Beijing's Waves of Old-City Renovation: A New Way of Life, or Just New Talking Points? | Is Old Beijing Dead? (1)

A vessel for nostalgia, a political achievement on display, a social talking point, a design experiment — that is what Beijing's old city has become.

Over this year's National Day holiday, 1,200 people a day walked through the nine hutongs of Shichahai in Beijing, and 20,000 information booklets were handed out in all. Baitasi and Dashilar posted similar numbers.

All three are tourist districts, but most of the people who came were not there for the scenery. Among them were residents who had lived in the hutongs for decades, students from art and architecture schools, government officials, retired professors, and people who work in business, in academia, and in design.

In old Beijing slang, for that week and a half they all became hutong chuanzi — hutong drifters — wandering back and forth through lanes that are usually quiet, there specifically to see the newly renovated courtyards and old houses.

The booklets they took away were handouts for three themed exhibitions at Beijing Design Week: the Dashilar Renewal Program, the Baitasi Regeneration Plan, and Meet Shichahai. Wang Yudong, executive deputy director of the organizing committee office of Beijing International Design Week, told QDaily that with the Beijing municipal government moving to Tongzhou and some cultural industries moving out, a large number of vacated old buildings — from factory workshops to hutong houses — need to be filled again.

Wang's idea, put simply: "Low-energy, small and medium-sized cultural industries should be built up gradually inside the inner city. This kind of industry usually isn't only offices — it also includes cafés, boutiques, other commercial spaces. Many European cities have successful examples."

Under this thinking, "old-city renovation" — a subject that has been argued over since 1949 — is back on the agenda. Every so often you see words like "restoring the old to look old," "mass demolition and rebuilding," "housing relocation," and "micro-circulation renewal" turn up in the media. But on the whole they have all been "the government's business": for anyone who does not live in the old city and pays it no attention, these terms mean very little day to day.

This year's Design Week was different. How is it being renovated? Is it being done well? Does it mean anything at all? People discussed these questions often — partly because earlier renovations are now fermenting into wider public argument, and partly because people have realized that after all these accumulated years, no one still knows where this city's renovation is actually heading.

(I)

Zhuo Jun entered the School of Urban Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. After graduating, she and some friends opened an interior design studio called Jing Design. As she remembers it, within architecture circles Ma Yansong was among the first designers to take on hutong renovation; the curved metal surface he set down inside a courtyard drew a lot of discussion. Her mentor, Liang Jianguo, had earlier renovated a siheyuan in southern Beijing.

But hutong renovation comes up far more often in public talk. "That would be the renovation the Japanese designer Aoyama Shuhei did for the Fat Auntie's family, the one on the show Dream Home Makeover (《梦想改造家》)." After it aired, WeChat official accounts writing up the "Fat Auntie renovation" repeatedly cleared 100,000 reads.

That case may have struck a chord with two groups at once: people living in the old city and people living in new apartment towers. The first group's situation resembled the Fat Auntie's. The second group worries daily about housing prices that keep climbing after years of restraint, living space that keeps shrinking, and family units that keep getting smaller too — empty-nest young people, elderly people living alone, young people who have just left the families they grew up in to make homes of their own.

Aoyama recently did a second hutong renovation for Dream Home Makeover, and this time he also turned up in two different districts, first at Meet Shichahai and then in the Baitasi Regeneration Plan. One job was the interior of one of the six households at Lechunfang No. 1 in Shichahai; the other was an international competition for design proposals called "The Rebirth of Beijing's Small Courtyards." Among the 24 shortlisted proposals for that competition, his studio BLUE was one of two teams to win the top prize, with a design for an artist's workshop.

"That earlier kind of renovation, full of talking points and artistic flourish, had its own value — it drew more attention and discussion, for one thing. But now, like Aoyama, a lot of designers are returning to the humane side architecture ought to have, settling down to study smaller projects," Zhuo Jun told QDaily.

The Dutch designer Issabel Drissen feels the same. Three years ago she came to work in the Beijing office of a design firm called Spark. A year later the office was closed because it could not win large projects, and Spark renamed itself Clou. Drissen has stayed on in China as an independent designer, working with different design studios, and the jobs she takes are all small ones too.

The mass demolition and construction that began in 2008 now looks like a problem left over from another era. For designers there is no longer enough open land for big projects, and in a slack economy few clients can pay large design fees. Architects who had spent years, willingly or not, pushing out the city's edges and skyline without pause now find they have time on their hands.

Just then the central government put old-city renovation and rural construction on the table, and architects began to have time to rethink what it means to be an architect — above all what the profession is for socially.

"I've been in China 11 years, seven of them living in Beijing's hutongs... I think the shared community and shared life of the Beijing hutong is exactly this kind of half-public domestic space... A home should be open; a home should merge with the city. The city can be brought into the home, and the home can extend into the city... It has to do with nature, and with life," Aoyama Shuhei said at a recent Yixi talk.

Duo Ning, founder of Duotai Architecture, shared an article on WeChat Moments last August titled "Dream Home Makeover Designer Aoyama Shuhei Brings Beijing's Old Hutongs Back to Life." He had something to add.

"Looking back at 2015 ten years from now, it may turn out to be no more than a small ripple at the bottom of a market trough... The road out has to be trodden by every practitioner together, the way Mies put it: 'Architecture should arise from its own era, just as old architecture did. What each era achieves matches how far it dares to explore.'"

(II)

"A donkey turd — shiny on the outside."

Zhao Shujun said this standing at the gate of Lechunfang No. 1 in Shichahai. In old Beijing dialect it means: all surface, no substance.

Zhao Shujun was born in 1957 and has lived on nearby Baimi Xiejie ever since — close to 60 years. "The courtyard we lived in used to be the back garden of Viceroy Zhang Zhidong's residence. Now that was grand. Ever heard the saying 'never step past the front gate, never cross the inner gate'? You've probably never even made it past the inner gate. A proper siheyuan has ear rooms, wing rooms, a rear courtyard, a moon gate — you only know what that tastes like if you've lived in one."

Baimi Xiejie sits right beside Shichahai. In Zhao's memory, life in the hutong meant swimming in summer and skating in winter, shutting the door to whisper secrets, and dragging out a stool to sit in the courtyard or standing at the gate whenever you felt like talking to a neighbor. He does not like the look of Lechunfang No. 1 at all, and does not understand why a Japanese designer was brought in to renovate an old Beijing siheyuan.

"What is this thing they've made? Not a trace of the old siheyuan flavor left."

Interior of Lechunfang No. 1

Six designers, Aoyama among them, worked on the interior of Lechunfang No. 1. They dug the siheyuan down two levels, leaving only a long vertical strip in the middle as a two-story shared space, part of it opened up into a light well. The area around it was cut into six units — A1, A2, B1, B2, C and D — each renovated by a different designer to his or her own concept.

From outside it is still the gate of a siheyuan, but inside it feels more like a row of townhouses. Lift the whole space straight up from underground to street level and you would have a three-story building with six apartments, each one taking the full height of its unit. Every unit holds a good many staircases running up and down, some of them steep and narrow. The only link between units is that long, narrow central passage, plus the floor-to-ceiling window each unit turns toward the shared space at the center.

Zhao's own Baimi Xiejie was brought into the old-city relocation program long ago, but the terms are less generous than they were. "It used to be 1 to 7.5 — one square meter of old house got you 7.5 square meters in Xi'erqi, plus a resettlement payment of 40,000 yuan per square meter. Now it's 1 to 3.8 for a place near Aosen, or 1 to 5.5 in Shijicun, with a resettlement payment of just 10,000 yuan per square meter. But go take a look and you'll see: the apartment itself is too small, and too much of the floor area goes to shared space."

Xi'erqi, Aosen, Shijicun — all of these residential areas sit around Beijing's Fifth Ring Road. Xi'erqi in particular lies close to the Zhongguancun Software Park, full of internet companies, and doubles as the interchange between the Changping Line and Line 13, which makes it one of the most crowded subway stations in the whole city.

Zhou Zifan is a second-year student at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. He volunteered in Dashilar during Design Week and found a little time only on the last day to come see the renovated hutong courtyards in Shichahai. When we met him at Lechunfang No. 1 he was, like Zhao Shujun, unhappy with the design — but for a different reason: "the design details aren't humane enough."

Two of Zhou's teachers studied in Japan before returning to teach in China, and their main research is also renovation and design for small units. Touring the site, he ran into problems his teachers had called "taboos": a staircase pitch of more than 45 degrees, steps close to 30 centimeters high, doorways narrower than 80 to 90 centimeters — the width you need to pass through squared up and turned sideways — and so on. Because of these he tripped on stairs, hit his head, and had trouble getting in and out.

"These past few days volunteering in Dashilar, the feedback I hear most from residents nearby is: it looks good, it's novel, but it's a bit far from our lives," Zhou Zifan told QDaily.

Whether about the renovated courtyards or the exhibitions inside them, this kind of response was common in every district.

Liuhai Hutong No. 24, also in Shichahai, was turned into a "Tiniest Concert Hall." On the evening of September 29 the China National Symphony Orchestra was invited in for a small concert. Invited media and a few young people who had followed the sound listened happily, many of them holding up phones to shoot video and take photos. The residents did not come in.

One resident asked us: "Is this going to be a concert hall all the time? No. 13 Middle School is right next door, and two kids there have exams coming up. I'm worried it'll disturb their studying."

Another pointed at the housing management office in front of the concert hall, and at a courtyard wall facing it from the side. "That's less than ten meters apart. Look how neatly the air-conditioning racks are mounted outside the housing office. There's really no money to patch up ordinary people's courtyard walls?"

Across from the courtyard in Dashilar holding the Dutch art exhibition "Nostalgia," a middle-aged man surnamed Li squatted on the ground. He told QDaily: "After they took this house over it took four years just to repair — look, the eaves still aren't finished. Every year at Design Week a different bunch comes in to put up an exhibit. I can't see what's so good about tying a few flowers under a big balloon, or standing four giant heads in a row."

In Baitasi, a Professor Wang from the School of Architecture at Tianjin University walked the whole site and kept turning one question over: what was the motive behind all this? In his view, "none of this counts as architectural design; it's art made for an exhibition." "People's doubts about safety and function are fair enough, but before you judge something you have to be clear what you're judging it against. Personally, I don't think these projects were ever meant for the hutong residents."

(III)

In its history Beijing's old-city renovation has never produced a single success, and foreign experience is hard to copy here. At the foot of the old imperial city, policy counts for more than elsewhere, and the longer a place's history, the more intractable its problems.

Weng Li, former editor of Chinese and Foreign Film Market Trends (《中外电影市场动态》) at China Film Group, wrote in The Culture of the Hutong (《胡同的文化》), published in January 1992: "Beijing's hutongs are not merely the veins of the city or its thoroughfares. They appeared only after the city itself existed — more precisely, only after Beijing became the capital of the Yuan dynasty... At first glance Beijing's hutongs all look alike, grey walls and earthen tiles, one and the same. In fact they are not: every single hutong has something to say for itself, has its own story, and is full of curious anecdotes and lore."

Those stories once formed the base of the city's history and culture, and the pride of old Beijingers.

Two years before Weng's book came out — on November 23, 1990, to be exact — the Beijing Municipal People's Government announced its first list of historic and cultural conservation areas. The three big districts in this year's Beijing Design Week — Dashilar, Baitasi (on Fuchengmennei Street) and Shichahai — were all on that first list.

By 2002 Beijing had designated a second batch of conservation areas, 15 in all, and added three more three years later.

But the buildings that vanished with no record and no explanation are probably more numerous still. Old Beijing has a saying: "nine gates inside, seven outside, four in the imperial city; of the nine gates, eight chime-plates and one bell" — the first half describing the city's layout, the second its folklore. Of the twenty city gates in the first half, not one is left.

Shan Jixiang, director of the Palace Museum, recently proposed that every historic block still worth preserving as a whole within Beijing's 62.5-square-kilometer historic urban area be designated a conservation area: "At its peak, Beijing had more than 6,000 streets and hutongs. Today, within the historic urban area, fewer than 1,500 streets and hutongs remain, and only just over 600 of them lie inside the 30 designated conservation areas. How the other 900 or so should be protected is still unclear." Within the historic urban area, these traditional remains cover less than a third of the total area, and their building forms and street patterns differ widely.

Much of what people understand about Beijing's urban planning comes from Beijing Record (《城记》), published in 2003 by the Xinhua reporter Wang Jun. It is worth a brief recap.

In Beijing's history, Dadu, the Yuan-dynasty capital, was the first capital planned on the principle of merging residential wards and markets into one. Beyond its basic scheme — court in front, markets behind, the state modeled on an extended household, a strict hierarchy of order — it was also a complete design running all the way from the courtyard up to the city.

"The jian, the single bay, is the city's most basic unit. So many bays make a siheyuan, so many siheyuan make a hutong, so many hutongs make a fang, a ward, so many wards make a city. Precisely because these fixed proportions held between them, much of the building material could be prefabricated to one standard and put up quickly: Dadu covered 49 square kilometers, and from the first day of construction to the day the emperor took the throne to govern in person took only seven years... Only for large structures — the Confucius Temple, the Imperial Academy — could the grid be broken and the building allowed to span several hutongs."

When the new People's Republic made Beijing its capital in 1949 and planned a central administrative district, that pattern was broken for the first time.

Many people still remember the fiercely argued "Liang-Chen Proposal." In 1950 the scholars Liang Sicheng and Chen Zhanxiang proposed keeping Beijing's old city intact and putting a new administrative district together to its west, in the area from Gongzhufen to Yuetan. Such an arrangement would have kept too many functions from piling up in the old city, which leaves large numbers of people living on the outskirts and working in the center and creates heavy cross-district traffic. It would also have avoided the enormous investment needed to tear down the old city on a large scale and build a new one.

What they wanted to avoid sounds exactly like Beijing today. The argument came round again in 1979, when Wu Liangyong proposed a multi-center structure to disperse functions out of the old city. None of these proposals prevailed.

Between 1949 and 2003 Beijing went through three rounds of renovation. The first came in the 1950s and 1960s, when the city walls, the memorial archways and other ancient structures were torn down (there was even talk of renovating the Forbidden City, which came to nothing). The second came in 1990, with a plan to renovate all of the city's dilapidated old housing within ten years; it never happened, because "a large batch of projects could not balance their funding." The third came in 2000, when a new demolition-and-relocation method was introduced with lower compensation standards, meant to clear all dilapidated housing in five years. In the first two years more houses came down than in the whole previous decade. Then in 2002, after criticism from many experts and scholars, the plan was halted.

(IV)

Wang Jun's Beijing Record does not cover what came next. In the memory of many young Beijingers, the renovation of Qianmen Street right beside Dashilar, and the tourist-clogged Nanluoguxiang, are probably the two failures they witnessed themselves.

The artist Hashimoto Doko has been in Beijing for 17 years. She usually runs a studio at home called Dingweitang, teaching young people printmaking and rubber-stamp carving. For this year's Design Week she applied to take part in the Chinese Traditional Handicrafts program in the Dashilar district, and was given a 20-square-meter courtyard at No. 13 Cha'er Hutong, where she explained and demonstrated woodblock printing to visitors.

But there was another question she wanted answered more: what exactly does this Dashilar Renewal Program intend to change?

In 2003 Hashimoto had just graduated from the printmaking department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Back then this district — which Beijingers say as "da shi lar" and outsiders always mispronounce "da zha lan" — was her favorite place to wander. On days with few classes she would take the bus to Qianmen, then walk on foot through Dashilar all the way to Liulichang, 1,400 meters away. The walk always made her think of Xiangzi, the rickshaw puller in Lao She's Rickshaw Boy.

Less than three years after graduating, Hashimoto went back to Qianmen and found nothing there but the Quanyechang building, a lone protected landmark. "It gave me a fright — a few months, and how was everything flattened?" From then on she rarely went to that district again.

From 2006 to 2009, on the momentum of the Olympics, the large-scale renovation of Qianmen Street was treated as a major municipal project. The once-crowded main road became a pedestrian street, while two new north-south arteries parallel to it were opened on either side: Qianmen East Road and the reopened old Meishi Street. They took over from Qianmen Street as the route linking Luomashi Street (Liangguang Road) in the south to Moon Bay at the Qianmen gate tower in the north.

Traffic capacity improved, but Qianmen Street, stripped of its job as a thoroughfare, became a tourist attraction. Its leasing and management rights were sold to Pan Shiyi's SOHO China, and it filled up with every kind of faux-antique building "restored to look old," losing its pull among old Beijingers and people like Hashimoto Doko alike.

A Zhihu user, @Cui Yuchun, lamented: "After Qianmen Street was renovated, the neighbors who used to stream through these lanes moved out past the Fifth Ring Road, plenty of time-honored shops said goodbye to the place for good because the rent got too dear, and I left the Beijing that raised me too." He allowed that "traffic jams aside, before the renovation the Qianmen area was full of tricycle carts, pancake stalls, sweet-potato stalls and corn stalls playing hide-and-seek with the chengguan, and the underpasses were packed with beggars and street performers (all of it a con) scraping a living at the bottom of society." But he also felt that "the Qianmen of those days had a real human warmth to it, the authentic, recognizable truth of street life."

Renovation this blunt is agreed on all sides to be a botch of old-city renewal.

By contrast, the renovation of Nanluoguxiang, which ran roughly in parallel with the mass demolition at Qianmen, was considered a success. At least that is how the Beijing Institute of Urban Development still described it as recently as 2015, in its report "A Study on the Planning Reserve for Major Projects in the Protection and Renovation of Beijing's Old City."

"The Nanluogu model: a micro-circulation renewal model with the government as the implementing body, achieving restorative repair and renovation of the original architectural character, cultural relics and hutong fabric through small-scale, incremental organic renewal."

Even so, Nanluoguxiang slipped out of control. Today, like Qianmen Street, it is a busy but low-grade tourist strip. A friend of Hashimoto's opened a shop there: "but the rent tripled within a year, and it scared her off. Go look now — chain stores coming and going, the same brand turning up again and again."

Last year Nanluoguxiang failed to make the first list of China's Historic and Cultural Blocks, announced jointly by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. Dashilar made it instead.

(V)

The Dashilar Renewal Program, the Baitasi Regeneration Plan, Meet Shichahai — these similar-sounding new plans may well leave people like Zhao Shujun, Zhou Zifan and Hashimoto Doko confused.

On the surface their implementing bodies and operators appear to differ too. Open the brochures handed out in the different districts and you find the names of three property developers — Guang'an Holdings, Huarong Jinying and Tianheng Real Estate — while the operators are Dashilar Investment Company (known as "Da Tou"), Keyi Venture Capital and UED Magazine.

In fact all three developers belong to the Xicheng District government in Beijing, and their day-to-day work is mainly housing relocation and thinning out the population. As for the operators, apart from Da Tou, a subsidiary of Guang'an Holdings, the rest are private platforms that assemble designers and media resources.

A staff member on the Baitasi Regeneration Plan project team put it simply: "The government provides the land and the money; everyone else provides the ideas and the labor."

One factor is strengthening the government's will to renovate. Li Yi, who turned 60 this year, used to live in Houhai and has since moved to a hutong near Caishikou. He recently went to a branch of Bank of Beijing near Caishikou and noticed a change on a fire-safety notice. It read "Capital Political Center Zone," not the old "Capital Center Zone."

The official term for the shift is "relieving the capital's functions": keep the political function only, drop the roles of economic center and cultural center. Which means district governments now have to work out for themselves how to fill their communities with economic and cultural activity — and if you have not forgotten the executive deputy director of the Beijing International Design Week organizing committee office from the start of this article, that is exactly what he was talking about.

The Dashilar Renewal Program was the first of the three to join Design Week, and this is its fifth year. Its flagship project, Yangmeizhu Xiejie, began in much the same position as Nanluoguxiang: renovating a whole street. But Nanluoguxiang was originally a residential area, while Yangmeizhu Xiejie has been a commercial street since ancient times, so the goal there was to bring commerce back. Even so, in the view of Jia Rong, who runs the program's execution, "Nanluoguxiang was overdeveloped, too commercial. The hutong turned into a marketplace, and that isn't sustainable. It's exactly what Dashilar's renewal has to avoid."

Their method is still to relocate residents first and lease to merchants afterward, but with tight control over which merchants get in. Since 2011, 614 of 1,700 households have been moved out. The criteria for merchants include "agreeing with the idea of organic renewal, having a distinctive appeal and drawing power, having cultural substance of their own, fitting the architectural character of the street, respecting local ways of life, and getting along well with the original residents." Because there is no telling which residents will agree to move, the vacated houses do not form a continuous stretch; they are scattered through the hutong like flowers pricked into a vase.

Some of the merchants who moved in think Yangmeizhu Xiejie is a success so far. At the end of the street, a plainly decorated Hunan restaurant called Yufunan opened in October 2015 and has drawn plenty of young customers. Its owner, Zuo Taiming, told QDaily: "Honestly, I rented here because I had no money... Rent on Yangmeizhu Xiejie was only seven or eight yuan a square meter a day, the shop was 61 square meters, and it was Beijing Design Week, so foot traffic looked decent. I made up my mind."

Zuo said the shop turned a profit in its first month, and he soon found an investor. He is now preparing a second location, 400 square meters, next to the Lu Xun Museum in Baitasi, at a higher rent of 80,000 yuan a month. "But we don't plan to go chain. A lot of the brands that open on Yangmeizhu Xiejie are probably like us — a little precious in tone, selling to a niche crowd to begin with."

Over the past six months, though, he has felt merchants arriving on the street faster. "Four or five new shops have opened since January."

Jia Rong's team, which runs the Dashilar Renewal Program, also set up a Dashilar cross-disciplinary center — the Dashilar Platform — in 2011, a meeting point between government and market that brings urban planners, designers and brands together, plus a "Dashilar Pilot Project" that solicits proposals from designers, institutions and schools at home and abroad for concrete problems in the district. The ultimate aim is "to turn old-city renovation from the rigid method of 'wholesale relocation and rebuilding from scratch' into the soft planning of 'thinking about the area as a system and renewing it organically through micro-circulation.'"

(VI)

Micro-renewal, micro-circulation. This is a core concept of the Dashilar model.

Both the Baitasi Regeneration Plan and Meet Shichahai appear to want to copy it. In substance it means keeping the residents who do not want to leave while pulling in new people and new businesses, to form a new community that mixes old and new, shops and homes.

Bao Jianda, planning manager in the operations department of Beijing Huarong Jinying Investment & Development Co., Ltd., which organizes the Baitasi Regeneration Plan, told the media during last year's Design Week: "We hope to speed up the renewal and regeneration of this area by renovating buildings, improving the landscape, moving some low-end businesses out, and bringing in suitable, well-matched cultural and creative industries."

Last year they also held a press conference and released the following list of plans:

• Lu Xun Museum area: aimed at the Financial Street crowd, extending to Beijing residents who want to spend on culture. Positioned as a humanities-and-culture district, with core businesses including cultural bookshops, a new Lu Xun Museum and small theaters.
• Dongxicha Commercial Street: aimed at people who want to spend on culture, foreign tourists and the fashionable crowd. Positioned as a 24-hour multi-function commercial street, with core businesses including an arts-and-creative experiential shopping center.
• Baitasi area: aimed at cultural figures, business travelers, and people with some money to spend who want a high-quality life. Positioned as a cluster of boutique hotels, including cultural academies and boutique hotels.
• Fusuijing Building area: aimed at cultural and creative companies, designers setting up studios, and the like. Positioned as an incubation base for creative industries, with core businesses including creative-industry incubation and cultural office space.
• Other areas along the route: aimed at Beijing residents who want to spend on culture, domestic and foreign tourists, and so on. Positioning and core businesses to be decided by where each property sits.

The plans on this list are not very different from a rigid arrangement handed down by a government.

A person in charge at the body running Meet Shichahai told QDaily that Tianheng Real Estate in fact started relocating households in its assigned area at around the same time as Guang'an Holdings, and has now taken over more than 100 courtyards. Because Shichahai, like Nanluoguxiang, has become in many old Beijingers' minds a "bar street," the developer has been careful about renovating it, and joined Beijing Design Week only this year. Unlike the fanfare around Guang'an Holdings and Huarong Jinying, it appears in the promotional material merely as the organizer of a sub-project in the Shichahai district.

"They wanted to see what these courtyards could be used for, so in May this year they came to us to pick courtyards and line up designers. We chose 9 out of more than 30 courtyards, then had the designers draw lots to decide who designed which. No theme was set — designers could go entirely by their own ideas, and could even bring in cultural-creative brands from their own circles to work with. None of it was settled until August, and the internal proposal review wasn't until September, so construction had only a little over a month."

These projects were scattered around Shichahai as the "Nine Courtyards" and shown to the public during Design Week. Perhaps to draw more attention, the participants were all designers well known inside architecture circles but probably still unfamiliar to the general public: Li Xinggang, Cui Tong, Wang Weijen, Liu Kecheng, Zhang Ming, Zhang Zi, Zhang Ke, Liu Heng, Li Yinong, Ke Wei and others.

The organizer said: "For the organizers and the designers this really only covered the most basic costs. Some designers put a good deal of their own money in too — Li Xinggang came to the site more than 20 times in one month to build his 'stacked courtyard.'" Li Xinggang is the Chinese chief designer of the National Stadium, better known as the Bird's Nest.

By opening day on September 23, some courtyards were still unfinished. But Tianheng Real Estate reckoned it could exhibit them as a trial run, see how people reacted, and let the designers adjust afterward and turn them into permanent spaces. "Beijing Design Week is only a temporary exhibition anyway. Renovation is a long-term thing. It has to be done slowly."

One question no one has ever asked: with designers involved, does renovation actually become any more "reasonable"?

Coming next: What are the designers thinking?