I first went to China in 2002, a year after the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing. That initial trip was about exploring nature, cuisine, ancient temples, archeological sites, and, in general, experiencing lifestyles in China, mainly outside of its major cities. I was motivated by the pure curiosity of a Western tourist driven to an Eastern country in search of the old world, the exotic, hoping to catch a glimpse of a rich traditional culture on the cusp of its inevitable radical transformation. At the time, there was no modern, or rather contemporary, architecture in China to speak of. There were only the promising first hints of the development of a potentially new architectural language being undertaken by just a handful of independent architects almost entirely under the radar.
Speaking of modern architecture in China, virtually all buildings built there during the entire 20th century, no matter how distinctive and compelling, were derivative in one way or another. It was a combination of factors, including the weight of millennia-old Chinese history, a civil war, the Japanese occupation, the Cultural Revolution, and the country’s prolonged isolation from much of the world that held its architecture from the eventual entry into the modern period for so long.
When China finally ascended onto the world’s stage it did so with a bang. And it was architecture that gave its many achievements a tangible substance. The Beijing Olympics in 2008 and Shanghai Expo in 2010 came off spectacularly. One ambitious development followed another, encouraging hundreds of millions of Chinese to relocate from sleepy villages to roaring cities. By now we no longer seem to be surprised by the sheer scale and complexity of the kinds of engineering and architectural projects that are being undertaken in China. Numerous eye-catching buildings have been implanted into cities we never even heard of until very recently.
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The cumulative work produced by these pioneering architects since the turn of the century can now be identified as distinctly Chinese architecture, not vernacular, but uncompromisingly rooted in Modernist traditions. The earliest deliberate attempts to create uncompromisingly modern works of architecture in China were undertaken by the Hangzhou-based architect WANG Shu (b. 1963). He experimented with small-scale projects for about a decade, between 1988, when he graduated from Nanjing Institute of Technology, and 1997, when he opened an independent practice, the Amateur Architecture Studio with his wife LU Wenyu (b. 1967). Those projects reflected Wang’s interests in Deconstructivist architecture, which can still be felt in his contorted and disjunctive forms, cavities, and erratically juxtaposed materials. His Library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University of 2000 is thoroughly modern, a poetic pavilion-like contemplative structure on a lake. It is arguably the first pure Modernist or rather Neo-Modernist project in China, although, during our conversation with Wang he emphasized that he sees this project as Post-Modernist.
Its references are multiple—from Aldo Rossi and Richard Meier to Alvaro Siza and Tadao Ando, and to Chinese traditional gardens and pavilions. Yet, none are explicit or literal. The building is the first major independent architectural statement by any Chinese architect that does not rely on direct historical prototypes. Wang emphasized to me that his transition from what the architect calls his white period—when he followed abstracted Western models—to a black or rather dark period, referring to the natural colors of the traditional materials utilized in his buildings—soil, bricks, pottery plates, and tiles.
Wang’s dark period is best represented by three key projects. The first is the regeneration of Wencun Village in Zhejiang province (2012-16), a strategic design of public squares, bridges, and insertions of two dozen houses and small inns into the village’s historical fabric. The second is the Xiangshan Campus at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, a collection of 30 academic buildings completed between 2004 and 2013. And the third is the Ningbo History Museum, built in 2008.
Out of these three large public works, it is the Museum that expresses its design most clearly as a manifesto, a personal stance. It is at once a manifestation of strong aesthetics and ethics. The building’s enigmatic form evokes a medieval fortress surrounded by a moat. But its greatest impact is on its multifaceted surface, largely covered by a mosaic of beautifully arranged bricks and tiles salvaged from dozens of old villages that were demolished in the area, now occupied by the Museum. Wang clarified his intent, “I want to build a small town with its own life, which could once again, wake up the latent memory of the city.” Not only the result is a stunning work of art, but it also communicates a very strong message to opportunistic developers: Stop demolishing our heritage! Look how beautiful it is! Among the Museum’s visitors are those displaced villagers who come here to reconnect with their past both spiritually and literally.
Using architecture as a tool of resistance (his term) on such a grand scale and with such compelling prowess, the Ningbo History Museum, completed the same year as the Olympic venues designed by the starchitects, has become the embodiment of an alternative way for many local architects. In fact, it is their most dominating reference, a spiritual anchor of contemporary Chinese architecture. Over the last decade, working with either salvaged or brand-new traditional materials in contemporary ways has turned into the single most recurring theme in the work of many Chinese architects. In fact, it is the use of traditional materials, most apparently in the countryside, that now constitutes contemporary Chinese architecture’s identity. Wang’s contribution here is twofold. On the one hand, he reinstated the value of everything traditional, and on the other—his ingenious imagination unleashed boundless creative exploration for spatial, structural, and material originality.
The architect’s Wa Shan Guesthouse for the Xiangshan Campus at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou (2013), is a case in point. A social-cum-conference center, hotel, and dining hall this labyrinthian, creature-like building is covered by a single, multifold roof, turned into an adventurous attraction for viewing by means of an idiosyncratic system of zigzagging ramps, stairs, landing platforms, and bridges. The building enables these chaotic passages and links to carry visitors both under and above the roof with seemingly just one purpose—to showcase itself. Everything here is an invention. There is a cloud of geodesic dome-like wooden struts that sprawl in every direction in a noble effort to hold up the roof, but in reality, it is held up by a disguised framework of reinforced concrete and steel supports. Still, this seemingly redundant wood structure creates a series of wonderfully baroque, Piranesian spaces. The whole building provides an entirely original and emotionally charged experience, evoking some of the best works by such inventive and self-referential European architects as Carlo Scarpa and Enric Miralles.
Another early critical project is the “Commune by the Great Wall” development, a boutique resort originally made up of 11 villas and a clubhouse built in 2002, next to the popular Badaling section of the Great Wall. It was eventually expanded to 50 villas and other public buildings. The project came from the initiative of Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi, the developer and property-tycoon couple behind SOHO China, the largest developer in the country, who also developed prime commercial and office assets in Beijing and Shanghai. As an active architectural patron, Zhang has been a key force behind the hiring of celebrity architects, most notably Zaha Hadid, for many of the company’s subsequent commercial developments, in particular office buildings and shopping malls.
For the Commune, Zhang Xin originally invited 12 up-and-coming Asian architects from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Singapore. The experimental houses, designed by the likes of Shigeru Ban, Kengo Kuma, Gary Chang, and Rocco Yim, were built to test whether progressive architecture could be used as a marketing tool. Needless to say, the model proved to be highly effective. One of the original villas, the “Split House” was designed by Beijing-based architect Yung Ho CHANG (b. 1956). He also served as the compound’s curator who invited the other 11 architects, his personal acquaintances.
Chang’s villa is an uncompromisingly modern and concept-driven structure. Entirely stripped of typical traditional Chinese formal references and décor, the Split House is among the first self-confident works that refused to follow the expected nationalistic model that the Chinese architects were pursuing so diligently for a good part of the 20th century. During my visit to Chang’s studio in Beijing in 2017, he told me, “I don’t think the world of architecture should be divided into East and West. I want to think of it as divided into north and south climatically, not culturally.” The house is a conceptual work. The title comes from a physical rending that splits its volume into two halves, forming an open courtyard to save the existing trees and bring nature within, quite literally: the glass floor at the entry area hovers right over the creek. The house is conceived as a variation of a flexible prototype, which surely was the architect’s response to the client’s vision of eventually building additional copies of the original villas.
Chang’s ingenious idea anticipated different angles between the two halves to be adjusted to a particular topography. The house is envisioned in at least nine distinct designs—a single-volume house (with no split), a house with two parallel bars, one with two bars at an angle, a right-angle house, a single-volume back-to-back house, and so on, although only one variation was ever built. Chang’s elegant concept also serves as an environmental model: it is built out of rammed earth walls and timber framing, and can be quickly taken apart or, if abandoned, eventually will disintegrate and disappear back into nature.
Yung Ho Chang is rightfully referred to as the father of contemporary architecture in China. His independent practice Atelier FCJZ, which he started with his wife Lijia LU (b. 1960) in 1993, is modern China’s first independent architectural studio. It laid the foundation for contemporary practice in the country. Chang spent years of teaching at the leading universities in China where he founded and headed the architecture program at Peking University. He was a professor at Harvard’s GSD and headed the MIT School of Architecture from 2005 to 2010. In 2012, the architect was invited to join the Pritzker Prize Jury. He was instrumental in awarding that year’s Prize to Wang Shu who became the first, and so far, the only Chinese citizen to win the profession’s highest honor.
Chang met Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi in 1995, the year SOHO China was founded. After designing interiors for the company’s early showrooms in Beijing, the couple asked him to design a private villa for them. Completed in 1998, that project became the first modern private house built in the hills outside of Beijing. It is poetically called Mountain Dialogue Space. The house is a steel-framed structure with three guest rooms, popping up through the singular sloped roof with their cubic forms, glazed on all four sides to enjoy the views of the surrounding peaks and valleys.
Chengdu architect LIU Jiakun (b. 1956) is a pioneering master who dedicated his practice, Jiakun Architects, founded in 1999, to the revival of the use of traditional materials and skills. Liu’s much-celebrated Rebirth Brick project, initiated after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, was based on producing bricks and cement blocks from the rubble of damaged buildings to facilitate the “rebirth” of culture and place. The project earned him a reputation as the “architect of memory.” Another one of his important projects is an attempt to reverse the erosion of public spaces in China by rethinking the urban residential block. His West Village development, realized in the architect’s hometown in 2016, is an inventive solution that has the potential to become a new urban prototype, perhaps even for cities beyond China. This six-story residential, cultural, commercial, and sports complex, with a publicly accessible bicycle and pedestrian rooftop promenade along its perimeter, is a dense development that revives the healthy sense of a vibrant community.
Speaking of his fellow Chinese architects, Liu told me, “I think what we all have in common is a certain hunger for learning and opening up to many ideas that were out of reach before. And most of these architects were exposed to living and studying abroad for many years before coming back, so their work was infused with what they have learned overseas. And there was a kind of urgency to innovate and build after a long period of official government-approved style. Then in the ‘90s, we all became free.”
Another of Liu’s passages describes China’s rush for modernization, which has taken its cities by storm, as his and all Chinese architects’ personal challenge:
The city grows madly, memories are vanishing, public space has been slowly eroded, as are the genius loci and conventional lifestyles. Is it possible to transfer the all-consuming nature of capitalism into a win-win case of sharing, and thriving on the gathering of the often-overlooked contents of daily life? To regain the initiative of today’s vulnerable public spaces? To keep up with the traditional cultural genes in contemporary cities? To turn the marketplace into art? This is our challenge.
To put into perspective how maddening China’s development has become, here are some extremely sobering statistics. According to historian Vaclav Smil’s book Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization, China used one and a half times more cement in three years between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. in the entire 20th century. Of course, that was the American century, when the United States built its Interstate Highway System, bridges, Hoover Dam, and a forest of skyscrapers. China produces and consumes about 60 percent of the world's cement and erects more than 60 percent of all skyscrapers, six times more than its nearest rival, the United States.
This unprecedented development has a price. According to Tianjin University research, in the first decade of this century, the number of traditional villages in the country was reduced from 3.7 million to 2.6 million—the destruction of more than 300 villages a day. The urgency of this situation brought many Chinese architects to the countryside. In 2018, the Chinese Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale presented an ambitious show called “Building a Future Countryside.” It was organized by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China, and curated by Li Xiangning, since then the dean and professor at Tongji University.
The exhibit confronted the professional with how much original architecture was built by Chinese architects in just a few years. What was impressive is not just the quantity but the quality. Many of these projects share the inventive use of traditional construction techniques, materials, and community-oriented programs. But by and large, these projects are not used by architects to express their personal styles. As a result, we can already see a strong common typology of these projects, in a way, shaped by collective and regional forces. They share an identity of their own. The seeds of this architecture were first planted by the three pioneering architects: Wang Shu, Yung Ho Chang, and Liu Jiakun who took strong personal stands to establish a kind of architecture that is now identified as fundamentally contemporary and distinctly Chinese.
