx in the last three decades of millions of Mandarinspeaking immigrants has slightly diminished Cantonese linguistic dominance.Although Cantonese shares a lot of vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon.

Because of the nationwide promotion of Mandarin, very few Cantonese speakers are knowledgeable in the full Cantonese written vocabulary.

This diagram shows the population of different dialectspeakers in China.
(Figure.The language of China From Zhou Dynasty① to present)

① Bohz. William G. The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System, American Oriental Series78. New Heven: Amarican Oriental Sociaty, 1994. Ancient Chinese System was formed in Zhou Dynasty(BC1046 - BC256) .

02 Cantonese Generated in Alleys

Compared with Mandarin, Cantonese obeys a more complicated rule of prosody. Sounds produced by the human voice vary along multiple dimensions. Languages use these dimensions in different ways to distinguish utterances. In particular, there are wide differences from one language to another in the suprasegmental, or prosodic, features: variations in fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration, which are not a function of intrinsic characteristics ofphonetic segments.

Lexical stress and lexical tone are the two principal methods by which languages use prosodic features to distinguish one word from another. In tone languages, a lexically distinctive function is served by the fundamental frequency level or contour realized on a syllable①.

However, the promotion of Mandarin② in China and the rejection of local language will lead to a cultural crisis, and eventually Cantonese will become an endangered language that only exists in a museum. So I put Cantonese Tone's Palaces in the alley as a memorial hall.

① Anne Cutler, Huanchih Chen.Lexical Tone in Cantonese Spoken-word Processing.
② On February 6, 1956, the State Council issued the Instructions on the Promotion of Mandarin, which promoted Mandarin nationwide.

03 The Grid of the Museum

The grid based on alleys is the most prominent characristic of Canton context.The alley in Canton is the main place to generate language events. People have conversation, debates, greeting in such narrow space.

When studying the urban space in Canton, I found that the patterns of stress and intonation in Cantonese are similiar to the walking experience in Canton alleys.

04 Prototypes of Tone's Palace

The varied tones in Cantonese can be analogous to the figures of Canton impression.

In this diagram, Cantonese tones, the elements constitute Cantonese, can be divided into 9 types①.

Accroding to pich levels, there are six tones in open syllables.

Considering the duration of every tone, three tones end with stops. So I designed nine tones' palaces representing for nine devices to generate vowels and nine paths of spatial experiences.

① Bernhard Karlgren. Etudes sur la phonologie Chinoise. Beijing: The Commercial Press,1994

05 Cantonese Tones, Cantonese Memory

For Ado Rosi. the city is a theater of humn and events. This theater is no longer just a represention; it is a reality. It absorbs events and feelings, and every new event contains within it is a memory of the past and a potential memory of the future①.

Cities are in reality great camps of the living and the dead where many elements remain like signals, symbolscautions. When the holiday is over: what remains of the architecture is scarrea. and the sand consumes the streetagain. There is nothing left but to resume with a certain obstinacy the reconstruction ofelements and instruments inexpectation ofanother holiday.
-Aldo Rossi.A Scientific Autobiography

① Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman. The architecture of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1982. the Collective Memory

06 Nine Tone's Palaces in the Cantonese Museum

Hollow wall is constructed by laying bricks on one side or by alternating flat and side masonry. It is a load-bearing wall or the filling wall of the 1-3 stories civil buildings with the advantages of material saving, light weight, heat insulation and sound insulation.