*Dream Renovation* Made Him Famous. He Says Repeating the Same Renovation Is Pointless | 100 People With Ideas
Plenty of people say he looks like Shun Oguri, but an architect can't make a living on good looks.
Plenty of people say he looks like Shun Oguri, but an architect can't make a living on good looks.
Ten years after arriving in Beijing, Shuhei Aoyama speaks decent Chinese. In conversation he listens closely to your question, thinks for a moment, then answers slowly and in earnest.
This summer the designer from Hiroshima, Japan, became known to a much wider audience after appearing on Dream Renovation (《梦想改造家》), a big home-makeover reality show on Dragon TV. He turned a cramped 35-square-meter home in Nanluoguxiang — three generations, five people — into a bright, orderly place to live, and redefined what a life in the hutongs could look like. He was also the first foreign designer to appear on the show.
Within days Aoyama was on Weibo's hot-search list and riding a wave on Douban, where threads titled "Shuhei Aoyama is so handsome!" and "How do I marry Shuhei Aoyama?!" shot to the top. Warm, adorably awkward, thoughtful — those became the words people reached for to describe him.
After the show finished the renovation of what it billed as the "smallest school-district home in history," the home of a woman the show called Fat Auntie and her family of five, Aoyama became, in everyone's eyes, the master of the small space. "A lot of people have come to me wanting their homes redone. 'I have a 10-square-meter apartment, can you fix it up for me?'" A faint smile hides at the corner of his mouth as he says this. Then he shakes his head. "But those are projects we probably can't take on anymore."
"I don't think designing one person's living space means very much — so much of it comes down to individual taste and style," he says. "Take Fat Auntie's place. A lot of old houses in Beijing's old city have the same problems hers did. What I was after with that renovation was what comes after it: this way of renovating can be spread around. That's what matters to us."
The people who live in Beijing's hutongs are mostly the elderly, foreigners, and residents of modest means packed into shared courtyard compounds. Aoyama hopes what he learned from this renovation shows more people what is possible. "That's the kind of work we want to be part of, not just individual cases."
He has loved architecture since he was a boy, and his eye is still on bigger projects.
Aoyama's father worked in architectural design and took small jobs of his own. Aoyama's feeling for architecture came out of the professional books on his father's shelf, which he flipped through all through high school. When it came time for university, he chose architecture at Osaka University without much deliberation. After his third year he took a year off to travel as a backpacker: first a boat crossing of more than 50 hours to Shanghai, then Xinjiang, Tibet and Nepal, then the Middle East, Africa and Europe, and finally the sail from Shanghai back to Osaka.
That long trip gave him a great deal to think about beyond design. "Every place has its own way of living and its own rules for living," he says. "Before you think about the architecture, it's worth thinking about how people there actually live."
He went on to a master's degree at the University of Tokyo, and spent a year of it on exchange at two European schools — the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-La Villette, and one in Brussels. The Paris school leaned artistic, he says; the Brussels one was rigorous and orthodox.
He was reading architecture magazines then, too. Beijing was deep in its preparations for the 2008 Olympics, and a run of new work by big-name architects was surfacing: the CCTV Headquarters by OMA, the Bird's Nest national stadium, the National Centre for the Performing Arts led by the French architect Paul Andreu. "None of them were built yet, but there were renderings, and I kept watching. I felt something was changing in China."
That, plus a few earlier trips to the country, is why Aoyama took an internship in China after graduating. He decided to "come see for myself what kind of changes were happening here."
He planned to stay two months, then go back to Japan and look for work. Two months later he decided to stay. "I found it interesting here — there was more I could do. Even though I was still young, it felt like there was more room to do things than in Japan." The year was 2005.
His start in Beijing was still a Japanese firm, SAKO Architects (Beijing). It was there that he landed the project he has enjoyed most since coming to the city: Tanggu Primary School in Tianjin. He ran it from the bid through construction and worked on every layer of it — interiors, architecture, landscape. "I think it was a meaningful project, because chances like that don't come often. Projects in China are large now, and plenty of them change direction or stop halfway. If you're unlucky, you can work at a firm for years and never see a project you worked on get built. So seeing one through to the end was lucky."
The Tanggu school sits on a large campus that also holds a kindergarten, a middle school, a library, a gymnasium and a cafeteria. What stands out in the primary school Aoyama and his team designed is the inside: the spaces and the paths people take through them. Design started in December 2008; the school was finished in September 2011.
The sides of the roof carry no glass, which makes a half-outdoor space with air moving through it. Ordinary classrooms run along one side of the building, music, dance and lab rooms along the other, and several connecting corridors tie the two together, turning the space between them into a place to meet. Look out through the round passageways, doorways and windows of various sizes and the view turns playful and odd — a touch of Yayoi Kusama, the Queen of Polka Dots.
A year ago Aoyama left SAKO to start his own practice, B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio. No larger ambition seems to lie behind the move; to him it was a natural outcome, the choice many architects make, and it gives him more room to pick the projects he wants. Besides running the firm, he is working on a PhD in Tsinghua University's architecture department. By the time he decided to do it he had been working for seven years at a constant pace, and he felt he needed a stretch of time to think slowly, and more reading behind him if he wanted to make something different later. "If you want to design new kinds of buildings, you probably need some theory underneath. I felt that alternating between theory and practice was the better state to be in."
Study and work already press on him, and he lectures on top of both, at North China University of Technology's School of Architecture and Art. He treats it as a conversation with the students, one he grows from too.
In school he preferred design courses to the ones on structure and mechanics, and the architect he most admires, Kenzo Tange, made buildings that hit you in the gut. As Aoyama puts it: "A lot of architects' work needs rational analysis before you can appreciate it — how good the spatial layout is, what new materials went into it. His spaces move you without your having to think at all."
It is the same when he designs. Aoyama doesn't want to be pinned to one style: partly because he still counts himself as growing and wants to open up more possibilities, partly because he doesn't think every project has to be self-expression. "Every project really is different, and I try to meet each one fresh. I don't think this kind of design comes out of my own strength alone — I hope that each time, running into different people produces something new."
That doesn't mean he has no preferences. He likes nature, and while he can't name a material or two off the top of his head, he says it plainly: "I don't like shiny things. I like things with a matte feel."
Since the studio opened, most of B.L.U.E.'s work has been interiors — restaurants, jewelry stores, shops, hotels — such as the Yuanmai Shanqiu bakery at Juntai Department Store in Xidan, and SANLIPOP, a row of street-front shops in Sanlitun. But, Aoyama says: "We're an architecture firm. Our goal going forward is still architecture projects."
The thinking behind every project he does, as he sees it, ties back to the city around it — which is where the studio's name comes from. Spell out B.L.U.E. letter by letter and you get Beijing Laboratory for Urban Environment. He has even thought about building somewhere with strong natural features of its own, a desert, say.
Aoyama lives in a hutong near Nanluoguxiang; the studio sits at Langyuan Vintage, in the core of the Chaoyang district CBD, about as far from a hutong as you can get. Out the studio window, the face of the small building across the way is covered in plants, which now and then lifts his mood on a late night at work.
He is fine with roast duck, old-Beijing hotpot, the genuinely local food. He barely cooks, so he often eats noodles — Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles and the like. One thing he can't take, though, is the crayfish young people are so fond of these days. "Is it that you find them too spicy? Or not clean?" "No. Crayfish were what we played with as kids. They were toys."
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.