The Rising Dragon: Design in China
Posted: August 30th, 2010 | Author: James P. Cramer | Filed under: Global practice | Tags: Add new tag, architecture, Shanghai |Paul Doherty contributes the following guest blog. Paul is senior vice president of Screampoint, which provides governments, multinationals, and large real estate portfolio companies with visual solutions to manage and maintain their assets.
I am enjoying my adopted home country of the People’s Republic of China. I have settled into having a wonderful family, a growing business, and a feeling that the future is very bright. You take a keen interest in design when you make a place home. Just ask any residential designer about their clients’ interest level of every detail of their home.
I live and work in Shanghai in an area called the French Concession. Shanghai has been a city constantly shaped by its foreign trade, foreign invasions, and foreign occupation. You can see the influence of each era in the different parts of the city: the Bund, the German Concession, the English Concession, the French Concession. Thus, I live in an area that could be picked up and placed in the middle of Paris and not miss a beat.
But what makes a city is not just the vocabulary and context of its buildings. It lies in its smells, sounds and people. What makes Shanghai so wonderful is the variety of its smells, sounds, people … and its neighborhoods that make you feel as if you are in a different city by entering any one of them.
Shanghai is hosting the World’s Expo at the moment. Seventy million people have been to this city already to experience the Expo, with two more months to go. The showcasing of the world’s cultures, foods, and design are making this year’s Expo one of the best. The astonishing architecture and design of the numerous pavilions alone is worth the trip. But with the exposure to the world’s designs at the Expo — and understanding that Shanghai has a past that is shaped by outside design influences and architecture — a sensitive question is beginning to emerge in the design community of Shanghai and throughout China: What is modern Chinese design?
My personal view is that the Chinese are struggling with finding their own design vocabulary when it concerns buildings and the context of urban design. The majority of building design for large-scale development is coming from Western-based design firms. This has created a disturbing array of geometric shapes throughout cities like Shanghai that have not created a design movement, trend, or vernacular that can say to the world, This is a Chinese building.
One trend that is emerging is a movement toward historic preservation, seen in developments like Xintiandi, Tian Xi Fang, and the new Sinan Mansions. Taking its cue from the past, the rehabilitation of older Chinese structures and repositioning them for modern functions has rekindled an interest in older Chinese design forms, culture, and meaning. This combination of learning from the past to define the future could be giving rise to a new generation of Chinese designers who will define this century’s design in China.
One can only hope that in their home, a true design emerges that helps better define a city, a culture, and its people.
I traveled to Shanghai last summer and thoroughly enjoyed staying (and eating!) in the French Concession. Your comments about historic preservation are interesting, especially in light of the neighborhoods in Beijing that are being replaced with more modern projects.
If you have written about Chinese design elsewhere, I would love to read more of what you’ve written!
Thanks for the kind words… there are other musings regarding China and our industry at: http://enr.construction.com/opinions/blogs/doherty.asp
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Sinan Mansions have nothing to do with historic preservation! The original villas were demolished and rebuilt from scratch to fit the new layout. Original interiors were not preserved, while numerous residents had to vacate their homes and relocate to suburbs.
There’s a good Wall Street Journal blog post today on Ladislav Hudec’s impact on the cityscape: “Hudec: The Architect Who Made Shanghai,” http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/09/07/hudec-the-architect-who-made-shanghai
I found this to be a very thought provoking entry. “…struggling with finding their own design vocabulary” is symptomatic with China in general. After decades of communism, the nation was stripped of any real identity and the creative class was destroyed. Not knowing any better, China has resorted to copying others as they lack an understanding of how to create and implement original ideas. Intellectual property is something that is copied, not developed. The result is copied architecture that “looks good” but is not necessarily functional. Additionally, as noted above, foreign architects are often hired creating a further disconnect between the nation and its architecture.
This touches on other complex issues. China is the western world’s unofficial colony. The west has exploited the cheap labor and efficiencies obtained by the lack of regulatory oversight to produce low cost goods in China with little regarding for the environment or worker’s rights. Right or wrong, China took the easy path and became the world’s production factory. This has further deflected the nation from establishing its own identity. You can see this in what the nation produces. Think of Japan and you get Honda, Toyota, Sony, etc. Think of Korea and you get Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, etc. Think of China and you draw a blank. “Made in China” is a label we see on goods that used to be made in the US or Europe.
My apologies for the rant. Hopefully, for the good of China and the world, China will re-establish an identity that will manifest itself in many ways, including architecture.
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The desire for a national style has been expressed consistently in all nations throughout the modern period, perhaps evidence of a deep seated longing in the human soul. The longing for a Chinese style expressed here is no different. When the U.S. was emerging as a world dominating force over a hundred years ago, the same question was frequently posed. Frank Lloyd Wright eventually wrote a book called “An American Architecture,” by which he meant his own work, of course. As far as I can see, not in the U.S. nor in any other nation has a modern, national style come about. I would be very happy if someone could tell me where such a thing has happened other than in the soft sense suggested by another responder: every successful modern country has created great brands that can compete within the world economy – great but hardly unique.
It is the example of history that leads us to believe that there should be national styles. The history of world architecture is structured by the glorious succession of styles, each of which indelibly distinguished the great civilizations of the world. Why should we in the modern period be any different? What we tend not to dwell on is that all of the great historical styles which we admire occurred in traditional, pre-modern societies. The ancient Greeks, a glorious example, built Greek architecture, but they also spoke Greek, ate Greek food, dressed like Greeks, worshipped Greek gods, and called everyone else barbarians – a word meaning everyone but the Greeks. This is a home town, team spirit aspect of traditional closed societies that were in a life and death competition with their neighbors for survival and dominance. Within each society internal dissension was suppressed in the effort to wield a cohesive, motivated fighting force against one’s competitors. In spite of the glorious results in the cultural sphere, this was far from a benign phenomenon.
The individual freedom which the modern world offers prevents us from recreating these cultural groups with the same ferocity – thank God. But modernization is an ongoing process that still has not affected all of our world equally. We read about the tensions which the modern project creates in the news every day. We should hope that any attempt to create a modern Chinese style meets the same fate that such attempts have met in other modern countries. The alternative, where China and its people see themselves as embattled on every front and in need of forging a distinct identity that updates the traditional one for the purpose of confronting a hostile world is a possibility that we had best hope does not come to pass.
Style is a quality that has meaning only when observed in a historical context and on a macro scale. Style is an organic occurrence that is defined by all the influences on the built environment of the period when a building… a movie… a dinner plate is made. Style, just like history, cannot be understood in the period in which it occurs. It is only relevant in hindsight.
It is unfortunate when designers misunderstand this fact and attempt to “apply” style to anything. Using the same reference to Greek architecture as Michael did in the post above; the U.S. borrowed Greek architecture to define it’s own government architecture. It became a style named for the fact that it was a borrowed style “neo-classicism.” In that act, the founding fathers and their architects lost the opportunity to create a uniquely American architecture, because it was more important to them to send a symbolic message about the relationship of this new nation to the democracies of the past. Frank Lloyd Wright, among others set out to correct what they perceived as a mistake, as well as to capitalize on it (which was to become the American way, if not the American style). He and they failed stylistically, but succeeded commercially, and ultimately it was the skyscraper that would define American architecture. This was not a contrived style, it was a response to many more profound influences than a designer sitting at a drawing table wondering how to “create a style.”
What profound influences are emerging in China that may create as identifiable a “style” as the skyscraper, or the Greek temple? We will not know until we can look back on it with a historical perspective.