Archinect - Features

‘Every Piece of Architecture is First a Work of Fiction’; A Conversation with Ole Scheeren

2023-01-20T07:51:00-05:00

For the past 30 years, Ole Scheeren has built a career defined by an internationalist outlook. The German architect has lived in 10 countries, and worked in 25, always guided by a philosophy that recognizes "the power of bringing people, cultures, and practices closer together."

Nowhere is Scheeren's philosophy better encapsulated than through Büro Ole Scheeren; the firm that Scheeren founded in 2010 having previously served as a Partner and Director at OMA. Today, his 100-person-strong studio operates offices across Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangkok, New York, London, and Berlin, designing and delivering schemes throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Despite their varying typologies and geographies, the projects are united by Scheeren's belief that architecture can instill an emotional anticipation of narratives and stories.

In December 2022, Archinect’s Niall Patrick Walsh sat down with Scheeren at the 2022 World Architecture Festival in Lisbon, Portugal for a wide-ranging discussi...

‘I Seek To Create an Escape From Everyday Life’; A Conversation With Ma Yansong of MAD Architects

2022-10-15T07:16:00-04:00

Much has changed for Ma Yansong since Archinect last spoke to him in 2014. From their roots in Beijing, China, Yansong’s firm MAD Architects has expanded to offices in Los Angeles and Rome, employing over 160 people on major architectural commissions. In 2022 alone, our editorial has offered updates on the firm’s work across continents, be it the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, the Cloud Center in Aranya, China, or the commercial MoLo complex in Milan. Added to this list in October was the Quzhou Sports Park, whose newly-completed stadium marks the first step in what will become the world’s largest earth-sheltered complex.

Following news of the stadium’s completion, Archinect’s Niall Patrick Walsh spoke with Ma Yansong for an insight into the project, and how it represents MAD’s architectural philosophy. We also use the discussion to reflect on Yansong’s own journey through architecture, his role in MAD, and his thoughts on nature, cities, and history. The discussion, ...

Shenzhen: A City at a Crossroads in its Past and Future

2021-09-10T13:55:00-04:00

The past, present, and future narrative of Shenzhen offers rich ground for architectural thought. The megacity, which emerged from the remote Chinese countryside over 40 years, has captured the imagination of urbanists seeking to understand its rise, architects seeking to contribute to its lively urban fabric, and national governments seeking to replicate the "miracle of Shenzhen" and its associated economic riches in their own country. However, despite the prevailing narrative of a highly-planned "instant" metropolis springing from nothingness, Shenzhen's history is more complex, more expansive, and more grounded in localism, than is commonly noted. Meanwhile, as the city continues its meteoric urban expansion, local and international architects, curators, and researchers are tasked with weaving the next chapter of Shenzhen's story; guided by forces of innovation, culture, climate, and geopolitics.

spatial practice on Becoming a Global Player as a Small Team

2021-04-07T08:18:00-04:00

spatial practice is a small Hong Kong-and-soon-to-be-Los Angeles-based collaborative partnership established by Dora Chi and Erik Amir. Initially founded in Beijing, the young firm very quickly gained exposure to projects of a scale that often remains reserved for more established offices.

In our latest Studio Snapshot, we had the pleasure of chatting with Chi and Amir about their journey so far, if and how the pandemic has impacted their operations throughout the past year, and what they look forward to with the opening of their new California studio.

Sino-African Architecture; A Look at the Rise of Chinese-Built Projects Across the African Continent

2020-02-18T11:46:00-05:00

A boom in Sino-African trade relations since 2000 has catapulted China from being a relatively small investor in Africa into becoming the continent's largest economic partner. This shift, in combination with a decreasing profit margin for construction projects in mainland China, has encouraged both Chinese state-owned construction firms (SOC’s) and private contractors to seek new project opportunities on African soil. In 2011, Chinese contractors surpassed European construction companies to become the biggest player in the continent’s construction explosion and rapid urbanization.

In addition to SOC and private enterprise developments, there is a strong political will from Beijing to increase Chinese presence in Africa. At the close of the ‘China-Africa Forum for Cooperation’ summit held in 2018, the Chinese government announced that it had set up a new $60 billion funding pot for the development of projects on the African continent. Today Chinese firms, with their proven track reco...

Patrick Lam Discusses the Search for Complexity Through Simplicity

2019-05-13T12:04:00-04:00

Hong Kong is known for its skyscrapers and busy urban landscapes. However, within the dense complexity of the city architect Patrick Lam uses Hong Kong's crowded landscape as inspiration to creating simple design solutions for residential living. Skilled in both architecture and fine arts, Lam's design firm Sim-Plex taught him to think of every possibility a small space could offer.

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Archinect chats with Lam about art, living in Kowloon City, and what it means to expand the possibilities of limited space.

#ArchinectMeets @krisprovoost

2018-11-09T10:00:00-05:00

#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.

Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.

We spoke to Kris Provoost, the photographer behind @krisprovoost. As a Belgian based in China, Provoost demonstrates an undying passion for his new home base as he uniquely documents it for his social media. And his background as an architect undoubtedly aided in his ability to photograph buildings as their designers might have envisioned (or wished they had).

A Conversation with Studio8, a Mostly-European Staffed Small Studio in Shanghai

2018-07-16T13:45:00-04:00

Based in Shanghai, Studio8 is a multidisciplinary studio designing everything from the visual identity and branding, to the furniture and architecture for restaurants, hotels, stores, and residences. Founded only three years ago, the firm is comprised of an international team of young creatives. For this week's Small Studio Snapshot, we talked with co-founder Shirley Dong about designing spaces; their magnificent, recently completed, Anadu resort; and working together as a diverse team from all over the world.

Fellow Fellows: WAI Architecture Think Tank

2018-01-18T09:00:00-05:00

Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the current eruption and trend of fellowships in academia today. These positions within the academic realm produce a fantastic blend of practice, research and design influence and traditionally within a tight time frame. Fellow Fellows sits down with these fellows and attempts to understand what these positions offer to both themselves and the discipline at large. Fellow Fellows is about bringing attention and inquiry to an otherwise maddening pace of refreshed academics while giving a broad view of the exceptional and breakthrough work being done in-between the newly minted graduate and the licensed associate.

This week we talk to WAI Architecture Think Tank. WAI Architecture Think Tank is an international studio practicing architecture, urbanism and architectural research, founded in Brussels in 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, author and poet, Nathalie Frankowski. WAI ...

Beijing-Based Rocker-Turned-Architect Cao Pu Sees Architects as Social Workers

2017-08-21T09:30:00-04:00

Originally part of an electric-rock band, Chinese architect Cao Pu began his architectural career doing stage design for his musical group. Today, his studio remains small with a focus on conversion and community revival projects and his designs demonstrate a talent for working within small spaces and low budgets.

For this week's iteration of Small Studio Snaphshots, we talk with the musician-turned-architect about involving clients in his process, designing "in the gap," and architecture as a form of social work.

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson's Tsingtao Pearl Visitor Center Reintroduces Wood Construction in China

2017-08-11T09:14:00-04:00

While wooden frame structures are quite common in North America, in China, concrete, steel and brick have long been favored as the sturdier building product. Bohlin Cywinski Jackson's new Tsingtao Pearl Visitor Center represents an international collaboration to reestablish lumbered building materials in the world's largest construction market.

Never Meant to Copy, Only to Surpass: Plagiarism Versus Innovation in Architectural Imitation

2017-04-13T12:15:00-04:00

Wangjing SOHO, a three tower complex in Beijing penned by Zaha Hadid, became a worldwide sensation when it was revealed that the scheme was being allegedly plagiarized by a construction team in Chongqing, southern China. Despite the subsequent outcry from the professional design world, Hadid responded that if the ‘copy-cat’ designs displayed innovative mutations, “that would be exciting”. While many architectural icons are commissioned precisely for their artistic originality, the design response is often non-site specific, which raises interesting questions when such icons are reproduced around the globe. What does it mean for architectural originality and innovation, when a ‘copy-paste’ strategy is normalized?

The People’s Architecture Office Uses Mass-Production and Readymades to Deliver Affordable Architecture to Difficult Sites

2017-03-07T12:21:00-05:00

With a name like theirs, it’s no surprise that the People’s Architecture Office strives for inclusive, socially conscious and accessible design. The Beijing-based studio has developed a practice that takes advantage of aspects of the Chinese economy to deliver affordable, contemporary design to difficult sites, from historic hutong districts to rural areas.

Uniting the peripheral and the central at the 2016 Venice Biennale

2016-06-18T10:13:00-04:00

How architects are educated, and the role they play in society, are key questions of today. As an architecture teacher, I ask my students how they see their role; are they makers, choreographers, gardeners, enablers, artists? This year’s Venice Biennale asks, and tries to answer, the same question. There are many different answers.

Transparent Motives: the ins and outs of sex-specific architecture

2016-04-15T08:20:00-04:00

If sex is the ultimate form of openness, then the architecture designed specifically to facilitate it could, up until recently anyway, be described as opaque. Even those more flagrant hot spots, like Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea or Japan’s ubiquitous love hotels, tended to be built to obscure their purpose, at least from the outside. Indeed, it is only within the last few decades that the notion of sex as an activity that could be displayed, or at least not obscured, has come into a more public architectural vogue. Transparency, in its boundary blurring form, is a defining characteristic of architecture for sex.

UpStarts: Four O Nine architecture and design

2015-01-12T09:30:00-05:00

In a country infamous for its one time zone and countless architectural knock-offs, Four O Nine's success is startling and original.

UpStarts is a series of features on the foundations of contemporary practice. It will have a global reach in which practices from Europe, North America, Asia, and beyond will be asked to address the work behind getting the work, and the effect of cultural contexts. The focus will be on how a practice is initiated and maintained. In many ways, the critical years of a fledgling design partnership is within the initial five years, after the haze and daze of getting it off the ground. UpStarts surveys the first years of practice as a tool for tracking the tactics of the rapidly evolving methods for sustaining a practice.

Student Works: "Townization", a new Chinese urbanization paradigm from the GSD

2014-12-26T10:43:00-05:00

It would be something of an understatement to say the last thirty years of urbanization in China have been rough. Rapid and often unsustainable growth made newly transitioned cities difficult to maintain and economically fraught, burdened by their own heft. So when the Chinese government revised its strategy in 2013, it focused on more subtle and adaptive goals. Dingliang Yang, an urban planning student at the GSD, has a plan to make sure that happens.

Showcase: Garden School / Beijing No.4 High School Fangshan Campus by OPEN Architecture

2014-11-14T19:41:00-05:00

Taking cues from the urban and pastoral, Beijing No. 4 High School (aka Garden School) strives not only to model elite Chinese public education, but also to also drive development in its relatively new town of Fangshan.

A new nature: Interview with Ma Yansong of MAD Architecture

2014-05-22T13:05:00-04:00

Ma Yansong is a trailblazing figure for Chinese architecture, having made a name for himself around the world as a business leader and innovative architect. Recently named 2014's Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business, Yansong founded MAD Architecture ten years ago in Beijing, and earlier this year announced the opening of another office in Los Angeles.

What is the Los Angeles Biennale of Architecture / Urbanism?

2014-05-06T11:04:00-04:00

For three days this past February, eight loosely-affiliated individuals sat around a makeshift table in Shenzhen and talked about Los Angeles. This is the purely pragmatic explanation of what the Los Angeles Biennale was, in its inaugural form at 2013’s Bi-City Biennale of Architecture / Urbanism, taking place in Hong Kong and Shenzhen.

Aftershock #2: "Serendipity Machines" and the Future of Workplace Design

2013-11-27T17:59:00-05:00

AfterShock is a non-conclusive series that grapples with the impact and responsibility of contemporary architectural design, hoping to instigate dialogues on how to make architecture more accountable.

ShowCase: Liyuan Library by Li Xiaodong/Atelier

2012-10-24T19:19:00-04:00

ShowCase is an on-going feature series on Archinect, presenting exciting new work from designers representing all creative fields and all geographies.

We are always accepting nominations for upcoming ShowCase features - if you would like to suggest a project, please send us a message.

Amateur Architecture: A New Vernacular?

2012-03-11T20:20:00-04:00

Wang Shu may be a surprising choice for this year’s Pritzker Prize, but it’s an excellent one, and well-deserved. In recent years the Pritzker Committee has gravitated towards architects who produce work with an innate understanding of place, allowing their ties to local culture to infuse their work. The choice of Wang Shu (and, by extension, of Amateur Architecture and partner Lu Wenyu) continues this trend: his work is as culturally-sensitive and contextually responsive as it is aesthetically stunning.

Op-Ed: Sticks and Stones; Ai Weiwei and the Uses of Architecture

2011-05-26T12:39:00-04:00

This op-ed was initially conceived as a series of critical Twitter messages by Fred Scharmen, aka sevensixfive, directed at blogs (including Archinect) that have been providing ongoing exposure of new architecture projects in China, considering China's unfair capture and treatment of artist/activist Ai Weiwei. In an effort to investigate this issue further, and hopefully spark a little productive debate, we invited Fred to pen this op-ed.

Should the media protest the treatment of Ai Weiwei by ceasing promotion of all new architectural work in China? Should architects refuse to take on new work in China? Should we continue to support the work of architects and artists in China, but only with a disclaimer? Please share your thoughts in the comments.