The Architect Who Studies "Wild Architecture" Wants You to See Another World | 100 People With Ideas

"What you saw is what matters — not what I said"

Late last year, Xu Teng, a 29-year-old architect, started a WeChat official account called The Institute for Un-Serious History, picking a fight with everyone who obsesses over star architects and avant-garde design. His first post went to the Houshan Grandma Temple in Yi County, Hebei — a building thrown together out of corrugated color-steel sheet, housing gods with blunt, literal names: the God of Wealth, the God of Study, the Matchmaker. In the rear hall stands a Car God gripping a steering wheel, who keeps travelers safe; pilgrims from Beijing come to him to pray for luck in the license-plate lottery.

"If the Car God fails to keep you safe, Ksitigarbha is right next door — one-stop service." Xu used the line recently at a talk at Banceng Bookstore in Shanghai and got a roar of laughter. It was his third talk on "wild architecture" in a few months, and nearly every one has sold out. Rather than "knockoff" or "freak," Xu prefers "wild" for these buildings: most were never designed by a professional architect, or have been remade by improvised, unofficial use.

After the Grandma Temple, Xu posted a run of other wild buildings: the Gan Culture Square in Dandong, Liaoning, where a 9.9-meter red sculpture of the character gan — "to do," "to work hard" — stands in the middle of the plaza; a knockoff Pompidou Center in Chongqing; a giant aquarium shaped like a soft-shell turtle at Baiyangdian Lake; and a half-Temple-of-Heaven, half-White-House "East-meets-West" at the Shijiazhuang Film and Television City.

In the most recent post, a design by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has "joined" the wild ranks. A private club outside the Donghua Gate of the Forbidden City had been subleased to a souvenir shop. If Kuma could see his white hollow polyethylene bricks now floating above 5-to-10-yuan souvenirs made in Yiwu, Xu wrote, he would "cry himself unconscious in the bathroom." It is the rarely told sequel to a famous architect's work, and the comments filled up with sympathy for "poor Kuma."

But Xu is also tired of readers who frame all of it as beauty against ugliness. "What is the essential difference between building the world's biggest soft-shell turtle and building the world's tallest skyscraper?" he asks.

I

Xu Teng's day job is first-year PhD student at Tsinghua University's Institute of Architectural History and Historic Preservation. "The Institute for Un-Serious History has nothing to do with my field, really," he told QDaily. His master's thesis was a reconstruction study of the Song-dynasty painting Emperor Minghuang's Summer Palace (《明皇避暑宫图》), rebuilding the halls and pavilions it depicts. "It's one of my advisor's research topics too. Fewer and fewer historical remains survive, so we try to trace the history of Chinese architecture through old texts and images."

Finding the Grandma Temple was a byproduct of the institute's biweekly seminar. The topic Xu prepared was "Where Are the Fantastic Buildings," a survey of structures built on mountaintops, hillsides and cliffs. Online he came across a photo of the Grandma Temple's main hall taken by a hiker. "Buddhist temple or Taoist temple, the main hall traditionally has a name of its own — 'Mahavira Hall,' or something else. This one is direct: two big characters, 'Main Hall.'" Soon after, he and a friend made their first trip to Yi County.

"They never thought [the Grandma Temple] was strange; if anything they thought we were the strange ones — what's there to photograph?" After the Institute for Un-Serious History's first post, the video studios Kehua Video and Aha Video got in touch with Xu Teng and went to Yi County to shoot.

Xu still remembers the Kehua Video editor telling him again and again how the place felt: like an "experimental base for contemporary art," absurd. The short film strings together pieces of the temple — donation boxes, statues, murals — and interviews pilgrims, temple keepers and villagers running the stalls. On the question of where the temple came from, one line is pulled from each person's answer, and the cut still adds up to a "seamless," complete story.

At the end of his Grandma Temple post, Xu explained the "contracting system" behind it. "Houshan," the back mountain, is properly called Hongya Mountain. At its foot, Matou Village farms out each hall to a different household. The contracting family decides for itself how to arrange the statues, murals and ritual objects in "its own" temple, and can also rent a patch of ground along the steep pilgrimage path to put up a stall selling offerings. Someone had painted "taken" straight onto a pile of loose rocks in red.

It is really a "temple pedestrian street" contracted household by household, Xu said: a spatial sequence that looks governed by religious doctrine but is, underneath, a row of separate shopfronts. Last year the pilgrims came in such numbers that the incense burned hot enough to destroy the main hall; this year the villagers pooled money for a new one. In the Aha Video film, the temple keeper says: "There's no wish that can't be granted. If we're missing a god, we just build one."

Unlike rigorous academic research, this involved no deliberate effort to interview locals. Xu does remember meeting one key figure at the Grandma Temple: Matou Village's Party secretary. "Apparently he used to be a labor contractor in Beijing, then came back to the village to concentrate on running the cable car up and down the mountain." The only dealing Xu's group had with him was asking permission to film. "We asked if we could shoot a promotional video in the village. He didn't really object, and he didn't say yes either — I think he just found us odd. The video team had planned to interview him too, but he happened to be away at a meeting that day."

The next hit from the Institute for Un-Serious History was the Gan Culture Square, in Dalishu Village, Dandong, Liaoning. Unlike the Grandma Temple, Xu never got to the site. He joked about the color of the character: white and yellow both carry bad associations, so red it was, the color of prosperity.

II

Not long ago Xu Teng finished a round of "touring talks": three in one week, at Yixi in Hangzhou, Banceng Bookstore in Shanghai, and Peking University. Afterwards he posted to Moments: "I feel completely drained." Before that he had spoken at TEDxTHU, on Tsinghua's home turf, joking that he was the first speaker in TED history to need two interpreters — besides the English one, he needed a Mandarin interpreter to "sort out" his Hubei accent.

Of the three recent talks, Xu had the most fun at Yixi in Hangzhou: the theme, "The Spectacle Watcher," carried no baggage and let him get back the mischief of childhood. Peking University made him the most nervous. Banceng Bookstore in Shanghai was the "most serious" — in his own words, he was "almost unable to fend off the questions." That talk was titled "Wild Architecture Studies." One architecture student asked, "Faced with buildings like these, what can an architect actually do?" Another pressed further: "What counts as 'the grassroots'? Does the Gan Culture Square show what ordinary people think, or what the local bureaucracy thinks?"

"Part of why I called it The Institute for Un-Serious History is that I'm a bit lazy," Xu told QDaily. The account is more of an "entertainment show." "I'm not coming at it as a proper news story or a piece of academic research. I haven't used interviews or done much study of these places. As for what nourishment there is in any of it, or what it really is — I don't think what I say counts for much either, because these days I don't quite believe what other people say. Anything that gets written up has some invention in it."

From a plain "spectacle watcher" to distilling something called "wild architecture studies," Xu admits to a feeling of powerlessness. "What I want to do is tell people this phenomenon exists, and that these cases are typical. Through a window like this you can see that such a world is out there. What you see for yourself is what matters most — not what I say."

In his second year at university, Xu Teng got a commission from the family: an older cousin asked him, then an architecture student at Chongqing University, to design a small Western-style house. "I was in my swollen-professional phase," he recalled — his head full of "the vernacular" and "the local." To bring out plain, earthy country character, he designed a red enclosing wall with an elegant tea room inside. His cousin took one look: "In the countryside, red brick is what you build pig sheds out of."

Xu's uncle — his father's sister's husband, a truck driver with forty years on the road — "won" the design instead. His "scheme" was a collage of fragments of rural Western-style houses he had seen over years of driving all over the country. What a house in the countryside needs, he told Xu, is to look imposing, and looking imposing is a set of features: a stepped entrance, a gold gate, a two-meter European chandelier. "It's not a question of taste, it's a marker of status. In the end our whole village looked like this — without a chandelier people felt the house wasn't finished. You had to catch up."

"But he doesn't even like these Western-style houses himself. What he loves is a courtyard house; he thinks a place with a courtyard is comfortable to live in. My aunt, on the other hand, is a devoted fan of 'palace style' — everything she buys has to be European palace style. My uncle thinks that's vulgar; he wants things with an antique feel. But look: classical Chinese or European palace, both are only choices of form. If you don't start from solving the problem of how the space works, there's no difference — classical, European palace, both are in fact very far from us."

Xu Teng once traveled to Baiyangdian Lake to see the world's largest aquarium shaped like a soft-shell turtle — the Jin'ao Hall at the Baiyangdian Lotus Grand View Garden — and climbed onto the turtle's head. On the Institute for Un-Serious History he joked about how hard this giant thing must have been to build, so lifelike is the form: "Only architects with clumsy hands use so-called formal abstraction as an excuse for their own creative failings. The good ones don't deal in vapor."

"We talk about 'freak buildings,' but what usually shapes them isn't the designer and isn't the developer — it's the worship of 'world's biggest.'" Xu listed three Guinness World Records that look nearly the same.

The locals he met at Baiyangdian took the behemoth entirely for granted, Xu said — no different from city people's indifference to yet another building billed as the world's tallest. "Is it absurd to build the biggest turtle out here? Is it normal to build a tower in a city? Is there any essential difference between the two? We're just more used to the city's visual language... Out in the vast countryside, what people need is nothing like what we in architecture think about, or train for every day."

III

Besides watching these spectacles, Xu Teng also does research on buildings. Tsinghua's Institute of Architectural History and Historic Preservation carries out material restoration on old buildings. In 2012 Xu went to the Jintian Temple in Lanzhou. Built around 1400, it was once the place where Taoism was taught in Lanzhou in its early days; in 1956 the temple became a Workers' Cultural Palace.

"When we went to look, the place was full of people drinking tea, playing cards and eating sunflower seeds, gathered under the trees and inside the halls. Deep in the halls someone was singing opera — Qinqiang, I think — with a crowd of old people sitting below, listening." That, Xu said, was the first time he felt the vitality of an old building. "People always said heritage-preservation work happens in museums. I used to think so too." The statues in the temple were long gone, but the building still gave shelter, "and made a kind of closeness between people." After Jintian Temple was listed as a national heritage site in 2013, the opera house, the card room and the Lanzhou Qin Opera Troupe were all moved out together.

"Unexpected Chongqing" is another project he joined, with students from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Chongqing University. The "Unexpected Chongqing" exhibition opened this June; its preface reads: "Rather than architects' highbrow designs, they are more interested in the survival wisdom of ordinary people."

At TEDxTHU, Xu gave an example of a space "Unexpected Chongqing" turned up: the Yuanlu, or Round House. Built early in the War of Resistance Against Japan, when Chongqing became the wartime capital, the circular building was designed by the architect Yang Tingbao and became the home of Sun Ke, son of Sun Yat-sen. After the founding of the People's Republic, the Round House was nationalized and turned into staff dormitories for Chongqing's No. 2 Printing and Dyeing Plant. Seventeen households lived inside the circle, less than 500 square meters of it, each paying 300 yuan a year in rent.

As residents changed and space ran short, people added on and rebuilt the Round House on their own. The usual method was to insert a mezzanine. The central hall, where Sun Ke and his wife once held dances, became a mixed-use zone: the kitchens of six households crowded into it, and two households put in bathing rooms.

In 2007 the Round House was named one of Chongqing's first Outstanding Modern Buildings. The cramped additions that had recorded the residents' ingenuity were cleared away bit by bit, and the building was restored to its original look as Sun Ke's former residence. "The house died, just like that," Xu said. "Another self-righteous tragedy." The best design, he believes, has to be able to hold "the mess that time makes."

Xu sets this experience of space, grown by the wild world on its own, against the argument that followed Dream Home Makeover (《梦想改造家》) last year, a show in which designers renovated a batch of old houses. Going back later, some of them found that many of their designs were not working as intended: a stair railing on a roof had become a place to hang laundry. "It's not that their designs were bad," Xu said. "They just couldn't take in the mess."

But under the Institute for Un-Serious History's post about the Round House, someone objected in the comments: "the mess that time makes" is a designer's pretty fantasy; whether the residents want to live in spaces that cramped is another question, and high space efficiency is only what hardship forces on you. "They are people trying to live properly, after all, and they shouldn't become our bonsai." Xu replied, "You have a point too," and let it go.

Cover image: archiposition. Images in the text without a credit are courtesy of Xu Teng.