“This is going to be amazing! I feel so excited,” says Zhu Pei about his now under-construction Majiayao Ruins Museum and Observatory in Lintao, Gansu province. The Beijing-based architect designed his building like a deeply embedded cavernous space evoking a giant fragment of ancient pottery, resembling an archaeological site from the Neolithic Age discovered here a century ago. The building is so unusual that it cannot be described in common architectural terms. For example, a vast cast-in-place concrete hyperbolic shell lies prone on the ground, blocking the cold wind from the northwest in winter. The architect used the sand and gravel from the local Tao River to produce a special rough concrete with horizontal scratches on the surface, symbolizing the traces of thousands of years of erosion. All of Zhu’s buildings are quite remarkable. Yet, despite their novelties, they are rooted in culture, nature, and climate. They are designed based on his architectural philosophy, Architecture of Nature, articulated in five fundamental points: incomplete integrity, sponge architecture, cave and nest, sitting posture, and structure and form.
The architect explained these guiding principles during our recent video interview. He sat in front of his architectural library, including Le Corbusier: Complete Works (Oeuvre Complete) in Eight Volumes, at his Spanish Colonial house with an ongoing contemporary renovation and addition in California. He splits his time between the US, where he often teaches and lectures, and Beijing, where he runs Studio Zhu Pei and has been the dean of Architecture School at CAFA, the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts. He told me, “Teaching is also learning.”
Zhu Pei was born in 1962 in Beijing. He loved painting since childhood and recalls visiting the National Art Museum of China, NAMOC frequently. Seeing a major show of paintings by Cézanne, Monet, and other French Impressionists in the late 1970s was particularly memorable. He told me he was so overwhelmed by the paintings’ extraordinary beauty that he felt he would not be able to reach that level. He thought architecture is art too and that making architecture can also be transformational. He then decided to go into architecture to leave his mark, liking the idea of being able to design a house, a neighborhood, or, one day, a city.
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Vladimir Belogolovsky: I love your quote: “A building created just to perform a particular function is a dead building.” What would you say makes buildings come alive?
Zhu Pei: One of the five points that I developed for my architecture is called incomplete integrity. A lot of my inspiration comes from Chinese landscape painting and contemporary abstract painting. What they have in common is their incompleteness. They always leave something unspecified and unspoken. The viewer is invited to complete a painting and reflect on it. The same can be said about poetry. They rely on our imagination to complete them mentally. This means that artists work together with the viewers to complete their paintings. This makes such art timeless because it is not meant to speak about one particular moment. This is how I see architecture. Not only do I leave architectural forms incomplete to allow them to be integrated either with nature or urban fabric, like this. [Zhu brings his hands with outstretched fingers together.] Not like this. [He smacks two of his fists.] But also, the same should be said about program, content, and space. Some room must be left for breathing space and future use. But when everything is defined, you squeeze poetry out of your spaces. Inspiration is about sparking imagination. That’s where architecture begins.
VB: Noting buildings’ need for empty spaces and incomplete forms, you said, “Only through its incompleteness can architecture connect with light, wind, and people.” What could you add to that?
ZP: Incomplete is not the same as empty. My Kiln Museum was specifically designed to showcase the history and production of porcelain. It was a simple program. But I wanted to do more than that. I brought the idea of combining the archeological site with the new building to create a complex made up of indoor and outdoor spaces. There is a network of interconnected buildings and spaces. The idea of incompleteness is about not occupying the entire space with its program. We need to leave room for people’s imagination. If you seal the space too much, no air and light can come in. The complex is conceived as a wandering space, not simply walking from one room to the next. This is where my second point, called sponge architecture, which is about permeability with constantly changing scales, sizes, and variations of light, shadow, and contents, comes to the fore. So, we created a series of opposites: dark cave-like spaces and light ones like nests, outdoor–indoor spaces, and then semi-outdoor and indoor again, upstairs and downstairs, buildings next to windy courtyards, and so on. Both incompleteness and sponge architecture principles make the experience very rich.
VB: You studied architecture at Tsinghua in Beijing and the University of California, Berkeley. Did you come across mentors who influenced you there?
ZP: My professor at Tsinghua, Guan Zhaoye, studied at MIT as a visiting scholar in the early 1980s, soon after the Open Door Policy was initiated in China. He showed us the kind of architecture we never saw, including slides of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn buildings. What I took from him was his deep understanding and care for context. He always advocated extending existing buildings rather than starting new ones to establish dialogues with existing architecture. Then, when I was at Berkeley, my studio professor was Charles Correa. Every other Friday night, he would invite his students to his temporary place, Julia Morgan's house on campus. He and his wife, Monica, a textile artist, cooked Indian food for us, and we talked endlessly about Indian fable, culture, and architecture. I realized that his contribution was in how he transformed modernism into so-called critical regionalism. He wouldn’t just bring modernism back to India; he realized that he had to integrate it into local culture. By the time when I was at Berkeley, Kenneth Frampton’s lecture deeply touched me, and I began to study his books, especially his Modern Architecture: A Critical History and Studies in Tectonic Culture. After returning to China, I was also influenced by Wang Mingxian, an architectural thinker and artist who advocated for experimental architecture in China in the 1990s.
VB: Two metaphors — garden and courtyard — play major roles in both traditional and contemporary Chinese architecture. How critical are these notions in your architecture?
ZP: All of my recent projects include a courtyard. Architecture is not a sculpture. It is rather about experience, natural light, content, program, space, permeability, materiality, its relationship with the context, and so on. Another one of my five points is a concept I call sponge architecture. Architecture is all about experience rather than viewing an object. The function of the courtyard is to organize architecture compositionally and spatially and bring in natural light. It is a way of breaking down the volume and blending it with nature. I let architecture catch the sun and welcome the wind. When you go to a dark space, you will see bright light beyond. These are little strategies that you can learn from traditional Chinese architecture. A courtyard is essential for a house. It is not an empty space; it is a living room. It is the key spatial element that I adapted for my own architecture as well.
The important thing about a garden is that it is associated with wandering. It is a place with nothing to do, but it is the most enjoyable place. You wander through it, contemplate your thoughts, or notice some curious details. A garden is where you find peace of mind. It is a philosophical idea. According to Chinese tradition, it is always a part of a building; that’s what makes a shelter a spiritual experience.
VB: Another one of your five points is called cave and nest. What is it about?
ZP: The idea of cave and nest comes from the earliest tradition of humans living in caves, which are protective and natural places to inhabit. Later, humans started building nest-like wood structures, which are more about a determination to build something. It was a purposeful act of dealing with the weather. Caves were always there, but nests had to be built. Interestingly, if you look at many great examples of architecture, you will find both cave and nest exemplified in the same building. It is important to have intelligence in architecture by taking advantage of climate, wind, sun, etc. When you sleep, you want to be protected and embraced, but when you work, you need openness and light. When the nest and the cave are combined, they also create a natural exchange of microclimates within the building, adapting to changes in the external climate. The yin and yang of the nest and the cave establish a connection between human psychology and the natural cycle of seasons, as well as day and night.
VB: You have said, “As long as we can understand nature, we will master the wisdom of architecture.” How do you address nature in your work?
ZP: Whenever I start a project, I want to discover the root of culture, nature, and climate. For example, in the Imperial Kiln Museum in Jingdezhen, where summers are unusually hot, my concept started from discovering the traditional building technique of both local brick kilns and small alleys with vertical courtyards to catch wind and bring shade and ventilation. That led to designing the museum as a network of more than half a dozen brick vaults of different sizes, lengths, and curvatures. The form and materials of the museum were translated from a traditional brick kiln; the wind tunnel idea was inspired by the surrounding urban setting.
In all of my projects, I look for lessons from local building techniques. There is always wisdom and intelligence in traditional structures because they are based on careful observations. We don’t have to invent things from scratch all the time. When we try to bring nature to our architecture, the point is not to plant trees on top of our buildings but to learn from nature's intelligence and form an attitude toward it.
However, no matter how much intelligence we bring to architecture, it is also about creating emotional spaces. To me, architecture is always an art project. It is about our five senses, experience, perception, materiality, intuition, and, of course, artistry and creating something new. Buildings are not based on calculations alone. If we don’t recognize architecture as art, it will disappear in the future.
VB: When you talk about your architecture, you use such words and phrases as fragmenting, layering, rootedness and creativity, incomplete form, incomplete integrity, new experience, and dialogue with history; how else would you describe your work, and what are you trying to achieve with your architecture?
ZP: I always want to create tension between tradition and innovation, the past and future, rootedness and creativity, proven ideas and untested ones. The rootedness not only discovers the nature of things from the past but, more importantly, understands their value and meaning in the present. As Martin Heidegger said, “History is the starting point that the present cannot escape. It is not just the past era, but its connotation is still hidden in today's world.” I also recall a quote by Le Corbusier, "The creativity of an architect is never rooted elsewhere but in the lessons of past history." This is how I understood the relationship between rootedness and creativity.
In other words, the is nothing consequential about the future; it has many possibilities. Architecture is not about creating very strange objects; our cities are full of them. They look like strange objects that have fallen from outer space. However, the point is to find a connection to culture, history, place, region, and climate and stimulate people’s imagination. The rootedness and creativity must be combined. If there is no continuity, there is no dialogue and no understanding. I always say architecture is art but not only visual art, like sculpture. I like to compare architecture to music, not something visual. There is rhythm and familiarity, and then there is a new sound, a new expression. But if you have one new expression after another, it creates lots of noise. You need order, sequence, and an occasional change of rhythm and accent. Yet, if there is no break in continuity and repetitiveness, there is boredom. A sense of surprise is very important. Architecture is the art of creating complexity through simplicity. That’s why an architect must be an artist.
The fourth principle of my five points is sitting posture which is not only the orientation of the architecture but rather the inherent relationship between the architecture and its natural environment, geology, and topography. It is about where to place the building and how to take advantage of the orientation, sun, wind, water, mountain, and so on, just like traditional Chinese feng shui. From the moment of site selection, the foundation of architectural wisdom ecology is established. Choosing the right posture for the building is hugely relevant, especially with the growing impact of climate change.
VB: Your projects seem to be quite diverse in terms of their forms, materiality, and spatial organization. You even said, “I want to forget what I have done in the past.” What would you say is common to your projects? What are the hints that may help to identify them as Zhu Pei projects?
ZP: If I summarize the identity of my architectural language in a few words, I would say sculptural and structural, roofscape and landscape. The former explains my fifth point, structure and form. It is impossible to consider these points independently. They must be combined. Thus, sitting posture, structure and form, roof and earth, all become a single entity. In my Kiln Museum, the vault form is structural, while the Zijing International Conference Camp is a dialogue of roofscape with landscape. The same can be said about most of my projects. What you almost never see in my buildings is extensive glazing, metal, double skin, or representational elements. I like structure to convey the gravity, texture, and power of architecture. These are commonalities, but every place is unique, and my buildings address that notion head-on. I am against the idea of following a single style. Recognition is in a similar attitude, not repeated stylistic tricks. For example, I hate always using a column and beam structural system as a solution. I want column-free spaces with spatial structural forms for public buildings. That forces me to think about unconventional structural and material solutions. I try to create something new every time. As an architect, you have to create the experience that people know, and then you need to try to create the experience that people don’t know.
