Urban Acupuncture

I. M. Pei, Studio Pei-Zhu and Atelier Deshaus modernise the Chinese vernacular

Torn across temporal and spatial axes, the challenge for contemporary Chinese architects is to become both genuinely contemporary and genuinely Chinese. The tension between identity and modernity may well be an old cliché, but there is real difficulty in being modern in a world where modernity is identified with Western grandeur or communist squalor, and real conflict in building a “Chinese” architecture without slipping into pastiche or nostalgia.

For a recent wave of Chinese architects – most born in China and trained in the US – the solution to this quandary is a kind of hybridisation. Returning to the vernacular, they reread it through the lenses of the twentieth-century’s great international architectural movements. They aim to capture something like the essence of Chinese buildings, a shared structure rather than a hackneyed style, and imbue it with modernity.

The most renowned of these recent experiments is no doubt I. M. Pei’s Suzhou Museum. Probably the last building from the architect of the Louvre Pyrmind and the Bank of China Tower, the Suzhou Museum is a kind of homecoming for Pei. The museum, located in Pei’s ancestral hometown, is only the second building in mainland China by the country’s most famous architectural progeny. Set amongst the town’s World Heritage listed historic quarter, it was called upon to be both the last masterpiece of China’s greatest modernist, and a sensitive response to China’s architectural heritage.

The result is a fascinating modernist meditation on Suzhou’s buildings. From the vernacular, it borrows the grey and white colour scheme, the multi-inclined gabled roofs and the symmetrical façade. In a town known for its magnificent traditional gardens, Pei’s museum hides its own modern version.Water connects it to the renowned Humble Administrator’s Garden which sits adjacent to the site, hidden behind a high wall.

And yet for all these links, the style is unmistakably Pei’s own. The traditional colour scheme and structure provide the foundation on which Pei toys with an intricate series of geometrical forms, reminding us that symmetry and its deviations are as much an interest of Western modernism as of ancient China.

In effect, the Suzhou Museum actually hovers somewhere between a modernist study of local form and a postmodernist celebration of local style. There’s something cartoonish in the grey lines that mark each articulation, suggesting the museum may really be an ironic simulacrum of the iconic Suzhou style. The building stylises Suzhou’s history, of course, but it does so respectfully and elegantly. It is unmistakably ‘I. M. Pei on Suzhou’, and it feels like a necessary intervention – although perhaps an unrepeatable one, despite Pei’s ambition that it offer Chinese architecture a way forward.

The Suzhou Museum may be unrepeatable, but the concept of taking the vernacular and making it new has inspired many major players in China’s new generation of up-and-coming architects. In Beijing, Studio Pei-Zhu are aspiring towards architecture as a form of ‘urban acupuncture’, capable of neutralising recent developments that have replaced much of Beijing’s heritage. Their Blur Hotel, a renovation of an existing building near the Forbidden City, infuses the blocky ex-government building with traditional elements. It models itself on the siheyuan – traditional courtyard houses in which buildings are organised around a single courtyard or series of courtyards – by alternating enclosed spaces with courtyards carved out of the existing building.

This reference initially seems submerged beneath a characteristically modern form. The rectangular façade and flat roof shed Chinese ornamentation and complexity in favour of a pared-back, semi-transparent aesthetic that embodies the clean elegance of contemporary architecture. At night, however, when the building is lit from within, the specially formulated fibreglass-reinforced plastic lights up like a Chinese lantern, glowing with the warmth of light shining through paper. It’s an image – of technical complexity creating traditional comfort – that might just stand for the entire project. Elsewhere in Beijing, Studio Pei-Zhu continue to play with the courtyard form.

Transforming an existing siheyuan into an artist’s studio and residence for renowned Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, they have meticulously preserved the existing structure. Facing the traditional buidings, however, is a strikingly modern building. Open, flexible and geometric, it both contrasts with and complements the siheyuan. Its materials – glass and steel – are defiantly modern yet oddly deferential, reflecting the traditional buildings almost as if to camouflage itself. Like the Blur Hotel and the Suzhou Museum, it seems to be professing its modernity only as another iteration of an historical development on something quintessentially Chinese.

Although the siheyuan is an iconically Beijing form, the structure, with its hierarchical organisation, courtyard focus, and inward-facing design, permeates Chinese architecture. In Shanghai’s booming Qingpu district, Atelier Deshaus’ Qingpu Private Enterprise Association Building uses modernism’s adored glass box as the basis for another courtyard development. The glass perimeter, a stand-alone curtain wall, functions as a modern iteration of the blank façades of traditional Chinese buildings. Behind it, bamboo gardens separate the wall from the building. Inside, the square building clusters around a central courtyard, landscaped to include a large pond. The building reconfigures these classic principles in a modernist style, elevating the first floor and using a glass cladding system. There is an openness to Deshaus’ building which is uncharacteristic of the vernacular, but what it opens onto – landscaping that has become an integral part of the building – could not be more Chinese.

I. M. Pei, Studio Pei-Zhu and Atelier Deshaus each apply a modernist rigour to the Chinese vernacular, stripping ornamentation back to its purest lines. Beneath the dark wood, dragon motifs and sweeping roofs, the distinctiveness of Chinese architecture emerges as a structural principle rather than a decorative overlay. Underpinned by courtyards, gardens and landscaping, the Chinese form is at once an architecture of enclosure and an architecture of the natural world.

Juggling privacy with the outdoors, it is actually an exemplary urban architecture – one which seems to have lessons for Western architecture as much as for Chinese. I. M. Pei’s claim that, in the Chinese vernacular, “architecture and the garden are one” prefigures a turn to atriums, internal gardens, rooftop gardens and even courtyards in contemporary Western design. Turning inwards towards ponds and plants, this model clears a space for calm and reflection within the urban landscape, as well as providing the environmental benefits of a living eco-system.

In China itself, the resonance is more profound. Proving that the traditional is equal to the task of modernisation, they offer an alternative to cheesy pastiche of ancient styles on the one hand and slavish imitation of Western experimentalism on the other. The result is a truly local, truly modern style: a genuine evolution of the Chinese vernacular. +

1 The sweeping east corridor welcomes visitors to the Suzhou Museum, replicating the geometry and the grey and white colour scheme of the exterior. 2 The Suzhou Museum (shown here in the interior of the Great Hall) privileges the complex geometry that has become characteristic of I. M. Pei's style. 3 Studio Pei-Zhu's Blur Hotel renovation has been designed to recall a Chinese lantern when lit up at night. 4 The Blur Hotel renovation is dotted with courtyards such as this one, which evoke the traditional Chinese architectural form in a sleek modern context. 5 The irregular shape of the buildings interior add interest and provide a modern twist on the rectangular forms of the vernacular. 6 The Qingpu Private Enterprise Association Building seen from the outside resembles a large glass box – a reference to both a classic modernist form and the typically protected inward-facing façades of Chinese courtyard houses.

IMAGES Courtesy of Kerun Ip, Studio Pei-Zhu, Atelier Deshaus