By Daniel Elsea
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Shenzhen-based architect Xiaohua Fei, principal at X-Urban Consultants has also been experimenting with metals. Incorporating aluminum with stucco for a villa in a coastal area Guangdong Province, Fei took thin panels of the metal and coated them in an easy-to-mold stucco, a material rarely used in China.
These projects by Zhu and Fei, however, have benefitted from a rare luxury in contemporary Chinese architecture: time. In both the Blur Hotel and Digital Beijing projects, for example, Zhu was given months—in one case an entire year—to fine-tune his design, allowing him to collaborate with material manufacturers to create new products.
“In China, the quick design process barely allows architects to explore new possibilities with materials,” says Yung Ho Chang, the noted Chinese architect and chair of the department of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “And market forces are now making material research and experiment more and more difficult or at least more expensive.”
As China experiences the pressures of hasty, meteoric economic growth, developers and clients demand that architects work faster than their colleagues in other countries, especially those in the developed world. There is just not enough time for architects to develop ground-breaking ideas. And in China, architects often exercise only limited site supervision, which leaves the development of new building methods and materials out of their control.
Along with Zhu, Chang is one of the few architects in China who can afford to concentrate on introducing unfamiliar materials to the Chinese market. “Our office all along has been making attempts to engage new materials and structural systems as often as we can,” says Chang. “However, the ‘new’ should be defined as something that is not regularly used in China and/or not recently used,” he cautions.
Like Zhu, he explores new materials often as a way to keep costs down and applies them in unexpected ways. While working on a landscape project in Beijing, Chang discovered the porous qualities of inexpensive plastic pavement blocks, a material most often used when grass is grown over asphalt or pavement. As it turns out, the blocks are strong enough to take a perpendicular load, so they can be used as part of a building’s structure. Moreover, “its porosity is ideal for transmitting light,” notes the architect.
When Chang’s firm, Atelier FCJZ, needed to build a bathroom for its own office on almost no budget, the architects simply built one out of the plastic pavement blocks. They took blocks arranged in a honeycomb pattern, joined them together, and then sandwiched them between parallel panels of polycarbonate. In terms of weight, the new structure was so light that no foundation was needed.
Although just a small, one-off project, Chang’s plastic outhouse could serve as a powerful model for a variety of common building types, from mass temporary housing needed after natural disasters to bathroom facilities on construction sites.
Many of Chang’s discoveries begin unintentionally, often in the midst designing an unrelated project. For example, while working on the Rice House in Matsudai, Japan, Chang noticed the structural potential of steel grating, an inexpensive industrial material. He began using steel grating in art installations, but when he was commissioned to do a house on a steep slope in an overgrown section of Nanjing, he decided to design a building mostly out of steel grating.
Relatively light in weight, steel grating does not require a heavy foundation and it allows plants to grow up and through it—important benefits for a client who wanted to disturb the original site as little as possible. Since it had never been used structurally, Chang had to perform special load tests to ensure that it could be used as a load-bearing frame and decorative skeleton for the building.
Chang’s work has an untreated—almost organic—quality to it that is largely made possible by using materials not often found in Chinese architecture. For example, his Split House at the Commune By the Great Wall outside Beijing employs laminated wood frames and rammed earth walls as both structural support and integral design elements. For contemporary China, the decision to use laminated wood frames was virtually unheard of before then, despite their widespread use in other markets, especially the U.S. And the Split House’s rammed earth resurrects an old Chinese tradition. Building rammed-earth walls is a craft that “is unfortunately almost lost,” laments Chang.
Chang’s office has been reintroducing other materials that have been absent from China for decades, such as bamboo. Many people assume bamboo is commonly used in China, but in fact, it is not. Perhaps Chang’s most compelling bamboo project was for the Chinese Pavilion at this year’s Venice Art Biennale. Using a material indigenous to China, Chang and his team at Atelier FCJZ explored the flexible qualities of bamboo to create a temporary space to represent the nation.
“We focused on two unique techniques of working with bamboo,” says Chang, “bending and weaving.” When heated with fire, bamboo can bend like an arch, allowing the architects to create a large curvilinear “basket” that covered an existing archeological site.
The firm Urbanus also used bamboo for a temporary exhibition, this one at the OCT Contemporary Art Gallery in Shenzhen. The building, which was a transitional structure on the site before a permanent structure was built, played on the fungible character of bamboo, just as Chang’s Biennale pavilion did. In addition to the temporary gallery, Urbanus designed its permanent replacement—in a renovated industrial warehouse.
Wanting to re-introduce the bamboo scaffolding systems native to Southern China for centuries, Urbanus partners Xiaodu Liu and Yan Meng created a mock-up of the future gallery space entirely out of bamboo. The overall form is a floating tube that hovers above ground and guides visitors to the gallery’s entrance. Its structural supports and beams are made of naturally found bamboo tubes, and its floor is made from a bamboo weave.
“The whole structure is elegant because of its material simplicity and the humanity of its craftsmanship,” notes Hui Wang, the third partner in the firm, who is based in Beijing.
While most of the prominent building projects in China today grab attention with grand architectural gestures—such as impressive cantilevers or sweeping glass facades—a small band of Chinese architects is pushing innovation in a different direction—one that focuses on the fine-grain issues of materiality, low-budget construction, and local context. Just as scientists studying tiny organisms under a microscrope can make discoveries with very big impacts, these architects are helping to develop something very big: a new identity for Chinese design. Instead of putting curved roofs on top of commercial buildings like big hats or imagining pagoda-shaped office towers, architects such as Zhu, Chang, Fei, and Urbanus are exploring more sophisticated ways of connecting today’s construction to their nation’s cultural heritage. By merging an understanding of local craft traditions and the fabric of urban life with modern approaches to technology and new materials, these designers are changing the built environment one small piece at a time. In the process, they are setting an example that others may want to follow. 
Daniel Elsea is a Hong Kong-based writer who has covered architecture and design in China since moving to Asia in TK.
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