Two European Architects Spent 10 Years in China. What Mattered Most Was "Guanxi."

But here, "guanxi" isn't a shady shortcut — it's a network of people.

"On January 20, 2005, after a long ride on an old green-painted train, we came to China from Siberia, where it was minus 29 degrees. It was a wondrous trip, white ice and snow the whole way..."

That is how the two founders of AIM Architecture, a Shanghai design firm, described their arrival in China in the introduction to the firm's tenth-anniversary retrospective. Wendy Saunders is Belgian, Vincent De Graaf is Dutch, and the account reads with a touch of romance.

Before 2005 both worked as architects in Europe. China was a very distant idea. What brought them here was pure chance: Wendy came across a job ad on a Dutch website saying a project in Shanghai needed architects.

Then came the journey described above. Their original plan was as romantic as the trip itself. "I thought maybe I could come to China for six months or a year, to experience something different," Wendy said in the interview.

A decade earlier, Shanghai had already put up two supertall towers, the Oriental Pearl and the Jin Mao Tower. Before 2005 the city counted nearly 50 buildings over 100 meters. Riding that boom, which was carried along by appetites for power and money, were countless ambitious architects dreaming up the city's future.

Building the next tower was what Wendy and Vincent really came to China to do.

But in their first months in Shanghai, after throwing themselves into five or six design competitions for big projects, they began to see that it would not be as simple as they had imagined.

"We had no guanxi, nobody knew us," Wendy told QDaily. "Guanxi" was the only Chinese word she used in the whole interview. In architecture, that is hardly a Chinese peculiarity. It was just that for a married pair of architects with nearly a decade of European experience behind them, accepting that everything would start from zero was, at the time, not easy.

They lost every one of those competitions. Their carefully made drawings won over a few clients, but in the end every project went to a local design institute or to a large foreign firm like KPF.

"I think you still have to prove what you can do, and prove you're not one of those people who wins a competition and then leaves." They understood what it took to gain a foothold in Shanghai, that "paradise for adventurers": you follow the rules of the game, widen your circle, and let people see you are serious.

Small projects became their way in.

The first one they took was an art gallery called 1918 Art Gallery. The owner was a friend of a friend, and he said he had no money for design fees. "I said we had no projects either, so we could do it for free, on one condition — we design it exactly the way we want," Wendy recalled.

They kept the mottled concrete columns, added a few display walls and a wooden staircase, and worked to hold on to the worn feel of an abandoned factory, which gave the gallery the artistic air it needed.

Set against their later work, this loose, do-as-you-please gallery design turns out to hold a number of telling details. The mottled concrete columns, for instance, show up again in AIM Architecture's current office, which they designed themselves. And the wooden staircase, now a fixture of the booming co-working world, later reappeared in the offices they did for SOHO China. Simplicity and plainness are the style they like.

In 2006 Wendy and Vincent formally set up their own studio. The work was mostly interior design — private homes, offices, restaurants and other commercial spaces — and the projects came mainly through friends' introductions.

Over the next four or five years the early thrill wore off. Small interior jobs were a long way from building the next tower, and the slow accumulation was, inevitably, dispiriting.

Almost every year, they had a version of this conversation:

"Let's go home."

"Never mind, let's stay."

"Let's go home."

……

And every time, the two of them gave in again: "Fine, we'll stay and see what happens, until the day we really, really want to leave."

Staying turned out to be the right call. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the room for architects in a Europe stuck in economic trouble shrank further; for anyone working alone rather than under a big firm, the supply of projects would have been grim.

For Wendy and Vincent in China, business kept coming through the door. And their decision back then to concentrate on small projects looks, in hindsight, like a shrewd one.

At the time most Chinese and foreign firms were chasing big projects, and few studios were both willing and able to handle the small interior jobs that were multiplying in the same years.

Designs that now look utterly ordinary — heavy use of wood in a Japanese vein, or a clean, fresh Scandinavian look — were still novel then. AIM Architecture could do all of them. In the five years after the studio opened, a two-person team grew to nearly 20, and the projects that arrived by word of mouth among friends piled up until even Wendy lost count.

While the portfolio grew, that old-fashioned spread by word of mouth was also building guanxi, and building it fast.

"After about four or five years, people probably thought, they're still here, they must be serious — and they started being willing to give us projects," Wendy said.

After 2010, those five years of experience pushed AIM Architecture to a turning point. Big projects grew noticeably more common, and the work went beyond interiors into landscape and building design. The best known of them are the interiors of Naked Stables in Moganshan, several SOHO China interiors including SOHO Fuxing Plaza, and the complete design of the Fushengyu resort in Mianyang, Sichuan.

The three could hardly be more different in style.

Naked Stables in Moganshan, finished in 2011, mixes African elements with Chinese village style. Its 120 guest rooms, two restaurants, bar and conference center were all designed by AIM Architecture.

AIM Architecture worked on four SOHO China projects in all: the interiors of Century Plaza, Fuxing Plaza, the SOHO 3Q Guanghualu flagship in Beijing, and the Bund office. All four aim at modern minimalism, but each reads differently.

The lobbies of Century Plaza and Fuxing Plaza both reach for a sense of the future: the first through shiny metal, the second through lighting that turns a marble space into a bright, fantastical one.

The highlight of the SOHO 3Q Guanghualu flagship is a bold wooden staircase, a move that was still fresh in co-working design in 2015.

The Bund office, finished in 2016, uses broad stretches of pale marble to brighten the interior, while touches of orange and mustard yellow and some wooden furniture warm up a thoroughly modern workspace.

At the Fushengyu resort in Mianyang, Sichuan, AIM Architecture handled everything — landscape planning, architecture, interiors — and won Best Building Design in the hotel and leisure category at the 2016 World Architecture Festival. The landscape and the buildings aim at a plainness that settles into the surroundings. To bring out the hot-spring theme, the designers scattered pebbles and short wooden posts around the spa facilities. Indoors, floors and ceilings are lined with warm-toned wood and paired with cotton-upholstered furniture, for a comfortable, unhurried feeling.

Wendy and Vincent can move between styles so easily because of everything they took on in those five years. And much as with the small jobs, these large projects also came to them, in part, through the contacts they had built.

They met the owner of Naked Stables at a dinner a friend had arranged. Hearing that she was looking for a designer, Wendy and Vincent led their team in drawing up a proposal to her brief, and she liked it. Fushengyu came as a direct commission from the owner, on the recommendation of an engineer who had worked with AIM Architecture for years.

SOHO China was a different story. In 2006 Wendy and Vincent entered one of SOHO's architecture competitions and lost. Later they designed a villa in Pudong for a client who happened to be a friend of SOHO China CEO Zhang Xin, and who showed Zhang their drawings. Zhang liked them, and invited the pair to compete for the interiors of SOHO Century Plaza. This time they won, and the partnership began.

Different clients want different things. And for these two European architects, the hardest part of ten years in China has been finding the balance between what the client asks for and what they want to design.

In Europe most of their work had been understated, socially minded projects with simple designs. China's many "luxury" jobs, and how unlike one another they were, forced them to keep adjusting. "Compromising your design for the client, that definitely happens a lot. But there isn't only one road to Rome — there are many roads to choose from, and you have to find the one that's comfortable for you and comfortable for the client too," Wendy said.

Over those ten years, what Chinese clients mean by "luxury" has shifted too. In the past, Wendy said, they cared more about outward opulence, about that shiny look; now they pay more attention to how comfortable a space feels. The popularity of Scandinavian minimalism in recent years bears that out.

What's interesting is that when the talk turns to the future, Wendy and Vincent now picture something different from what they pictured on arrival. At the tenth-anniversary retrospective, they built a small screening room and ran a short film imagining what is to come. The ideas in it are wild: a mountain in Pudong, a beach on the Bund for people to play on, city overpasses covered in greenery...

They no longer cast themselves as builders of the next tower, but as designers who can touch more of people's lives. That breaks into two parts: ecological architecture, and social projects — schools, public squares — that change life for more people.

And unlike before, the biggest obstacle ahead is no longer a thin network but a changed environment: China's slowing growth and the fiercer competition that comes with it.

Wendy takes the optimistic view. "Compared with Europe, China is rich, so when people took on a project they didn't necessarily think hard about what they actually wanted, or why they wanted it that way. But once the economy isn't so good, people probably think a bit more, are a bit more careful — which is actually a good thing."

The team is now close to 40 people. Wendy says they want to hold it around 40 and put more energy into quality. "At the start we had lots of energy and we were also naive, so we acted on impulse. People would tell us, in China we do things this way, that way. For a while you have to spend time searching and getting things wrong. Now we're much more mature. We've done a fair number of projects, and we know how a lot of things are done. But I don't want our studio to only do the things we already know how to do. I want us to keep asking questions, and keep going."

They have adapted to China's pace, and grown able to roll with change. "For us, working in China is more like a journey. As a designer, you have to find your own place here."

Cover image and all images in this article courtesy of AIM Architecture.