Three designers call their first 10 years “dumb.” How did that happen?

They didn’t want to be tied to any one field; they wanted to try everything. That drive is what they call being “dumb.”

To sum up the tenth anniversary of their design studio, BAM, the three founders picked an unexpected adjective: dumb — or, as they wrote it on the wall, 10 Years of DUMB!

To Jake Walker, Dan Gass and Allison Dailey, though, “dumb” is not an insult. It stands for everything a designer tries out while growing up. And as you will see shortly, the word may also point to the fact that in China the three took on jobs with almost no limits, and made a lot of strange things in the process.

Recently they put every project of the past ten years that carries a trace of “dumb” on show at the Tabula Rasa gallery in Beijing’s 798 art district. In the hundred-odd-square-meter hall, every wall is covered with panels packed with a dizzying mass of pictures and text explaining BAM’s various projects; the stands hold several finely made models, along with a few oddly shaped “artworks,” such as a wickless hand-shaped candle.

On opening day, Jake Walker wore a red-striped suit and broke into loud laughter again and again as he talked with people. He looked more like an artist than an architect or a landscape designer.

A visitor who walks in without doing any homework may easily come away from the jumble of exhibits with one question: what kind of place is this? That is exactly the feeling the three designers want people to have, because it is what their ten years have been like.

BAM stands for Ballistic Architecture Machine, a name Jake, Dan and Allison worked out together. From the start they had decided against the “old-school” way architecture firms name themselves — dropping the founders’ own names straight into the studio’s name. They wanted what the whole studio did to be “bigger than what any one individual could do,” which pushed them toward a choice with more collective meaning.

Set against its explosive logo, the acronym BAM looks fairly rock-and-roll, but they have a serious explanation for the meaning behind each letter.

Ballistic is about possibility and flexibility: they did not want to be tied to any one field, but to try different things freely, “to push forcefully in any direction.” Architecture refers to the subject all three studied at Cornell University, and to the rigor behind architecture that applies to every kind of design. Machine stands not for the mechanical feel of a machine running, but for a state of “working extremely hard.”

Look back at BAM’s ten years through those three letters and a number of interesting episodes turn up.

Jake, Dan and Allison met at university. All three studied architecture at Cornell, but what brought them together was that they cared far more about public art installations than about architectural design. When they founded BAM in the United States in 2007, they did not become architects; they stayed on the art path, because art let them “test our ideas faster.”

That was just before the global financial crisis broke. Next to Dubai, China and Brazil, with their “economic expansion” and “lots of projects under construction,” the United States had “not that many interesting things happening.” So in 2009 the three came to China and opened a new office in Beijing. For the eight years since, they have worked like a local Chinese studio, taking on mostly projects for Chinese clients in China.

The quick jump from an American background to a Chinese setting, plus a starting position of “no projects at all,” was the beginning of the “dumb” years.

To find clients, BAM paid for its own art installations — among them a plastic-bag “awning” they rigged up inside a Beijing courtyard house — while also casting a wide net for potential clients and taking on any job it could handle.

China’s economy was in far better shape than Europe’s or America’s at the time, but as BAM saw it, there was simply no market in China for the kind of public art they wanted to make — art meant to “make the city better.”

“No one would look at something we made and say, oh, this is important,” Dan Gass told QDaily in an interview. “We had to make it first, and then let people see how it worked. A lot of the people we ran into early on, developers for instance, would say, here, make us a pretty sculpture for this spot. In their minds an installation was just something nice-looking that you put in a corner to make their project look luxurious and beautiful.”

For a while they compromised, and ran on a policy of saying only yes. “There was a period when, as long as there was a project, whatever it was, even if it wasn’t what we had in mind, we’d take it and do it — we wouldn’t say no,” Jake Walker said in the interview.

That is how they came to finish a string of “unexpected” jobs: a parade float for Wuyi Mountain, an air filter, hand-shaped candles, novelty T-shirts, Christmas decorations. The years were not wasted. Art installations have short production cycles, so they completed 26 public art projects in three years, and through all those different jobs they quickly filled out what they knew about fabrication methods and materials. “Through that period we tried every experiment we wanted to try, and that was extremely valuable to us.”

With some experience and a certain number of clients behind them, the three began to think about a deeper question: what does a city actually need?

After 2008, with the Olympics successfully behind it, Beijing’s skyline kept rising as more skyscrapers went up. But in BAM’s view, a city built around architecture does not get better just because its buildings grow more numerous and taller. What really builds a city’s identity, they argue, is not the buildings but the space between them.

The way to fill that space and make it serve the city better is landscape design. From 2012, BAM’s work began tilting in that direction.

They started by helping build urban green belts, and gradually got chances to design landscapes for commercial developments and parks. The sense of art and interaction they had pressed for in their installations carried straight over into the landscape work.

Phase 1 of Beijing’s Daxing Park is a public space full of circles. Cobblestones, tile, rockery and different kinds of plants form circles, half-circles and concentric rings across the open ground. The linear paths common to parks are broken up here. People can walk along the edge of a circle, or step down into a sunken, turf-covered soft-landscape area and sit on the grass or on white marble cube seats.

Similar geometric elements appear in the design of Daxing Park Phase 2, along with some new ones: a mosaic pieced together from tiles of different colors; grass slopes recut into terraces with rows of seating set into them; and, at the center of a giant set of concentric circles, a spring that opens in summer. The seats throughout the park were made deliberately wide, so people can lie on their side, stretch out flat or sit cross-legged — relaxing in the park whatever way suits them.

At the children’s playground at Beijing Indigo, the project BAM calls its most popular, an artificial landscape gives children a place for their own small adventures. They can play in a sandpit shaded by an orange disc, or climb “mountains” on ropes and pipes. They can come back down the mountain on a white marble slide, and try a spinning swing, a spiral balance beam and climbing frames.

And in “Finite/Infinite,” a park done with the renowned landscape architect Peter Walker (Jake’s father), a single row of plane trees is copied by mirrors into an endless wood, while outside the mirrored walls hedges, plane trees and white gravel make up a finite space — which hands the whole landscape a dose of philosophy.

To Jake, going from making art installations to designing landscapes is not a change of direction at all: “What we’ve always been interested in is public space. We have never designed an art installation for someone to put in their living room. An installation actually sits inside a much bigger idea — how a city should be used. A public art installation is only one part of that… Everything sits in a bigger context, which is public projects. So it isn’t that we used to make public art installations and later went off to do something else.”

The narrow definition of “public art installation” they had met in clients while making installations turned up again in landscape design. Just as clients would equate an installation with a good-looking sculpture, landscape was taken to mean green space — a park, a green buffer strip, a courtyard. To BAM, streets, subways, highways, traffic jams and bike lanes all count as landscape too.

Beyond that gap in how urban landscape is understood, the obstacle that comes up more often in landscape design is the high turnover on client teams. “People change jobs very frequently, because that’s how they climb higher up the ladder, so they don’t stay with any one thing all the way through. The designer may be the only party who can follow a project from start to finish — on the client side the bosses change often, management changes often, the organization is huge, so there’s a lot of personnel churn. There’s very little continuity… and whatever you could have gained from that continuity is lost,” Jake explained in the interview.

For landscape projects, which take far longer than public art installations, that churn is sometimes fatal. Between a project’s design phase and its construction phase, designers often come up with new ideas, but “a new boss doesn’t necessarily have the patience to understand them.”

So now and then BAM starts a project with no client at all — the landscape design for the Guomao Bridge area, for instance, which took nearly four years to reach a final plan.

The project began because BAM’s office at the time sat just south of Beijing’s Guomao district, and the staff’s thoroughly unpleasant crossings at morning and evening rush hour showed them what was wrong with the way the area had been designed.

This district of overpasses and criss-crossing roads was laid out around cars, buses and the subway first, with sidewalks, driving lanes and bus waiting areas added on afterward. Getting around on foot became dangerous and difficult, and traffic clogged badly at rush hour as well. As new skyscrapers kept going up in and around Guomao, the congestion and the danger kept getting worse.

BAM put forward a plan to rebuild the combined road space, improve both the vehicle and the pedestrian routes, and turn the unused ground under the overpasses into a park. As they saw it, the park could become a connecting thread, tying pedestrians to the subway station and to the office towers nearby.

“What we look for is the problem — what problem is actually there, and specifically a problem nobody has paid attention to. Everyone is thinking about how to grow the economy, how to make money, and nobody really cares what the problem behind it is. That’s one reason this project is unusual,” Jake said in the interview. “We didn’t want to wait for the government to come and say, please design a park, and only then start designing. We’re designers. We know what the problems are.”

Looking at it now, it was this “dumb” drive that won the three of them more opportunities, even if they cannot always sum those opportunities up in a single sentence.

They were pleased to find, for instance, that compared with Americans, “Chinese developers want to bring nature into their projects” — not because the developers care about nature themselves, but because “70% of respondents said that, apart from the design of the apartment itself, the landscape outside it is the top factor deciding whether they buy a property.” They then added that a culture of garden design has perhaps planted an awareness of nature in Chinese consumers, and that this is a good thing too — although they have never actually looked into how this so-called garden culture found its way into the buying decisions of today’s consumers. It may well be the pleasant fantasy of a few foreigners living in China.

That way of reasoning may itself be part of what they mean when they call their own development “dumb.”

Cover image and all images in the article provided by BAM.