China's New Home Life - New York Times

China's New Home Life - New York Times

April 20, 2006

By ELAINE LOUIE

Beijing

ON a cold, gray day in late March, Guan Yi, one of the most influential collectors of contemporary art in China, lifted this reporter by the elbows and pushed her up a steep brick ramp of his own design, toward the second floor of his new house here. Later he jogged down another ramp as his guest followed on tiptoe to avoid losing a heel in its steel-grate surface.

"I don't like women in high heels," he said through an interpreter when asked why he had designed such treacherous means of access to the house, which he finished last year. "I prefer women to be in sneakers."

After a pause, Mr. Guan added: "There haven't been glamorous women in my life lately. Perhaps I'm not so attractive."

Mr. Guan, a self-taught architect, is one of a group of artists and designers with varying levels of formal training who are changing the definition of the Chinese house one idiosyncratic project at a time. Using traditional materials like red and gray brick and wood, along with an often quirky, instinctual approach to design — and relying on the low-cost services of China's vast force of manual laborers — these artists and designers are reshaping indigenous forms like the courtyard house and the canal town in a modern idiom that appeals to the country's rising leisure class.

Mr. Guan, 40 and divorced, is a charter member of that class. He grew up in Tsingtao, where his family owns a factory that makes machines for oil production. In the 1980's and 1990's he started several businesses there, including a commercial photography studio, which, he said, allowed him to finance his art collection.

He began collecting in 2001, before the Chinese contemporary market took off toward its current heights, and in 2004 he spent $200,000 for a 10-year lease on a warehouse to house his growing collection. For $100,000 more he renovated the warehouse and added his own house, a 650-square-foot duplex attached to the original 2,600-square-foot building, which now serves as a "private" museum for some 200 of his 500 artworks.

Outside the complex, the only suggestion of what goes on inside are some sculptures, including an airplane wing, broken and rusted, resting on the sidewalk; the wing is a part of an art piece by Huang Yong Ping, who modeled it after the United States spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan Island in 2001. (A second part, with a real cockpit and a bamboo fuselage, is on display in the artist's show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass.)

The museum section of Mr. Guan's house — which he said is open by appointment to art collectors, curators and students — allows him to enjoy the spoils of his success day and night. The attached house, centered on an interior hall decorated with bamboo and 100-year-old blue-green ceramic furniture, is otherwise nearly as spare in design as the warehouse. It is Mr. Guan's first work of architecture, and it reflects the inspiration of his hero, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The living room is furnished in an early hybrid of Western and Chinese styles, Shanghai Art Deco, and is dominated by a satirical painting by Wang Guangyi of smiling politicians shaking hands. Upstairs, Mr. Guan's bachelor bedroom is monastic, with floor-to-ceiling windows, a Ming dynasty bed designed for one person and a bathroom, enclosed in glass, that offers no privacy at all. "This home is only for me to stay," he said, smiling. "Art is very close, and love is very far away."

ONE of Mr. Guan's favorite artists, Ai Weiwei, is also reinventing the courtyard house. Another largely self-taught architect, Mr. Ai, who is collaborating with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on the design of the Olympic stadium for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, built a stark, modern, gray brick house for himself, his wife, Lu Qing, and a passel of formerly stray dogs and cats, in 1999, on the northeast edge of Beijing.

"People had never seen a building like this," said Mr. Ai, who is the son of Ai Qing, the poet, and who studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in Manhattan.

The 5,000-square-foot house, surrounded by high walls, has 19-foot ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows and austere concrete interior steps. The materials and the basic architectural concept are traditional, but the expression is clearly modern.

Toshiko Mori, the chairwoman of the architecture department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, who stays in this house when she visits Beijing, called it a place of contradictions. "It is a courtyard house, yet it is not," she said. "Functions are clearly separated, and privacy and individuality insured. Traditional courtyard houses had shared functions and spaces that made life public." She added that the house "disrupts tradition yet constantly refers to history: one sleeps on a hard wooden bed, heating is limited, and one experiences the sobering real life under communist socialist regime," but there is a new luxury in the large interior spaces and the indirect light that suffuses them.

This kind of tension between deprivation and luxury — an increasingly salient theme in the new China — informs much of Mr. Ai's work, including the art piece he displayed on a recent visit: in one of the cavernous, sparely furnished rooms in his house, two enormous celadon bowls, about three feet in diameter, were each full of 500 pounds of freshwater seed pearls that gleamed in the sunlight. When he was young, he said, and his family was poor, he associated pearls with "the corrupt," the only people in China who could afford to buy them. Earlier this year, after commissioning artisans to make the bowls, which are copies of ones in the Forbidden City, he bought the entire batch of pearls — cheap irregulars — for $5,000 in the south of China. He added, "You cannot buy a perfect pearl for less than $5,000."

Mao Ran, a friend of Mr. Ai's and a designer of buildings, liked Mr. Ai's studied balance of austerity and luxury so much that he commissioned him to design his house and office, also in northeast Beijing, in 2005. He also suggested that he and Mr. Ai team up with Urs Meile, Mr. Ai's European art dealer and the owner of Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne, Switzerland, to build a walled compound of three live-work-gallery spaces on a 21,000-square-foot lot nearby.

Mr. Meile, who travels to Beijing five times a year, owns half the complex, or one and a half units, one of which serves as a pied-à-terre for him and his family, upstairs. (He contributed $700,000 toward rent of the land and construction, which has come to a total of about $1.2 million so far, although the complex is not yet finished; the three men, who took out a 20-year lease, together pay an annual rent of $24,000 to Cao Chang Di, the local village.) In January Mr. Meile's 22-year-old son, Rene, a student at the Beijing Language and Culture University, moved into the space after having spent five months in a 12-by-15-foot sparsely furnished dormitory room. Suddenly, he had a 7,000-square-foot loft.

"I was astonished by the space," he said, almost dwarfed by his surroundings. "It was hard to imagine living here." It was vast and, for the first week, empty.

Mr. Ai designed a voluminous gallery on the first floor of Mr. Meile's living space — it is now the Beijing branch of his gallery — and a two-bedroom apartment on the second. The main gallery is lighted by angled skylights at either end, so the light is dispersed. Traditional Chinese houses can be dark, but many of the spaces in Mr. Ai's architecture, including Mr. Meile's unit, are dim to diffuse, and are lighted by clerestories, or long, slender windows. "In darkness," Mr. Ai said, "the mind is more peaceful, and big windows don't necessarily give you a sense of home." On the other hand, the only way to reach the apartment upstairs is to exit the building and cross an open-air balcony, which has a stunning view of the courtyard and the vast expanse of sky.

The expansive space has been furnished with pieces from Mr. Ai's collection of antique armoires and chairs, and dining and coffee tables made from huanghuali, a coveted Chinese hardwood. Mr. Meile asked Nataline Colonnello, the 29-year-old director of his Beijing gallery, to take his son shopping for pots and pans and sheets and towels at Ikea, and to buy sofas at Qu Mei Furniture Shop, a Beijing store specializing in Scandinavian-style furniture. One week and $2,500 later, the loft became a home.

Mr. Ai was scrupulous in his arrangement of buildings on the small site. "I made it similar to a Chinese garden," he said, "with a constant change of view" for anyone moving within it. The building facades are sharply angled and paths twist. Even patches of lawn are asymmetrical.

For the compound wall, which runs along a working-class street dotted with bicycle-repair shops and pork-bun stands, Mr. Ai used a lattice of gray bricks instead of creating a more conventional solid wall. "The holes in the walls are not for decoration," he said. "They are to look at the reality."

THAT kind of reality has been largely banished in the area surrounding Cambridge Watertown, an 800-unit mixed-use complex that takes up 70 of the 1,400 acres that will form a new suburb outside Zhujiajiao, about 30 miles west of Shanghai. Before the area was rezoned for development in 2003 it was home to rural villagers, who farmed the land. In 2002 the Shanghai municipal government decided to create nine new developments in the city's outlying districts, in an effort to alleviate congestion in the city by persuading upper-middle-class residents to move to the suburbs. In a maneuver that has become familiar all over China, the government relocated about 300 families from the area that became Cambridge Watertown to new apartments about a mile away.

Although most of the new commuter towns are "characterless," according to Sun Jiwei, the local government's vice district chief in the Qingpu district, Zhujiajiao New Town, where Cambridge Watertown is situated, is an exception. That is partly because Zhujiajiao proper is a 1,700-year-old "water town," built around a cluster of waterways, and its new suburb, which will add 20,000 people to the old town's 30,000, also follows the natural contours of the water.

Ben Wood Studio Shanghai, which under the name Wood & Zapata designed Xintiandi — a commercial district that is considered the SoHo of Shanghai — created Cambridge Watertown as a "contemporary interpretation of a traditional water town," said Ben Wood, the principal architect. Unlike Guan Yi and Ai Weiwei, Mr. Wood, 58, is neither Chinese nor self-schooled (he studied architecture at M.I.T.), but he and his partner, Delphine Yip, are similarly intent on creating an architecture that marries traditional Chinese materials and building types to a modern vocabulary.

Gray-roofed villas and town houses line the banks of Cambridge Watertown's network of canals, interspersed with willows, camphor trees and maples. The symbolic center of the development is an 18th-century house that was probably built for a scholar or a merchant. Jeffrey Wong, a retired businessman and preservationist in Shanghai, who was the original leaseholder of much of the land that now makes up the development, brought the house there — along with other vernacular structures, including temples, teahouses and pagodas — to create a never-realized artists' colony. He took most of the buildings with him when he left, but he sold the house to the developer for one renminbi, or about 12 cents, with the proviso that it be preserved.

The surrounding houses are gray brick and white plaster, with contemporary interiors. One model show house, whose interior was done by Gravity Partnership in Hong Kong, was created for design aficionados, an influential minority in China's new upper middle class. It features a one-and-a-half-story living area with black granite walls, maple floors and a fake oversize flat-screen television. The open kitchen has a black stainless steel counter.

Among bourgeois Chinese, Ms. Yip said, there are two schools of thought on kitchens: "Some like them enclosed, when the maids do the cooking, and you can hide the dishes, smells and grease. Then there's the newer generation, who have gone abroad, who like to cook," she said, and who consider "the kitchen the soul of the whole house." (The houses in Cambridge Watertown have open kitchens, but buyers can elect to close them, since the houses are sold unfinished.)

One hundred units have been completed so far, and since last May, 56 of them have been sold for prices ranging from $170,000 for a 2,200-square-foot town house to $375,000 for a 3,000-square-foot villa. The buyers are chief executives, businessmen and designers, said Guo Wei, vice manager for sales at the development.

David W. Wang, president of Starwaly Properties Group, the developer, created Cambridge Watertown with the expectation that people would live there and commute to Shanghai, less than an hour away by car. His first customers, however, have bought the houses as second homes, and will take possession on June 30.

But they will not necessarily move in right away. "People will spend six months to one year decorating," Mr. Wood said. "In a Chinese house, white plaster walls are not enough." Since the development still has 700 other houses under construction, it may be a ghost town for a while.

But Mr. Wang is optimistic. Within six years, he predicted, Cambridge Watertown will have a coffeehouse, a teahouse, restaurants, a grocery store, a primary school and a light-rail system that will connect it to Shanghai, 20 minutes away. Ma Qingyun, the founder of MADA s.p.a.m., an architectural firm in Shanghai and a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University, is more guarded about the development's promise. "It will be filled up, if they adjust their expectations," he said. "They may have to lower their prices" to attract enough upper-middle-class buyers "who want more space and can't afford Shanghai proper."

Whatever its immediate commercial prospects, Zhujiajiao New Town may soon find itself with plenty of competition, as other high-style bedroom communities pop up around Shanghai, offering a new way of living for the city's growing professional class.

"A lot of wealthy people don't know how to spend their money on design," said Tong Ming, an associate professor of urban planning at Tongji University in Shanghai, and one of five architects designing a complex of 10 courtyard houses south of Shanghai that is expected to be completed this year. "They choose white marble and chandeliers, the more expensive the material, the more luxurious."

But he has recently seen a growth in design awareness, he said. As young Chinese professionals become more familiar with new forms of housing, he added — "the modern spatial layout, the open kitchen, private bedrooms, combining indoor and outdoor spaces" — they are beginning to see how well these forms suit their new way of living.

[+/-] show/hide this post