By Daniel Elsea
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Architect Pei Zhu is sitting in his new office in Beijing’s Beixinqiao neighborhood holding a small object in his hand.
“I spent more than half a year with a local manufacturer to develop this,” says Zhu, “It looks like the exterior of a Chinese lantern.”
Zhu refers to a small 5-by-5 centimeter-wide (2.5 centimeter thick) block of frosted translucent fiberglass, a material that puts him at the technological forefront of Chinese design. He plans to use it as a primary material in a new hotel to create a large iridescent façade that will lend the building a calm luminosity. Ever the forward-thinker, he is using technology to re-imagine age-old motifs.
Zhu’s work is part of a wave of innovation emerging from China’s current building boom. Along with architects such as Chang Yung Ho, Fei Xiaohua, and the firm Urbanus, Zhu is helping to develop a new aesthetic—an architectural language that is thoroughly contemporary, but retains a Chinese texture and sensibility. This new generation is designing in a way that is Chinese, yet avoids condescension and eschews provinciality. At the same time as huge skyscrapers, airports, and opera houses are being built, these architects are focusing their energies on smaller projects that grow organically from their historical and physical contexts. Just as the architecture of Tadao Ando and Shigeru Ban seem both modern and “Japanese,” or that of Alvaro Siza is modern and “Portuguese,” the work of these architects is evolving in a particularly Chinese way. What distinguishes much of this work is its reliance on homegrown technologies—especially in terms of materials—to help craft a contemporary idiom of design.
With so much construction happening within its borders, China has become a testing ground for new architectural techniques. But much of this innovation has focused on mechanical and engineering feats developed by overseas architects and consultants. SOM’s Poly Headquarters and Rem Koolhaas/OMA’s CCTV project in Beijing, for example, are much-anticipated examples of dramatic structural engineering. Local architects in China, though, are exploring innovations that are less about cantilevers and more about textures. In reinterpreting Chinese building for a new era, architects like Zhu, Chang, Fei, and Urbanus are both developing new materials and also using old ones in new ways.
The translucent fiberglass that Zhu holds in his hand is a small but important piece of the puzzle that young Chinese architects are trying to solve. He plans to use it as a building block for the façade of his Blur Hotel, a boutique accommodation that will sit in the shadow of the Forbidden City’s East Gate on one of Beijing’s old thoroughfares. Set in the middle of a dense and ancient neighborhood, the hotel is surrounded by hutong and northern Chinese courtyard buildings. Given its traditional context, Zhu felt the building should acknowledge tradition.
He approached the hotel as a lantern, a contemporary beacon in a traditional part of the city. But he wanted to preserve what he calls the area’s “urban carpet” of courtyard structures built at an intimate scale. So he designed a courtyard building surrounded by an iridescent curtain wall that will give it an ethereal quality.
“It has a traditional sense, a light quality,” says Zhu, “I want to give a sense of Chinese building in the modern time.”
Finding a substitute for stone
To imbue the building with the look of something glowing from the inside, Zhu wanted to use an indigenous precious stone—known as yun—which is translucent and radiant. “It’s a decorative stone, like a diamond,” says Zhu. Unfortunately, yun was too expensive, so he searched for something more affordable, something manmade.
“I needed a translucent material that was not glass,” he recalls, “but there seemed to be no affordable alternatives in China.”
So he approached a local manufacturer of fiberglass reinforced plastic (FRP) to develop a sturdy material that could express the qualities of a Chinese paper lantern. After months of back-and-forth explorations, Zhu and the manufacturer were able to create a special FRP that had similar luminous qualities as yun stone. Taking an FRP commonly used for roofing on temporary structures in China, they were able to develop a version that is transparent. This new FRP is sturdier and stronger than previous ones, but looks and feels light, almost paperlike. Zhu then designed a gridded pattern for it, one that resembles the texture of a honeycomb, to create a bright, soft shell for the hotel’s façade.
The new material is quite affordable, costing only ¥600 per square meter. The project is slated for completion by October 2006.
“Now in my studio I have a couple people full time who are devoted to just developing new materials,” says Zhu.
They are currently working on Zhu’s most high profile project to date: Digital Beijing. The building, which Zhu designed with his former partners at the Shenzhen-Beijing firm Urbanus, will be the digital command center for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It will serve as the capital’s communications hub in after the games are over. The facility will sit at the core of the Olympic village near Herzog & de Mureon’s Olympic Stadium and Australian firm PTW’s Aquatic Centre. The design, which was inspired by the contours of a computer motherboard, is supposed to reflect “a new architecture of our time,” says Zhu.
Realizing that the FRP he developed for the Blur Hotel can have other uses, Zhu will incorporate it in the Digital Beijing project. He plans to use it as flooring for the building’s ground floor “digital carpet,” an idea that is similar to Zaha Hadid’s “urban carpet” at the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. Instead of being fashioned out of concrete like Hadid’s carpet, Zhu will make it out of the gauzy FRP and project electronic images on it. “I realized it also has the affect of a screen,” says Zhu. He will also make internal pedestrian bridges out of the material, as it is strong enough to support people walking on it. Images will be projected on the bridges too.
Zhu also worked to develop new cladding for the exterior to keep costs down. Originally, the building’s end facades were to be made of a yet-to-be-determined stone. But as the project’s costs increased, the stone option was cast aside. After more than a year working with a Chinese manufacturer of aluminum soda cans, the design team was able to come up with aluminum sheets that had a stone-like quality. “They’re not stone,” notes Zhu, as he taps a finger on a sample, “but they’re not very metallic either.” The effect is essentially a visual trick on the viewer: from a distance, one thinks the building is clad in stone, but actually it’s the same material as that used for Coca-Cola cans.
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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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