Interview with Yan Meng, Architect and partner in the Urbanus architecture office, Shenzhen/Beijing, China
Interview: Martina Baum
Further information:www.urbanus.com.cn
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What is the relevance of context – the history of a place and its identity – in your projects?
Today we live in a globalized world. In a global society, it’s almost unavoidable that people’s lives and their social and built environment are getting more and more alike: everyone’s wearing jeans and using an iPhone, for example, no matter if you are living in China or the Netherlands. Especially in the Asian context, all cities are becoming alike and the old structures are being demolished. The issue is how architecture should respond to this kind of situation. After thirty years of fast-track urban development in China, for example, it’s time at the moment for re-thinking this approach by the government, as well as by the architects. I think architecture is one of the few elements that are really related to the specific place. Architecture – for good and bad – still has this kind of relation with its context. Architects should therefore not just build a building on a particular site, but should shape the place and thus the city. For Urbanus, architecture has this ambition to anchor a building within the city, to tell the particular story of the place, to make it bigger, louder, and make it comprehensible to the people, its users. This is the case not only for the transformation of existing buildings, but also for new buildings. It’s important to look at a site, to study the history and culture of a particular place, and then use architecture as a device to create a place.
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Particularly in fast-growing cities with a high level of demand, old structures are often being torn down to make room for new projects. Existing structures are perceived as a factor hindering new developments. What sort of potential do you see in the existing building substance?
Renovating former industrial buildings is becoming almost like a trend in China. Ten years ago, people didn’t consider the value of these structures. The only existing building typology that was regarded as valuable was traditional monuments. It was through influence from the West that people started to realize that old buildings have the potential to be something really interesting and can be a valuable part of everyday life. In Shanghai, for example, they’re building several dozen creative zones based on the idea of renovating existing former factory buildings. It’s becoming more and more popular. In a lot of our projects, the existing buildings are often not outstanding in terms of their architectural quality. Most of the industrial buildings are not in good shape and are not of good quality. Why should we have to keep them?
This is particularly interesting in the Chinese context, because we are basically demolishing everything. Not just old houses dating back a century or two – we’re also demolishing buildings that were built only 20 years ago. In a lot of projects, the reason why we insist on preserving more is to preserve traces of history, just the most ordinary pieces or fragments of history. We’ve already demolished almost everything, so we have to say that we now need to preserve almost everything of what still existing in order to keep some traces as a memory. This is different from the Western idea of preservation for buildings with outstanding architectural quality and historical significance. What we would like to say with our proposals to developers and the government is that you don’t have to destroy everything and you don’t have to build just simple towers. Architecture can and should be much more engaging and more sensitive to the context.
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In your projects, you complement old building substance by appending new additions. How important are these new additions, and what potential does the combination of old and new hold?
To express our approach in this type of situation, we use the phrase ‘preservation for creation’. It’s not just about preserving the existing building for the sake of preservation – as I already said, most of these buildings are not in good architectural quality or shape, but we take these as opportunities to explore new potentials, to contain new lifestyles. This is the main purpose and why we say this is a process of creation, taking into consideration the existing building and all the memories it carries. By appending new additions, we create a dialogue between old and new. This approach really highlights what’s already there. You can develop new typologies, a new spatial articulation to promote new lifestyles. That is the result of combining old and new. For us, old and new are equally important.
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Are you trying to tell a story with your projects, to show these traces of history? And is it importantfor the building’s development history to be comprehensible to the viewer?
I can give you two examples of this. One project is the OCT East Factory in Shenzhen. When the developer came to us and said he would like to renovate these factory buildings, something that immediately sprang to mind was Project 798 in Beijing. But when we went there to see the site and the buildings, we were so disappointed. There were just simple factory buildings with shedroofs, in bad shape. We were asked to convert it into a contemporary art centre. We came to the conclusion that precisely because of the quality of the buildings, a lot of things can be done and can happen that would not be suitable in a typical art gallery or space. You can dig a hole in the floor, you can do whatever you want in these buildings and with them. That’s their special potential. We decided to keep basically all the traces – even the traces of reinforcement work on the buildings – and to make the development visible.
The Tangshan Museum project is also really interesting in this context. The existing buildings are among the few buildings that survived the great earthquake of 1976. The concept is quite similar to the OCT project. We kept the existing buildings and then created public spaces around them. For the renovation, we used simple industrial materials, related to the site and building typology. Tangshan is not Shanghai, it’s one of the second tier cities in China. To begin with, we were a little worried about whether the concept would be acceptable. But in the end, people turned out to be very proud of the place – they really love it. It’s a big success, which we never thought possible in the beginning – just because we highlighted what was already there.
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To what extent should architecture allow for adaptation by the user?
This is almost the top priority in our public projects. We want to use architecture as a tool for generating good-quality public life. We still believe that architecture has a social dimension, as a factor that promotes and stimulates urban life. Especially in the Chinese context, we’ve been building these isolated architectural objects for thirty years. Now we’re starting to realize that the quality of urban life is lacking. We try to tackle this topic in a lot of our projects. Architecture can be a tool – sometimes it’s a minor procedure, like acupuncture. You hit a specific spot that can have a much bigger impact on the whole body. Lots of people say that architecture isn’t able to achieve much. It can’t solve social problems – of course not –but it has the potential to change a specific condition. This is the case not only when you’re renovating existing buildings, but also when you’re building new ones. We always try to find the specific task in the particular site.
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In some of your projects, such as ‘OCT East Factory’, you decided to apply a development strategy, as opposed to a fixed master plan. Could you elaborate on that particular strategy? What are the advantages of such an approach?
OCT in Shenzhen is a special kind of project, because the whole area is owned by a single developer. The site contains ten existing buildings, such as factorywarehouses and dormitories, built in the 1980s. In the middle of a mixture of white-collar/middle-class residential areas and a Disneyland-type entertainment zone, these factories have been left as residual spaces in this fast-growing city. The planning strategy is to simulate the natural growth of the city, starting from a linear addition to the existing warehouse that accommodates the new art centre. The empty lots between the buildings are to be gradually filled up with galleries, bookshops, cafes, bars, artists’ studios and design shops, along with lofts and dormitories. These new additions will fill the gaps, setting up new relationships between the buildings by wrapping and penetrating the existing fabric. They also create a second layer of interconnected urban spaces and public facilities. The planning is not intended to define a clear boundary or fixed new forms. Instead, it is trying to set up a dynamic, interactive and flexible framework to constantly adapt itself to the new conditions imposed by the vast changes in the city.
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Do you take potential future changes of use into consideration in your planning work?
Yes, definitely! Of course, it depends on the building type. Monuments and government buildings are a different story, but especially in housing and renovation projects, it’s extremely interesting to consider time as a major factor in shaping the space and shaping the community. We regard time and change as positive factors. A lot of the Urbanus projects don’t actually make good architectural photos, but we create places and we’re proud of that.
