Double scenes. Thumb Island and Snake Street
Chinese thinking is primarily about scenes. By “scene” I don’t mean how things look. The two projects are intended to offer common benefit to the new district of Qingpu (Thumb Island) and a new neighbourhood of Chunshen (Snake Street). “New” here means under-equipped with urban commerce and public spaces. Although it was conceived partly by ourselves, Thumb Island is by and large a governmental initiative and Snake Street is the work of a private developer. While the former is intended to create public spaces that support or are supported by commercial activities, the latter is intended to create commercial places engendered by the presence of the public. The discussion on the relationship between public space and commercial activities is complex and could go on forever, but one thing is certain: public space is only qualified as such by popular use. The strategy of Thumb Island was to split the architecture into programmed space and un-programmed public areas. The roof is a three-dimensional extension of the landscape around the lake, while the space underneath is devoted to a variety of public and commercial functions ranging from wedding services and banquets to sports events and theatre. The strategy for Snake Street, on the other hand, is to slow down the passing residents so as to encourage the use of public space and also stimulate purchases – an experiment the client agreed to test. While Thumb Island is very much a raw architectural form defined by a concrete framework reminiscent of a freeway flyover, Snake Street is intended as a fashionable, smooth concrete surface dotted by fasteners (one of the buildings on this development has been designed by a Japanese architect). The inspiration for Thumb Island comes from a rule in popular Chinese landscape painting. It recommends the presence of a small mountain to emphasise a sense of scale in the presence of water, be it a lake or the ocean. The metaphor behind the Snake Street project, instead, is the “floating wine glass”. In this drinking game a small, winding “canal” is carved into a large stone surface; cups filled with liquor float down the channel with the water. Wherever the cup stops, the nearest player must drink the wine and fill the cup again before putting it back in the canal… The difference in Snake Street is that it is the people who flow down the winding street instead.
The double faces. Book Pavilion and Red Star Kindergarten
What China still does best is straight lines and perpendicular corners. If time and cost limitations are imposed, one is reduced to these basic features. Our designs for the library of Zhejiang University’s Ningpo campus and our own office in the centre of Shanghai are not, as may appear, the result of frustration with difficulties in constructing curvilinear shapes, nor of a secret anxiety about the complexities of budget control. Instead they stem from a conscious attempt to avoid complexity in construction and the consequential cost increases. The rationale is brutally clear: education facilities are severely underfunded and in the brief our budget is defined as “as low as possible”. Time and money were not the only constraints, but they certainly were the harshest. The Book Pavilion is essentially a cube with a hollow centre. Its exterior skin, designed to be as homogeneous and simplified as possible, employs the two cheapest materials to be found locally: red mud brick and orange fur wood. The former is used to build houses that even peasants are ashamed to inhabit, and the latter is employed in the boat-building industry. The details drafted for the building do not differentiate between horizontality and verticality, in other words the constructional logic is not driven by gravity. Plans and sections of the building’s skin are identical, so that the construction teams need only be instructed once. The building took 8 months to complete, with a budget of 1,200 yuan/m2 (€120/m2). Red Star is a renovation of an abandoned kindergarten built in the ‘70s, which was subsequently transformed into the headquarters of MADA s.p.a.m. The existing facade was left intact, but totally re-clad. Not only because it would have cost more to strip off the existing white tiles than to clad them, but also to reduce noise during construction, a sensitive topic with the neighbours. The cladding material is a woven bamboo board commonly used for making formworks. This material has been a favourite ever since the office discovered it on a construction site five years ago, but for the first time in this project it has been employed for both the interior and exterior.
Double walls. Well Hall and Xian TV Headquarters
The city wall of Xian is arguably the most visible feature of the famous ancient capital. The Well Hall is a small, self-funded experimental project outside Xian. On the surface it looks almost like a typical local peasant’s home, but it violates many aspects imbedded in traditional construction. The height of wall is doubled to accommodate two levels of usable space. Consequently, the traditional courtyard is turned into a narrow slit facing the sky. The same wall height is extended to enclose an area equal to that of the enclosed space, creating a well-like garden which is traditionally used for semi-domestic activities (animals, open toilets and experimental farming etc.). The experiments go further beyond the wall. The whole building has been constructed by local retired workers without the use of construction drawings as such. Building skill is in their hands, not heads. If one were to give them drawings, they would tell you it “cannot be done” simply because they are unaccustomed to reading conventional construction drawings. So we supplied them with freehand sketches that look familiar and easy (see p. 90-91), along with frequent on-site one-to-one demonstrations that further helped them to understand what would otherwise appear as a completely alien construction process. In this way the traditional methodology is absorbed and subverted to meet our requirements. While the wall in Well Hall is to separate inside from outside, the “wall” for Xian TV serves to contain a diverse range of programmes in a limited height. The centre has an area of 80,000 m2, but only reaches a height of 12 metres due to restrictions on sightlines towards a nearby historical monument. It is a large fortified pit within which two- or three-storey building blocks are inserted. This sounds like the city of Xian itself, which is defined by a wall with a depth. But the depth of Xian TV’s wall is hollowed out to contain all service functions. This wall is treated with stacks, folds, punches and cuts to indicate that it isn’t opaque and that various functions lie behind. With this programmed “city wall”, many functional blocks are organised and connected horizontally. An open concourse is carved out of this dense juxtaposition to hold all the functions that involve interaction with the audience, as well as news broadcasting kiosks, a demo-postproduction studio, the advertisement department and a live broadcasting studio for festivals and national holidays.
Riding the wave of China’s renewal
Deyan Sudjic
Quingyun Ma, it seems, has a way of being in the right place at the right time. To have returned from America aged 34 to establish his architectural office in Shanghai in 1999, would certainly suggest a man with the ability to spot the possibilities that the exploding city offered as a practical place to work, rather than as an object for theoretical study at least three years before his mentor Rem Koolhaas. The question that one might ask is if he has done even better by being in the wrong place at the right time, or even the wrong place at the wrong time, or any other possible combination of those possibilities. He managed to leave Beijing where he graduated from the Tsinghua University to do a masters in Pennsylvania, just ahead of the Tiananmen massacre when the road to the airport was still a two lane strip of tarmac. It was a six lane toll road by the time he came back. But he also spent a couple of years working with KPF, and subsequently in the architecture school in Shenzhen, which might be understood from either direction. The idea of teaching architecture in the city that erupted from nothing into a belligerent semi-urban monster threatening to swallow Hong Kong whole is either a master stroke, or the bitterest of ironies. It certainly suggests that he has been able to make something of the darker side of architecture, and the underbelly of urbanism - a suggestion that is certainly born out by the nature of his work. Getting to Beijing in time to join Rem Koolhaas on building the CCTV headquarters is certainly good timing. Unless of course it could be construed as putting Ma - a serious contender for the role of contemporary China’s first home grown international architectural celebrity - in a slightly uncomfortable position. If he belongs to China’s fourth generation of architects, setting aside all those countless generations of Chinese designers who built its traditional monuments over the centuries, then is he not in the same relationship to the West that his 19th century predecessors, trained in America, Britain or Germany? Certainly Ma has spent enough time around Koolhaas to pick up some of his verbal tics. “In China”, Hans Ulrich Obrist reports Ma as saying, “failure is always positive”. Does it matter? Well there certainly is a way in which architecture does play a role in a country establishing a new definition of itself in the manner that China is doing, and Japan once did. It was its film makers, its fashion designers and its architects who did as much to demonstrate to the rest of the world the dangers of underestimating Japan as anything else. China has been making films for a couple of decades now. Obviously it hasn’t managed to develop a Yohji Yamamoto or a Rei Kawakubo as yet, though it is clearly working on it. And in architecture it’s got a way to go before its in the position that Japan was when it made its breakthrough at the time of the Tokyo Olympics. Judging by the speed that China is going, it fully intends to have caught up by the time Herzog and de Meuron’s stadium and the CCTV building are ready for business in 2008. In China, as in Japan, there is a simultaneous, mutually exclusive, and fascinating attempt to be both relentlessly new, and also to embrace some of the texture of an ancient national identity. “I used to be a pure modernist, but I realised that my refusal to do anything historical was wrong. History is so pervasive”, he says. Ma’s background, and the circumstances of today’s China make it hard to understand how much he is shaping events, rather than being shaped by them. He can sometimes sound as if he has simply been absorbed by the context in which he operates. “Sales pavilions are the new cathedrals”, he said of one of those show suites that litter Chinese construction sites, erected in an attempt to dazzle house buyers in a country that only discovered the domestic mortgage seven years ago. His work, which ranges from the house he built for his father in homespun stone and wood, to slick shopping centres for Chinese yuppies utterly refuses to be predictable to the point of predictability. But as a measure of what is happening in contemporary China, it says a lot.
