Whenever I meet new people and they find out that I work for a US based Architecture firm in Shanghai, invariably the first words out of everyone’s mouth (or some derivative of) is “wow, what an opportunity… you’re definitely in the right city for architecture”.
Shanghai is a curious beast; it’s Los Angeles (via size), New York (via density), Las Vegas (via glitz and glam) and Tijuana (via fuck-up-ed-ness). The Landscape of the city changes on a daily basis….no joke. I’ve been taking these long runs on Saturday mornings and I swear the street configuration changes with each hour and buildings get demolished and new construction begins from one Saturday to the next. This city, nay, this country is growing so fast that the taxi drivers don’t even now where they are going half the time. The taxi drivers are not trying to rip you off they are seriously lost. It’s probably because overnight the government decided that this area or this road needed to “disappear” for the good people’s economic growth.
Another interesting thing I was told is that Architecture (all design for that matter) here is viewed as a product and not a service. When a Chinese client hires you, they are buying a product. “Give me Architecture”, like it is something you unwrap and “viola”, architecture. In the West Architecture is a service. It’s a process of investigation, exploration, a study in aesthetics that hopefully, at the end of the process, yields a beautiful product.
Because of this mindset, The Chinese are buying “out of the box” architecture and design. Some government official will take a holiday in Tuscany, Italy for example and the next thing you know there are Tuscan Style Villas in his District. It’s ridiculous. They even take pride in the fact that they are at the forefront in creating these out of context monstrosities. I know we do this to in the States too. I remember sitting at a wedding and one of the guests found out that I was in architecture. Needless to say, she went on and on about the amazing design of her new house. She mentioned she “designed” it with her developer and that it was a blend of the developer’s Whispering Willow and the Meandering Stream Collection with a Tuscan turret entry (someone shoot me now!) I get it, but what’s happening in the US is not at the grand scale that it is occurring all over China.
In Shenzhen for example, there is a whole city being “created” replicating a Swiss Alpine village in the Alps. I mean this isn’t some cute small touristy town like Solvang which is on the road to nowhere. This is going to be a major metropolis. They are literally moving mountains to create a lake and fabricating mountains to re-create scenery from the frickin’ Sound of Music. On the way to Hangzhou or Suzhou you can see miles and miles of development with billboards ads that read, “Italian Villas, or Chateau Maison Villas or Mediterranean Villages or my personal favorite…”Homes just like Orange County California”. Oooh the humanity!!!
Currently I work under the umbrella of our sister company in China. The have a lot of talented designers here. In fact, their resumes are all very impressive. Lot’s of Ivy school grads. Name them (Harvard, Yale, MIT, Brown, etc... and all of them have at least bachelors or masters or multiple degrees from there). The thing is they all practice “paper architecture”. The thing missing is good ol’ “time put in”. The big “E”….experience….time in the field sweating it out, rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty, yelling and screaming at contractors telling them that they don’t know what the fuck they are doing and showing them how it should be done. Or maybe the flip side, having the salty old contractors yell at you telling you that you don’t know shit and that even his 12 year old daughter knows the difference between a 6 penny nail and a lag bolt. So we have all these super smart designers designing a formal urban plan or landscape designs for a university in rural china that would look great in the middle of Oxford or some other Ivy League campus but has no business here or waterways and canals that meander through the city and look great but occur 10 meters above the water source so water has to flow upward for it to work.
This all does back to a country that is growing too fast and furious. The Chinese government takes what exists somewhere else and puts it here but without ever understanding its history and why it successfully existed in its initial context. China is becoming Disneyland on steroids. The only problem is we go to Disneyland to escape from our daily lives, we don’t go there to live our daily lives.
…to be continued…..
Shanghai is a curious beast; it’s Los Angeles (via size), New York (via density), Las Vegas (via glitz and glam) and Tijuana (via fuck-up-ed-ness). The Landscape of the city changes on a daily basis….no joke. I’ve been taking these long runs on Saturday mornings and I swear the street configuration changes with each hour and buildings get demolished and new construction begins from one Saturday to the next. This city, nay, this country is growing so fast that the taxi drivers don’t even now where they are going half the time. The taxi drivers are not trying to rip you off they are seriously lost. It’s probably because overnight the government decided that this area or this road needed to “disappear” for the good people’s economic growth.
Another interesting thing I was told is that Architecture (all design for that matter) here is viewed as a product and not a service. When a Chinese client hires you, they are buying a product. “Give me Architecture”, like it is something you unwrap and “viola”, architecture. In the West Architecture is a service. It’s a process of investigation, exploration, a study in aesthetics that hopefully, at the end of the process, yields a beautiful product.
Because of this mindset, The Chinese are buying “out of the box” architecture and design. Some government official will take a holiday in Tuscany, Italy for example and the next thing you know there are Tuscan Style Villas in his District. It’s ridiculous. They even take pride in the fact that they are at the forefront in creating these out of context monstrosities. I know we do this to in the States too. I remember sitting at a wedding and one of the guests found out that I was in architecture. Needless to say, she went on and on about the amazing design of her new house. She mentioned she “designed” it with her developer and that it was a blend of the developer’s Whispering Willow and the Meandering Stream Collection with a Tuscan turret entry (someone shoot me now!) I get it, but what’s happening in the US is not at the grand scale that it is occurring all over China.
In Shenzhen for example, there is a whole city being “created” replicating a Swiss Alpine village in the Alps. I mean this isn’t some cute small touristy town like Solvang which is on the road to nowhere. This is going to be a major metropolis. They are literally moving mountains to create a lake and fabricating mountains to re-create scenery from the frickin’ Sound of Music. On the way to Hangzhou or Suzhou you can see miles and miles of development with billboards ads that read, “Italian Villas, or Chateau Maison Villas or Mediterranean Villages or my personal favorite…”Homes just like Orange County California”. Oooh the humanity!!!
Currently I work under the umbrella of our sister company in China. The have a lot of talented designers here. In fact, their resumes are all very impressive. Lot’s of Ivy school grads. Name them (Harvard, Yale, MIT, Brown, etc... and all of them have at least bachelors or masters or multiple degrees from there). The thing is they all practice “paper architecture”. The thing missing is good ol’ “time put in”. The big “E”….experience….time in the field sweating it out, rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty, yelling and screaming at contractors telling them that they don’t know what the fuck they are doing and showing them how it should be done. Or maybe the flip side, having the salty old contractors yell at you telling you that you don’t know shit and that even his 12 year old daughter knows the difference between a 6 penny nail and a lag bolt. So we have all these super smart designers designing a formal urban plan or landscape designs for a university in rural china that would look great in the middle of Oxford or some other Ivy League campus but has no business here or waterways and canals that meander through the city and look great but occur 10 meters above the water source so water has to flow upward for it to work.
This all does back to a country that is growing too fast and furious. The Chinese government takes what exists somewhere else and puts it here but without ever understanding its history and why it successfully existed in its initial context. China is becoming Disneyland on steroids. The only problem is we go to Disneyland to escape from our daily lives, we don’t go there to live our daily lives.
…to be continued…..
2 comments:
hey...since when did you get a blog. way cool. what's with all the words though?
I love your rantings, vic. I can hear your voice in my head. Do please write more.
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