| | Yung Ho Chang and Zhang Xin are perfect case studies of generational change in China. Yung Ho Chang’s father was one of the chief architects for the Chinese Communist party, designing the National Museum of Revolutionary History in Tiananmen Square; Zhang Xin lived with her mother in a Cultural Revolution-era re-education camp, before joining the Hong Kong manufacturing boom as a sweatshop worker.
Yung Ho Chang took his father’s architecture course at the Nanjing Institute of Technology (now Southeast University), and won a scholarship from Ball State University in Indiana. “You still needed good connections,” he recalls. “First of all, nobody had any money. You could only get about $50 in foreign exchange.” Zhang Xin saved enough doing sixteen hour shifts in an electronics factory to get herself to the University of Sussex, and then on to Cambridge. Yung Ho Chang is now head of architecture at MIT, a naturalised American still recognised as one of China’s most important architectural creators; Zhang Xin is a Beijing property tycoon, raising billions of dollars through the Hong Kong stock exchange. With her husband, prominent entrepreneur and media figure Pan Shiyi, and their development firm, SOHO China, Zhang Xin dominates the Beijing architecture scene like no other private citizen has done before.
Zhang Xin’s commitment to architectural design, and her belief in the marketability of top Chinese and international architects, was unheard of when she launched her property business in the 1990s, and is still atypical today. When Yung Ho Chang returned to Beijing in 1993 to start his own practice, it was Zhang Xin that gave him his first commission. (Yung Ho Chang called his firm “Atelier Feichang Jianzhu” – meaning “Amazing” or “Extreme Architecture” – at a time when Chinese firms were still called No. 1 Design Firm, No. 2 Design Firm, and No. 3 Design Firm.) In 2002, the so-called “Commune by the Great Wall” made both Yung Ho Chang and Zhang Xin’s reputations.
The Commune, on eight square kilometres of mountainous country just beyond the tourist-packed Badaling section of the Wall, brought together twelve architects from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore. Alongside Chang were such veterans as Shigeru Ban and Rocco Yim, who was recently commissioned to design the Museum of Guangdong. Each were given a million dollar budget to draw up a fantasy home on plots snaking through a valley.
The results won Zhang Xin a special prize, the Silver Lion, for her role as a “patron of architecture” at the 2002 architectural Biennale in Venice. And Yung Ho Chang’s “Split House” won particular acclaim in the press for its poetic use of landscape, its native and sustainable materials, and its sophisticated modernist form. It signalled a resurgence of confidence in Chinese and Asian architecture at a time when Western names (Koolhaas, Holl, Foster, Andreu, Herzog & de Meuron), were being awarded control over many of Beijing’s status projects.
The success of the Commune was in some sense unlikely, since the development never really knew what its function was: it has been variously rebadged as a gated community, hotel, demonstration model and “architectural museum”. Now with corporate backing and the oversight of the Kempinski Hotels chain, it is both elite hotel and museum, open to visitors to study its architectural exteriors and several of the interiors.
It was certainly never a “commune” (though when it first opened as a hotel its staff wore well-cut, black Maoist pyjama suits emblazoned with red stars, terrifying the guests); indeed, “commune” may well have been Zhang Xin’s ironic gag. The project, Zhang Xin claims, is a middle class reimagining of her forced exile from the city during the Cultural Revolution, when she found contentment feeding farm animals and exploring the hills around the re-education camp in Hunan province. These days wealthy Beijingers actively seek out a dose of the country life, she says – and they’ll pay good money to get it.
Yung Ho Chang is ambivalent about the role of the Commune. “My father did work for the state in the name of the people,” he told the BBC as he wandered through his Split House. “I don’t think [his work] is that accessible. In my case, I’m working for the new middle class. And my problem is am I really able to reach more people than my father? That’s always questionable.”
Yung Ho Chang imbues his modernist style with a humanist sensibility and a high regard for the natural environment. His Split House is literally “split” down the middle to bring the Shan Shui (mountain and water) into the building: a creek runs through the middle of the glass-floored entrance room. A courtyard is enclosed by the mountains on one side with the house, and its two split halves, on the other. While the Split House seems purpose-built, it is in fact modular and convertible.
The angle between the two halves of the house can be adjusted to fit other topographies. According to the dictates of the land, the Split House can be transformed into a single house, a parallel house, a right angle house, a bar house, or back-to-back house. Yung Ho Chang, who’s previously written about “urbanising bamboo”, incorporated time-honoured Chinese building methods into the design. Its load-bearing walls are made of rammed earth with a partial wood frame – a well-insulated wall that regulates fluctuating seasonal temperatures. It also makes it relatively simple to demolish and reuse. “The house can deteriorate, can disintegrate and can to some extent disappear back into nature,” Yung Ho Chang says.
The “See and Seen” house by Cui Kai, chief architect of the China Architecture Design and Research Group, is similarly well-grounded, set on a mesa amongst low-lying brushwood. The earth excavated to level the courtyard was placed on the roof, and sewn with grass. Along with heat-preservation floor panels, three-layer windows, and the careful treatment of cold bridges at the joint between the inside and outside of the steel structure, the heat gains and losses from the large glazed areas are effortlessly managed. The living room, gloriously light and open, is kept parallel with the unfolding vista of mountains to the west, while the second floor is lifted atop a steel structure, to maintain an unbroken verge of land encircling the house. Like the Split House, See and Seen is adaptable for other regions with altitude-changing earth ridges, with the angle between the living and sitting rooms completely alterable.
While the Commune’s houses reference traditional design (most obviously in Kengo Kuma’s Bamboo Wall house, a remarkable construction of bamboo poles in varying densities), the project is as much about recognising regional talent as it is about the disappearance of national difference. Both Yung Ho Chang and Zhang Xin take Mies van der Rohe as their lodestar; Yung Ho Chang sees Mies as perfectly adaptable to Chinese conditions. “In history, Chinese culture assimilated more than a few ideas from the outside,” he says. “In fact, cultures have been able to take something from others and make it their own. During the process of assimilation, the idea loses its foreignness and becomes just an idea. Therefore, to understand Chinese architecture today through an East versus West argument could be too simplistic.”
While Yung Ho Chang promotes a cautious intellectual internationalism, Zhang Xin adopts a more strident open door policy. “I haven’t seen anything that could be described as Chinese architecture in the last hundred years, frankly,” she says. “When you consider Chinese architecture you immediately refer to architecture like the Forbidden City. A lot of China’s urban architecture was built between the 1950s and early 1970s and mostly in a Russian style that was already no longer Chinese ... For us, as for any creative industry, the only criterion is good or bad design, good or bad architecture. There is no such thing as nationalism for Chinese architecture.”
Post-Commune, Zhang Xin has brought Zaha Hadid and Peter Davidson to
Beijing and listed on the New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges, turning top-
end architectural design into a billion-dollar industry. With massive town planning, shopping and residential projects in her real estate portfolio, the small-scale and
rural Commune is an exception. Whether the miniature experiment becomes a path-way or a mere interesting side-road for Chinese architecture lies partly in her hands. + PREVIOUS A panorama of the eight square kilometres of private land in the Shuiguan Mountains, which the Commune shares with the Great Wall of China. 1 The “Suitcase House” by Gary Chang (Hong Kong) builds equipment and storage spaces into the base strata of its cantilevering form, accessed by lifting up floor panels. Internal spaces are separated by adjustable blinds. 2 Lounge area of the Commune’s Club House, by Seung H-Sang (South Korea). 3 Yung Ho Chang’s Split House. The two sides of the house form a wedge around an open courtyard. The sides are bridged by a walkway with a glazed floor; a creek, pooling and overflowing from the courtyard, runs beneath. 4 Split House interior. Rammed earth with a partial wood frame forms the structure. 5 The “Bamboo Wall” house by Kengo Kuma (Japan). Its interior spaces are demarcated with varying thickness of bamboo. IMAGES Courtsesy and copyright of Kempinski Hotels |
