She Builds the Houses of Songzhuang's Artists | 100 People With Ideas

"Day to day, Songzhuang looks deserted from the outside. But once you walk through someone's door, you find that under the calm surface every community here is living a rich, full life."

Songzhuang, a village 30 kilometers from downtown Beijing, is home to some 20,000 people who make their living painting, writing, or making films. Some of the ones doing well have bought land here and built houses. Peng Lele is a woman architect who has built houses for many of them.

Eight years ago, when Peng Lele first came to Songzhuang, the place was still bleak. Houses had gone up wherever their owners pleased, with no planning and no infrastructure, and high-voltage lines ran over the village pond.

Like most formally trained architects, she went from the Nanjing Institute of Architectural Engineering to a state-owned design institute, and then to Yung Ho Chang's firm, Atelier FCJZ. After a few years she left to open her own practice, Baizijiayi Architecture Studio, named after her office address: No. Jia-1, Baiwanzhuang Street, Beijing. Unlike many architects who came up through the big state institutes, Peng Lele likes designs that are "fun." "A project doesn't get built until it reaches the fun part."

In 2006, when the installation artist Chen Qingqing said she had a plot in Songzhuang and wanted someone to build a studio on it, Peng Lele took the job without hesitation. Later Li Xianting told her she ought to build a house here too, so she simply moved her studio out.

In the art world Li Xianting is known as Lao Li; some also call him the "godfather of Chinese contemporary art." One of the first to settle in Songzhuang, he used his reputation, his connections, and his gift for organizing and mobilizing people to draw more and more artists there, until the village became a loose, self-organized artists' colony.

In 2004, the Songzhuang township government handed him 400 mu of land — about 27 hectares — to develop as a cultural and creative industry zone. Galleries, studios, art production facilities, an art exhibition and trading center, and the world's first village-level art museum, the Songzhuang Art Museum, went up there one after another.

Peng Lele's own house, like the houses of many other artists, exists thanks to this "creative and cultural industry park," even though their presence has little to do with the industry itself. Still, after years of designing to other people's requirements, having such a large piece of land appear out of nowhere, to do with as she liked, made her happy.

She surveyed the site and decided to push one common feature of the North China countryside as far as it would go: a hundred-mu pond, about seven hectares. The house she built faces east, onto the water and into the wind. Peng Lele spread every functional space out on one level, made the entire east side transparent and open, and put windows on the south and north sides as well.

"Designing windows on all four sides was purely about how the space would feel. I never expected that once we moved in they would create a cross-draft — the holes we'd left for air conditioners turned out to be unnecessary, the ventilation was that good. Then sparrows plugged up every one of those holes with nests, and now their chicks wake me every morning," Peng Lele said.

Coming in from the landward side, along a dirt track through the village, the first thing you see is a big vegetable garden. Behind it the working and living spaces open out in sequence: the offices Peng Lele shares with her colleagues on the outermost layer, then a guest room, a tea room, a study, the bedrooms. Each space is kept as separate as it can be, so that each blends as far as possible into the natural surroundings. "I once asked Lao Li why he put me here, next to the piece of land with water on it. Probably because he knew I was an architect, and a house built by the public lake would surely do the shared environment some good," Peng Lele told QDaily.

As a kind of "payback," she also built Li Xianting a wall where a straight line meets a curve. Li Xianting is forever caught up in social activity, and his house in Songzhuang works more like a public meeting hall. Because it sits right next to a patch of village common ground, the wall had to divide public space from private space and steer the flow of people at the same time.

She designed it in a spirit of pure play: a straight gray wall and a curved red one. Where the two meet sits a string of small functions — an outdoor toilet, a tool shed, a doghouse, a chicken coop — each one half courtyard, half interior. From outside the wall looks sealed shut, but it has a single public entrance.

The interesting part came when she sent the construction drawings to Li Xianting and he turned them down. "He said the curve in the drawing wasn't the one he drew, that the line was wrong. I looked, and sure enough it wasn't his line, so I redid the drawings that same night. It shows how sensitive artists are to form and volume — the proportions can't be off by even a little."

Of all the houses she has built for artists, the one Peng Lele likes best is the studio for Xiang Jing and Qu Guangci. In 2011 the two sculptors, who are married, moved their entire working base to Songzhuang. Beyond the basic needs of living, the house had to hold work, exhibition, and conversation, plus separate living quarters for ten assistants. How to keep a decent quality of life inside such a dense mix was the problem Peng Lele set out to solve by design.

Fitting that many functions into 3,000 square meters left Peng Lele only depth to work with. She talked Xiang Jing and Qu Guangci out of the "white box" — the sealed, four-white-walled space of the traditional museum gallery — and instead opened up the exhibition hall's walls and carried them outdoors, into a space open to nature where inside and outside seep into each other. By laying out different routes through it, she tied the public platform, the outdoor space, and the stairs together, so that the separate functions stay independent and still connect.

Peng Lele thought of these spaces as built like a novel — setup, development, turn, conclusion. Getting the rhythm exactly right, tension and release under control, was what she cared about most in the whole design.

After the studio was finished, visitors came often. One day she watched one of Xiang Jing's assistants walking on the outdoor platform, merging with the sculptures — some moving, some still, against a backdrop of hills, water, and trees — and it felt oddly like stepping into another time. She couldn't resist raising her hand and shooting a short video. In a composite space like this, architecture and art mirror each other and hold a close conversation, while nature, the natural backdrop to the work, has become part of the work. The largest concession architecture ever made to nature, though, was an addition to the artist Nan Xi's studio.

"There are a few crabapple trees in Nan Xi's courtyard, planted by hand when the studio was completed. That was six or seven years ago now. Surveying the site for the addition, we found one of the crabapples near the south edge of the plot, and we felt this tree ought to be kept. So in the final design, everything that happens in the space is built around this one crabapple tree."

To give the crabapple room to grow well, the building's first and second floors both step back far enough to guarantee it sunlight and space. Above them, the third-floor studio is a rectangular room; stand under its skylight and look down and the whole crown of the tree comes into view below you. This is the strongest angle from which to see the crabapple, and as the light shifts with the seasons, living next to the tree keeps the people inside constantly aware of how life is changing.

In winter, bare branches outside and their shadows within; in summer, leaves outside and shade within; in spring, pink blossom; in autumn, bright red fruit. All of it changes the light and the mood indoors and out, laying different textures over daily life — which makes Peng Lele feel that architecture, in its own language, joins the conversation between an artist's work and an artist's life.

"Day to day, Songzhuang looks deserted from the outside. But once you walk through someone's door, you find that under the calm surface every community here is living a rich, full life." In spring she watches birds build nests in the trees in the back courtyard, sometimes for hours at a stretch. The first twig is always the hardest to place; it keeps falling, and before long the ground is covered with twigs. "It's like the big tree we moved into our studio courtyard: one year you watch it recover, the next you watch it fill out with leaves, and after that it puts down deep roots in this soil. I only hope they get to grow here a long time, and are never moved again."