Shuhei Aoyama, the "Internet-Famous Architect," Is Puzzled: "What Even Is an Internet-Famous Architect?" | 100 People With Ideas

He doesn't think it's a good term. He doesn't like it, but he accepts it.

All through January, Shuhei Aoyama had more work than he could keep up with.

On the morning of January 11, he and colleagues from his studio traveled to Shanghai for business — meeting a client to discuss a contract, then going to see a site. It was a renovation project; Aoyama had looked at it once before and felt it was exactly the kind of work he wanted to do.

Early the next morning he flew straight from Shanghai to Xiamen to see another project, then hurried back to Beijing that same night.

After a weekend in Beijing he went on to Haining, this time for the Ganhe Street renovation. As one of the invited architects, Aoyama would help build a new scenic area there called "Zhimo's Hometown."

The day he arrived in Haining, Aoyama visited the former residence of the poet Xu Zhimo, filmed a set of videos among the ruins, and posted to social media a photo of graffiti he had spotted on a Haining street corner. One follower joked in the comments: "Off to Leather City to buy a mink coat?"

The architect Shuhei Aoyama has 310,000 followers — search the tag "architect" and he may well be the one with the most. He has lived in China for 13 years, but most people first heard of him three years ago, through the show Dream Home Makeover (《梦想改造家》).

In 2005, after taking a master's degree at the University of Tokyo, Aoyama came to Beijing to try his luck. The city struck him then as full of opportunity and energy, and he began working as an architect at SAKO Architects in Beijing.

The Japanese firm had only just been founded; counting Aoyama and its founder, Keiichiro Sako, the whole studio came to five or six people. Today SAKO has 36 architects, works on projects in China, Japan, and South Korea, and has offices in Tokyo and Fukuoka.

Aoyama was there during the firm's growth years, when the work coming in was all big developer projects. He went through things an ordinary employee at a large architecture firm might never encounter — how to talk to clients, negotiate design fees, sign contracts. From what colleagues had been through, he even learned what to do in court when a client refuses to pay the design fee after a project is finished.

But thanks to "bad luck," the projects Aoyama designed kept failing to get built, for one reason or another. Watching colleagues around him land buildings of their own, he wanted to follow a project through the whole process — and as that kept eluding him, he grew anxious.

That long anxious stretch lasted until his seventh year at SAKO. Only then did he get to take part in every stage — architecture, interiors, landscape design, the bid, and construction on site. He led it with Yoko Fujii, who later became his wife: the Tanggu Elementary School project in Tianjin.

Looking back on those years now, Aoyama says what he learned was less about design than about how to run a small studio — and what an architect's life actually is.

The architect's life Aoyama saw back then was his boss Keiichiro Sako's.

Sako, who had also started his own firm in his thirties, was more diligent and more exacting than Aoyama had expected. "When we traveled for work we'd usually leave early and get back late, and on the way to and from the airport he'd always have his laptop open, working," Aoyama says.

He doesn't think he has that same rigor. In his third year of university he spent a year backpacking through 25 countries — an experience he has brought up again and again in interviews since becoming known, and one that shaped who he is now.

"There's nothing I especially like, and nothing I especially dislike," Aoyama says. "I feel like I can accept and understand almost anything — even the things I don't agree with have their reasons for existing." He thinks he lacks any absolute standard of judgment, which is why he calls himself not a particularly rigorous person.

He stayed at SAKO seven and a half years in all. After the elementary school was designed, Aoyama felt it was about time to start something of his own. In recent years the building boom had moved out of the hands of big-city developers and into more scattered places; rural regeneration and urban renewal were just beginning, and Aoyama saw his opening there.

In 2014 he and Yoko Fujii founded B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio. The name nods to the "Ao" in Aoyama, which means blue, and is also the abbreviation of Beijing Laboratory of Urban Environment. In the studio's early days Aoyama got projects through friends he already knew. Before long a friend in the media made an introduction, and the producers of Dream Home Makeover came looking for him.

Aoyama appeared in the show's second and third seasons, renovating "Chubby Auntie's Home" and the "L-Shaped Corridor Home." By using space cleverly, he turned cramped, cluttered Beijing hutong houses into warm, comfortable, modern homes. Before each renovation he insisted on eating and sleeping alongside the residents for 24 hours, the better to understand what they needed — a habit that stuck in a lot of people's minds.

After those two episodes Aoyama was suddenly "famous." His Weibo posts, which used to draw a dozen or so comments, started drawing hundreds, then thousands. Many people began following him, hoping he would take on their design work.

Dong Xue was one of the clients Dream Home Makeover brought to Aoyama. He had worked in urban planning and heritage preservation. In the summer of 2016, when he decided to rent a courtyard house in the Baitasi neighborhood and hire a designer to turn it into a guesthouse, the first person he thought of was Aoyama, with all his experience in renovation.

The courtyard, with a big pagoda tree in the middle, caught Aoyama's eye too. "We were lucky — he happened to have the time and energy to take it on," Dong Xue says. They started talking in the summer of 2016, spent the following months on the initial design, and broke ground on the courtyard right after Chinese New Year in 2017.

All the way through, Aoyama was involved far more closely than Dong Xue had expected. The bathtub, for instance, was laid in marble; because the base normally needs a slope for drainage, they discussed how to place the joints many times over. Or take something as small as how to mount the spotlights — Aoyama drew seven sketches just to explain it.

When he first asked Aoyama to design the project, Dong Xue had not realized how famous he already was. One chance encounter showed him just how popular Aoyama was. And yet this designer who "seemed like he could pick up a project anytime, anywhere" still brought full patience and attention to detail to the work — something that left a deep impression on Dong Xue.

Once, Aoyama went to check the site at Dong Xue's courtyard, standing out in the hutong to see how the view through the gateway worked. A young woman backing her car down the alley spotted him standing right there and shouted: "Hey! I know you! Can I get your card? I want you to design something for me!"

Aoyama politely turned her down. A home-renovation show had brought him fame and a real chance to design for ordinary families — but in real life, few people can afford an architect's fees.

Over the past three years Aoyama has designed the Lost & Found store at Beijing's Guozijian; four Yuanmai Shanqiu bakeries, at Xidan, Fuli City, Huamao, and Wangjing; the Elite English SOHO center in Beijing; the Editor boutique in Shanghai; and the DOE trend-culture store, among others. The most widely covered of his recent projects is the renovation of the Suzhou ancestral house of Bei Runsheng, granduncle of the architect I.M. Pei — at 3,200 square meters, also the largest renovation Aoyama has ever taken on.

Last year Aoyama tried some work outside his field as well, making a set of storage cabinets with the furniture brand Zaozuo, called the Life Bento Box. The first building project after he founded the studio was the new Shanghai space that Tokyo's Ota Fine Arts opened at West Bund, which he led the design of; it opened in early November last year.

The studio has now grown from 5 people three years ago to 20. Besides him and Yoko Fujii there are 16 young Chinese designers, each with one or two projects underway on average.

Their sites now reach as far as Urumqi and Yunnan. A few more projects will be finished this year, among them a hot-spring center in Chengde — B.L.U.E.'s second complete building. The "city community of 400 boxes" that Aoyama proposed in 2015 at Kenya Hara's "CHINA HOUSE VISION 2025" was built as a model and shown at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale; barring surprises it will be built for real next year in Quanzhou. It will put into practice the "Share House" idea Aoyama has raised repeatedly in past interviews. The current scheme has three floors: the ground floor open to the public, usable as co-working space, a bookstore, shops, and a gym; the second and third floors more private living space, perhaps mixing short- and long-term rentals.

It isn't only clients who come looking for Aoyama; big brands invite him to their events too. He gave a talk called "The Relationship Between Indoor Air Circulation and Architectural Design" at the launch of a Dyson air-purifying fan; he went to the ThinkPad 25th-anniversary event at Art Beijing dressed all in black, with red shoes chosen on purpose; and he built an installation called "Sensitive Home" for a freeplus event in Shanghai, sharing the stage with the brand's spokesperson, Hebe Tien.

Aoyama has become busier than he ever imagined. Brands send him invitations, he turns up as an architect, and what he does there has little to do with architecture. People call him an internet-famous architect, which sounds to him unlike the "star architects" he has in mind — Zaha Hadid, Ma Yansong. He is puzzled, and asks back: "What even is an internet-famous architect?"

He may not like being called internet-famous, but Aoyama really is the only person anyone calls an "internet-famous architect." He caught Dream Home Makeover just as it exploded in 2015; among the ten architects invited each season, labels like "a Japanese guy whose Chinese is great," "good-looking," "considerate," and "meticulous" made him, as luck had it, the most famous of them all.

Curiously, Before After (《全能改造王》), a long-running Japanese reality show with a very similar format, never produced an "internet-famous architect" like Aoyama. Aoyama thinks the reason he took off may be "something about the scale and the population of Chinese society." Unlike the Japanese, he says, Chinese people trust someone they have heard of more readily, which makes a celebrity worth more.

"Without the show's reach, I might be nothing at all," Aoyama says. He accepts the opportunities fame brings, and knows how to use them.

Online, Aoyama is much more active than he was before he was famous. He enjoys sharing small, funny details of daily life with his followers, and over long stretches of back-and-forth a kind of unspoken understanding has grown up between them.

He often carries a Freitag bag on business trips, for instance, and whenever he spots something sticking out, he hangs the bag on it.

The habit came from watching the life around him. He noticed that the aunties and uncles doing plaza dancing would find a tree branch nearby, or some other protrusion in the city, and hang their little bags on it. Construction sites are the same — workers find all sorts of places to hang a bag. He had almost never seen this in Japan, and it taught him something: "I learned how to use urban space."

His followers may not understand why he is so fond of protrusions, but that hasn't stopped them from copying him. Some go hunting for protrusions the way he does, hang their bags, then post the photo on Weibo to get his attention — and a good protrusion photo stands a fair chance of earning a like from Aoyama.

Plenty of architects are known for being severe; in daily life Aoyama stays gentle. He spends about half his time traveling for work and the other half in the office, usually with a cup of coffee in hand. Talking with people, he does his best to say what he means in Chinese; afraid the other person won't follow, he will put the same sentence several different ways, and he laughs shyly when he doesn't know how to answer. When the talk turns cheerful he relaxes without noticing and ends up sitting cross-legged on the sofa.

When Aoyama calls himself "not rigorous," what he means is that he takes on a great many things gladly. When commercial invitations reach him he usually feels too awkward to say no, can't tell which he should go to and which he shouldn't, and asks the people around him what they think. In time he came to understand and accept that commercial events and media exposure are simply an exchange of money for time. From that he seems to have drawn a lesson: the more people know you, the more likely opportunity is to arrive.

As an architect, Aoyama doesn't aim to make buildings that win international prizes, and he doesn't seem to be searching for a method or theory of his own either. A friend who knows him well uses words like "restrained" and "orderly" about his work: he avoids designs with strong visual clashes, preferring something apt and rational.

A strict demand for detail is another impression many people have of him.

While designing the Youxiong cultural-tourism apartments in Suzhou last year, he wanted one of the outdoor bathtubs made of solid wood. Since there was no precedent for a solid-wood bathtub in China, he went to a former client he already knew — Yuan Yue, marketing director of the furniture brand Lost & Found — and asked her to help find a manufacturer who could make one. The wood had to take heat and water and hold its shape over time; many manufacturers wouldn't take the job on without running tests first, so it dragged on a long while. When the video outlet Yitiao came to film, an oval ceramic tub had to stand in. But after filming wrapped Aoyama kept looking for the thing he had pictured, and in the end he found it and got the rectangular solid-wood tub he wanted.

Architects today each pursue their own direction, Aoyama thinks, rather than all pointing the same way as before. This era may never produce another Le Corbusier, but that doesn't mean it has grown worse.

"In the past they might have changed a city by putting up buildings. But now more and more people are doing community-building instead, doing research together with local residents — and trying that way to change how people see their city, the quality of their lives, and the relationships between them."

Aoyama agrees with the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki's account of an architecture of "empathy": "Fifty years ago modernism was a big ship, and everyone aboard was both friend and rival. After the 1970s modernism stopped being a ship and became an open ocean instead, everyone cast adrift on it, no longer friends and no longer rivals."

He feels that architecture now is no longer just a building — it can be a piece of furniture, even a book. He explores changes in society and history with the same appetite he brings to exploring space. Lately he has been reading anthropology and robotics, thinking about where the boundary of the human lies. Frequent commercial events keep the studio running, and they also keep half his body and mind outside architecture, taking in information from every direction. Gathering this kind of "empathy" from different fields is, as he understands it, part of making good architecture.

In Aoyama's own words, life right now is "not especially satisfying, but I can't say where the dissatisfaction is either." He describes everything as still on the way up, and expects to meet more, and better, building projects ahead. He clearly no longer worries about running out of work; the worry now is how to keep the quality of the design up as the studio grows.

"Take Kengo Kuma's studio — two hundred people, and his projects are still very good. So you need a system that keeps a studio running," he says.

Images courtesy of B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio