First published in InMagazine.
Conversation carried out by Robin Peckham and Venus Lau with Doreen Heng Liu.
Doreen Heng Liu, the principal of NODE Office and a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, began her architectural career with something rare in that field: a blank slate for the design of a new urban space, located on the Nansha peninsula south of Guangzhou. Now, she maintains a level of independence for her Shenzhen-based office, investigating and responding to the changing conditions of urbanism in the Pearl River Delta through urban planning, building design, installations, and research. Her work is based largely around a series of keywords that delimit the theoretical problematic of her practice: abstraction, antigravity, assemble, average, collage, concrete, contradiction, contrast, critical, crowded, dimension, double meaning, experiment, frame, installation, lightness, multi-viewpoints, neutralism, node, research, slowness, solid, space, temporary, texture, transparency, uniform, and void.
Your office begins geographically, conceptually, and technically with the Nansha area at the very center of the Pearl River Delta, unique for its status as both a gateway and border left largely untouched despite the rampant urbanization occurring around it. Besides the elements of vernacular architecture and location, can you tell me how your practice has grown out of the development of Nansha as a so-called new town? What further work will you do with the Nansha development project?
I started working on Nansha as an in-house architect for the Hong Kong-based Fok Ying Tung Group, which approached the development project during the phase of rapid construction in the Pearl River Delta, seeing it as a blank slate to engage in. Nansha represents a certain desire for Guangzhou, which has always been a river city that nevertheless desires some relationship to the ocean, imagining itself in competition with places like Shanghai and Hong Kong. So Nansha is a container port in some ways, and Guangzhou’s maritime link to the outside world, but it is also seen as an international leisure town with many second homes for people from Hong Kong and across the Pearl River Delta. Nansha had a clear vision at the very beginning on what it would look ultimately, but the developer lacked an experience and a knowledge of “infratructure” to execute and construct a city. For many years, I was involved with the development of Nansha Fok concession, but mainly designing single buildings for them, like a museum, a bookstore and an apartment building and so on, out of the local context. Many years after, Nansha is stilll an empty city, remaining a conceptual city of utopia without any real life. That condition has made me reconsider my design practice and the way to approach architecture. I often asked myself at that time if architecture as object is a main reason and drive to make a city work. Of course the reality at that time gave me a negative answer, leaving me with a desire to understand what makes a city work and the way it could be, and what relationship architecture plays and could play in the process of making a city. So I decided to go back to school and pursue my study in urbanism. In 2008, I finshed my DDes in Harvard and came back to the region. Those few years away have given me a new perspective on my practice, especially in Nansha. In March this year, together with Shenzhen Planning Institutes, my office won the Nansha Jiaomen River Central District Urban Design Competition. It was a great win with good timing. The local government has finally come to realize that the social infrastructure and industry, along with public space, perhaps, are more important forces and elements to shape a city than a pure bedroom community or fast built-up architecture without content. And I am glad we are able to work on these issues side by side with them.
One of your recent projects is an urban planning design for Yangjiang South. Yangjiang is familiar to many outside of the Pearl River Delta solely because of one of its most famous artistic residents, Zheng Guogu. How do you see his ongoing “Empire“ piece, which illegally and somewhat virtually develops a physical proeprty on the edge of the city? How would you compare and contrast your approach to redesigning Yangjiang with his?
Zheng Guogu and I met very early on, working on the “Canton Express,” Guangzhou Triennial, and other major projects during that period when so many of the figures that have become known for their work on the Pearl River Delta were just emerging. Though we are good friends, we had some disagreements at that time, mainly because we have different ways to approach and process design. We were all young, naive, and ambitious. Perhaps we were coming from very different backgrounds. I, as an architect with formal training, tended to think more rigidly, whereas he, as an artist, comes from a rather informal but more free perspective. There was a period of little contact until recently my office was awarded a contract to design the new city of Southern Yangjiang. Yangjiang is approximately the same scale as Nansha, and we came back into contact, hitting it off right away. Especially for a portion of the design including four exisitng villages, I would like very much to work together with Guogu. The government sees villages in the path of development as a cancer of sorts, wanting to exterminate them outright, but I disagree. As an architect and urban designer, I consider respect for existing conditions always as an important stand to take. And these villages represent an important history of the place that we can not ignore and delete as if they were never there. Both the government ambition and the will of the local people l have to meet and evolve into a form of new design. I believe in process and I have great respect for Zheng Guogu’s insightful practice of many years in this region. Zheng Guogu and I of course have very different understandings of design, and his architecture is far from the urban planning in which I have been involved, but we are all working on similar and interesting problems, especially responding to the local conditions. But my idea of working with him was short-lived. The government was not interested, preferring to get the planning job done as soon as possible. They could not tell the difference and they have no time to wait, I suppose. Our many initial expectations fell short in this case due to the speed of project. We were not able to exchange ideas with the government and local people; our investigation is incomplete; and an international forum on “new city design” turned out to be a local design jury. We quickly wrapped up our master plan and possible scenarios and left the place. I don’t know when we will ever have a chance to come back again and work on the same level of work. I guess this is the typical situation of China practice today: big ambitions, but with no tangible method to guarantee the quality of the work. Being an architect in China requires a lot of negotiation with this kind of bureaucratic vocabulary and mentality, but the result is often trivial.
You have also recently completed work on the Guangxi Museum in Nanning, in addition to other art and science museums in Shenzhen and Nansha you had previously completed. What special factors must be incorporated into museum design? Hong Kong is currently preparing to choose a design for its upcoming West Kowloon Cultural district projects, with the solicited proposals made public this August. If you were given the commission to design the museum, what unique features would you bring to the project?
The Guangxi Museum was a competition project, which, as is a normal practice these days in China, gave us only two weeks. The site is prominent, and the government would like to make it an iconic object (as usual). The form-making is more important than anything else in our mind, and dominant through our design process. However, in recent years, my office has already started to shift. I have also been influenced by another process of museum design, which is more about the process of art: how is the art of today different from the past, and how does the space affect the city and its neighborhood. It eventually will reshape the form of the museum today, sometimes perhaps formless. For example, take the Times Museum, a collaborative project with Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux, which we completed two years ago. It is, a branch of the Guangdong Museum of Art located in the north of Guangzhou. In that case the developers had requested an iconic design and chose a significant site in the center of their housing development, but Koolhaas resisted, complaining that he could build that kind of museum as a single object anywhere in the world, why did he have to come here? He was more interested in the nature of such a neighborhood museum, located in a typical housing development like this. It is generic enough for him to test some of his new ideas of museum making, I would guess. The concept became most important, and the form could be fluid and uncertain according to the concept. Ultimately the museum space was distributed in fragments over the “excess space” of several floors in one single residential tower, a unique model for a museum. I think a new concept like that could be interesting for West Kowloon.
Unlike many architects who begin working with interiors and only later graduate to buildings and then urban planning, especially in Hong Kong, where opportunities are few, NODE began by directly engaging with government commissions for major urban planning projects. How does this affect your relationship to building design, and what role does scale play in your practice?
As an outgrowth of Nansha development, in recent years my office has been more and more interested in the urban issues and how our design practice situated and responded to various urban conditions today in China. It was only later that NODE was officially founded as an independent practice, and we have become smaller since recently moving our main office from Nansha to Shenzhen. People often ask me why we would move now. I have to say, we did not give up Nansha. This is still a place that has great potential, and we still expect a lot of changes in the next five to ten years. Nansha, eventually, is a city to come, but not yet. The office has been detached from a normal world for a long time, and I think a design office, at least part of it, can only grow and mature out of an urban reality, not an isolated setting like Nansha currently, and we need to mature desperately. Therefore, I see the move to Shenzhen as a way to test ourselves. If my office is able to survive in a cruel reality, it means we are strong enough to be sustainable. Architecture is not only a beautiful concept, but also a social work. So I have to have an alternative place suitable for the nature of my office today. Shenzhen, perhaps, should be considered a better place for now. Named as a “Capital of Design” in 2008 by UNESCO, Shenzhen seems like the place to be. The government has been quite supportive and willing to accommodate and nurture such smaller practices like ours, compared to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, which I think are both more difficult environments right now. There is a trend that more and more employees and contracts will end up with the large and state-owned enterprises, especially in this region. The small practices like us, who wish to spend more energy on creative, avant-garde projects, will shrink. Who knows. We would like to stay small and innovative, but we also need to grow strong and competitive against bigness and monopoly. Of course, we also hope the government will be open and accommodating to practices like us, hopefully able to provide some tangible assistance. Even so, we still have our competitive edge and there are a lot of other design opportunities out there in this region and China. To me, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou form a grouping of cities in line that makes the Pearl River Delta a very interesting and dynamic system in which to work, live, and experience. This region is the root of our practice and continues to give us inspirations. We are happy to stay here and be part of its growing process.
