How Do You Make a Building Part of Its Surroundings? The Architect of the Shanghai Natural History Museum Has an Answer

A building you remember doesn't have to be aggressive.

"The site was still under construction. I walked into the lobby and made my way through the building... When I got to the atrium, the space suddenly opened up, and sunlight came in through the cell wall. That moment really stunned me."

Two years on, looking back at the Shanghai Natural History Museum, whose design he led, Ralph Johnson — global design director of the American architecture firm Perkins+Will — says the atrium is the part of the building he likes best. The curved wall they call the "cell wall," which looks as if it were made out of the cells of countless living things, runs from the ceiling straight down to the bottom of the building. Shafts of sunlight come through the glass blocks one by one and break apart inside, printing patches of light on the floor, the walls and the dinosaur skeletons. The line between the building and nature blurs.

Ralph calls a design like this a "metaphor." The same literary device turns up elsewhere in the building: the east facade is planted with greenery to form a "living wall," standing for a forest; the rough rock wall on the north facade answers to "moving tectonic plates and canyon walls eroded and carved out by rivers"; and the whole spiral-shaped museum, its roof covered in plants, has been nicknamed the "green snail," after the spiral of a nautilus shell.

Every one of these "metaphors" has to do with nature.

"The idea behind the whole building is how people can come to understand nature through the environment the building makes," Ralph said in an interview with QDaily. "The way to do that is to put up a man-made structure that still belongs to nature."

The spiral was the first idea to take shape. To Ralph, the spiral is "one of the most ideal and most natural geometric forms you can find in nature." Using it as a frame, he added a green roof. From the air, the lawn of Jing'an Sculpture Park runs up against the building and carries on all the way to the open-air platform on top — the "man-made structure" slips into the park's green this way, "as if it had grown out of it."

That changed how the exhibits inside are laid out and how visitors move past them. The starting point sits on the second floor above ground, with the origin of the universe; the story then runs down the spiral in a straight line and stops on the second basement level. This arrangement, Johnson said, "is a lot like the Guggenheim Museum in New York."

Unlike the Guggenheim, though, roughly half of the Shanghai Natural History Museum sits underground. To get daylight into those spaces, Johnson and his team came up with the "cell wall" and a sunken "landscape garden." "It's about growing one idea out of another, putting tradition and modernity together, while also thinking about the local culture," Ralph said in the interview.

Against Shanghai's steadily rising skyline, this building — some 44,517 square meters of floor area and only 18 meters tall — looks like an oddity.

Ralph calls it a "horizontal skyscraper." Next to towers that grow straight up, a building like this usually catches fewer eyes. And unlike most vertical towers, which only have to be impressive on their own, the hard part in designing a building that lies low against the ground is making it sit comfortably with what surrounds it.

The rule Ralph follows is that a building should not jar, should not break the continuity of its surroundings. He has used it on other projects too.

The United States Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C. stands in front of a small hill. So as not to cut off the green running down the slope, Ralph set the buildings out in steps that drop one level at a time along the hillside; none of them rise above the treeline around them, and every roof is planted. From the air the cluster looks like a hill town — the stepped form plus the planting on top lets it fold into the hill behind.

The Tinkham Veale University Center, designed for Case Western Reserve University, is a smaller building. The student center stands in the middle of the campus, beside an open lawn and between three different parts of the campus. It reaches out along three axes in three directions, and its roof is cut into three sections, each at a different pitch.

Like the two projects above, it looks as though it grew out of the grass, an extension of what was already on campus and a joint between the campus's three parts.

Ralph likes to start a design this way: "A horizontal building is tied to the ground... Switch to a vertical building and you can't build that connection."

What makes this kind of design interesting is the life that comes out of its exchange with its surroundings. Ralph explained it through his own attempts at the banjo: "You can just play the notes off the page, without any feeling, but once you play well enough you can start to feel some of the subtler things in it. I think that's a lot like architecture — you can build something completely rigid and boring, but you can also give it life."

As an architecture student, Ralph thought about building eye-catchers too. He grew up in Chicago, a city with no shortage of modern buildings that were famous in their day — the Sears Tower (since renamed the Willis Tower), which took the title of world's tallest building from New York's World Trade Center, is a good example. The glass tower was finished in 1973, just as Ralph Johnson was entering the profession and before the race to build tall had really started around the world.

"As you keep learning and pile up experience, you realize that a good city is not made of one eye-catching building after another. Separate buildings fight each other, shout at each other, and they can't come together to create a good environment," Ralph said.

Old quarters in places like Italy pull at him: "The buildings look a lot alike, but they're harmonious, and there's a sense of community." After joining Perkins+Will, a firm founded in Chicago, in 1976, Ralph slowly began looking for architecture that could sit harmoniously in a city.

The houses scattered around Chicago by the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright gave him a push. He still remembers a Wright house he saw on Chicago's South Side in elementary school: "The way the house was joined to a small hill was fascinating. Wright was always good at tying structure to place, at fusing architecture with nature. I've carried that memory with me ever since."

Like Wright's houses, most of the horizontal buildings Ralph went on to design were not commercial work. They don't make much money, and their clients are a different sort from commercial ones.

"Architecture is very interesting. With some buildings, once they're finished you don't even know who will use them — commercial offices, say, where the client the architect deals with is the developer, not the people who will end up in the space. I've seen it many times: you build them a tower, and two years later it's sold to someone else. The building is more like a commodity," Johnson said in the interview.

He would rather work on education, healthcare, culture and other social projects, because he knows exactly who a building like that is finally for, and knowing that helps him sharpen the design.

"If [the building] is for doing experiments, then you have to think about how the design can make the scientists working inside more creative. You might need to add some social space, so that outside the lab, in informal settings, researchers talk to each other and strike new ideas off each other," Johnson said.

As he sees it, a building can answer the needs of different projects and do more than one job.

For a museum, the building is not an empty shell to put exhibits in. "We know what the mission of a natural history museum is, and we can carry it out through the building. Once people are inside, they can see the relationship between the exhibits and the building — how the two fit together and work on each other," Johnson said in the interview.

In a teaching building, the entrance hall, the corridors and every corner have to do with education, Johnson believes: "The classroom is the formal place of teaching, but an architect can turn the places outside the classroom into informal ones, and in the end the two come together."

Today, with the global environment getting worse, a building can also become a "teaching tool," "to let people understand the idea of sustainability." Designing teaching buildings for Agostinho Neto University in Luanda, the capital of Angola, Ralph and his team put a huge roof floating above the building. Wind can pass over its rolling form and blow into the courtyard through the gaps in its surface, improving ventilation and cooling the building down. For African countries that cannot afford cooling equipment and the power to run it, this is a cheap way to deal with the heat.

Being public work also gives these buildings a wider reach: "I joined Perkins+Will because they happened to have a school project at the time. I still like doing education buildings. In the past few years I've done more cultural projects as well — they give you more creative freedom, and they're public projects... Social buildings — education, healthcare, culture and so on — are all projects that do society good. I think working on them makes you feel good about architecture, because it can push education, healthcare and culture forward, and help the whole society along."

Some people have picked out what Ralph's buildings have in common — a clean look, a stress on sustainability in how they work — and called it his style: "People tell me they can see that a building is mine, or that there's a consistency across my work, that I have my own style. I've never actually set out to build a style. I'm not that fond of signature work that always looks the same."

He doesn't deny the consistency, though. He goes back to his finished buildings from time to time and gets new ideas out of them: "Sometimes you learn something by revisiting a building you've built. When you were designing it you may have thought it would be used one way, and the real users may not use it that way at all. Go back and look at that, and you learn something new."

Going over finished projects with different people in the firm has become part of his job as well. As Perkins+Will's global design director, besides leading his own designs, he flies out regularly to the firm's offices around the world to talk through projects with the local teams.

Those offices are full of young architects. They are long past the "primitive" era when Ralph designed with pen and paper, and work with computers instead. "But what hasn't changed is that you still need a big idea. The computer only makes carrying it out more efficient; the thinking hasn't changed. Only the tools have changed. The essence of it hasn't changed much."

Forty years into his time at Perkins+Will, Ralph is past retirement age. He has no plans to retire, because there is still plenty he wants to try — religious buildings, for one, which he has never touched: "Short of health reasons, an architect never retires, the way I see it. I think it would be a shame to retire while you're holding this much knowledge and still have creativity in you."

Cover image and in-text images, unless otherwise credited, are provided by Perkins+Will.