Being a Designer Isn't About Who's Smarter — Sometimes It's Just Plodding Work | 100 People With Ideas

Architect Zhou Wei says design is like making sushi: once your hands get a feel for slicing fish, and you take something plain as far as it will go, you find your sushi has become unlike anyone else's.

Architect Zhou Wei's studio, Atelier Mearc, sits in an old house down a lane off Yongjia Road. A small courtyard, a few architects and two cats are their entire assets. The Chinese name, Mi'ao, comes from two things: they love cats, and Mi'ao sounds like the Chinese word for a cat's meow; and the shapes of the two characters — mi radiates outward from its center, while ao looks like a little house.

Zhou Wei's two kittens

How he became an architect has a plot straight out of a TV drama. He was studying art in high school when he passed a property developer's ad on the street: "What we offer isn't a house, it's a home." The line moved him. He saw that as an architect he could draw and shape other people's lives at the same time, putting his own ideas about how to live into the work. "So my dream was to be an architect — not to make a great name for myself, just to design a few small houses with love in them. I've done that now."

In college he interned at an architecture firm run by a Japanese couple. The husband's first assignment was to shade every road on a drawing gray with a pencil and every patch of grass green. He happened to like pencils and sketching, so he worked his way slowly through what looked like a tedious chore. Next might be cutting a few small blocks of material, or something equally basic.

It was all as basic as work gets. The husband kept telling him to slow down, not to rush toward a result.

"It surprised me, because it was nothing like the education I'd had, or the architects I'd read about in the media. It's like an apprentice at a sushi restaurant: you can't touch the fish until you can wring out a hot towel, then you learn the knife, and it may be ten years before you're allowed to prepare fish. The internship lasted more than two years, and it left me hungry for architecture ever since." He calls the man the biggest influence on his path in design, the one who changed how he thinks about the work.

"He told me a designer isn't the one who's smartest — it's a plodding profession. You don't build something off a flash of inspiration. It's like making sushi: once your hands get a feel for slicing fish, doing the same work day after day, growing attached to simple ingredients, taking something plain as far as it will go, you find your sushi has become unlike anyone else's."

The idea of a studio came in 2012. A friend lent him a corner of his own company's office, high up in a skyscraper, to work from. At the end of 2013 the old house in the lane went under renovation, and it has been the studio ever since. "I ask myself: do I want a company? Not really. Five or six people, two cats, a comfortable place — that's enough."

The studio's day starts at 10:30. Every morning Zhou Wei comes in, waters the flowers in the courtyard, feeds the two cats, pours a cup of coffee and starts work, often until late. Mondays and Thursdays are "Mi'ao Canteen" days: an auntie cooks home-style dishes for everyone, and friends who work nearby often drop in to eat.

To most people, thirty-something no longer counts as especially young. But architecture rewards seniority and experience — plenty of people don't lead a major project until their forties — so the young Zhou Wei and his studio are at a disadvantage against the big firms.

When I asked whether that was hard, he grinned and said it's fine, really. "If you're thinking about building a company, you'll feel this isn't your era. Turn it around: I've opened a small sushi shop, and that's plenty good."

Most of the clients who come to Zhou Wei are companies that like trying out new concepts, shaping a brand image through the atmosphere of a space. Others are private owners with highly personal, custom requirements, and occasionally there's a developer. What he cares about most is whether he gets to do design he likes.

A green office space designed for a company (Field Office)

An interior remade to measure for a friend (Mirror House)

Zhou Wei is clear about his design principles. One is to dig out the deep connections between behavior and space and turn them into the starting point of a design; the other is to stick to local ways of building — studying traditional methods, for instance, and using simple but clever small structures. Both run all the way through their work.

Take the bicycle shade shelter in Sanya. When they designed it, Zhou Wei and his colleagues started with a question: what do people actually do while they wait at a red light? So they went out to watch the street, and found that people do far more than they had imagined — in one minute, all sorts of things.

"Some eat, throw away trash; some check themselves in a mirror, sort out their things. So could we make a shelter that answers those needs? Sanya also gets a lot of rain — how do you handle shade and drainage at once? Third is cost. We didn't want a design like this to push costs way up, so we used stainless steel and optimized the design to save material."

The Norway Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo is the kind of attempt Zhou Wei likes best: the building itself, the space inside and the surroundings were all designed together, coherent and of a piece. It was one of the few indoor structures in the world built from large glue-laminated timber and a membrane structure; after the Expo it could be taken apart at the joints and shipped elsewhere to be used again.

His most recent finished project is a hair salon in Hangzhou. The inspiration came from a film, Upside Down. "That film builds a parallel, twin world. The salon tries to shape a single flowing space, even throughout and able to extend without end. The materials aren't flashy in themselves; they're there only to express abstract forms and the relationship between inside and outside. The continuously shifting ceiling, the spotlights set into it and the sheet of light film all hint at the several functional zones the larger space contains."

People take the space in fully from inside it, an effect achieved by pairing ceiling with floor. During a haircut the light is bright; in the shampoo area the ceiling blocks the light and softens it. That shift over a few steps lets people feel how rich the space is.

The salon's exterior is a ring and fully transparent, meant to show the people moving inside, so objects like mirrors are kept faint. The cutting mirrors, set at 45 degrees, are unusual: the rectangular empty frames extending out on either side work like a division drawn in two dimensions, which doesn't block the eye so much as open it up. The evenly lit film overhead weakens every object's shadow, so the person becomes the focus.

Besides design work, Zhou Wei runs a regular salon. The Mi'ao Salon, held every two months, has been going a year now, in a café near the studio. Each time they invite someone from the design world to come and talk. Whoever shares has to be distinctive, with ideas of their own. The speaker doesn't need to be senior — it might be a young person with real promise — and plenty in the audience will question their views or say they admire them. "Come once and you'll see: arguments break out easily, and afterward everyone can still go have a drink together."

He hopes talks like this can produce some real exchange. Many of the speakers hold views that differ from his own, and in the course of a talk people collide and challenge each other's thinking. "Conflict is what actually helps you. You see what other people are thinking, and at the same time you rethink whether you're right. It renews you."

Q = QDaily

Z = Zhou Wei

Q: Do you have a preferred design style?

Z: A few principles. First, stay humble toward the environment. Second, pay attention to the relationship between people and their surroundings. Third, I prefer things that are "weak" — a good design spends a lot of time at the end erasing the traces of its own design. Living somewhere with a very strong sense of design often puts pressure on people. I prefer things that don't look stylized, that blend quietly into your life.

Q: What materials do you like to use?

Z: Real materials. Wood should show the color of wood, stone the texture of stone. What matters is that it's real, which puts people at ease. I wouldn't paint a wall green; if I really needed green, I'd pick a material that is green to begin with.

Q: What is Atelier Mearc best at?

Z: What we're best at, and most interested in, is this: with a small house we can design the building itself, do the interior, and turn the garden into its landscape — ideally adding a few pieces of furniture we've made ourselves. For us, only when all of that comes together can you really give someone a way of living.

Q: Have clients ever asked for something far from your own ideas?

Z: It happens. But our clients are mostly the people who will use the space — the salon owner has to run the business and work in it; this client has to live there. With clients like that there's no conflict between us. I'll respect every idea of yours and give you more surprises besides. The real difficulty is with development projects, where they may care more about the building's commercial value. We try to understand what they need, but we hold to certain principles. We are, after all, a sushi shop that doesn't do braised pork. (Laughs.)

Q: At this stage, what's the studio's biggest difficulty?

Z: Some people think our interior work is good but takes too much time and money, and figure they might as well go to a decorating company — people don't always understand. But I think it will get better, just as ten years ago everyone found MUJI baffling, and now everyone can see the design value in it.

Q: What are your two cats called?

Z: This is funny. A friend picked up two cats and gave them to me, saying they were both boys. I noticed one was well-behaved and one was a handful, so I named them Gege ("Big Brother") and Didi ("Little Brother"). Later a checkup at the vet found they were girls — so it should have been Jiejie ("Big Sister") and Meimei ("Little Sister").

Q: If you weren't a designer, what would you do?

Z: Put it this way: right now I have this studio and a few architects, and I can pick the projects I like. That's already a very good place to be — I've already fulfilled the dream I had as a kid. Whether it can keep going, like whether that sushi shop stays open or closes, isn't entirely up to me. I make the best design I can, and if society doesn't need it for now, I might as well go do manual work — deliver packages, make sushi, chop vegetables. No harm in that.