This fall China has been on the brain of Portland's art and design community. Taking a cue from the Portland Art Museum's "China Design Now" exhibit, which surveys the latest in design, fashion and graphic design from China, the next installment in our Designs On Portland discussion series will feature three local architects with experience across the Pacific in the land of Mao and Ming.
Scheduled for Thursday at 6:30pm at Design Within Reach (1200 NW Everett), the talk will feature Robert Packard of ZGF Architects, Gary Reddick of V3 Studio, and Rick Potestio.
ZFG has quietly designed numerous projects in China, such as the Silo City Residential District in Beijing, an 8.6 million square foot LEED-rated residential district ; the 900,000 square foot FuWai Cardiovascular Hospital in Beijing; and a 600,000 square foot expansion of the Beijing Children's Hospital.
V3 Studio and Reddick's previous firm, Sienna Architecture, have been hired to design a number of buildings and master plans such as the five-building Jinan Olympic Park complex in Jinan, China (shown in rendering form at the top of this post and directly above).
Potestio hasn't designed a building in China, but the architect, professor and urban planner has traveled extensively in China and conducted charrettes there to generate designs for housing projects in three Chinese cities.
More than simply looking at the work these architects have done, the hope is that our conversation will delve into the challenges and opportunities facing Portland architects as they seek out and procure work in China.
The speed of development there can be staggeringly quick, for example. That's appealing to an architect used to seeing projects languish on the drawing board, but not so appealing when you're asked, for example, to only design a project through the design-development stage and then hand over the blueprints to a different architect who will see your baby through to construction. At the same time, the government itself can help or hinder a project.
Two years ago I interviewed an engineer, Steve Burrows, from the renowned engineering firm Arup, about working in China; his firm worked on the Bird's Nest national stadium and the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV Tower (the latter of which is pictured above in a shot I took in 2007 when the building was under construction). When I asked him about the Chinese government's attitude about the stadium being constructed, Burrows had this to say:
"From the top of Chinese political leadership down they were going to do this. They could have found us not compliant with Chinese code and made us go through the infinite loop of proving the unprovable. But they always found a way to keep it moving forward. There was always an attitude of, 'There must be a way.'"
But what happens when it's not a national landmark like the Bird's Nest? Notice Burrows indicated that Chinese code can be problematic a lot of the time, bogging down a project indefinitely.
We also hope to talk about the challenge of China discovering - or rediscovering, to put it more accurately - its own architectural vernacular. As wonderful as much of the new Chinese architecture from recent years has been, most of it seems to have been designed by western architects. Or even when it is designed by Chinese architects, it looks western. How does China preserve the history and tradition of its architectural past even as its ultra dense population goes from courtyard-like hutong villages to highrise residential towers?
As always, the discussion is hosted and sponsored by Design Within Reach.
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