Working with architecture in east-west contexts was the theme at a workshop hosted at Nanjing Southeast University last weekend, at which attendees were treated to presentations and Q & A sessions from two seminal figures in the industry.
Jack Young is Founding Partner at we architech anonymous in Beijing and has worked previously with Foster and Partners, currently ranked the UK’s top architecture firm, after studying at Bartlett School of Architecture.
Tao Wen is Director of W.h.Y-iDesign in Beijing, having previously held an architect’s position at the prestigious Zaha Hadid Architects. The company’s founder, Zaha Hadid, was an Iraqi-British architect. She was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. One of her iconic designs is to be found here in Nanjing, in the form of the Nanjing International Youth Culture Centre, built to coincide with the 2014 Youth Olympics.
Tao gave a presentation entitled “The Complexity of Architectural Design and Application of Material”, while Young chose for his topic, “Architecture Through Making: A Building Dead or Alive”.
Archidream (执·筑) was a presentation of Artsy, the Nanjing based design collaborative initiative that provides lectures, workshops and training under its guise of “To create a better world everyday through art for the many”. Part of Artsy’s mission is to prepare students for the academia abroad, more than likely in fields involving art or design.
“I heard about what they were doing to help kids to go abroad to study, and to inform them a bit better, said Young speaking to The Nanjinger. “It’s hard when you’re young and just come out of school. Or even when you’ve done an undergraduate in China. If you look at the list of universities to go to, it’s very mind boggling. And the two countries have very different methods, so it’s good to inform people about your experience, and what they would get out of it.”
On the speed of construction in China, Young started by referencing the UK; “It’s a great place to go and learn, but it is a difficult place to practice, because of the speed of projects there, and the scale. So often you end up with a very slow trajectory of building. So I came to China because I thought maybe I could speed up that learning process”.
“Back home, especially with working at Fosters, some of our projects would take 2 years just to get out of the ground, because you would find something special and you would have to close it and protect it and decide what to do… So it gives the architecture a bit more time, at the beginning stages of the project, when it is being commissioned, to design in a more considered, thorough way. Wheras, here, it’s still considered and thorough, but it happens at further stages along the design process.”
Tao Wen added, “Because there are so many people [in China], the population is huge, so you need to understand the competitiveness. You must be quick, otherwise, you will be bankrupt.”
“Regulations in Europe and England are much more strict than in China. You need to go through so many stages of certification. In China, sometimes you can go first, and come back later to do all this kind of documentation.”
The well-attended Archidream event took place at the Nanjing Southeast University’s Department of Architecture on Saturday 12th May, from 1 to 6pm.
