From the high-rise to the hutong
Just a few years ago, Chinese architects would have worked for the
state. Now a whole new generation are striking out for themselves.
What are they building? Jonathan Glancey re****ts
Audio slideshow: China's most exciting buildings
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/flash/page/0,,2263980,00.html
Wednesday March 12, 2008
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/architecture/story/0,,2264277,00.html
The Guardian
Zhu Pei and Wu Tong, architects of Studio Zhu Pei, in front of their
creation Digital Beijing. Photograph: Dan Chung
Say the words "new Chinese architecture" and what springs to mind?
Ambitious skyscrapers, soaring apartment blocks, Olympian designs in
central Beijing by celebrated international architects, and the
unbridled kitsch of suburban estates like Thames Town, a bizarre
mock-English development near Shanghai.
But even while great - and likable - tracts of old Chinese cities
continue to come tumbling down in the names of change and
modernisation, the country's up-and-coming practices are developing
intelligent new forms of specifically Chinese design, even if they do
draw from the west from time to time. Whatever other glamorous
projects these talented young architects are beginning to scoop up, it
is mostly housing for ordinary people that concerns them - that, and a
desire to change the direction of Chinese architectural development,
all too often a soulless juggernaut ripping the hearts from old towns
and cities.
Zhu Pei is one architect at the forefront of this new wave. In his
busy Beijing studio, Zhu shows me ideas for the redevelopment of one
of the city's "hutongs". Made up of tangling alleys brimming with
workaday life, Beijing's hutongs are fast disappearing. "This is the
type of district most people lived in before the towerblocks arrived,"
says Zhu. "Naturally, many people were happy to move out to new
apartments because the hutongs were old, poor and often unsanitary.
But the hutongs are built on a human scale and can be very beautiful.
What we propose is reconstruction: adding gentle modern buildings
where necessary, to improve them and make ordinary people like them
again. We want the present to connect with the past - we want to
perform an urban acupuncture on Chinese cities."
This isn't easy. As Zhu knows, it is far easier to design ambitious
new museums and s****ting venues than it is to construct modest, modern
homes in age-old city courtyards and alleys, especially when such
sites are being hungrily eyed up by state-sponsored property
developers. Educated at Tsinghua University and the University of
California, Zhu - who set up Studio Zhu Pei in 2005 with architects Wu
Tong - was the man behind Digital Beijing, the all-but-completed
control centre for the 2008 Olympics, as well an origami-like art
pavilion in Abu Dhabi that will stand alongside monuments by Zaha
Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry. He is also working on designs for
the Guggenheim Beijing and created the city's Kapok hotel, with its
translucent screens and ****mmering courtyards.
Yet the building he lingers over, as we look through his work, is a
beautifully restored single-storey merchant's house - the Cai
Guo-qiang Courtyard - that stands in a Beijing hutong. The house, says
Zhu, is "about 200 years old. Here, we have had the budget to create a
house that belongs to old Beijing - and to the modern city. But you
can't do this cheaply, even though this is the way we would like the
hutongs to go forward." Without ideas like this, he says, Beijing will
lose its soul.
There are similar concerns over at Standard Architecture, where I am
talked through models, drawings and photographs of highly intelligent
new townhouses by Zhang Ke, who did his masters at Harvard. These
townhouses, built in terraces, boast internal courtyards and gardens,
some open, others glazed. Although busy creating big art galleries and
impressive hotels, Zhang is clearly very excited by the new housing
Standard is developing.
"There is no implied style," says Zhang. "They are simple, free of
ornament. We have concentrated everything on what people tell us they
really want." And what they want, clearly, is courtyards. "The houses,
although narrow, are deep," he says. "You enter into high-walled
entrance courtyards and then into inner courtyards that are
double-height living rooms. Behind the kitchens are third - or garden
- courtyards. And on top of the bedrooms, we have roof terraces."
I look on with envy at these courtyards within courtyards, offering
privacy, daylight and space, even on low budgets. We could be building
these modern homes in Britain, instead of third-rate junk. Coming
fresh to private architectural practice in China - just a few years
ago, Zhang and his partners would have worked in huge state-run
studios - young Chinese architects appear to have an unhindered view
of what can be done, as well as a genuine love of the old Chinese
towns and cities that, sadly, are being replaced by rubbish to rival
our own.
Wang Hui, of Limited Architecture, meets me in the cafe on the ground
floor of Beijing's Today Art Museum. His studio is just down the road,
in the basement of a high-rise apartment block. Gl***** of hot water
arrive to take off the morning chill, steaming up the architect's big.
green-framed gl*****. But, even in the depths of winter, Beijing is a
much warmer place than Taer Qin Xinjiang, a Tibetan village some
16,000ft up in the mountains, where Wang Hui has been toiling to
complete a school for the children of nomadic herders. Although modern
in plan, the school is built of local materials, while the sun meets
all its energy needs. This is a genuinely "green" building, one that
Wang is proud of.
'It's not a money-making venture," he says. "It's a four-day journey
up the mountains by Jeep; it's a bit different from doing cultural
projects in Beijing." For Wang, this venture is as much about giving
something back to Tibet as it is a way of proving that a fresh
generation of Chinese architects is as removed from the absurdist
world of Thames Town, some 20 miles south of Shanghai, as it can
possibly be. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, we might even
look to China to see how to develop parts of our old cities, build new
towns and decrease our use of energy.
How can you tell that Thames Town is not in England? Well, for one
thing, there's no Chinese takeaway. In fact, when I turn up at Thames
Town, in the depth of a cold snap, there is nothing to eat whatsoever.
Not even a Tesco Express, although don't hold your breath. A
coffeeshop with a name that seems to say "Costa" proves to be nothing
but a façade. The local pub is empty and dry as old bones. It is not
even fitted out. A nominally "independent" record shop - promising
"all the music style", with the words "Miles Davies" splashed across
its windows - is as silent as a grave. The door of the parish church,
a prickly, wafer-thin version of an English gothic revival parish
model, is locked and bolted. Thames Town's official website describes
it thus: "Embraced by lush greenery and beautiful scenery, the
catholic [sic] church is an exclusive living space to begin a life of
happiness and bliss."
Thames Town is a Chinese fantasy, a make-believe English town
designed, as far as I can see, for business-class families who want
either to play out a Hollywood version of life in an English town, or
else rent out faux historic English homes to those for whom a
comic-book, or TV-influenced, western lifestyle is the way to go. In a
narrow Thames Town shopping street, a young bride and groom strike
poses for a photographer. This is a daily occurrence in Thames Town.
Couples, married in humdrum civic offices in Shanghai, send family and
friends pictures of themselves Four Weddings and a Funeral-style, shot
in Thames Town.
The odd thing is that Thames Town is so quiet. Being here is like
walking onto an empty film set, or waking up to find yourself one of
the few people left in the world. Just where are the 8,000 people who
are meant to live here? Perhaps they commute en masse to Shanghai. I
ask a beaming security guard huddled in a scarlet greatcoat. He says
that a third of the houses in Thames Town are lived in, while the rest
are for rent. So are they empty? He smiles. OK, when does the pub
open? He smiles again. We walk on, hungry and thirsty, as CCTV
cameras, mounted on both sides of every street, follow us - a sudden
reminder of England.
I walk into what is meant to be, I think, a Belgravia-style townhouse.
Inside, all is bleak concrete and exposed plumbing, with a narrow
stair leading up to cramped, low-ceilinged flats. Classical
pro****tions are clearly not the order of the day. Through low-set
windows, I peer out at a townscape dotted with cartoon-like versions
of red 1930s telephone kiosks and what looks to be a Scottish
baronial-style provincial bank. (It turns out to be more flats.) Quite
where the Thames slips into this town planning equation escapes me,
although there is a canal, if not a river, by the empty pub, complete
with frustrating dead-end walkways - a metaphor of sorts, perhaps, for
this utterly un-English new town.
Shanghai was an intensely cosmopolitan city before the communist era.
Today, in the age of officially controlled ultra-capitalism, it is no
stranger to fey and fanciful English-style architecture. A 30-second
walk along Foochow Road, just behind the Bund (the city's famous
Edwardian baroque and art deco riverfront promenade) lies the
Macgregor House. Dating from 1937, this mock tudor (or "joke oak")
cottage was once HQ to Caldbeck Macgregor, purveyors of fine wines and
spirits. It survives as a teasing riposte to the 21st-century
architectural bombast of the high-rise Pudong district, across the
Huangpu river. In Shanghai's Hongqiao district, you can find Victor
Sassoon's house Eve, a grand mock tudor pile dating from 1933; and I
have also been to Holly Heath, an endangered "joke oak" suburb that
might as well be in Surrey.
Thames Town, though, is a joke of a different nature. Commissioned as
part of a new town programme initiated by Huang Ju, former secretary
of the Shanghai communist party, it was designed by the international
engineering practice WS Atkins, along with eight other themed foreign
towns on the fringe of Shanghai. On the journey back to the city, I
spotted a windmill in what must have been Dutch Town; I hope you can
forgive me for not bothering with Swedish Town, Spanish Town, Italian
Town, US Town, Australia-New Zealand Town, German Town, complete with
a Volkswagen factory and architecture by one Albert Speer Jr. There
was even a Chinese Town. Somewhere not far over the horizon, though, a
new school of Chinese architecture is emerging - one that is seeking
to connect genuine traditions with the needs and desires of the future
· The work of young Chinese architects and designers features in China
Design Now, at the V&A, London, from Saturday to July 13. Details:
020-7942 2000
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