"Should Hutongs Be Torn Down or Preserved? I Support Neither — Is That Allowed?" | 100 People With Ideas

What Wang Shuo argues for is effective intervention in hutong renewal — renewal that answers the needs of the way people live now. "Do something that can move things in a better direction."

Between the east bank of Xihai Lake in Beijing's Shichahai district and Deshengmennei Street sits a brick-and-concrete factory block, two rows deep, one side facing the water. It belonged to the Beijing Bureau of Machinery, and was later turned into the Blue Lotus Bar, a place with a modest reputation around Shichahai.

Before renovation

Now the owner wants this plot, which runs from Xihai Lake through to Deshengmennei Street, to become a space with the cultural character of a Beijing hutong. He brought in Wang Shuo, founder of the studio META-Project, with a list of functions to fit in: a tea room, formal dining, gatherings, offices, meeting rooms, living quarters and space for entertaining.

Wang Shuo has watched the renewal and evolution of hutongs closely for years. His studio, META-Project, sits at No. 59 Dongsi Shiyitiao, a hutong in the middle of the old city.

The META-Project studio

Since 2012, Wang Shuo and the architect Andrew Bryant have run "Super Hutong," an international research collaboration that has been shown at Beijing Design Week, the China Design Exhibition and the Venice Biennale, and has won support from the Graham Foundation and McKinsey's Urban China Initiative.

This courtyard by Xihai Lake is META-Project's latest attempt to work out how to renovate a place somewhere between preservation and demolition.

When the project was finished, two opposing camps appeared on social media. One thought it "too new — maybe the renovation went too far," and said "this has nothing to do with a hutong." The other called it "a very comfortable space, a design with real character," "done with real care, modern in technique, and highly finished."

In his years of studying hutong projects, Wang Shuo has "never thought the physical form of the hutong mattered all that much, or that the siheyuan courtyard house was so remarkable." What matters to him is the life and the culture inside it. "I've always felt this culture is something people produce naturally, for their own use — the shape that emerges once you take everyday behavior into account."

Take this courtyard by Xihai Lake. It breaks with the siheyuan layout typical of hutongs and is split instead into a sequence of three courtyards. Wang Shuo thinks that actually fits how people live now.

Inside the space, Wang Shuo ran two small experiments: one in piecing materials together, the other in the use of barrel tile.

Many hutong renovations use gray ceramic tile to imitate the texture of old brick. "I think gray ceramic tile is a disgusting thing — it's like buying a fake LV bag. If you can't afford real gray brick, you use gray ceramic tile," Wang Shuo said. To get the look of real gray brick, he chose volcanic rock instead. Freshly cut it is light gray; the more it is polished, the darker it turns. Polishing to roughly 20, 40, 60, 80 and even 100 percent gave him five shades of the same stone, and with them the natural effect of "ink divided into five tones." In scale and in color the material comes close to the high outer walls of the grand old mansions in the hutongs, while its texture varies far more precisely and finely.

The barrel tile is the other highlight of the courtyard. Wang Shuo first designed four or five different screens to enclose the space, and the owner liked none of them. Then the owner told him a story: as a child he used to climb onto roofs and pry loose other people's tiles, and got a beating when his family found out. Looking back, he had a certain fondness for barrel tile, and it was he who suggested using it.

It is an old material used a new way. Barrel tile was made to cover roofs; it varies in color and in shade, and carries "an accumulation of Chinese culture, with a bit of an ink-wash feel to it." Wang Shuo had a module built, and the tiles were set in mortar and stacked vertically inside it, one by one, the way they are laid on a roof, to form a screen. "I asked that each tile be turned one centimeter as it was laid, and that the whole thing be stood upright once it was built, so this dull gray material would show intriguing shifts of light and shadow under different light and from different angles."

Diagram of the overlapping barrel-tile construction

META-Project spent a month on the design and two months on construction, and came away with, in Wang Shuo's words, "a result we're quite satisfied with." He told us: "Nothing we build is meant to look like something else. It's really about what this person needs from his life, plus the understanding of urban culture we've built up through our research. In a short space of time it reflects those things very directly. If I'd had more time I might have kept tinkering, and the effect wouldn't have come out this direct." That, as it happens, is also his answer to the doubters online.

We have written about hutong preservation before, in "Is Old Beijing Bound to Die?". Shi Jian, co-founder of Youfang, told QDaily then: "Preserving hutongs has already become a consensus. Any demolition and rebuilding should proceed on the premise that the fabric of the hutong isn't destroyed and the look of the buildings isn't destroyed either."

Not long ago Wang Shuo gave a video interview about the courtyard by Xihai Lake. The title was blunt — "He Actually Said Beijing's Hutongs Shouldn't Be Preserved". After watching it, Wang Shuo's father called to tell him, "You put that so well." What Wang Shuo wants to say is, "That's not actually what I meant."

He would rather not talk about preservation at all. Whenever hutongs come up, people want him to pick a side first: preservation or demolition. "I say I support neither. Is that not allowed?"

What he wants to discuss is how to intervene effectively in hutong renewal — "to do something that can move things in a better direction."

So what counts as effective intervention?

"I think the precondition for doing anything is that you understand the reality better. Our main problem is that we don't understand the reality — we're just doing things blindly."

"What you need is anatomy," Wang Shuo said. "You need deep analysis. You need to understand the relationships among its cells, its blood, its tissue. Only once you understand that can you give it an injection and treat the illness."

"Super Hutong," the project Wang Shuo is working on now, is the first stage of that effective intervention. "Right now I want to work out what its operating framework looks like. We think that once we have that framework, it can support a lot of people doing the right things on top of it — and by right I mean pushing this city in a better direction."

From the start, META-Project has tried to balance nonprofit urban research against commercial work. "Super Hutong" belongs to the first kind, and its subject is Beijing's old hutongs.

Wang Shuo is a Beijinger, but he grew up in a work-unit compound, a dayuan, not a hutong — though his grandmother lived in a dazayuan, a courtyard house crowded with families, inside one, so his childhood memories include scenes of hutong life. The people who study hutongs and take an interest in them today, he told us, generally did not grow up in them. "A lot of them come from the compounds, or they're foreigners, because I think you need some distance from a thing before you can appreciate its good and bad sides from farther off. Living conditions inside a hutong are quite poor — you don't even have anywhere to go to the bathroom — and there are a lot of painful memories, so the people who lived it don't think it's so great."

Hutongs have interested Wang Shuo for a long time. Taking his master's in architecture at Rice University in the United States, he wrote his thesis on the urban transformation of Beijing. After graduating he worked as an architect at Peter Gluck and Partners in New York and at the Rotterdam headquarters of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), then returned to China as a project architect in OMA's Beijing office, where he handled MahaNakhon, Bangkok's tallest building.

The MahaNakhon project

In 2009 Wang Shuo decided to go out on his own. "I'm a Beijinger — I had to do something for Beijing."

That is when the hutong research began, and the studio still puts half its energy into research. "We try to get grants or sponsorship for these nonprofit urban-research projects, because otherwise we'd be in trouble — funding our research with the money we make from commissions just doesn't work."

"Super Hutong" is now in its third year. Wang Shuo's plan splits it into three stages. The first uses fairly traditional methods to study the city through things like people's movements and social circles. The second gathers people from many fields — urban planners, anthropologists, historians, artists, developers, entrepreneurs — for a series of roundtables and workshops, "so everyone can spark something in each other and open up the possibility of working together." The third is called "urban simulation," and its results will take physical form: site-specific installations, interactive exhibitions, or even direct involvement in real hutong-renewal work.

"Super Hutong" at the Venice Biennale

Plenty of people have wanted to work with him along the way. The Dashilar Renewal Project, which we have reported on, wanted him to build a demonstration model for hutong renovation. But Wang Shuo has always felt that "if I just knock something out in the middle of the research, it's likely to be pretty naive, because I haven't finished the research yet."

In research, Wang Shuo insists on "leaving out any commercial consideration, so I can analyze the city fairly purely and objectively." After a few years of findings, though, chances to advise governments and developers followed. When the government commissioned Beijing Capital Land to redevelop the area from Dongsi Santiao to Batiao, the developer brought him in as an adviser, and he handed over the ready-made models of intervention and renovation from his earlier research, staying involved as the work went on. In his words: "What's actually been built is still a long way from good, but at least they now know they can't use the old model of tearing everything down and rebuilding."

Set the research aside, though, and Wang Shuo works differently once he is inside a real project.

"If you're going to do a project, it has to be self-consistent, economically and in how it's set up. We won't build the kind of thing that's just an installation. A real project means an entirely different set of problems — you have to solve the client's problems and meet their needs."

At the courtyard by Xihai Lake, for instance, the owner's office and his home are both packed into one large house, so the problem was how to reconcile working and living.

META-Project recently finished renovating a cultural and creative space in Jianchang Hutong near Yonghe Temple, right against the west wall of the Imperial College.

The Imperial College's Biyong Hall, seen from the factory building

The entrance, beside the Imperial College's west wall

The factory building, more than 1,000 square meters, had struggled to find tenants and stood empty for years. In the end the owner simply turned it into a maker space for culture and media. One requirement was obvious: a flexible layout, for entertainment, meetings, a library, offices, exhibitions, reception and more.

The ground-floor courtyard

The site had already been enclosed into something like a siheyuan courtyard. Wang Shuo's method here was "a renovation model of intervening to activate": he injected a set of wooden boxes, almost installations, into the big space to bring it alive, and added an outdoor staircase running straight up to the second-floor terrace, from which you can see the neighboring Imperial College's Biyong, the hall built in the Qianlong era where the emperor once lectured. "The good thing is it brings a sense of story back to the place. Once you plant these boxes, you suddenly feel there's a scene and a plot. It brings back a lot of that hide-and-seek feeling — the boxes can look across at one another, which makes for some interesting moments in how the space gets used."

Panorama of the mezzanine

The box installations

The box installations

The attic

The attic

Look across META-Project's work and you can see that each space throws up an interesting pattern of intervention of its own. Wang Shuo never starts from "let's make this old, or classical, or European, or Chinese." The way you renovate, he says, has to be tied to the way people use the place. "The condition we set before taking a project is basically this: if you let me make a bottle, the bottle has to follow the state the wine is in now. Which is to say, if the house allows for a better way of reflecting contemporary life, we're willing to do it."

Images courtesy of META-Project.