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Interviews

The Chinese City in the East Asian Context

While some cities, like Beijing, developed very much along the lines of canonical forms of the classical imperial city, other cities, like Shanghai, never were of that status. One answer to your question stems from the level you are looking at it: East vs. west, Japan vs. China, and in what flavor: is it about pure morphology, building type and so forth. The Chinese city can be analyzed from different perspectives, from something quite similar to what we know in the West up to something that is absolutely unique. My own point of view is that when you look at the middle level, there are probably enough distinguishing features suggesting outcomes that are East Asian in their complexion but not necessarily Chinese.

Decolonizing Architecture

We started the Decolonizing Architecture project as a way to inhabit the place, to have an active position, instead of being passive. Part of our audience is an art audience and they say this is not art, than an architecture audience and than they say this not architecture, than an academic audience and they say this is not academically correct. As such you find yourself always surrounded by tensions and problems. But at the other hand I like more the art world because it allows something that in another field you would not be allowed to do.

City under the City

The system of the canals dates back to 17th century. It is so strong, beautiful and a really fantastic structure. Along the canals a lot is changing. When you analyze which houses are from the 17th century and which are not, there are more buildings from other centuries, than from the 17thcentury. So the system is strong, you can change things without disturbing the structure. I do not mean to change all the old houses, I am against this, but the structure has potential, and the plan continues to exploit this structure.

City/State interviews

In the future the middle class will become more and more the force that supports the power of the country. The middle class will be those citizens that make the visions for the government and as such become a more self-organizing society that is responsible for the regulated development. Cities should represent the middle class, because the upper class is a small class and the objective for the ‘no class’ is to improve their quality of life into middle class. Every developing country is like this. The problem is that people have difficulties in thinking about the future, as they only care about today, but for creative industries, and architecture is just a small part of the creative industries, I hope that in the coming twenty years we will make a great leap forward and architecture could be part of that.

The Chinese cities deal with an articulation of different problems, different markets, different forms of production, different ideological basis from those in israel and the occupied territories of course. What you see very clearly in the Chinese cities is that the speed of construction, combined with a technological breakthrough in the capacity to organize resources, and especially to allows a much closer relation between financial mechanisms, financial cycles and urban development.

I jumped on the wrong train

When history appears in art, as a material used for construction, it holds not only memory, but also knowledge, reflecting the conditions of the time. Using historical materials allows me to show the contradictions and conflicts of the current condition. It comes naturally to me when I’m making art. New and old should be integrated more often in architecture; the combination makes sites and cities more interesting. This is not what is happening in today’s China, however, where government policy can lead to the overnight eradication of entire areas. Such brutality and violence goes beyond buildings, ignoring residents, citizens, memories, traditions, the past. It shows the kind of society we’re living in.

The New Urban Ecology

In today’s world of globalized capital and labor, everything is interconnected, so both shrinking and expanding are not a phenomenona completely of their own separate event. One important mistake in the Shrinking Cities project, that I believe, was the isolation of the shrinkage phenomenon, and by doing so, we do not get to understand the full scope or extent of its relations with the dynamics of urban growths. That is why I pleaded not to look at our subject cities as shrinking or expanding, but rather as moving cities.

Co-Evolution

For us the reason to take a different attitude is the opportunity China poses to develop ourselves. Our interest comes obviously from the importance of China but also of sustainability; here you have the two main world agendas in one project. My genuine interest lays in finding another way of working in this profession. For a lot of the younger generation of architects it is just not so interesting to be this artistic genius. I think they might have discovered that the world is a very complex place and that there is not one right solution. It is not so interesting to just express yourself as it is to be part of something bigger, to be part of society. If you want to have an influence on the way society is developing, you can’t really get that influence by making personal statements, you really need to make your contributions integrated into some bigger structures in the world.

Xin Tian Di

But the hutong is not a traditional architectural style of China, the hutong is a recent phenomenon. The hutong didn’t exist until the Chinese took over and kicked out all the aristocrats and let people squat in the alleys. Hutongs are nothing more than a squatters village, built with recycled materials. There is no history of the hutong that predates the twentieth century. I am not sure if people understand that basic concept that the hutong is a spatial idea, not an architectural idea. It is a wonderful way to increase density, once you get in the middle of the hutong, it is totally removed from the city. You can recreate all those things. The government in this is totally confused, they think a hutong is a courtyard house. Indeed, buried in the hutongs there are some courtyard houses, but the hutong is not a courtyard house. When they rebuilt it they want to create courtyards houses. I once worked on a project in Beijing, right outside the East Gate of the Forbidden City. I did 17 courtyard houses but quit the job, half way through. I had a huge argument with the local government who wanted me to make all the houses traditional. I told them I need to be able to do whatever I want I do. They said it doesn’t matter; every detail, every roofline, everything has to be traditional Chinese.

Architect in China

If you look back on the last ten years, the really inventive people are business people. They generate so much wealth, so much energy, so much potential. They look into new potentials for maximizing the hidden values of the world. So when you think business, you can cross ideas, cross branding, cross breeding, really connecting – things those in the ‘practice world’ hate to do, because they are not courageous enough. That leads to the question of how you finance it. By organizing your office as a business you really can finance it; you link it to the bank, to individual groups with reliable funds, to investors from everywhere in the world.

For me business is about the encounter between a good idea and money. As for the funding of it, it is not really difficult to find money these days because there’s a lot flying around. Some people don’t know how to spend it; the important thing is to connect your idea to that money.

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