Like Designing a Church in Zhangjiagang: Every Building Has to Find Its "Reason" | 100 People With Ideas

The architect Zhuang Ziyu thinks that is what architecture is: "If you start out with something that has a lot of force to it, you can give up pieces of it along the way. But if what you start with isn't strong enough, you may end up with nothing at all."

Zhuang Ziyu recently moved his studio from Jianwai SOHO, in Beijing's CBD, to a courtyard house in Dongjiaogan Hutong, next to the Bell and Drum Towers. He is the only Chinese partner in the German architecture and design group RSAA, and its principal architect for China.

The Bell Tower and the Drum Tower sit almost exactly on Beijing's central axis. Climb to the second-floor glass platform of the courtyard house RSAA renovated and you have the best angle for looking out at both. Duck out of the narrow Dongjiaogan Hutong and you are in the busy, workaday streets around the Drum Tower.

For Zhuang, moving the studio into a courtyard house made sense because working in architecture means moving back and forth between old and new, standing between the past and the future — "it is only in that back-and-forth that you find something new."

Independent architecture firms are no longer rare in China, but RSAA's position is unusual. It is not the China branch of a foreign firm, and not a studio opened by an architect who came home from abroad. It arrived with German ideas, yet a Chinese architect steers it, and it is turning into an ever more local brand. Outside the Cologne headquarters, China is RSAA's most important market. The Qingdao office takes on large public buildings — cultural, office and planning work — while the Beijing office concentrates on smaller projects with a character of their own.

Architects rarely sum themselves up by a style, but whenever they do something, they find themselves a "reason." Moving the studio into a hutong needed one too.

The church in Zhangjiagang, still unbuilt, is one interesting experiment. During the bidding, Zhuang asked the Zhangjiagang Religious Affairs Bureau whether they needed a church that looked like a church. They said it was up to the designer. "There were no limits, so I put in a bid," Zhuang says. "I knew our chances of winning that way were slim. But I wanted to find myself a reason."

RSAA's proposal for the Zhangjiagang church carried a strange freshness. Instead of the ornate look of a traditional Christian church, it pulled the most basic geometric elements out of a wide range of traditional church imagery and stacked them back together as abstract slices, so that the outside of the building changes as the viewer's angle changes. Inside, the space is soft, enveloping and gentle, with a strong sense of flow. The auxiliary buildings around it sit in a native state, rooted to the ground: a series of low walls blocking sightlines, and the stillness of a lake, make a "stage" in front of the church entrance that stresses its central place.

The back of the church

The interior of the church

In the end the client picked a relatively modern church — and the other shortlisted scheme, sure enough, looked like an old European church. "With this kind of bid in China, they will probably end up choosing something middle-of-the-road," Zhuang later explained to himself. "Put plainly, buildings are expensive. Putting one up costs a few hundred million to more than a billion yuan, so they aren't likely to give you that much room to do these things."

Like the drab, by-the-book buildings you see everywhere in China, these public projects tie up a great deal of society's resources and are large in area and scale. RSAA has handled a fair number of them: the Jining Cultural Center, various high-end residential compounds, the Shanxi Radio and Television Center, the new campus of Tianjin No. 4 Middle School, the Qingdao International Convention and Exhibition Center. On projects like these, Zhuang knows, "we have to carry a lot of baggage as we walk forward." That is not much like making IT products or online products.

The new campus of Tianjin No. 4 Middle School

Some examples excite Zhuang. The SOHO China projects Zaha Hadid designed work purely from form; they are mostly making visual impact, news hooks and market talking points. That is different from Vanke, which turns housing into a product it can copy, cutting costs while still delivering relatively high quality. CCTV's new headquarters exists to tell you that what it challenges is the conventional way of expressing space; everything about it serves that intent.

Last year Zhuang was invited to give a TEDxCQU talk in Chongqing, "Standing in the Future, Designing the Past," on how hard and how complicated architecture is as a discipline. Modern architectural history has no shortage of admirers of Mies van der Rohe, the master who held that "less is more." But in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi argues that outstanding architecture is necessarily contradictory and complex, rather than pure or simple in an either/or way. It is a book on architecture that Zhuang holds in high regard.

Given all that complexity, what kind of architecture firm can live well? Zhuang remembers that in China this used to be easy. Whether a design institute or a private firm, "landing one developer was enough to live on for several years." But now the slump in the property market has hit the whole architecture and design industry, and design institutes and design companies have begun making deep pay cuts and layoffs.

There is not much room left for designers to go looking for reasons. The young architects who studied architecture abroad, spent years soaking in firms there and came home to set up studios on a whim now rely more on sites like Gooood to publish their work, entering competition after competition — and most of what they submit never gets built.

After a short trough in 2008, RSAA's business slowly recovered and is now fairly steady. Zhuang says RSAA China starts about two large public building projects a year, three or four planning projects, another four or five small interior projects, and a few competition bids. The Beijing team also takes part in designing the large projects in Qingdao. These big jobs have earned RSAA a good name.

The Jining Cultural Center

Zhuang also has the German headquarters' background in green building to thank: in sustainable architecture he cleverly found himself another reason. It is no longer purely a luxury like an architect's concepts and ideals; clients are far happier to hear about the "principles of sustainable development" it contains. Sure enough, firms today all bring green, environmental thinking into their designs — it is a respectable piece of rhetoric. "This is how we get more attention from clients, so they see that this is a company with a character of its own, and what its strengths are," Zhuang explains.

Set aside these conceptual word games and what Zhuang cares about more is the experience a building gives: first, whether it feels comfortable; second, what it is like when you actually use it. He is now leading the RSAA team designing the Five Seasons Hotel, the high-end brand under Nanjing's Jinling Hotel. He imagines making, within a limited space, an atmosphere in which people feel green living at every moment. Zhuang calls it the project that so far realizes his ideas most fully and compromises least. It is more enjoyable. As for the Zhangjiagang church, Zhuang says, "you'd be doing well to run into one or two of those in fifty years."

Architecture is more an art of compromise. Luckily Zhuang has worked out a few tricks of the trade: "If you start out with something that has a lot of force to it, you can give up pieces of it along the way. But if what you start with isn't strong enough, you may end up with nothing at all."