Studio Pei-Zhu

When Pei Zhu won the competition for Digital Beijing, he was a partner with Urbanus, one of China’s superstar architectural firms and his official co-partner on the Digital Beijing project. Then in 2005, Pei Zhu amicably parted ways from his former employer, setting up his own practice, Studio Pei-Zhu, with his wife Hui Teng. In the three years since, Pei Zhu has become one of China’s most respected architects, both at home and overseas. He has won major commissions – from Digital Beijing to the Guggenheim Beijing – and is regularly featured in the Western press as one of China’s top architects.

Zhu’s career trajectory is typical of Chinese architects of his generation. He holds master’s degrees in architecture from both Beijing’s Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley. His cultural roots and current milieu are Chinese, but his sensibilities have been trained in a Western tradition. His work seems to hesitate between the “international” style attributed to him by the New Yorker magazine, and a subtle attention to urban China, both contemporary and historical. Wu, on the other hand, comes to architecture via art, literature and design. Her influence skews the practice to the interdisciplinary, the artistic and the thoughtful.

The architecture produced by these competing influences is appropriately complex. On the surface, Studio Pei-Zhu subscribes to the futuristic international style associated with such contemporary heavyweights as Zaha Hadid and Santiago Calatrava, a style driven by the rise of computer modelling and a new interest in the interface between high technology and more natural forms. If Digital Beijing can be read – rather gauchely perhaps – as the symbolic statement of this technological flavour, its implications play out more subtly but more clearly in buildings like the Art Museum of Yue Minjun. Modelled on a pebble taken from the nearby river, the art museum flows in sinuous curves that testify proudly to their origins as renderings. Even less curvilinear buildings, such as the Beijing Publishing House, seem to cite the deconstructivist tendencies of contemporary superstar architects.

The importance of pioneers like Hadid is inescapable, but beneath the abstraction of deconstructivist architecture, Studio Pei-Zhu grounds its projects firmly in the integrity of reference. There is barely a project in its stable that has not begun as an image. Digital Beijing, we hear everywhere, is a motherboard or a barcode. The Art Museum of Yue Minjun is a cobblestone. The Publishing House a stack of books. The Blur Hotel a Chinese lantern.

Such heavy reliance on metaphor risks both the trite and the gaudy, but Studio Pei-Zhu avoids such pitfalls with an emphasis on formal abstraction. Where reference seeks to introduce content into architecture – to make a building ‘say’ something or ‘tell’ a story – Studio Pei-Zhu reconfigures it not as meaning but as form. The pebble is not something that the Art Museum speaks to or of, so much as it is a pattern, a shape, a way of curving. The same is true of all Studio Pei-Zhu’s references, each of which is abstracted to the point that narrative gives way to geometry, line, texture and curve. Its origin as an image, however, holds the form together, giving it a coherence and an integrity that true deconstructivist architecture would strive to strip away.

Despite the almost ostentatious modernity of this architecture, Studio Pei-Zhu designs with a humility and deference to the past that seems at odds with their futuristic style. The practice invariably prefers renovation to demolition. Both the Blur Hotel and the Beijing Publishing House are built on the skeletons of older office buildings, artefacts of the less attractive moments of Beijing’s building boom. They aim to open, extend and beautify the existing buildings, while leaving the structure intact. The firm is attempting to reclaim Beijing’s urban spaces while shunning the impulse to raze and begin again that has done such damage.

Their design for the Guggenheim Beijing applies this philosophy to a genuinely historical building. Huang Shi Cheng, built between 1534 and 1536, is China’s oldest surviving imperial archive vault, and will become the site of the Guggenheim Beijing. Studio Pei-Zhu’s plan will renovate the structure, preserving the historical buildings while removing contemporary additions in favour of their own new buildings. These new insertions are designed to be invisible. Structurally separate from their surrounds, apparently hovering just above the ground, their brushed metal façade reflects the historical buildings. They retain the emphatic modernity of Studio Pei-Zhu’s other work, but acquire a ghostly invisibility that defers to the existing architecture.

It may seem counterintuitive, given the monumentality of the firm’s best-known buildings, but this humility may be one of Studio Pei-Zhu’s most characteristic gestures. The objects that inspire them – computer chips, piles of books, stones – are mundane, drawn from the often-overlooked detritus of everyday life. If their elevation to the level of abstracted monument tells a story at all, it is a story of reappraisal, of appreciating the unappreciated and the underappreciated. Their renovations follow a similar theme, bringing a contemporary sheen to existing structures; eliciting an interface between China and the West; between international style and local urbanism; between past, present and future. In the process, they engage in a profound reappraisal of the Chinese urban landscape that embraces both its Western-influenced modernity and its uniquely Eastern character. +

1 Digital Beijing – the main data centre for the Beijing Olympics – houses substantial electronic equipment in its three Western slabs. The voids between the slabs allow this equipment to be properly ventilated, while the windowless north and south elevations protect it from sun damage. 2 Digital Beijing’s eastern façade. The eastern slab has been designed to house the centre’s staff in an office environment. Here, glass replaces granite as the dominant material, allowing for natural light to enter and illuminating the building spectacularly at night. 3 Digital Beijing’s western façade, seen from ground level, is impressively monolithic. The heavy granite walls are broken up by strips of glass. 4 The Art Museum of Yue Minjun in its spectacular natural setting. Set against the Qingcheng Mountain and alongside the Shimeng River, the museum’s form has been created to echo a stone found amid the river. It aims to contextualise the building within its environment while retaining a spectacularly contemporary look. It is clad in a highly polished zinc coating, designed to reflect the surrounding scenery and mimic the water’s own reflective character, while providing the museum with a glossy, high-tech feel. 5 The Art Museum of Yue Minjun, pictured here alongside the Shimeng River, will house an exhibition space and a small artist’s studio. It is designed to showcase the work of Yue Minjun, one of China’s most respected contemporary artists, known for his ‘Cynical Realist’ pictures of laughing men. 6 A concept drawing for Studio Pei-Zhu’s Beijing Publishing House. The design creates a number of external terraces that break down the opposition between the existing office block and the surrounding city streets. By exposing the inner workings of the building to the gaze of the public, Studio Pei-Zhu aim to create an atmosphere of mutual interest, in which the staff of the Publishing House get inspiration from their urban environment, while passers-by are prompted into greater curiosity about the publishing industry. 7 The Guggenheim Beijing will incorporate Huang Shi Cheng, China’s oldest surviving imperial archive vault. The extensive restoration of these historical buildings will be complemented by the introduction of discreet contemporary additions such as the building pictured in the centre of this rendering. These new additions are designed to defer – in both scale and design – to the existing structures. 8 The Beijing Publishing House, located on a major arterial road on Beijing’s symbolically significant north-south axis, is designed to generate interest in the publishing industry. It will combine spaces for work, learning, retail and leisure, in order to encourage the public to use the building.

IMAGES courtesy of Studio Pei-Zhu, Jiao Chongxia, Liu Wentian