Fei Qing and Renhe Architecture

Solid, Elegant Architecture Requires a Patient Heart

Jelly Prototype 0612 sounds like a laboratory experiment by food scientists, but this structure may represent China’s best architectural response to the unprecedented historical changes of its last 30 years.This is actually a large structuralmodel for a building designed by Fei Qing and Frank Fu, partners in Renhe Architecture, prefiguring the “Jelly Building” to be erected in Yizhuang, or,officially, the Beijing Development Area, the proposed Economic and Technology development zone in the southeast of the city between the 5th and the 6th Ring Road. The project has been stalled by the economic downturn but its natural-looking, landscape-like design represents the studio’s vision of the humane, people-centered architecture that China really needs.

Ironically, their perspective on what China needs has been shaped by 20 years spent as registered architects in New York City. Experience accumulated in both Eastern and Western societies has honed the partners’ view that design is a process always at risk. Fei Qing hints at their philosophy: “Our product, a design, can be put in danger anywhere, any time, by more fluid social dimensions, so the architect must always be willing to start fresh.” Or start anywhere. Renhe, in Chinese, means any or anything. She explains, “It denotes that we are a multi-disciplinary practice C architecture, urban design, city planning, interior and landscape, industrial design, as well as graphic design.” Renhe started the Jelly Prototype Series in 2005 and keep working on it today.Along the way they have produced architecture, urban design, and even jewelry design. For the partners, evolving circumstances are not an imposition but the very field in which design competence is shaped and tested. Just as well, because China arguably offers the most rapidly evolving circumstances on earth, worthy challenges to architects and urban planners.

Fei Qing and her business partner Frank Fu graduated from Tsinghua University, class of '85 and both subsequently did their Master’s at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The partners started business trips between the States and China in 1994, seriously re-engaging professionally with Beijing in 2004, in response to requests from universities to lecture. Finally, in 2005, they took professorships that would allow them to continue with their practice. China was where the action was, and still is. “China is the architectural laboratory of the 21st century and this is perhaps a good thing,” Fei Qing comments, and adds, “It’s a way of channeling information, culturally speaking. Any communication, be it one way or two way, is almost always better than no communication at all.”

The architectural legacy of Beijing reveals a struggle to preserve “Chinese-ness.” “In the late 1980s and early 1990s as the capital built up, a lot of pagoda or temple-like structures were retrofitted on very tall buildings in a way that violated all sense of traditional proportions,” Fei acknowledged, “and you couldn’t get the city’s approval at that time without these kinds of roofs.” Meanwhile, Fu and Fei were working in Manhattan absorbing its architectural experiments, as China went on to try its hand at re-inventing some iconic international styles.

Chinese architects adopted and adapted metal crowns or wheel-and-needle structures inspired by the DG Bank rooftop(or Deusche Genossenschaftsbank am main) in Frankfurt, nicknaming it the “Statue of Liberty" for its wheel-like design and American designers. Modern structural references to pagoda tops (that look like giant rockers) seemed to me to be quoting the traditional upturned shape of ancient post and beam roof construction with clean, pared-down lines. But Fei Qing disabused me of that notion, pointing out that this is a French design first seen in the Chinese mainland on the Shanghai Grand Theatre in People’s Square, and may have been inspired by the Peak Tower in Hong Kong (1995, Terry Farrell). The somber glass towers that imitated Mies Van der Rohe also appeared in Beijing, sometimes without the famous architect’s mastery of proportion. But it’s the elaborate crowns on Beijing skyscrapers that emphasize the persistence of orientation to the rooftop. The roof is traditionally an important element in Chinese architecture, and rooftop obsession has modern precedents too: a Western showpiece like the Opera House in Sydney is all roof, and arguably so is the "Egg" or National Center for Performing Arts.

Fei Qing points out that of course Beijing needs iconic buildings appropriate for the seat of government and a modern match for the capital’s imperial heritage. Another impetus for eye-candy was that by the turn of the century, China was preparing for what Fei Qing calls the “Wedding” or the Beijing Olympics. A host of signature buildings or "wedding cakes" became a kind of architectural pantheon. Beijing’s Capital Airport Terminal 3, National Stadium, the new CCTV headquarters and the National Center for Performing Arts, all immediately earned Chinese nicknames (the Bird, Bird’s Nest, the Bird’s Cage, and the Egg). They were all “architectural objects” and all designed by European architects.

Fei Qing and her partner brought back a different kind of valuable experience from the West to their studio in Beijing. “The New York experience gives us different perspectives professionally. First of all, the free spirit that propels our explorations and experiments in design. Secondly, the cool state of mind we’ve developed for dealing with various situations arising during the design process, a kind of pragmatism that is absolutely essential to realizing the changes you want to make.”

What do Fei and Fu want to make? The rules. The rules have to do with the balance of use in a development, and what kind of community you want to preserve or create. The principles of Renhe operate with scopes that encompass neighborhoods, not just buildings. The Jelly Building will provide a focal point for Rongha Road where piecemeal approval of construction over the last ten years has left a collection of structural dominos without functional or visual connection. In Fei Qing’s opinion many city blocks in Beijing suffer from this discordance, but she views it as a phase intrinsic to rapid urban development. Looking at a single building, good designs should prove flexible to purposes that emerge in the future, and structures bent to a past undertaking made hospitable to unforeseen ventures. Wholesale demolition of a city’s past is not a sound approach to urban development from their standpoint.

Among the rules they favored in their recent work in Beijing was the preservation of industrial buildings and equipment. Fei and Fu proposed Beijing’s first ever special zoning C the soon famous Dashanzi Special Zoning District C in 2006. Having worked and lived in the Chelsea area of New York City, they witnessed the process of gallery migration from SoHo to Chelsea as brand name stores moved in to cash in on the glamour of art, driving rents up and triggering an exodus of the artists that made the place a magnet in the first place.In the 798 proposal they laid out why it is that making the rules is far more important than finding investors to fund new buildings on a given site. She explains, “You don’t change the rules mid-way about the kind of community you want, so the players will be people who accept the rules and collectively make a good team. Who plays well and stays in the game is worked out as you go along.”

Another rule is that beauty does matter. Fei Qing notes that, apart from official structures, at the sidewalk level Beijing buildings often look cut off at the feet so to speak -- the better not to intimidate ingress of the shopping public, the traffic of commerce.At the same time, the bottoms of buildings manage to limit the rest of the potential richness and variety of street life by failing to consider how the foot of a building can also foster what Fei terms the “unexpected, unexperienced, delightful, surprising” in the activity just outside their doors.

“Not a right angle in the place” is how they describe their Jelly Building. Not only do the architects reject blocks and angles, their approach is defined in part by resisting these and other geometries and symmetries we associate with buildings. “The Bird’s Nest looks unusual but it has a center. The Egg has a center. I am not interested in a center.” In her opinion, centers tend to draw everything in, make assumptions about what is interesting, and suffocate competing hubs of activity.“A center denotes something permanent. It creates a stage that puts something at the heart and all else on the edge, with no chance for these others to show their talent. I like a center that can be moved or shifted, or whose performers can be substituted. A center needs to be challenged to prevent stagnation, and moved to the edge sometimes. Multiple centers encourage dynamism,” she concludes. At the city level in New York, multiple neighborhood hubs compete and provide people with more choice.Beijing isn’t as dense as Manhattan but it has developed several hubs so far (zones for art in the northeast, film in the southeast, with more planned C like a “Broadway” in the northwest). “These intentions might be good for some groups but so many “multi-hubs” hardly work well at present because the core idea of the master plan of Beijing is to have an absolute sole center and place numerous ring roads around it,” Fei Qing points out.

Another essential for a healthier urban environment is attention to practical details. Design like people matter is a phrase with meaning for anyone who has navigated through the uneven floors and confusing interiors of some of Beijing’s malls and complexes. Polished stone surfaces common in Chinese design address durability but not safety. Certified safety glass use is a regulatory matter and standardized stair heights a function of proper construction supervision. Materials selection, needs to be part of architectural training, such as for non-toxic materials on the interior and exterior. Exhaust fans that do not intersect with people traffic is just one of the many ergonomic issues Fei feels are integral to designing for ordinary people who use the buildings and the spaces around them.“Foreign architects can’t do much, if anything at all, about creating a healthier urban environment.That’s what local people should do,” she feels.

Is the Jelly Building the future of architecture then? Of China’s architecture? I asked Fei Qing if the age of a “national architecture” may be a thing of the past in urban China, or anywhere. “A people’s architecture is intimate with their history, economy, culture and art. It always stirs people’s feelings, consciously or unconsciously. However, Chinese-ness is not a design pursuit or issue for us.There must be some so-called Chinese-ness in our designs just because we are born Chinese,” she concedes, “but beyond that, speaking of a national architecture does not make sense to me.”

Fei Qing is focused on the serious role architects play in maintaining environments that enhance, not just support, life. The future city, she feels, will not be utopian, but pragmatic, stimulating, and somewhat unpredictable. The Jelly Building will be characterized by spaces of variable size and shape, both in its interior and on its external overlap with pedestrian space. Their “Ramen Noodle” complex in Dajeon, Korea, proposed as a mixed use community in an older, dead part of town, also rejects straight up-and-down design.

Looking at the model for what will become the Jelly Building in Beijing I was reminded of spelunking, the sport of exploring underground caves. Inside this structure a person might experience little hideaways and unexpected "caverns," curved walls and irregularly shaped openings to the sky. Prototype 0612 was rendered first on paper, then as a computer model, then in clay, in fiberglass, on a larger scale with foam boards, and as a full sized PVC study model. The final, in stainless steel, was installed in the center of the campus of Fei Qing’s alma mater -- the Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University where she spent her last two years of high school. The alumni expressed their excitement about the proposed construction through their reaction to the prototype: it is the antithesis of the type of education system they had all endured for years, “not rigid, not uniform, not predictable.”

Fei Qing says the kind of solid, elegant urban architecture they want to achieve requires a patient heart. As a third-generation architect of a family that is something of an engineering - architectural dynasty, she may just have what’s needed for the long view of things.