Homes are fundamentally spaces, and the traditional chinese conception of space demands an appreciation of unity, wholeness, balance and symmetry. In the chinese world-view, there is interconnectedness, and the home—how it is arranged and what it contains—cannot exist independently. We can see a recurring and well-defined spatial theme in chinese history that covers philosophy, religious thought, art and design. Spatial qualities are rhythmic, and crisscrossed and interwoven into a fine texture that mirrors nature, a tapestry comprising yin and yang, wuxing (the Five elements) or the phases of the dynamic sixty-four trigrams. In this sense, the traditional chinese house is predominantly based upon a planar spatial schema, with orientation a key element. The axis was the primary orientational reference. From the records, east– west orientation once occupied the principal place in chinese culture instead of north–south orientation. Such traditions, over time, became the ordering structure in interior layouts; for example, in the inner halls of chinese houses, the west was usually reserved for sleeping and the east for daily activities.
Equally important is an understanding of the chinese physical environment as a result of a syncretic relationship between confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. one of the effects of this was the way in which the home space was related to the surroundings, which affects not just the architecture of the buildings but also the view from within and how that connects interior with exterior. The influence of the concept of the courtyard house is hard to overestimate, even though such courtyards themselves are absent from the majority of contemporary homes. One of the functions of the courtyard was to ensure privacy for the family, of course, while creating a common area onto which individual interior spaces opened. But it also fulfilled the important function of reminding and emphasizing the oneness of man and nature. The enclosed open space within a home is a microcosm of the natural world, bringing the symbols and details of nature into a shared space. Courtyard in this sense also stands for gardens, terraces and even balconies, and in the details of structure we can see how architects and designers work to make sure that the interior and exterior interpenetrate each other. Bringing the natural world into the home, even if in symbolic form, such as carefully chosen rocks, is the legacy of this original chinese idea.
The entrance hall to the Beijing house of artist Shao Fan, which he designed himself. A freestanding wall clad in dark gray wood follows traditional principles of breaking a straight-line view from the door, behind and into the house and courtyard.
The Bamboo Wall House, designed by architect Kengo Kuma, makes deliberate use of cheap construction materials—the poles used in scaffolding—but integrated with smoother and softer materials, such as the plastic box wall encasing feathers and the cloth-upholstered sofas.
These values of space inherited from tradition are now being reinterpreted. The scale of this was heavily influenced by the first round of real estate development in china, which since 1997 awoke a certain awareness of design and architecture, with the launching of magazines in this domain that began to explore what should be china’s own way of contemporary living. This was accompanied by the end of the traditional welfare housing allocation system in chinese cities and the large-scale residential development of Bi guiyuan in Panyu in guangzhou. Two particular events reflected this change. One was when the now hugely successful Soho developers Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin commissioned architect Yung Ho Chang to design and construct a country villa for them, creating a vogue of modern architectural design which broke the popularity of the european classical style. A second was the reconstruction of abandoned warehouse space along Shanghai’s Suzhou creek by Taiwanese architect Deng Kun Yen. Despite initial resistance, this sparked a re-examination of abandoned aesthetics that showed the possibility of integrating old and new, and made a positive impact on later interior design. At that time, Wang Mingxian wrote in his Fragments of Space History, “it expressed the participation in current culture with avant-garde colors which embody a brand-new space concept.”
We say ‘traditional’ but this does not mean past and gone. Despite the huge, century-long disruption of chinese society and culture, there is now a revival of interest in the rich history of chinese belief, thought and artistic sensibility that are ultimately expressed in a way of life. That way of life is naturally reflected in the home space. With the current rapid social development and changes, many chinese are eager to trace and recover lost cultural traditions and to redefine a chinese sense in their homes, as a kind of ‘oasis’ in the strange and fragmented outer world. Chinese architects and designers operate in this context, and the best of them are working in ways that attempt to integrate international design vision and professional experience into china’s reality for chinese living. Naturally, their views vary in how to balance international concepts—for which read Western, essentially—and chinese sensibility. At one end of the spectrum, Shao Fan, whose house appears here, believes that a true fusion of Western and chinese art and design is not possible, and that the chinese should concentrate on articulating their own cultural legacy. This means understanding not just the history of artistic and design development over the dynasties but also the world-view that these express. As an internationally recognized artist, designer, architect and garden designer, in the tradition of the literati (wen ren), Shao is particularly well-placed to comment on the contemporary development of chinese ways of living. He claims to be an unrepentant classicist, and draws strength and ideas from as far back as the Song dynasty, as evidenced in the houses he has built for himself and his friends. Like fellow artist Ai Weiwei, his self-designed house is a contemporary evolution of the traditional courtyard house, in gray brick and using modern materials as appropriate to create a series of interlocking spaces that turn the dwelling into a varied, comfortable and even philosophical experience. In both Shao and ai’s concept of this form, interior volumes have been enlarged and simplified in terms of actual space and height, and in the way they draw in more light than was traditional.
Others see the ideal as a response to a new interpretation of chinese lifestyle, one that fully embraces certain international modern aspects. How to bring about the integration of modern needs with traditional values is problematic, and the relative proportions accorded to modernity and tradition vary widely throughout this book. Both Zhong Song and anderson lee, for example, work conceptually with traditional chinese techniques of space management, and bring this design economy to bear on modern apartment dwellings. The result according to casual observation shows more modernist sense than chinese, with a marked absence of well-known chinese traditional design motifs, yet this is the result of integrating modern and traditional at a deeper, conceptual level.
The Zhong Ya Ling apartment in Pudong uses white as a foundation for a geometrical arrangement of elements. At the entrance is a display area, a full-height mirror and an antique jacket in the stairwell.
Renovation of existing architecture and style has been another significant strand, but one that came relatively late. Deng Kun Yen, mentioned above, who moved from Taiwan to Shanghai, played a key role with his conversions of warehouses along the Suzhou creek, something that the city authorities at the time found perplexing. Sweeping away the past and rebuilding from scratch had become an unquestioned ideal until then. Subsequently, the value of china’s heritage has become widely recognized, though not before some beautiful homes had been bulldozed. The various skills and techniques needed in a thorough restoration, from structural to decorative, have been developed, and through this development has come an even greater appreciation of the different stylistic periods of design, including Ming, Qing, republican, Shanghainese art Deco, and even the utilitarian 1950s. And, in case this revival of past styles seems too deadly serious, there are many instances of playfulness and irony in the use of motifs, particularly from the Mao period, as we see dotted throughout this book.
Ultimately, designing for the way we live is a matter of understanding space. How that space is colored, lit, furnished and connected to its neighboring spaces is the result, and it can deeply affect the well-being of the people who live there. Meaningless decoration, all too easily applied by developers, simply fails to fulfill the potential. Here we have a unique possibility of china’s contemporary design practice being responsible for its own future, projecting the chinese dream onto a way of living.
The family dining room of the Pei family mansion, built in 1934 in Shanghai, with a hand-painted screen covering one wall. This blend of Chinese and Western was an identifiable feature of the lifestyle of the city’s wealthy in the early twentieth century. The renowned architect I. M. Pei was born into this family of merchants and bankers.