Contemporary Architecture Travel In China | Architecture Travel Video

That's... that's... that's three meters. That's not... 1.5's here. Yeah? Where I can get you. You're not getting me. Hi. Welcome back again, guys. Good to see you. Kevin Huey, Andrew Maynard, Archie Marathon, and welcome to China. We're not in China. So recently, Kev went to China running an Archie Marathon tour, which looked amazing. So today, we're going to talk about how great the new work in China is. I like the self-censoring. It saves me editing the B-pin. I still said it, and your new mic's all picked that up. We all know Chinese architecture. It's all CCTV, bio-OMA, and it's the water cube, and the pavilion, no, the stadium. I heard something more. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that was done around the time. Star architecture. Yeah, there's a lot of star architecture, especially from the 2000s onwards, up till... and still do to this day. And is that why you went? To check those out? Well, I think it's important to go see them. But what's interesting, I think, and that's also from the participants' point of view, the best work are not those. The best work tend to be smaller, local practices. Yeah, well, the star architects, it seems like they've just been given these big, empty, meaningless plots without any sort of sense of place and told to just go nuts. Where the new generation, the local generation, seems to be actually interested in character, even though there's a lot of erasure. We see the hutongs gone. They actually want to deal with materials, and it's almost some sort of Frampton regionalism, in a way, even though there is this erasure. All right, so for those that don't know, what's a really brief summary of what a hutong is? Well, hutong, actually, you keep referring to hutong. Hutong is actually specifically Beijing. Hutong is a Mongolian word. It actually means well. There's a certain street pattern, certain street type. Beijing is single story, and that's quite important, too. You need to go to Beijing. You need to experience single story neighborhoods, because that's what Beijing was. The only thing that was colorful and multi-story was the Imperial Palace. The hutong, it's a Beijing laneway street, basically, which is quite fine grain. And a walled street. Because Chinese houses, Chinese buildings are walls. Yeah, and they face inwards. Well, Chinese mentality are walls. You know, you remove the walls, walls are still there, psychologically, socially. But yeah, it's walls within walls. Social syntax. Walls in the West is very much about marking the boundary. Whereas in Chinese thinking, it's actually about strengthening the center. So the focus is not on the perimeter, on the line itself. It's rather going, that is just defining the center and making it stronger. So I think that mentality is quite important to understand Chinese architecture. And of course, to see the star architects and a lot of buildings are just plonked in landscape. Huge sculptures in the middle of an open plain. And you can see things like Stephen Hou tried to play with the idea of the hutong. Yeah, they go, OK, well, it's this erasure, a vertical hybrid project. He tried to emphasize the street life that's actually floating, that links between these condominium buildings. What really doesn't work is that, well, you know, there's no street life. Even though it is the public program, public program. But yeah, like people, people want the street. You know, we're looking at these, we're standing on top looking at some of these roof gardens, empty, empty, empty. And then down on the street level, playground full of people. Star architects have been doing their thing. There's been pretty much a revolt. The public actually saying, can we stop spending huge amounts of money on these massive egotistical sculptures? But there's a new generation doing some pretty bloody interesting, almost regionally based things. What kind of architects, what kind of buildings did you see? Well, a lot of them have studied overseas. In fact, I think a lot of the around the 2000s, there were a lot of Chinese architects who were dean of Yale and Harvard. And so there's influence there. And I guess there's a flourishing of the Chinese arts, the Chinese alternative music scene, the punk scene and an architecture. You've got people like Gong Dong from Vector Architects. Vector Architects. Who, he was quite senior at Stephen Holt's office, both in New York and then in Beijing. He's also a professor at one of the US. Yeah, again, yeah, US. So there's this great link between, you know, these people that sort of move so easily between East and West divide where they see none and they're producing some of the most nuanced, thoughtful architecture. We actually went to the chapel, the Seashore Chapel and the Seashore Library, both of which just look like Le Corbusier's language. It's 100% Le Corbusier. But, you know, as if he understood it and going, I'm going to do something completely different with it. But he's also really, he's obviously really in tuned with making as well. And not only in terms of tectonics, but in terms of what other people in this region that are going to build this building, what can they do? Not just the making, but also understanding how buildings are treated and therefore the materials used is quite important. So that's where Wang Shu's work. Wang Shu is China's only Pritzker winner. And at first you look at it in photos, you go, yeah, okay, that's okay. That's kind of pretty. What's interesting is that they are not pristine. And I think that's what's really interesting about the work, you know, because in magazines or published images, they always look pristine, right? All the timber, everything looks perfect minus all the weathering and grass growing through and all that stuff and rotting away bits and pieces. His work actually, especially the campus in Xiangshan near Hangzhou, that is an architectural experimental lab. Like every building is just something else different and they all link together. So you go from one to another and go, oh my God, what's going on here? And you turn around the corner, it's like, oh, geez. And it's robust. Like, you know, it's a university. So it gets beaten up. There's spray paint, crap everywhere, bins, you know, and it doesn't seem to detract. And it's rare. I've never ever been to the building. You know, we're trying to take pictures of stuff. We go, oh, can we move that bin? Can we move that? There you go. Yeah. It's sort of counterintuitive for architects, but in some ways obvious that the thing should get better as it's used. But yeah, we do rush to photograph it, you know, before somebody lives in it, God forbid, and uses the space in their own way. Quick photograph it while it's exactly how I want it to be. Now you can move in. Now you can live in it. Put your ---- where you want. Which there's something really delightful about designing something in such a robust way that when people start to use it and they use it clumsily and throw stuff around and bang it, it actually gets better with age. That's a very thoughtful way of thinking well beyond just documenting it in a beautiful photograph. And I think a lot of the vernacular architecture and Chinese vernacular architecture that these local architects refer to, there's already a tradition of them, you know, they've aged for so long. So dust and mold in certain degree, moss growing on it. It's just part of the aesthetic. Yeah. And it's accepted rather than the modernist project of this pristine, minimalist, clean, white thing that just landed. Yeah. And it just seems that this generation that's using local materials or robust masonry slates and things like that, you know, it doesn't matter if things start growing. In fact, it gets therefore better with age once, you know, you get a lichen and moss growing on them. But it is good to have that experimentation forced upon. Yeah. Because they have to source local, they have to source to see what builders can do and try to understand what is the best way to achieve something, even though they've been looking at magazines in Japan and Spain and Europe and America, they have to innovate something that responds to local conditions, local building abilities. Well, in tradition, it's just abilities. Yeah. It can't just be about importing incredible glass from Germany that produces some sort of great thermal outcomes and huge spans. So important to go visit buildings, actually experience buildings. Yeah. And China, as we said earlier, I think a lot of the projects has been published in things like Art Daily and Dezeen, because a lot of them came after 2000. In fact, only last 10 years, really. There's so much stuff out there if you pay attention. And before that, it was virtually impossible to find beautiful, small, thoughtful projects. Well, you're not going to even big thoughtful projects. Yeah. There you go. There's nothing like, oh, this is a thing from the 1960s. I didn't know about this. Yeah. None of that. So how do you find them? You know, they exist from Art Daily. Well, it's a lot of research in partly being able to read Chinese helps. But China, I look for it on the map. And the maps are always changing. And there are different apps and stuff. It's just ridiculous. It's very hard to find them. Yeah. That's a helicopter. It's a chopper. Yeah. Get to the chopper. All right. So you spend all that time finding them. Then what? You just go? No, I think, well, I look at the plans. Yeah. Kids look at the plans, look at the drawings. And I make a judgment and think, what am I going to learn from this one? Would I cross town to see this? And would I cross the world to see that? And some of them are very difficult to get to. Like some of Vector's work are very hard to get to. Yeah. So when you're traveling, you're not going around just trying to collect snapshots of, we've got to get CCTV, because that's by a famous architect. You're actually going there to really scrutinize. We're trying to understand the context. CCTV, yeah, definitely go and see the context and see the scale of it. You can't get near it. You can get just outside it. But yeah, it is very much about what lessons I'm going to learn from it. It's basically what I want to see. It's what I think I can learn from. Yeah. If you go outside the historical center, the built environment feels exactly the same. The temperature may be different, but the building stock is, you can't tell one from the other, the roads, everything. However, the staying, and that's why we, in Aki Marathon, we stay in historical centers, because we get a sense of the original urban building patterns and streets and street life, and we notice the differences. And that's part of the thing with Aki Marathon. That's why we go to so many places rapidly, so that we can really see the difference as we literally, almost every second day, we experience something completely different, even though similar region, but quite different. So check it. There's going to be future videos about specific parts of China that Kev's been to. So keep an eye out for those in coming months. And we'd love to know what you think are some of the best Chinese buildings out there. What are some of the ones that we should see that Kev hasn't been to yet? Leave comments down below. Ah, this mosquito's biting me. I don't like it. Who the hell, who thought it would be a good idea to go into a bamboo forest? For God's sake, I could have stayed in the office. You wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant. Yeah, that would have been better. I could have been eating while we're doing this. This is actually really remarkable. Anyone know where this is? Drop it in the comments. It's actually a beautiful, beautiful space. It is. Thank you to everybody for subscribing. Please encourage your friends to do so. Thanks for returning as well. We're getting lots of people that just keep coming back each episode. Really appreciate it. Leave a like. Tell us what you want to see. Yeah, please do. Give us some ideas. At the moment, we're just making this ---- up as we go along. It'd be great to know what you guys want to see or think would be of value. We really appreciate you watching and we'll see you in the next one.