In many ways, the scene was no different from your average block party: adults strung up balloons and children gyrated inside hula hoops and bounced on a trampoline; the sound of music and the smell of food filled the air; beer was poured and hands shook and hugs exchanged. The atmosphere was one of openness and above all peace, but it was exactly this mood of tranquility that made the occasion special. Weeks earlier Vila Cruzeiro had been the site of open warfare between local police and Comando Vermelho, the drug gang that controls the neighborhood. Walls on the route to the painting are marked with bullet holes and spray-painted warnings: ‘Attention neighbours. In days of war, avoid leaving the house. Thank you, Comando Vermelho.’

News crews swarmed the steps as the party began. For GLOBO TV, the visit to the giant mural, called Rio Cruzeiro, was the first time it had sent a crew to Vila Cruzeiro since one of its reporters was murdered there while investigating drug dealing in the favela. For the artists, this positive coverage meant a chance to bridge the gap between the neighbourhood’s perception and its reality. “People here are very proud of where they live,” Jeroen Koolhaas, one half of Haas & Hahn, told me. “But the outside world looks on it as a shame that these neighorhoods exist and [thinks that] the people who live there should be ashamed of themselves.” His partner Dre Urhan continued the thought: “In public opinion, [favelas] are considered very far away; they’re in the middle of the city, but they are an inaccessible other world.”

Rio’s is a culture fixated on beauty. It is hard to imagine a more idyllic location for living, and the city has been crafted with such generosity and care that it elevates urban planning to an act of love. At times Rio feels like a macrocosm of one of its most celebrated resources, female beauty. Its architects and planners assume the role of stylists: they apply soft, vibrant colors to highlight the landscape’s natural tones, they erect rows of residential towers that emphasise her curves. Over the years they’ve proposed radical treatments to maximise Rio’s God-given potential, even, in the case of the city’s partly man-made beaches, a kind of plastic surgery.

To Rio’s beauticians, the city’s favelas are disfigurements, unsightly patches of brown that stain the landscape. They disturb the city’s image, not only because of how they look, but because of what they represent. They are the embodiment of Rio’s failure, the consequence of a city’s inability to accommodate all of its citizens, physically and culturally. Over time, favelas like Vila Cruzeiro have gained reputations as immoral, terror-filled places. The impression isn’t completely inaccurate, but it exacts a terrible price on favela residents, most of whom are not involved in the drug-related violence that fills the nightly news.

Creating imagery to counter the steady stream of negative coverage is one of the ambitions of Haas & Hahn’s Favela Painting project, which they launched in 2006 with some funding from the Dutch Ministry of Culture. Rio Cruzeiro follows the project’s first act, The boy with the kite, a mural in the centre of Vila Cruzeiro on the side of a building that became the neighorhood’s first art gallery. The inspiration for the project came in 2005 when Haas & Hahn (their name is derived from the last syllables of Koolhaas & Urhahn) first came to Rio to make Firmeza Total, a short documentary commissioned by MTV on the role of hip hop in the lives of favela youth. Struck by the disconnect between these neighorhoods and the city that surrounds them, Haas & Hahn started imagining ways to encourage the citizens of Rio to take a second look at one of their city’s defining features.

Over their months of work there, Haas & Hahn have built up trusting relationships with people in a community that has grown weary of outsiders. “A lot of times people come [to neighborhoods like Vila Cruzeiro] and they take,” Urhan says. (I’m reminded of a line I heard in City of Men, the acclaimed Brazilian TV show: ‘People come to the favela for two reasons,’ one of characters says, ‘either to buy drugs or make documentaries’ – the latter of which Haas & Hahn first did.) Urhan continues, “But making this painting is exactly the opposite. And unintentionally you create the best medium to communicate with the people, because when we walk here there’s no question whatsoever about why we’re here. It’s become a fact of life.”

Urhan shares an apartment in the favela, and he and Koolhaas were introduced into the community with the help of their assistants on the painting Giovanni Da Conceição Silva, Vitor Luis Da Silva, and Robson Teles Carneiro. “It’s an interesting situation when you’re an employer, but you have to ask your employees how to walk the streets,” Urhan says. “Everything that doesn’t have to do with paint, they know better. And for that they’re really invaluable to the project. And for our safety.” Now, Urhan and Koolhaas are clearly loved in the neighbourhood – as we talk, a constant stream of people greets them with affectionate back pats, thumbs up and cheek kisses.

As the sun is going down, the staircase becomes more active. ‘MSN’, a baile funk rhythm comprised of a Bobby McFaren-style beat box overlaid with sounds from MSN messenger, floats out of somebody’s window. The scent of barbecue wafts by. Someone suggests we get some beers. Having completed their project and attracted unprecedented coverage (in addition to almost every local paper and TV station, CNN, Al Jazeera and even Fox News covered the painting) Hans & Hahn are reluctant to charge their work with any excess significance. “Really,” Jeroen says towards the end of our talk, “it’s just like a shirt. A new shirt for the favela.”

“If you want to build a bridge between these two sides of the city that live side by side but have an enormous gap between them,” Urhan tells me later, “the easiest way is to do it through some sort of art intervention.” Koolhaas adds: “We tried to find a way for the [residents'] sense of pride to be painted on the walls of the favela so that the outside world could see how good they feel about themselves and could understand that there are families here that can take care of themselves.”

Given their ambition, it might seem strange that they chose for a subject a fish-filled river, an image with little obvious connection to favela life. But both artists stress that the neutrality of the image is essential to the project. “I think it is a political statement to make something unpolitical,” Urhan says. “There is a social and political statement in saying, ‘In this slum where there are so many difficulties and so much bad press, let’s make something that is totally detached from that, something that’s just beautiful.’”

Originally published on artreview.com

This is not a good time to be a great architect. Having achieved the rank of b-list celebrity during the boom years, architecture’s leading figures now bare the mark of the bubble. The public views them with suspicion; we recognize that architects no longer work for us. Fame has eroded their influence, delivering reverence but draining respect. In a time of crisis architects are not consulted. Despite their sensitivity, their awareness of history, despite the fact that they are at the center of a dozen different professions, even Pritzker winners find themselves out of the loop.

Nowhere is this condition more acute than in China, the land of infinite square meters and claustrophobic schedules. “Architect” is a relatively new concept in the PRC and, having evolved with the process of reform and opening up, the Chinese architect is generally considered an assistant to the policy’s main actors, government officials and entrepreneurs. His passive-aggressive role in the erasure of old, idiosyncratic cities and construction of new, generic megacities, undermines the local architect’s credibility and, by implication, the importance of architecture itself.

Since founding Amateur Architecture Studio fifteen years ago, Wang Shu has oriented his practice in opposition to China’s epic urbanization. In a lecture last year at Harvard, he explained the rationale: “In the past twenty five years, [China] did an incredible thing… One country with three to five thousand years of history, with such rich cultural and traditional things… made a big decision to demolish it. Ninety percent, just in the past twenty-five years. They do this and then build some new things; they copy from all over the world… It’s the professional urban planner and architect who did this disaster. They do this with the government together. And so I think maybe we need another kind of architect.”

This other architect is Wang’s Amateur, a romantic figure inspired by the past, agitated by the present, hopeful for the future, active and independent of Chinese commercial culture. She is experimental and thorough. She’s critical of the idea that modernity exists in winner-take-all opposition to the past. In the Amateur’s view, Modern is simply a division in a vast catalogue of materials and techniques at the designer’s disposal. In one of Wang’s key statements, the architect explains the Amateur’s output:

Amateur architecture is unimportant architecture. One of the problems of professional architecture is that it takes architecture itself too seriously. Building is more basic than architecture: it is closely associated to contemporary life, it is simple, often trivial. Before I became an architect, I was firstly a literati – architectural design was only my free time activity. What’s more important than architecture itself is the cultural atmosphere of the place; what’s more important than technology is the brilliant language, norms, and ideas in simple craft construction.

There was once a time — before reform, before the boom — when significant building projects in China were the product of an intimate relationship between craftsman and scholar. They shared a high level or trust and an almost unimaginable tolerance for ambiguity. Craftsmen rendered in physical space ideas expressed to them through poems and abstract paintings. Their primary task was not to produce substance but atmosphere, to manipulate matter in pursuit of the immaterial, and in this effort they exercised broad freedoms to interpret and experiment.

Wang Shu’s work is part of this tradition. His Amateur is closer in ideology to the scholars of the past than architects of today. He designs beautiful concepts that result in odd buildings. He makes sketches, chooses materials, defines dynamics, and then leaves the execution to amateurs who reinterpret his vision according to their desires and abilities. “In the construction process, you’ll find that the workers have added their own techniques,” he once told me as we toured his signature work, the Ningbo History Museum. “For example, they arranged the bricks in a traditional pattern from clothes. I didn’t tell them to do this, but they understood how, and they did it.” Did he mind? “No. I like this process: you start with a certain kind of thinking, but as it progresses, you can’t control the result completely, but the result is still controlled. I think this is very near traditional Chinese philosophy — how to balance nature and human beings’ abilities.”

Within our current environment of information excess, ever elevating resolution levels, infinite storage space and decreasing memory, there is something about Wang Shu’s embrace of imprecision that feels heroic. He is a proxy from the analog past, seemingly sent to earth to remind us that the best way to innovate is to understand the ancient. In explaining his work, he offers poems and references landscape paintings. On a tour, he sounds less like an architect than a guide in a nature reserve. He speaks of valleys, caves, lakes. When we reached the Ningbo Museum’s high point, a platform where the building splits into five jagged pieces, he said, “When I designed this, I was thinking of mountains. I couldn’t design something for the city, because there is no city here yet, so I wanted to do something that had life.”

The fact that the Museum is not aesthetically beautiful – from certain angles it is utterly clumsy – somehow doesn’t diminish its appeal. Against the backdrop of the contemporary Chinese city, with its endless articulations of newness, craziness, Westernness, strength and luxury and suffering, Wang’s commitment to craft and apparent indifference to commercial sensibilities can feel exhilarating. His is an experiential architecture. It doesn’t photograph well, because it preferences feel over look. It can’t be rendered because it is low res by design. In Wang Shu’s buildings the lines between in and out, dark and light, built and natural blur. In this hypermediated high contrast moment, when architecture often feels like an extension of set design, he offers stimulating atmospheres instead of impressive backdrops.

In some ways, Wang Shu’s Pritzker feels premature. There are certainly other deserving designers with longer careers, more influential arguments, more accomplished apprentices, etc. The recipient himself seemed to acknowledge this in his official response — “It’s a big surprise. I’m still so young!” But Wang Shu’s work amounts to more than a single studio’s output. It represents a civilization’s cumulative culture, dozens of philosophical and artistic traditions from high and low, many of which have been overwhelmed in China’s frantic drive to modernize. Despite the fact that the Pritzker committee made frequent use of the future tense in explaining their choice — “The fact that an architect from China has been selected by the jury represents a significant step in acknowledging the role that China will play in the development of architectural ideals” — in honoring Wang Shu’s work, the committee tacitly acknowledges this cultural legacy and, by extension, China’s undervalued contribution to architectural history. It is an inspired choice, one that shines a cold light on the excesses of contemporary urban design and offers the chance for re-orientation.

Originally published on domusweb.

Where is Ai Weiwei?
The Making of an Un-Named Exhibition

In August 2010, Ai Weiwei asked if I wanted to curate a section of the Gwangju Design Biennale. It was my first time hearing of the project and the place, and my first ever offer to curate. I accepted immediately.

A 30 minute conversation followed wherein Weiwei briefed me on the virtues of the event, including its big budget (“bigger than Venice!”) and open-minded leadership (“they wouldn’t have asked me to be director if they weren’t willing to take risks”). He talked about the host city (“good food”, “Korea’s democracy movement started there”, “many, many love hotels”) and described the biennale site, a complex of four interconnected galleries containing more than 8000 square meters of exhibition space.

As he talked, I started to worry. The scale of the project seemed huge and the expectations were high. The biennale’s theme, a strong, unclear concept derived from the Tao Te Ching and developed by the biennale’s co-director Seung H-Sang, I found difficult to penetrate. “Design Is Design Is Not Design,” Weiwei explained, was an epigram implying limitless creativity. “It is the end and the beginning,” he said. “For the biennale, we need to show design not as just a final product, but as part of a continuous process.” I scribbled the statement down. I wasn’t sure what do with it, but it seemed to me an anchor point, something solid enough to grab on to, extend out from.

I needed more, so I dropped the pretense of collaborating and reverted to my journalist roots, transforming our meeting into a desperate sort of interview. I prodded Weiwei with questions; I offered suggestions and requested clarifications, I repeated and rephrased his responses. He confirmed or corrected me, but he rejected nothing. It was as if his ambition was endless and capable of absorbing everything. By the end of the meeting, I’d written down dozens of commands (“Explore the reasons for similar activities in design”), analogies (“Exhibition like a body – fat, bone, organs, muscle, skin”), conceptual pairings (“Stephen Hawking + Buddhism”), and seemingly unrelated references (“Beat Generation”, “Big Bang”, “Food”, “Kunstkammer”, “French Almanac”, “KKK/Abu Ghraib/Burqa”).

At the center of the page, repeatedly underlined and surrounded by a cartoon cloud was the most important, least defined phrase of them all – Un-Named Design. This was the title of the section that I would curate. It was one of several sections in the show, but the only one that Ai Weiwei would oversee personally. Most of the points he’d made during our discussion were about Un-Named and when it was over he suggested I write a short statement to declare our intentions. That night I pored over my notes and eventually came up with this:

The Un-Named Design component will explore those facets of the human environment that are not conventionally considered design, yet influence everyday life and the perception of it. The works included in this section will derive from areas of creation where originality, signature, and marketability are not the primary source of value, and where the identity of a product is based on its theoretical force and practical use, rather than its material appearance. Examples from this creative territory range from highly purpose-driven virtual designs for social networks to the low-tech, custom manufacturing of low cost artificial limbs. The goal of this theme is to reframe design as a set of strategic solutions to human needs, rather than an ego-driven pursuit of subjective beauty. It will expand the concept of design beyond the material and show that it is not only about providing more or less useful goods, but also about the modification of human perception in a rapidly changing, interconnected world.

To illustrate the text I created a simple collage of design icons that I thought helped express what our section was aspiring to avoid. This image would provide the opening to every one of the dozens of Un-Named Design explanations I’d offer over the next year, the first and most important of which occurred in Gwangju two weeks after my meeting with Weiwei. It was a brief presentation, one of many that day as each of the biennale’s curators, its two directors, and exhibition designer introduced himself – the team was only men at that point, a mistake eventually corrected – and offered a first take on his appointed tasks. I presented a 30 slide PPT meant as a kind of declaration of intention. It was a lunging statement, short on details but unambiguous about the section’s ambitions; a year later, it still provides as good an explanation of our image of Un-Named Design as anything that followed, with a surprisingly high percentage of its proposals eventually making it into the show.

The following is an excerpt, illustrated with the original reference images and a few photos of the realized exhibits:

Our ideas for the Gwangju Design Biennale are based on the observation that our current concept of design is too narrow to capture the many forms of creativity and invention available around the world. This image shows a random assortment of artifacts that we feel embodies the prevailing understanding of design. Most of them of commodities or brand expressions. This is a very ungenerous definition of design, but it is the prevailing definition at the moment. In order to maximize its potential, the Biennale should become a platform for highlighting aspects of creativity that are outside of the conventional definition of design.

One of the primary methods that we’d like to use in the Un-Named Design exhibition is deconstruction – breaking apart a finished object to understand the decisions and considerations that produced it. By conducting a kind of dissection of a design object or process, we reveal individual components that when removed from the whole can have their own value and can produce their own kinds of inspiration.

One method of deconstruction could involve defining the formula from which a seemingly original design is derived. This image comes from the Graphic Standards Manual for USAid, the American development organization. It represents a critical component of contemporary design – the brand manual – the set of aesthetic and philosophical priorities that designers are instructed to follow in order to ensure consistency for their client’s brand. The brand manual makes explicit the fact that design is frequently not a pure creative process; it’s a highly regulated, top-down activity in which business often has the first and last word.

It is important to emphasize that design is not just a product but a process. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in mass industrial production. This is a photo taken in the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen where more than a dozen workers killed themselves recently. This factory has over 200,000 people working at it. At a scale that large there needs to be a highly developed and strictly enforced choreography of actions. You need to program a worker’s time almost to the minute in order to produce the millions of iPads and iPhones that we take so much pleasure from. We consider that manipulation of human energy an important and brutal form of design, as well a revealing underside to Apple.

Another point that we would like to make in this Biennale is that design is not dependent on technology or money. Design is ultimately dependent only on imagination and resourcefulness. This is a good example of that – a basketball that was turned into a bucket by a farmer in rural China. It is a masterpiece of design in the sense that it addresses a need by looking at a conventional item in an unconventional way. It implicitly challenges everyone else to do that same.

Here is an other example of rural Chinese design. This is a mansion constructed by a farmer. It is somewhat comical to look at – basically just a collage of architectural motifs from different cultures and time periods – Greek columns, Dutch gables, bay windows, etc. This is in some ways a very crude expression of post-modern design but it is also an important demonstration of the improving material conditions for millions of Chinese peasants.

Another issue that we intend to expose at the Biennale is military design. There is a huge amount of imagination, innovation, and subversive thought that goes into the creation of instruments of war. The fact that this is rarely recognized in design publications and exhibitions reveals another limitation in the current definition of design, namely that design is considered a tool for good by default. Most designers see their objective as improving the quality of life; design schools teach their students human-centered design and ask them to devise ways to improve life through function, aesthetics, etc. This a drastically imbalanced understanding of design, in my opinion, and one that contributes to its increasing irrelevance.

Military design is not limited to Stealth Bombers, of course. This is an IED, the improvized weapon that is commonly used by insurgents in Iraq. We intend to exhibit this.

We are not interested in focusing only on the more advanced or expensive designs. Often the most impressive design approaches are applied in situations of deprivation. This is a $20 prosthetic device developed in India and used in Afghanistan, many parts of Africa, and other places.

There are various very radical forms of design currently taking place in bioengineering. This is an image of a macaque that was made to glow in the dark by introducing a fluorescent hormone into it as an embryo. This experiment raises scientific, ethical, and even aesthetic issues, none of which are considered in the current design discourse.

Foreign and domestic tourists exert an overpowering influence on the physical appearance of the places they visit, as cities are increasingly built, planned, and changed under the gaze of outsiders. We’d suggest that this influence constitutes an indirect but nevertheless profound form of design.

The tourist fantasy extends from the physical to the virtual via immersive environments that allow visitors to experience their dreams and nightmares. This is a virtual reality theater that is often used by Duke University’s nursing school to treat patients with severe phobias.

Geoengineering is a field of study that seeks to deliberately manipulate the Earth’s climate to counteract the effects of global warming. It takes many forms – from planting artificial trees to shooting mirrors into space to fertilizing the oceans. Since we are unlikely to ever form a global consensus on what to do about climate change, we should acknowledge that these interventions will probably be undertaken unilaterally. This implies a very significant form of design – not only in the machines that will allow it to happen but in the planetary effects that their creators imagine.

Related is the impact we’ve already had on our atmosphere, in this case through the satellites we’ve launched. Space exploration is acknowledged for its design qualities, but in this case what we want to highlight is the legacy of space travel. This diagram shows not only the functioning satellites that orbit the earth but also the non-functioning ones and the millions of pieces of space junk that surround our planet and form a kind of man-made Saturn ring.

After the meetings in Gwangju, having been inspired by the biennale’s executive vice president Yongwoo Lee, director Seung H-Sang, Minsuk Cho and Anthony Fontenot, curators of the Named Design section, Francisco Sanin, the biennale’s master planner, and Massimiliano Gioni, the director of the 2010 biennale, whom I never met but who nevertheless provided invigoration and anxiety via his exhibition, I wrote a second, more grandiose expression of Un-Named Design.

As humankind enters the second decade of a new century, it is increasingly obvious that the standard means of describing our world are no longer adequate. The words and values engrained in our books and magazines, in film and online, are unable to accurately describe the forces shaping our lives. If we are to make the most of the present and think more intelligently about the future, we first need to refresh our language. To begin this process, we propose a radical reevaluation of “design”.

In Europe, the idea of design is well established but poorly understood. Over the past century it has been repeatedly altered to reflect changes in the political climate, elite preferences, or popular mood. In its current form, design projects the values of the free market. It is a vague amalgamation of clothes, home furnishings, personal hygiene, art, antiques, and user interfaces. It is western-centric, commodity-driven, and wealth-dependent. It is hugely influential and much copied, but it somehow loses depth with each incarnation.

In Asia, the notion of design is newer. Its status remains unclear and its limits are undefined. We propose that the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale seizes this ambiguity as a source of strength. Where in the West design is a often tool for exclusion, in Gwangju it can be inclusive, accepting contributors from across cultures and classes. Rather than proposing a single, globalized template for the world to follow, at the Biennale design can become a codeword for the invention of new forms of difference – new slang, new relationships, new hairstyles, new religions.

As its name suggests, Un-Named Design will challenge the myth of the designer. The exhibition will background issues of authorship in order to focus on effects – the ways in which design alters perceptions, reinvents, and reveals hidden truths. It will expand the boundaries of design to include fields such as bioengineering, virtual communication, permaculture, pre-modern technology, and performance-enhancing drugs. It will reject marketability as the primary means of evaluation and acceptance as the ideal audience response.

With a few refinements, this would serve as the all-purpose “project text” that we’d use to try to seduce would-be exhibitors, convince unsure collaborators, and promote our exhibition to the public. It was written in September 2010, a year prior to the opening of the show. From there we worked to address three inescapable needs: we assembled a team, added exhibits, and engaged our fellow curators in a discussion about the relationship between the Named and Un-Named sections.

From the first presentations it was obvious that Named and Un-Named overlapped; we shared common interests, in our earliest presentations we shared several proposals. In order to make it work we needed to find definitions that distinguished each section without enclosing it. The discussion went on for months, animating (and dominating) the biennale’s meetings, sometimes to the detriment of other sections. Eventually we came to a consensus, expressed best by Anthony, co-curator of Named: “The difference between ‘Named’ and ‘Unnamed’ is based on work being produced within the ‘design field’ and that outside of it… The field of art, graphics, fashion, etc. constitute an acknowledged design practice. This is what we consider to be ‘Named Design’… This phenomenon of ‘name’ functions in contrast to practices that are not necessarily acknowledged as ‘design’ (in the academic sense).”

This insight added another slide to my pitch presentation:

Un-Named Design became a kind of codeword for the forms of creativity excluded by the architecture/interiors/fashion/graphics/furniture/home furnishings design definition found in most blogs and magazines. It allowed us to escape issues of authorship and fame and concentrate on the idea of design itself. It also made apparent the lack of definition within our section. Our list of exhibits was growing by the day; Weiwei was providing a steady stream of intriguing, confusing suggestions – “low cost medicine”, “wikileaks!”, “nuclear smuggling ring” – and I knew we needed some way to situate it all. I made some proposals: the first was to organize Un-Named according to China’s traditional five elements of wood, fire, earth, metal, water. Based on the biennale’s Tao Te Ching foundation, I thought this might be an elegant way to incorporate the ‘everything under the sun’ subject matter that Weiwei seemed to want. He dismissed it out of hand. After that we tried a geographical organization, then grouping according to the sections of the newspaper, then according to a complicated but maybe interesting interpretation of cause and effect. In the end, the newspaper idea won out.

To firm up the concept, we made a survey of high and low brow papers from around the world and devised eight sub-categories based on the most frequently occurring section titles. We rearranged our exhibits to fit: six pieces in Politics, seven in Money; fifteen in Body, five in Culture; five in Home, seven in Environment; nine in Science, two in Sports. In a curatorial meeting in Gwangju, I proposed organizing the exhibition according to these sections. “A good biennale shares the traits of a good newspaper,” I announced. It should be timely and international in orientation, it should combine complex and common subject matter and should engage emotional and rational thought with equal energy. Our exhibition should encourage the collisions that occur everyday as readers pass through collections of curated news stories, before ending up at the sections that most closely match their interests. I closed by suggesting that we change the event’s name to the Gwangju Design Bulletin in order to emphasize the concept. That was one metaphor too many, though, and the idea didn’t make out of the meeting. For clarity’s sake, we hung on to it, and in the following months filled out the categories, adding, moving and removing exhibits, defining positions and deciding on story lines in a process that was essentially editorial.

In April, Ai Weiwei disappeared. His studio was shut down and his staff temporarily scattered to safe havens around China and elsewhere. I remained in Beijing and tried my best to hold things together. The remaining team was made up mostly of students from the Oslo School of Architecture, an ambitious, inexperienced group that by this point was accustomed to the precariousness of working with Ai Weiwei. Just a couple of months earlier, they’d had to relocate after the local government demolished Weiwei’s Shanghai studio; now it seemed their space in Beijing could go too. They carried on, nevertheless, often from their apartments and local cafes. We met regularly but my mind was elsewhere.

To be more precise my mind was nowhere. After Weiwei’s arrest I spent most of a month in a highly active, agitated and almost totally unproductive state, a kind of 24-hour news channel of the mind. I participated in circular conversations about the where/why/hows of Weiwei’s detention and theoretical release. I sought out the opinions of journalists and lawyers and thoughtlessly parroted their talking points about the Party’s rules of conduct. I listened to supposed friends offer anti-Ai opinions straight from the State papers’ opinion pages. I read gruesome, baseless stories about his treatment. I witnessed the international outcry, made a FREE AI WEIWEI mix and posted it on my blog. My website was hacked and taken offline. I stopped going to the restaurants where we used to meet.

As a coping mechanism, I re-doubled my efforts to develop the Un-Named section. The project became a kind of tribute in my mind, a testament to the artist’s vision and an uprising against the powers of info control that were attempting to delete him from Chinese consciousness. In an effort to preserve his presence, I made a document called “Ai Weiwei’s Advice”, a sort of greatest hits compilation I made from four months of meeting notes. It contained commands like:

- You have to find a way to make people understand
- You don’t have to say much but you have to be very clear about what you’re saying
- Always emphasize the bigger theme
- Always give another definition to what you’re presenting

The points were typical of Weiwei’s direction – vague but unambiguous, resolute in his commitment to communication and unafraid of misinterpretation or disagreement. We tried our best to uphold these virtues: we scrutinized our exhibits for hidden angles, we cultivated uncertainty and devised display strategies that emphasized clarity over spectacle. In this effort, we received invaluable, undercompensated assistance from Jingjing Naihan Li and Mi Michelle Liu, two Beijing-based architects who have chosen to forgo The World’s Fastest Urbanization in favor of furniture and graphic design, respectively. They joined in the days following Weiwei’s disappearance, spurred by their support for the artist and pity for his panicked collaborator, and their professionalism and clarity of vision brought the project back from the brink. With the return of An Xiao Mina, a member of Ai Weiwei’s FAKE Studio who was forced to relocate to the Philippines following his arrest, and the continued support of Hyun Jee Kim and Kayoko Ota, Un-Named’s associate curators in Seoul and Tokyo, we formed the Un-Named Design Team and set about finalizing the look and content of the section’s seventy exhibits.

It was a complicated process. Our commitment to featuring “fields such as bioengineering, virtual communication, permaculture, pre-modern technology, and performance-enhancing drugs” meant that most of our artists had no prior exhibition experience. For many, the design element of their work exists in disembodied form. In order to convince the audience that what we were showing – a political protest manual, DNA barcodes, execution procedures, a transcontinental monetary system – qualified as Un-Named Design, we needed to understand the thinking that powered them. We needed to make clear, in our minds first and then hopefully in the minds of others, that design extends past the physical to include intellectual creations of all kinds: it includes intangibles like software, law, and political strategy; most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more invention, more mutations, more self-enhancing connections. From this perspective, design becomes a much richer and much simpler concept: if a well made website qualifies as good design, then the 1000 lines of code that determine it must qualify as well. If these 1000 lines of HTML qualify then Tao Te Ching‘s 5000 characters of Chinese must. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, and enable future inventions. A workout regimen and an earth projection, then, are in the same category as Mies’s Farnsworth House and Apple’s iPhone. They are design; they’re, to borrow Kevin Kelly’s phrase for describing technology, “something useful produced by a mind”.

To enact these ideas in our exhibition, we developed an active, micromanaged approach to curating. In a manic two-month push, the Un-Named Design Team produced over thirty original exhibits, with thirty more attributed to outside designers but developed and produced by us in Beijing. We conducted interviews, transcribed and edited videos, made models and illustrations. We educated ourselves on subjects we knew nothing about and visualized the lessons. To compensate for the non-standard nature of our material, we applied standard display techniques – wall prints, monitors, cases, pedestals, etc. We designed the furniture ourselves, based on a strictly limited pallet of plywood, acrylic, and steel. I wrote descriptive texts for the catalog and gallery walls in a stripped down style to match:

‘Afterlife Design’ presents promotional material from commercial services for disposing of dead loved ones. These services are drawn from a rapidly developing design field that incorporates superstition and science in order to modernize the memorial ritual.

A couple of months before the exhibition opening, Ai Weiwei re-appeared. His release was as sudden as his arrest and considerably less predictable. By that point our effort had achieved a self-sustaining energy and Weiwei was content to let the project play itself out. We met several times, but mostly about logistics – “Has everyone been paid?” – and communication – “Please tell them I appreciate their support and hope I can come to the opening.” In the end, he couldn’t. The police still held his passport and couldn’t risk an outburst outside their jurisdiction. We all missed him. We wanted to eat and drink and force him to dance at the opening. I wanted him to see what we’d done. It wasn’t to be, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Ai Weiwei had made his essential contribution almost a year before. From there his idea was taken over, complicated, violated and improved by a messy collective of people committed to his vision, locked in an unpredictable and occasionally painful process of unnamed design.

Beijing, September 2011

Is it when construction ends? When users move in?

And how does one factor in the contributions of its occupants when assessing a building? Does an apparent conflict between the architects’ vision and the residents’ tastes indicate a failure? An opportunity? An inevitability?

The Giant Interactive Group headquarters is a big, complicated Morphosis building plopped down in the middle of a big, empty Chinese field. It is long and lean and low-rise, equal parts opaque and transparent, with an undulating green roof that provides welcome topographical variety to its flat, former swampland site.

The headquarters is located in Songjiang, an ancient town now incorporated into greater Shanghai. Giant Group’s campus is to be the centerpiece of Songjiang’s new “civilized industrial area,” but at the moment it stands largely alone.

A newly paved, traffic-free road splits the campus and elegantly divides its program into Business (offices, meeting rooms, etc.) to the east and Pleasure (gym and pool, clubhouse, restaurant and bar, etc.) to the west. Due to the remoteness of its location, the campus should be all-inclusive and both client and architect have gone to lengths to provide a wealth of work and play possibilities to Giant’s employees, many of whom now live on site but are accustomed to the hustle and bustle of Shanghai. Throughout the campus one finds an abundance of shared spaces – large and small, in and outdoor, defined and ambiguous. There is a library and an auditorium, there are meeting rooms and smoking nooks; there are sunlit walkways and shaded corners, there is the vast, scalable roof and a narrow jetty that stretches into a tiny, tree-lined lake. These thoughtful “third places” comprise one of the campus’s defining features and suggest the existence of a soft, compassionate core beneath the headquarters’ hard exterior.

But, of course, badminton matches, moonlight cuddles, and coffee breaks do not a global corporation make. Just to the east of the jetty, hovering above the lake, is the campus’s most dramatic feature, a crumpled, cantilevered shoebox that houses a combination conference room, office, and chillout lounge for Giant Group’s larger than life boss Shi Yuzhu.

Mr. Shi is a fascinating figure. A self-made man from a dirt-poor province, he has built Giant Group into one of China’s most promising and profitable companies. Part inventor, part gambler, part wise man, part pitchman, his is one of the iconic profiles of post-reform China. Through a combination of talent, tenacity, and occasionally reckless risk-taking, Shi Yuzhu has constructed for himself a corporate kingdom, of which Morphosis’s new headquarters appears to be the crown jewel. The chairman invested large amounts of both money and faith in his American architects’ proposal and on a few crucial occasions overruled his subordinates so that the building could be achieved according to their wishes. As a result, the Giant Group headquarters is an impressively coherent piece of work, utterly consistent in look and feel and indisputably Morphosis.

And this, perhaps, is the problem. The Giant campus bears all the marks of its designers: it is formally complex and futuristic; it’s chromatically subdued and materially restrained. It is a total design environment, from undulating roof to elongated ashtray, and the effect is simultaneously over and underwhelming.

Mr. Shi’s executive box is a good example. The interior is conventional but not simple. At its furthest point is the boardroom, a luminous, largely transparent space that feels like it’s collapsing on itself. Everything is white: the ceiling is gypsum board and the walls are Swisspearl. The floor is glass – a common enough trick these days, but very powerful in this case, as the visitor has no choice but the consider the murky lake over which his meeting is suspended.

Above the boardroom are Mr. Shi’s private quarters. These are arranged on two platforms, which ascend in intimacy from sitting to living to bedroom. As elsewhere in the campus, the interiors play straight man to the building’s flamboyant structure. The material and color pallets are narrow and the furniture is basic, but the walls pitch and the roof slants, and the mesh ceiling and glass facade reveal a dizzying number of structural elements. As a space it feels simultaneously extravagant and bare bones: part hotel, part waiting room; part funhouse, part warehouse.

Across campus is the Shi suite’s stylistic counterpart, a room of basins and pools that softens some of the headquarters’ hard edges. To reach it, one walks an elevated corridor that provides the building’s main circulation and one of its most attractive features. To the right are workspaces occupied by Giant’s young staff. These are sunlit and open, and the atmosphere inside is business-casual. One has the sense that the architects designed an element of Californian corporate horizontality into their first Chinese building: according to plan, all workers, including company directors, sit together, with only VPs and their secretaries sequestered in private offices.

After crossing the street, the corridor submerges beneath the headquarters’ green roof. Thus one enters the campus’s rec center, a complex that includes billiards, multi-function sports courts, and the aforementioned swimming pools. The pool room is special, partly because it feels soft. The jagged edges and acute angles of Mr. Shi’s office are replaced with gentle slopes, swooshes and oblong arcs. An enormous egg-shaped skylight brightens the space. A speckled blob droops from the ceiling.

This last feature is not ornamental: it’s a clever hideout for columns, ducts, pipes, and other unsightly architectural necessities, and it recurs throughout the building. But it fits best by the pool and it was there that I gave it a good look and realized what bothers me about the Giant Group headquarters.

As architecture it is expressive but somehow bloodless. The design is intelligent and rigorous in its own way, but cold – a kind of tectonic equivalent to techno music. This is partly down to color: the entire thing is grayscale, with a couple of cheeky pixels of lava red or tennis ball yellow scattered here and there. The polka dotted blobs, referred as ‘cones’ by their creators, should be fun. They vaguely resemble candy. But like everything else they are black and white and gray and one can only imagine them having the bitter taste of chalk and salty licorice.

Limiting color doesn’t guarantee cheerlessness, of course. There are many examples of black and white environments that manage to be simultaneously serious and fun. But this requires a certain acceptance of ornamentation that Morphosis’s design just does not allow.

The auditorium is a case in point. For acoustical reasons, the walls are covered in tiles of felt – a warm, tactile fabric with strong childhood connotations. But here too an opportunity for youthful cheer is shushed by the design’s emphatic neutrality. Looking around the room one sees only gray: gray felt, gray steel, gray floor. After a while even the white chairs started to look gray.

But in this same room, and elsewhere around campus, I found specks of cheerfulness that indicate a brighter future for the headquarters. From the ceiling’s mesh panels someone had hung an assortment of pink, purple, and yellow party balloons. Outside, they’d lined the building’s concrete walls with potted flowers in the same shades. Against Morphosis’s mechanical architecture, these gentle reminders of human conviviality felt soothing, almost therapeutic.

In many ways, the Giant Group campus is the antithesis of contemporary Chinese corporate tastes: Its entrance is understated, almost unnoticeable; its details are stripped down and its profile is modest, with almost no skyline appeal. To the extent that its leaders’ preference for big, blatant expressions of power has come to define China’s cities, Morphosis’s design provides a valuable counterpoint. But I can’t help feeling that it could use a bit of the passion and pride that even Shanghai’s dumbest architecture exudes. And I suppose it makes sense that it falls on the headquarters’ occupants to provide this – to make this alien their own, dress it up, and put flesh on its bones.

Originally published in Domus 943 (January 2011)

For the third installment in the 2011 Domus interview series, I spoke with Elizabeth Diller, the co-founder of Diller Scofido + Renfro, a multidisciplinary studio based in New York. Equal parts artist, architect, and academic, Diller has produced a body of work that resists easy classification. For more than twenty years, she, together with her partner Ricardo Scofidio, has engaged in a series of ongoing spatial experiments, played out in buildings, theatres, galleries, books, boardrooms, and class rooms. We talked about this varied output, smart and dumb technology, and New York’s testosterone-fueled architecture.

In this series we’re trying to better understand female architects’ work by discussing the personal experiences and interests that inspire it. If you don’t mind, I’d like to begin by talking a bit about your personal history. I know that you were born and spent your early years in Poland before moving with your family to America. I’m curious to know how you feel your time in Poland and immigrant experience in the US has affected your perspective on art and architecture.

I don’t actually think of myself as Polish. My parents raised me as a European Jew. My family was victimized by the Holocaust and, in their minds, Poland was as culpable as Germany, and so the Polish part of my background was never emphasized in my household, even though it’s my native language. But I feel, perhaps, more European than American and that is probably because of how my parents raised me. I came [to America] when I was between five and six and I didn’t learn to read English until much later, so I kind of absorbed everything.

There were some circumstances around the immigration that were part of my early formation and that I am sure have made a lasting influence and changed my outlook on things, but I can’t exactly grasp what it is. [Laughs] It’s just that I don’t really feel like I’m part of any world, but part of all worlds. It’s good and bad. But the reading thing was definitely an issue. I think I was a little bit slow in picking up my cultural surroundings.

After your family moved, did you find yourself within a community of other expatriated European Jews?

Yes, my upbringing wasn’t religious at all, but there was a community of Europeans that my parents were a part of and if anything the social life was concentrated around other European families. That was very much part of the formation, but pretty soon after that I became a rebel. In my teenage years I just made my own context.

It’s interesting that you say you made your own context as a teenager, because it seems to me that you’ve done something similar as a professional. You’ve managed to straddle architecture and art and use the qualities of one to challenge the other. Do you consider that a continuation of the cultural experiments you started as a teen?

I’m not sure what the direct correspondence is, but perhaps it’s my unwillingness to define specific boundaries in the discipline. After studying art and then studying architecture, I never needed the clarity of either being a professional architect or being an artist, and found some kind of middle ground that was contaminated from all sides. I felt very comfortable in the middle of everything. Perhaps that’s had some kind of lasting influence. I never really thought much about that, but I’m very comfortable between borders.

I’m curious to hear more about your studies. In the past, you’ve mentioned that [former Cooper Union Dean of Architecture] John Hejduk inspired your interest in architecture. Could you describe how that happened?

When I was a young student I was studying art and I decided to check out the architecture school. The Cooper Union was a great art school and a great architecture school. I just wandered into the architecture school and I noticed this guy John Hejduk who was an incredibly compelling personality. He opened the door for me to understand architecture as a cultural discipline – before that it had seemed to me just a profession. When I got a sense of him I realized that I should really study in the architecture school; it was a better fit for me.

My parents always wanted to channel my artistic skills and interests into the profession of architecture. They thought that it was a good way to make an income and to have a job. They thought that it was, somehow, a natural extension of what I was already interested in. But I had absolutely no interest. [Laughs] And the fact that they wanted that future for me made me want to resist it more. But then, later on, I came upon architecture in another form through John Hejduk, who exposed it to me as a way of analytical and creative thinking. So I decided to major in architecture and I transferred from the art school to the architecture school. But I never really wanted to give my parents the satisfaction of knowing that, so they didn’t really know that I graduated with an architecture degree until my last day of school.

I was basically allergic to the idea of following my interests because architecture was a profession. So when I finally graduated I never had the intention of becoming a professional architect, making buildings and such. I was interested in doing work around space and culture but that could use any media, at any scale, and didn’t need a client. So I was oriented already to do independent work in the form of installations in public space. That’s a really roundabout way of answering your question, but I think it fills in a couple of blanks.

This early work that you describe as being capable of incorporating any media, operating at any scale and being, in a way, unprofessional or counter-professional is very interesting to me, particularly since this interview is for a Chinese magazine. For many years, your studio didn’t build buildings and concentrated on visual arts, performance art, theatre, and academics. I have the sense that this is partly due to your own choice and partly due to the fact that architectural work was scarce when your studio opened. In China, architectural work is abundant, so much so that conceptual and critical exploration is pushed aside to pursue more pressing professional and financial gains. It seems to me that your practice is, in a way, an argument for the value of taking time to develop your ideas before assuming the burden of building.

It was an opportunity for me to take my academic world and expand it into some form of dissident practice. My interests were varied and there were many trajectories in the early work that still continue into the current work and now appear at many different scales. For me it is unimaginable to just start building right away. If I had done that I would have never had the opportunity to take a critical stand – to challenge the conventions and to question what the discipline actually is and how it interacts with other cultural disciplines.

With that said, for many years we were willfully doing independent projects – not because the work wasn’t coming our way, it was just because we weren’t really thinking about career paths that ended up with buildings. The paths had more to do with focussed research. And then it turned out that doing architecture, building buildings, was just one of the trajectories that we wanted to pursue, but never at the cost of doing the other work. The independent work continues – performance, exhibitions, installation, public art and all of that, it’s just that now we have the opportunity to do more things at different scales and different levels of permanence and different complexity levels, and so forth. But I think to shortcut that process would have have been for me personally to lose the edge around the work.

You mention that your early work was inspired by focussed research and I know that you still describe your practice as research-based. Could you identify the main areas of inquiry?

They are pretty broad. One very broad one is the relationship between smart and dumb technology, high technologies and low technologies. In the case of architecture, bricks and mortar versus intelligent systems – that’s one thing that has always been of interest. Another trajectory of research has been around the issue of mediated versus authentic experience. The criticism that there are cultural values that get mediated away because of new technologies is something that we very much resist; we are interested in new materials and experimenting with new forms and even new techniques without placing values on them. Another trajectory is visuality or the culture of vision, which embraces issues of power, exhibitionism and voyeurism, as well was more scientific and perceptual issues. This is something that is locked into a lot of our work and continues today.

We’re also interested in interdisciplinarity and all of our work tries to merge multiple disciplines. Sometimes we don’t have the expertise but we bring it into projects. We’re always working with choreographers and directors, robotics experts and different kinds of scientists and researchers. We’re always interested in the links and crossovers between disciplines. I could go on and on. There are many trajectories that we don’t feel are concluded research. They are ongoing and they are also methodologies that persist since we started. We don’t have preconceived ideas; we work, we analyze, we read, we step into projects knowing that we’re not the first ones there. We don’t believe in tabula raza, we like to situate ourselves within history and within the discourse, then take an opinion and proceed forward. That way of working has always been the way we do things.

You’ve said that there are many more, but for the moment let’s stick with the four research trajectories that you’ve just identified. Could you offer an example from your work to illustrate how you’ve pursued them? To begin with high and low tech: is there a particular project that you feel pushed your thinking forward in this area?

One of our earliest projects, Indigestion, was an interactive media project that involved a projection of a meal onto a table. The viewer could select from different diners and the script was written in a way that produces different kinds of interactions. That was, at a very early stage, meant to critique the empowerment of the audience to interact with something that had already been pre-scripted. It was done at a time when there was a lot of rhetoric around how technologies would change everything, how technologies would entirely transform cultural conditions. We were looking at everything with a certain skepticism while embracing technology. We were very cognizant of how much artistic practice could be divorced from the author, even though in that particular piece there was an implication of the audience being an equal part. That was an very early example of looking at that issue critically.

An intermediate example would be the Blur Building [the media pavilion we designed for Swiss Expo 2002] where we got interested in producing weather by combining available materials like water with certain responsive technologies to capture water and filter it and force it out of fog nozzles in order to produce an effect that was constantly changing. It was an early form of artificial intelligence where sensors around the Blur Building were constantly picking up the actual weather conditions to be able to fabricate artificial weather conditions using the water. We were able to make a big cloud that responded to humidity and air temperature, dew point, and all of that. So that was a similar trajectory there.

We just did a piece at the Cartier Foundation on human migration, an in-the-round media piece where the public was inside of an immersive video projection. The content had to do with human migration for economic, political, and environmental reasons. Forty-five minutes worth of content in the round was delivered in a digital graphic way that was created through data. We produced a lot of intertwined connections between these facets of politics, economics, and environment but through projection and a form of programming that allowed us to pick up only hard data to produce effects and stories that were not image-based. We’re basically making a forty-five minute movie without resorting to pictorial or narrative structures, using only ,data-driven graphics.

From these three examples it’s obvious that there is often overlap in your areas of research and that a single project can accommodate several of them. But let’s try to continue this effort to illustrate your trajectories through your work. The next area you mentioned was mediated versus authentic experience…

One of our earliest, well-known projects was the Slow House. That house was in a very beautiful site on the edge of a bluff facing the ocean. The contention of the house was that a window is every bit as mediated as a video. If we take a look at a beautiful sunset over the horizon without any artifice, that’s one thing. If we look at it through a picture window in a house, the view is already mediated by the fact that the window frames it. Then if we take a video of that view and broadcast it live in the house we will be looking at another mediated view. What makes one form of mediation different or better than other? That was the rhetorical point that that house made. We still think about those things. A lot of our work in the theatre involves performers that are a crossover between live and mediated performers. In Jetlag [the theatre piece we produced together with the Builders Association performance company] the protagonists have a presence onstage in media form and they move to physical bodies onstage and they record their voices and then play themselves back. They are part of the presentation of themselves to the audience. Moving Target, another theatrical piece, had a large, forty-five degree mirror over the stage that allowed the audience to see the actual performance on stage perspectivally, to see the plan view via this mirror that turned everything ninety degrees. We are very interested in that sort of splintered perception and the reinforcement of one and the other. It’s not a matter of substituting one or the other, it’s a matter of having them occupy our world without positive or negative value.

One more project – the ICA in Boston. The building is located right on the edge the harbor and it basically analyzes the view and distributes it in small doses in different parts of the building. It’s very much an apparatus, just like the Slow House, for producing and re-producing ways to mediate the surroundings. So that notion of mediation is really in every project. In The Brasserie [a re-design of Philip Johnson's restaurant in the Seagram's Building] every entry though the revolving door from the street is captured as a snapshot and put onto a video beam that basically announces every entrance into the restaurant and broadcasts it to everyone inside. I could go on and on.

What you are describing are ways to incorporate media within a building or creative space, but once you’ve completed a work it becomes a subject of media itself. I think that has strong implications on some of your works because they tend to experiment with meaning and material and often strive to resist easy representation. The Blur Building in particular has always seemed to me a very tricky work to capture through media because, as you’ve said, it uses water as a building material and produces effects that can’t be captured by photography or video. Nevertheless photos remain the primary means through which people are exposed to buildings. What are your thoughts on the state of architecture photography, and what alternative means of representation could you imagine to provide a fuller sense of experience?

Blur is a really good case in point of a project that had a very short duration. It was ephemera all the way: the building material was not solid, it was there but not there, it was constantly dynamic and ever-changing, and it was intended to only have a six-month life. In the end, the Swiss government wanted to save it and make it a permanent monument, but we wanted nothing more than to blow it up and have it dissolve as it had appeared. In that case, there are people who visited it and have memories of it, feel fondly about it and I certainly am one of those. But the photographs remain and people also connect with them. Many, many people have discussed it and many articles have been written by people who have never seen the actual Blur Building.

I like to think of photography as an end in itself – it’s not just a way to preserve something that’s no longer there. We actually like to think about making many manifestations of the same project. Early drawings before a project is realized – and maybe the project is never realized – are a manifestation of an architecture. The built project is another manifestation. The photographs of that built project are yet another manifestation. The stories that are told after the project is done is yet another one. And I don’t really feel that, for us, there is a hierarchy to that. They’re just different parts of the life of an idea. And I don’t feel that photography has the sole purpose of monumentalizing or extending the life of something. It’s just another manifestation and it has very much to do with the eye of the photographer and their interpretation.

Have you ever made an effort to capture all of the manifestations and represent that much fuller depiction of an idea?

That’s an interesting question. We did a book about the Blur Building called Blur: The Making of Nothing [Abrams, 2002] and, because that project has such a great story from conception to demolition and beyond, we tried to capture artifacts of the process. It wasn’t intended to document all the manifestations, but in the end it did exactly that. It started with the manifestation of the first idea on the back of a paper napkin – a real cliche – and went through the complexity of the technical challenge which became its own mini-project and included everything in relationship to making a cloud stand still, the realization of the influence of the actual weather, to the strict legislation of the authorities who were pushing us to make a sprinkler system in the thing, to the construction of it, to the overheard comments, to the argument about the demolition and the final demolition of it. And then, finally, the chocolate bar which was eventually cast in the shape of the building and was considered a great sign of success in Switzerland. All of those manifestations are captured in that book and we have no regret that it was blown-up. That’s just part of its life.

It’s interesting that you mention legislation. I suppose that’s one of the things that distinguishes your independent, art and theatre-based work from the architecture: in architecture the cast of stakeholders and decision-makers vastly expands and you’re forced to find ways to satisfy groups with totally different priorities and demands. In reference to your re-design of Lincoln Center in New York, you’ve said that throughout the approval process you gave the same presentation six times, but each time it was as if you were communicating in a different language. How do you adjust a set of fixed ideas for consumption by groups with differing and occasionally conflicting backgrounds and agendas?

The experience of Lincoln Center, with all its complexity, made me realize that I was already speaking in many tongues. The message is always the same but the emphasis is a bit different depending on who the audience is. Its true that I did a lecture that basically showed the same fifteen to twenty slides of Lincoln Center six times in repetition and each time I inflected the delivery of the description in a slightly different way. The same content but different nuance – it’s kind of a Rashomon lecture. In the end, if you have an idea that is really good and that you believe in you can convince people just by simply understanding who you’re talking to, without dumbing down the message, without tricking anyone, without lying or deceiving, simply by pointing out different things in different ways. So the voices don’t condescend at all they just understand the value of different things to different audiences and constituencies.

This particular project, because of its complexity, had to first of all get the buy-in of the Lincoln Center client, which is comprised of twelve, independent constituent organizations that share the same geographical location but are not bound together by any formal structure. They share only the mechanical plant; however, for any change to the campus they need unanimity. So I had to appeal to this group of twelve independent organizations, which was a feat in itself. Besides those groups and their directors and boards which were made up of hundreds and hundreds of people, the project was also partially on city property and used city funds so there was a structure that made our work accountable to a task force of the city commissioner, as well as each independent commission of the city, such as the planning commission, the cultural commission, the parks commission and so forth. So we had to get all of their buy-in at the same time. We also had to help raise money for the project, so we had to appeal to philanthropists and foundations and so forth. Because of legal designations related to Lincoln Center’s location we also had to appeal to the public through community boards. Then, beyond that, the project was historically sensitive so we had to constantly appeal to historical preservationists, as well as the press and the academic community and the profession. [Laughs] I think I’m answering more than what you asked, but it’s really, really complicated.

That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

[Laughs] Looking back, if I’d have known then what I’ve learned across the years, I probably would have been too intimidated to take on the project.

I suppose that it was inevitable that you would cross paths with historical preservationists because your designs for Lincoln Center make several drastic alterations, the most obvious probably being that you opened up Alice Tully Hall and made it accessible to the street. Prior to this, Lincoln Center had been a more less closed-off from the city. I’m curious to know how you interpret that lack of engagement. What do you think Lincoln Center’s original design says about its architects’ priorities and the spirit of that time?

It was designed at a time of massive urban renewal in New York. It was the time of [city planner] Robert Moses when there was a lot of new construction and very large areas in the city were being plowed down and homes and businesses were being displaced in order to build large housing projects, cultural projects, highways, and various other projects. In the case of Lincoln Center, the collection of architects shared a certain mindset toward centralizing the arts, which was an unusual idea that was pretty unpopular at the time, generally because even today we would say that it’s better to keep the arts dispersed rather than isolating them into one ivory tower campus. From an urbanistic standpoint, it was designed as a kind of hermetic place that was fortified from its context and that privileged the automobile at a very car-centric time. Many of the patrons of Lincoln Center were coming by automobiles from the suburbs and that explains the megablock planning where the cultural institutions sit on a plinth that houses the garage and the mechanical plant and winds all around Lincoln Center and produces an opaque face to the street.

I came from a different generation that wants to democratize the arts and bring the city in and bring the cultural production that’s happening inside Lincoln Center out into the city. Our studio was in alignment with the leadership of Lincoln Center, which also was interested in breaking down those walls. I think that the effort, if one can generalize it, was to undo the bad urban planning of the late ’50s and early ’60s and relieve that opacity into a more communicative interface with the city in which the institutions and the city bleed into one another.

One final thing about that project – I watched a talk that you gave at a TED conference in which you noted that Lincoln Center’s original designers were all men and said that part of the intention of your conversion was to decrease the level of machismo. How is machismo manifest in architecture?

I think that at that moment in time there were something like ten nationally or internationally recognized male architects who were collaborating on the masterplan and designing the individual buildings. I think I mentioned that they produced a testosterone fueled architecture. I think it was called ‘monumental modernism’ because these architects came from the modernist period but they were also speaking within a design code of large-scale, stone, classically-oriented building projects.

When we came to the campus we inherited this and there were only a few portions of Lincoln Center that I think ever resonated with the public and continue to resonate. These were not time-specific: they were mostly social spaces at the promenade level which were less about the monumental buildings and more about making a kind of buzz and intersecting all these streams of people into a common spectacle during intermission or just before and after a show. We liked that aspect and so our interest was less on the hard issues of architecture as opposed to the soft, social and cultural issues. I don’t mean soft as in female-male or that kind of cliche, but more about the relationship between architectural matter and atmosphere and other not representable qualities. That’s what was interesting to us and that’s where we wanted to go forward.

How do your experiences as participants in visual and performance arts influence your approach to designing cultural venues like Lincoln Center or the ICA?

The studio has a lot of empathy for the artists and curators and artistic directors, musicians, performers, and all of the people who occupy the other side of the museum or concert hall wall. Because of that we try to temper our voice a little bit to enable the multiple voices that occupy these spaces to be heard. We’re strongly against big signature gestures that are heroic and overly sculptural and that restrict the re-scriptability of certain spaces. It’s always a kind of magic trick of trying to find – or maybe it’s not a magic trick, maybe it comes from analysis and thinking and experimentation – trying to find how much voice is enough and when to pull back. With each of our projects we strongly feel that we have a lot of say and we have the expressive tools to say it, but it doesn’t have to be audible all the time. We continue to find ourselves on the other side of the museum wall playing the role of artist or collaborators in theatrical performances and we always want to have a lot of tools at our disposal. We don’t like to have any limits and our architecture tries to reflect that.

Elizabeth Diller is a founding member of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, an interdisciplinary design studio based in New York City, as well as Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. Born in Lodz, Poland, she attended The Cooper Union School of Art and received a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union School of Architecture.

As a final chapter of the book MAD Dinner, I spoke with the Chinese artist/troublemaker Ai Weiwei. The intention was to have an insightful and opinionated person respond to some of the book’s central issues, to provide a final burst of external pressure to our work. Weiwei did not disappoint.

This is the final conversation that we’re going to do for this book, so to start I’d like to return to a few of the points that have come up in the other discussions. One of the topics we’ve talked a lot about is utopia. In a conversation we had with the historian Wang MingXian, he mentioned that there is a contradiction in China between the seeming lack of utopianism in everyday life and the utopian elements that can be felt below the surface. What do you make of that contrast between daily practicalities and the willingness to dream about the future and large scale change?

This is a very typical kind of theoretical discussion, which I hate. I think it’s stupid, because it sounds right, but it is not related to reality whatsoever. It just sounds right, because all the scholars or theory-makers are very comfortable with these kinds of topics. It’s so self-serving.

Of course, if you think about earlier times, like under communism, there was a more utopian concept to the society. But, in reality, it had nothing to do with utopia. No matter whether you’re talking about the Great Leap Forward or the san lu xian, the three guidelines for development. All these utopian ideas were separated from the local policies, which were not so utopian.

Especially today, we’ve had this policy to let certain people get rich first, then we had the so-called Open Door Policy and reform. These may seem like utopian concepts, but actually the logic behind them has nothing to do with utopia at all. It has much more to do with power struggles, greed, ruthlessness, and the distortion of social justice. A lot of the changes that came from these policies were really the result of structural defects in the government, and it had nothing to do with utopianism. So it’s absolutely outrageous to talk about this sort of thing. That’s my impression at least.

So is your feeling that the notion of utopia is added after the fact to give these changes a pretty face and a sense that it is moving according to a plan?

It’s like buying a wedding dress for a farmer who works in the fields or fixes horseshoes. Of course she can wear it, but it has nothing to do with what she is doing.

Do you notice that currently there’s less interest in putting a utopian appearance on what’s happening in society?

Globally, I don’t think this utopian thinking and analysis is working. It’s so far from reality. I think it has no value, because the human being is becoming more and more practical, like an animal, he is very reactionary and reflective of his conditions. There’s almost no sense of right or wrong or moral judgment anymore. It’s only based on profit-making and how to make something bigger or faster or more efficient.

Most of the utopian projects, whether political or in terms of architecture, either were applied with great tragedy or simply stayed on paper. As theories, they work, but I think plans to make human society ideological or to impose certain kinds of unity at a large scale always turn out to be very stupid.

Another topic we’ve talked about is the relationship between architecture and art. Hans Ulrich Obrist mentioned that he’s noticed the proliferation of museums and galleries throughout the west has created more opportunities to show and re-discover artists and architects who may have been forgotten. At the moment, China is building museums at an incredible rate and some people worry that there won’t be enough skilled workers or collections to really make these new places meaningful. Do you see the potential for a kind of re-engagement with forgotten or misunderstood aspects of China’s cultural past through all these new exhibition spaces?

I’m not sure about elsewhere, but in China, I think all these galleries are being opened for two reasons. One is the blind planning policies of the state. They think a city might need a lot of galleries, but they don’t think about what goes in them. The other reason is the market. People think art can sell, so naturally they will be attracted to it as a business.

It reminds me… When China first started the Open Door Policy, people started to buy refrigerators. But, at that time, the living style was still day-to-day. Everyday they cooked and ate the food that they’d bought that day. There were people who went out to do the shopping, because they had nothing else to do. That was their daily activity. So there were never any leftovers; they ate what they bought and that was it. The refrigerator was purely an empty box. For years. For many families, the refrigerator had no purpose, but they bought a refrigerator simply as a showcase. I think the galleries are the same. It’s not only a showcase. You need other things – you need collectors, you need curators, you the facilities associated with the showcase.

Also, in China during the old times, people didn’t need a gallery to show their works. This is a purely western, commercial idea. In the old times, people simply made a painting on a scroll, then they would roll it up and put in their sleeve. When they go to visit a friend, they’d take it out. That’s another way to show it. I think the gallery is quite a stupid space, actually. You have a box there just for showing.

Another kind of platform for showing things that we’ve been thinking about is the popular media. One of the points that we tried to make is that, to a certain extent, mainstream media are useful, because they allow people in professions that haven’t had a high level of recognition, like art or architecture, to become more visible.

I think the Internet and and these kinds of media are the most wonderful thing to have happened. Any vehicle that can break the old system is revolutionary. It’s absolutely breaking the old value system, which is a system that is associated with a certain kind of power and rights. So I think this is one the best things to ever happen to human beings. For the first time, individuals have the possibility to announce themselves or get free information, to have an equal amount of information and opportunity to speak as anybody else. This is totally changing the world.

That’s true of the Internet, but for older media like magazines and television, there are still powers that decide what is included and how it is presented. One of the concerns the was expressed in another conversation we had with the critic Shi Jian was that, in order to establish yourself on these larger platforms, you need to subject yourself to being filtered and shaped in a way that the editors feel the audience can understand.

Of course that’s a problem. People always want to filter you into a certain kind of language. They think it’s easier to digest. That concept is totally crazy. They try to imagine a potential audience, which may or may not even exist. But, on the other hand, that always gives an opportunity to somebody who has a new idea and is brave enough to find a new channel or new passage. So this is OK. It’s the normal character of our thinking. You know, stupidity is a remarkable aspect of the human brain. We can never really escape from it. We always have the potential to make a breakthrough, but it always shows that we are very stupid.

It’s funny, because one of the main fascinations of western media toward China is the topic of censorship, but, when you spend time at western magazines and TV stations, you find that this imagined audience that you mention has the same influence of determining what can and can’t be said.

But that kind of thing is always very interesting, because then you realize that people have a weak point. No matter where you go, the weak point is the same: they are scared. It’s the same shit everywhere. The bigger the company, the more conservative they become, because they cannot afford any mistakes.

That makes the game very interesting, because you realize that you have a lot of possibilities. By nature, they cannot compete with you. If you’re a true troublemaker, then you’re always on the front lines.

I think the idea of “the game” is especially interesting in China at the moment, because there is a system here that is mutating, but is also making strong efforts to maintain itself. In that sense, the terms of the game are constantly changing, so the ways that one who plays would probably also have to be refreshed regularly.

Yes, especially in China, because it’s a society that has accumulated a huge amount of power at the top, either through the Communist Party or the old (imperial) structure. Because the size of the structure itself becomes so large, the spaces in between also grow, and the individual can have great freedom. It’s not like a place where power is evenly distributed and you have very little space in between the cracks.

In our conversation with Ma QingYun, he mentioned the idea that, especially prior to reform, there was an unstated contract here that basically said that if you are willing to forego freedom in a formal sense, you can actually experience almost total freedom informally, because there are so many gaps in the structure.

Because it’s such a simplified and brutally ignorant system. So there is a huge space to negotiate from. Because there are many many things that the power is not sensitive to and not aware of.

I think that another of the values of the Internet and online technologies is that they keep widening the spaces over which power lacks control. In or outside of China, the legal or commercial powers are always playing catch-up, so it’s only in retrospect that they can say, “That’s wrong.”

That’s why we’re living in an exciting time – because we act before we give moral judgment. We have a chance to do things without anyone watching. So we do it, and then maybe we find out that people think it’s wrong. But that’s only a moral judgement; it has a different meaning from the actual act. But in many societies or periods of history, it’s not like that. You act and you know exactly what the result will be, and this is totally lacking in adventure or surprise.

Do you think that observation also applies to the ways that cities are changing in China? They are basically growing wildly, and it seems there’s no oversight determining right or wrong, only a sequence of actions made by all sorts of parties.

Well, first, of course we are not trying to find an excuse for wrongdoing. There have been costs and very obvious mistakes there. But, besides that, any wrongdoing today may become a brilliant result tomorrow. If you are a chess player, you know that you play until you die – if you haven’t died then the game is still going on. So I don’t think it’s a problem. Even without planning, even chaotic conditions can later become very humane conditions.

Many things have been said about the environment or population density or traffic, and sometimes people will say, “If you do this, it would be wrong and that would be right…” But I think if you make it even worse, even more wrong, it can become a much better condition. The old judgments about right and wrong are talking about an existing experience, but these times are different. Humans’ minds can be brilliant when they are faced with a problem. If we never confronted true problems, we would never have brilliant conditions. For example, this post-communist Chinese society has the possibility to create real problems, but maybe something interesting, a different sort of conclusion or result, will come out of it.

I think that’s a particularly important point in terms of the issues you mentioned before, environmental and population issues, etc. Because, in confronting its problems, China has the opportunity to come to solutions that would be useful for other parts of the world, especially because they would have to be low cost solutions.

I think if the problem is created by people, the solution will also be given by those people. It’s their lives, they have to find their own way. They have to live with their mistakes, and wisdom will be generated from that. Most the time, the worst dangers are not caused by a crisis, but by the attempt to control. That, to me, shows the great danger in our society, because the whole civilization is based on problem control and safety-oriented thinking. I think to make a true mistake is a true opportunity to find new wisdom. But in many societies these kinds of mistakes are not allowed, so there’s no new wisdom there. It’s just a routine performance.

One of the interesting points in our talk with Jia JiangKe was that China is currently in a state where it does not look to the past or forward to the future. People here are only engaged in the challenges and dreams of the present. And I wonder if that refusal to think backward or forward is enabling people to forego moral judgments and potentially make “true mistakes”.

The conditions in China are very much the result of a dialogue with the communist ideology – the struggle between the old feudalistic society and the modern contemporary society. I don’t think, philosophically, Chinese people trust democracy as a scientific development. It’s just not in their blood. But, of course, after being beaten down, they realized that it is absolutely necessary for them to change the model. So the philosophy became extremely practical. In Deng XiaoPing’s words, “Touch the stone to cross the river.” You can’t stay on this side of the river and you can’t stay in the river. You have to cross it, but you go step by step. It’s really practical.

There’s a good side and a bad side. There’s no ideological struggle in the minds of most Chinese people, because they never look further than daily problems. But, actually, problems can’t be solved by looking only at the present, because whatever you do today creates a new problem. It’s very stupid, but that’s also based on those in power thinking that maintaining their power is the absolute first priority.

In an interview we did with Huang Yan, a Beijing city official, she mentioned that government participation has increased with the spread of free market values, like private property. People feel invested in defending what is theirs and so they have more interest in influencing the decisions that the leaders make. Even if it is not in their blood, perhaps people here are becoming more interested in democracy at least as a way to protect their own things.

What the communists are doing is also very practical. They will never announce the reforms, but they will deal with the obstacles. The current government thinks it is necessary to give some space for human rights and property rights. That seems very small; people might not consider how small policy changes will effect the whole, but a strategy for how to protect the whole city may come from these individual property protection laws.

I think, somehow, this powerful government has started to set up obstacles for itself to overcome. There used to be just one player, and now they’ve tried to introduce other players.

In talking about the possibility of change here, the British writer Ian Buruma made the point that the Party uses a strategy where it expands individual freedom while still limiting any kind of organized form of dissent. What do you think is the potential for group rights in the process of reform?

That would be the next thing. More and more individuals have the same kinds of problems, so it becomes a group automatically. Sometimes you see an entire neighborhood block a road, because they all have the same kind of problem. There are one hundred thousand illegal protests every year. Those are by people trying to protect their individual rights, but in the exact same conditions.

Do you see any possibility of these thousands of isolated protests ever linking together?

I think once their problems become unified, they will become unified. Now China is becoming more and more simple – rich and poor – the people who take advantage and gain all the power and property, and the people who lose all the property. I think it’s a danger for the society.

What do you think is the role of the educated middle class in this situation? Buruma argued that the affluent urban population, that you’re a member of, is not engaged in what’s happening to the mass of Chinese people, because life is getting better for them individually. He seems to think that the greatest potential for change in China is if this middle class starts to engage the pockets of dissent that you mentioned before.

It’s like being at a dinner where you have five dishes for five people. Then ten or twenty people come and, of course, people feel very different. Now fewer people are sharing more people’s profits and property. So maybe there is a space there, but the conditions are also changing.

What is the need for so-called social justice? I don’t think it’s only about spreading money and property. It’s more about the belief in a system that can be good for everybody, even the poor. But China has never had this system, that’s the problem. Even the people who have money – they’re rich, but they still don’t believe it. They will do anything to protect their own money. And that creates an unstable society, because there’s no justice in that kind of society.

A system like today’s communist structure tries to avoid acknowledging basic truth and providing basic justice. It’s stupid, because eventually it only protects those people who are not going to support it. The middle class and people who are getting rich today will definitely not support the [communist] system.

In talking to the government official I mentioned before, she made a point of saying it’s necessary to suffer for the good of the city or country as a whole. For instance, in Beijing there is terrible traffic and pollution, but the government won’t put a limit on the number of cars, because it’s a policy to have Beijing raise up the Chinese automobile industry. People living here just have to accept it.

That also comes back to the subject of justice. Who is suffering and who is profiting from this? If it’s not an elected government and the suffering is not worthwhile then of course it’s not fair. And in order to maintain this unfairness of course you have to control the newspapers. You have to control the freedom of expression, and, in controlling that, of course you become another kind of society. You’re not only suffering from car pollution, but from crimes to our minds and humanity. So I hate the kind of argument [the official makes]. We’d have to start from a very small element – justice, fairness, and individual expression. Otherwise it’s just an excuse for the wrongdoing of the government and the rich.

Certain improvements are visible in the media here though. There are more negative stories in the press than there were even a couple years ago, so clearly there’s an understanding that certain feelings have to be acknowledged even if the overall coverage is being controlled.

That’s true. I’m not saying that they’re not making an effort. The change is there, but is that because they believe in change or because it’s necessary for their survival? Those are very different reasons. Is it ideology or just necessity? Of course it can never be purely one or the other, but if there’s not enough discussion, no intellectuals, no healthy self-expression, then one side is missing and that automatically supports this kind of wrongdoing.

One day they plan to end this [system]. I think they are quite sure that it will come to an end, but, on the surface, it seems no one is willing to announce it. It’s crazy.

Do you think the government really has a plan like that? An exit strategy almost…

I wonder… If anybody has any rationality they should have a plan. They cannot maintain a society like this. It’s impossible.

At a certain stage, reform becomes more necessary but also more difficult. It requires much more effort and sacrifice. You cannot control it. I’ve never made a close study of this, but I can sense that it’s like a chess game. Everybody is trying to play a game where you make moves that don’t not draw immediate attention, but that can eventually be useful. Otherwise, the game would not be so interesting.

Another topic we’ve explored in the book is the idea of going abroad and the ways in which international recognition can help establish an artist within China. Zhang YiMou mentioned the model that his generation of filmmakers established where, through international prizes, you empower yourself domestically. You have a peculiar experience in that you’re well-known abroad, but have only recently started exhibiting in China.

Yes, and it was only one work. But I don’t think personal power is derived from [recognition]. Even if you get more opportunities, what are you going to do with the opportunities? Both powerful and powerless people constantly struggle; it’s just that the powerless have less of an effect.

It’s not about how much power you get, but how it’s used. Otherwise it’s a waste, just as with Zhang YiMou. He has no power, because the true power belongs to another – the government. He’s used as a part of the propaganda machine. These stupid kung-fu movies or whatever never touch reality; they don’t give you any valuable personal reflections on today’s condition. What’s wrong with them? It’s because they enjoy this collaboration with power so much. But actually you’re losing power, you’re not gaining it.

A final issue that we cover in the book, but we’ve not discussed here yet is nature. Nature is a theme at Ma YanSong uses a lot in talking about his work. Of course he’s not alone, many designers make these sorts of references to natural objects or images…

I think that Ma YanSong is absolutely a liar. His work has nothing to do with nature. It would be insulting to connect the terms Ma YanSong and nature together. He’s just a retarded liar. Print that.

So you’re saying that, in this case, the nature reference is added after the fact to put a pretty face on something, similar to what we talked about in terms of utopia.

Many people say their works relate to the spirit of nature, but you see that only people who are far from understanding nature talk like this. You’re human, you’re part of nature. Whatever you do, even your shit, is part of nature. Just because you talk about being part of nature doesn’t make you any more a part of nature. It is absolutely naive to talk this way. You can only say this to some government officials or developers who know nothing about architecture. So to use that excuse only shows a lack of educational background. It’s a kind of romanticism. I often see architects claim there’s some kind of connection to nature. But then you immediately think it’s just somebody wanting to sell a bad idea. A good idea is obvious. This kind of reference really underestimates human intelligence. It’s crazy.

Originally published in MAD Dinner (Actar, 2008)

For the eighth installment in the 2010 Domus interview series, I spoke with Paul Saffo, renowned forecaster. For the past thirty years, Saffo has worked with leaders in American media, business, and military to anticipate changes and develop strategies for the future. We talked urban robotics, the rise of the city state, and China’s harmful history of engineering megaprojects.

In this interview series we’re exploring the future of urban life, particularly how changes in technology, politics, or ecology will affect how we live. The ultimate goal is to help architects and planners anticipate these changes and develop strategies to deal with them before they fully manifest. I know that in your work as a forecaster you think about change very actively, and to begin I’d like to talk a bit about forecasting as an approach. I read a quote from you once that argued that everyone should become forecasters, so that it doesn’t become a field dominated by a few experts who distribute their knowledge more or less arbitrarily. Could you say a bit more about that?

For starters, everybody needs to be a forecaster on the future of cities. You can’t leave it to the experts. First of all, the experts’ track records are not all that great, but also an understanding of what you think might lie ahead is going to lead to much better decisions in the present. And we’re all by nature forecasters: you get up in the morning and you look out the window and you make a rough and ready forecast on what the weather is going to be for the next eight hours and you decide what to wear. You buy a house and you decide to get a fixed rate, versus an adjustable rate, mortgage and you’re making an integrated economic forecast of the future of global economy for the life of the loan.

The point is not to be right. That’s nice when that happens, but the point of forecasting is to understand the range of possibilities and then be able to respond to them. The image that I use when I explain it is a “cone of uncertainty”. From any present moment, event or question there stems of a cone of uncertainty. It’s a term that originated with meteorologists, because if you look at the weather, you can probably tell what’s going to happen over the next hour, but if you extend it over three days, then that cone of uncertainty becomes so broad that you begin having difficulty knowing the condition. That’s the reason that everybody should forecast. To put it more bluntly: everybody should forecast, because everybody is going to live in the future.

I’m curious about how forecasting works professionally. I know that you sometimes work as a consultant. Lately, I’ve become interested in the role of consultants, because I recently worked on a project with an architectural office who had hired a management consulting firm to provide them basic market analysis and a cultural overview of the city in which the project is taking place. I found it a very interesting dynamic, because in some ways these consultants have a huge influence in terms providing a perspective that architects, planners, and developers use to inform their design decisions. But at the same time, as consultants, they don’t seem to have any real responsibility for the final product, and I find that a strange situation, because the people who are being hired to do the thinking about a project don’t actually have any culpability. I wonder if you experience that in your work.

Yes, you do see that a fair amount. That’s in the nature of all consulting relationships, once you step outside of engineering consulting. If you’re working on an actual architectural project, of course, the acoustical engineer or the electrical engineer is on the hook for the advice they give. And I’ve always thought that there should be more responsibility there, but the simple fact is that McKinsey or any other consultant like that is giving a very raw input into that and there are lots of decisions in between the information received from them and what eventually happens. Like any large project, there are all sorts of opportunities for that information to get obscured.

To me, the right way to do it is to have a consultant that is with you long enough to build up a longterm engagement, so that they have a real stake in the project and will still be there to see the results. It’s like the difference between a “mow, blow, and go” gardener and an estate gardener: the guys who mow, blow, and go are there once a week and don’t really think about your garden at all, where the estate gardener is constantly looking at the change of the seasons and everything else.

I’m curious to hear your forecast for the cities. You’ve said in the past that you can imagine a future in which cities surpass nations in terms of influence. I’d like to know how you see that working and how it might manifest differently in from place to place…

By coincidence I have a piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle arguing that the [San Francisco] Bay Area needs to think more like a city-state and perhaps consider seceding from California, so I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit.

First of all, China in particular is growing faster than anywhere on the planet. You’ve got all that data about how many Manhattans they are planning each year. The really big mega-trend is the urbanization of human life. About two years ago, the global population ceased to be majority rural and become majority urban. This, for me, is an astounding fact, but I guess I’m not surprised that most people said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting’ and didn’t really pay much attention to it.

But it is an extraordinary fact, because this is the first time in the history of this planet that a mammalian species has become urban. We began settled life in cities ten thousand years ago, and so the whole city experiment for humans is not that old and now we’ve really put all of our bets on the future of the city. And that to me is quite amazing, and all the more amazing when you see how bad some of the world’s largest cities work – the favelas in Brazil or the slums in Lagos, or the like.

It begs the question, are cities sustainable? This is a question that, as a forecaster, I look at. Can we even make these large things work? Can we design them so that we can elegantly replace aging infrastructure? Because, of course, the city is going to live longer than the infrastructure.

That’s an important point, I think, both in America where the infrastructure is old and decaying and in China where the infrastructure is new but not necessarily well built.

Right. Here in the Bay Area we had an interesting example: the Bay Bridge, which was damaged in the ’89 earthquake, had to be repaired. The entire Bay Bridge was constructed in I think two years when it was first built, but it has taken twenty years to replace just the eastern span of the bridge. And it’s still not done.

On the other side there is a city like Shanghai. Like everyone else, over the past decade and a half, I’ve watched with astonishment as they put in freeways at lightning speed and made all sorts of decisions about neighborhoods. Then the question is: can you replace that infrastructure as it ages? In a way, I think the key challenge for new cities is to design the infrastructure to be elegantly replaced.

To estimate a kind of urban half-life…

And you have ask it at a deeper level, because it’s not as simple as saying, I’ll lay some sewer pipe and fifty years later I’ll have to replace it. Well, when the people laid it, they probably assumed that the way you’d replace it is to dig a trench and replace the old pipe and put the new pipe in. But now what we’re doing with sewer pipe routinely, especially when it’s difficult to dig up, is something called “bursting,” where they are running a device down that pipe, basically a little robotic pig that is bursting the pipe apart and pulling along behind it a PVC pipe. So we’re now replacing pipes in a very different way than they were laid. That brings up another issue: that wonderful PVC pipe that you just put in, when it wears out seventy years from now, will you need a new generation of robots that actually go in and disassemble it? Because it will be a little bit harder to burst PVC pipe. So simply thinking about replacing infrastructure is a really interesting forecasting challenge, because the first thing you’ve got to do if you’re looking fifty years, or even as little as twenty years, in the future is to play in the factor of robotics. We’re teetering right on the edge of a very large robotics revolution and it may be that our cities are maintained by robots.

This is one of the topics that I wanted to discuss with you. Robotics is a fascinating subject, of course, but particularly in the context of China because so much of what is taking place here is a result of the enormous supply of manpower that China has. As people have said many times, China’s manpower is a gift and a curse, because you can do so much when it’s effectively mobilized, but it also requires an enormous range of activities to keep people occupied and maintain stability. Whereas in a place like Japan or other developed, aging societies you can almost imagine a shift to widespread robotics as a way to make up for a lack of manpower, in China the issue seems more complex.

This is a case where, as a forecaster, I would take that and note that that was Japan’s vision in the early 1980s. Very early on, Japan identified that it had a graying population – the so-called ‘silver society’. You could see the post-war demographic bubble in Japan moving through time sort of like a pig moving through a python. Japan was the first of the developed world nations to age and when it aged, it aged very quickly. So around 1980, they decided they would start a whole robotics initiative to, by the year 2000, have capable robots that would take care of people and do work and become the steel-collared laborers. It didn’t work.

Now, if you look at the demographic data, China, because of its one child policy is going to age more quickly than any developed nation has in history. And it starts pretty soon: the rapid aging of the Chinese population begins in the next decade, and it gets older faster than just about any society ever will have.

So if, based on the Japanese experience, robotics are not the answer, how would you advise China’s planners to design for this rapid aging?

First of all, if you draw the notion of robotics broadly, it affects all sorts of infrastructure. It affects transport; it affects the nature of jobs. So, the first thing I would do is avoid the historic trap that urban planners have always had in front them and that is thinking they know what the future is going to be. That’s how we ended up with things like [the model community] Greenbelt, Maryland and all the post-World War II housing projects in Britain that were supposed to be utopian places to live and ended up being really horrible. We have example after example of that. So one way to avoid these sorts of situations is to start designing for surprise. Design in such a way that it allows maximum flexibility in use down the road.

We may have an aging population early, but then it may be that there’s a big influx of immigrants to China and that skews the population. Look at the United States: everybody was worried because of the birth control pill that the United States population would stop growing and that we would do what Japan did, but the United States is very unusual among the developed nations in that all the projections are for very healthy population growth for the next forty years – and that’s largely due to immigration and the fact that immigrants tend to have more children.

If I’m understanding it right, that idea of designing for flexibility would seem to imply a scaling down of some of the megaprojects that China is developing and replacing them with a wider range of less monolithic and maybe more experimental works.

China has a long history of large public works projects that have had ruinous consequences. Think about the Great Wall or the Grand Canal, which had disastrous consequences, and I think the Three Gorges Dam will be similar and China will live to regret the construction of it. The concern I would have for China is based on the fact that they developed a taste for the monumental and the heroic in the Communist era, and even before that, and even though they’ve now become a capitalist society they still have that taste the monumental and heroic. And the government, being run by engineers, is primarily responsible. So I would be designing my cities to be put to unexpected uses and to fail gracefully.

That seems to imply a different definition of sustainability than the one that currently dominates architectural discussions. Much of the talk now fixates on new technologies and materials, but a more basic and older idea of sustainability resonates with the strategy that you describe – designing things that are flexible so that they can change according to need and can be replaced with minimal waste.

My good friend Stewart Brand wrote a book some years ago titled How Buildings Learn. His premise was that the best buildings actually learn; they absorb experiences and change elegantly from the uses they are put to. And in a metaphor for that I love, he said, ‘If a building lives long enough it can become truly wise’.

Now, the other problem with cities is the grids. The part of the city that changes the slowest is property lines. After the Great Fire of London burned through, all the buildings we rebuilt in pretty much the same place and the roads were in the same place. That brings up a really interesting question: how can the uses of cities change in ways that make the usage of grids inappropriate?

I can remember a little border town on the Spanish-Portuguese border, Arcos de la Frontera, that was medieval but they managed to put streets in and drive cars. But, having driven a car there, the experience can only be described as trying to thread a needle while giggling. It was really pushing it.

If you go out to Kashgar where there’s the problems with the Uyghurs, the central government is demolishing all sorts of old parts of the city – alleyways and wonderful old buildings – and putting in their modernist, turn of the century stuff. I have two thoughts on this: one, it’s a political act – cities, of course, are always political. The broad avenues in Paris were consciously designed so that it would be very hard for Parisians to throw up barricades and very easy to move the military around quickly. Same thing with the US interstate highway system: it was done under the Eisenhower administration and it came out of the Cold War vision of being able to move the military around the country quickly.

That said, I really worry about there being too much emphasis in cities on broad avenues and open spaces, because that seems to be where architects and city planners have done their worst work. Just yesterday I was in San Francisco and there was a very obviously mandated open space between two buildings. It was nicely landscaped, but because of the size of the buildings and the direction of the wind, it had a Venturi effect and no one in their right mind would sit in there.

[Laughs] Yeah, I think I know the place you’re talking about.

The thing that I don’t know, but I’d really love to know is whether notions of feng shui are being considered by China’s architects and planners. Of course, you can’t throw a rock in China without hitting a feng shui practitioner, but I look at what’s going on in Shanghai and it doesn’t look like it’s following the principles of feng shui. And that seems a pity, because I think feng shui could really be an advantage for China in terms of urban planning. If you take away the hocus-pocus part of feng shui, the underlying principles are really common sense principles about environmentally sensitive siting of housing and property, alignments to the rising and setting of the sun and therefor to hot and cold periods of the year, etc. I just don’t know, but I wonder if the planners who are drawing up all these big new cities in China are paying attention to that.

One other thing: are you familiar with [the electric two-wheeled personal vehicle] the Segway?

Yes, but I’ve never tried one.

They’re pretty fun. Personally, I think the Segway failed because you look like a dork when you’re on one.

Right, you see them at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. All the security people ride around on them, but they definitely don’t evoke a sense of authority when they’re on them.

Yes, exactly. But actually it turns out that as security devices they work well. They move fast and you’re two heads above everybody else so you can actually see what’s going on. But you really do look like a dork.

Well [the inventor] Dean Kamen’s original vision for that was to sell the Segway in China. He was trying to convince officials that they could build entire cities around Segway transport. And it’s really a useful device; it just failed. I think the main reason that it failed is that it is just too big a change. It’s too big a shift and clashed with existing systems. Here in the United States, you can’t drive it the streets because it’s not a car and you can’t drive it on the sidewalk because it’s a vehicle, so it’s a little hard to figure our where a Segway goes. So he tried to make the case to the Chinese that they could use Segways to design new kinds of cities. Just as Los Angles, which was originally built around the street car system, was rebuilt around the automobile, he was arguing that the Chinese could build new cities around the Segway and keep the narrow alleys and still have efficiencies and the like. But, of course, they didn’t do it.

So a big question today is, what is the Chinese city being built around? If you go into Chengdu or someplace like this, it’s basically the classic mix – a rail system at the regional level, a big subway system, a lot of buses and more cars than the city would like to have. Is there a different model to build the city around?

I think that question brings us back to your idea of the city-state. In order to re-imagine urban models, there seems to me a need for greater autonomy on the part of cities to experiment and ignore, for instance, the demands of the domestic car industry, which in China is linked to the state.

As a megatrend, [the rise of the city-state] is inevitable. It’s already happening, and at some level China itself is an example. The twentieth century was dominated by the nation state, and for the first half of the twentieth century only nation states even had standing in international law: if you weren’t a nation state international law did not apply to you. That changed after World War II with the arrival of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which suddenly allowed nongovernmental organizations and, under certain circumstances, individuals to be recognized as “persons” in international law. What we ended up creating at the end of the twentieth century was an international order in which there were a lot more players than just nation states – there were NGOs, there were cultural units, all sorts of things. In this century the shift is away from the nation state: nation states will still exist of course, but in a globalized world the most important unit of governance will be the city-state.

What exactly is a city-state?

A city-state is a place that is large enough to have a global impact, but small enough that all of its residents understand where they belong and what their relationship is to the government.

Singapore is a good example: it’s a place where everybody knows where they fit, it has a global impact, and it runs very smoothly. It has a one party political system that a lot of people find strange, but frankly the economic bargain for Singaporeans is straightforward: Singapore is a very wealthy, very successful island in the middle of a bad neighborhood. You go down to the shore in Singapore – and the shore isn’t far from anywhere in Singapore – and no matter which direction you look you see trouble. You look towards Malaysia and there’s all sorts of social unhappiness and inter-ethnic tension; you look toward Indonesia and you have terrorism and uncertainty, etc.

Singaporeans are constantly reminded that they’re a wealthy place that works well located in a very bad neighborhood, and so their social compact with the government is, as long as the government is absolutely uncorrupt, focus on running things smoothly, make sure that our children have educational opportunities and I have a job and we won’t bother creating all the turmoil of a two-party election system. That’s Singapore’s accommodation, and of course it’s not perfect. And, by the way, not right away, but sometime in the next five years things are going to get a little unsettled in Singapore.

But anyway, a city-state is a unit…

Wait, you can’t just casually drop a prediction like that and move on. What’s going to happen in Singapore?

Singapore is experiencing a generational change in leadership. Singapore joined Malaysia in 1963 and then it split in 1965 and become independent. If you look at people like the Minister-Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, who was the father of Singapore – all of his generation remembers what it was like to be poor and to have no electricity, no air conditioning, and to live in a swamp. The next generation that followed remembered those things from their early childhood, but as early adults they had resources. This new generation has no recollection at all of Singapore as anything other than wealthy and successful. It is very Maslovian – not remembering how bad it was, they are going to be tempted to mess with there political system, and they’re going to get a little restive about the idea that they have this paternalistic government.

And by the way, the very last kampong, the very last village in Singapore, is about to be bulldozed over. In the middle of that whole island, there is still one kampong that has the old guys sitting around drinking beer in the little roadside stalls. It’s a piece of the past, and I tried to convince the government that they should preserve it as a museum of what Singapore was like before. But I think they are going to bulldoze it.

That idea of generational shift and what happens when young people become disconnected from the hardships of their parents and grandparents is very interesting, and relevant for China of course. Maybe we’ll get back to that later, but let’s return to the topic of the city-state…

Right, so as I see it power is really reverting from the nation state to the city-state. And those city-states are actual city states like Singapore or Dubai, but they are also virtual city states that may not be legally recognized, but, in terms of economic power, they are there. In this article that I mentioned earlier I argue that the Bay Area is a classic city-state: it’s nine counties, it encompasses Silicon Valley and right there you can see how this community of seven million people has had a global impact. We’ve given the world Apple and Google and Facebook, and many others.

In the case of China, you see all this silly speculation about whether the country is going to have a revolution and come apart or whether it stay together, but I think we’re headed into a world where, by midcentury it’s not that nation states will disappear, but power will have devolved so completely to the large urban centers that it’s going to be the mayors on this planet who are going to be the most powerful politicians. You can see that with China as it is: the mayors of Beijing and Shanghai wield considerable political clout and if ever there was going to be a push to make a change in the central government, I’d think it would come from the mayors. And I think in the back rooms of China there is considerable pressure being put by the mayors of cities on the central government.

Also, it’s important to remember that the provinces are all competing for resources and for development. If you want your province to grow, you want more cities and that is something that isn’t necessarily in the hands of the central government.

That’s true, and that raises another point. I haven’t been everywhere in China, but I’ve traveled a bit and I’m consistently taken aback by how consistent the appearance of Chinese cities has become. It is true that they are competing and that each province has the majority influence over its cities, yet still it almost appears as if they’re all coming from the same planning office.

Right, which is unfortunate. I think it would be a great loss of diversity – and I don’t just mean cultural diversity but business diversity – if China became populated by a bunch of cities that look more similar than different. It might take twenty years, but eventually there will be a vast reaction to that where people say, We don’t want to live in these things anymore.

In terms of regional independence, I’d like to ask you more specifically about local environment of California. You once made the point that California is more closely connected to Asia than to the east coast of America. It’s as if even though the geographic distance is longer, somehow business and cultural ties are stronger between California and this so-called foreign place. That seems to me like the beginnings of a disconnect from the nation state that could eventually lead California to forge its own path, independent of what the political and financial powers in Washington and New York say.

You see it all the time here in the Bay Area. There are lots of people here who spend more of their time in Taiwan or Seoul or mainland China than they do on the east coast of the United States. We look west; California has always looked west and Washington and Europe is somewhere behind our back.

You can already see here the beginnings of the breakup of the tight coupling of what constitutes a nation. Back in the first Bush administration, there was a period when George W Bush asked the California governor to send our California National Guard down to the border of Mexico to protect us against terrorists sneaking across the border. And our conservative governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said no; he refused to send the National Guard. Then, a week later he had a press conference down on the shores of the Pacific at Los Angeles harbor with a real head of state, Tony Blair, announcing a joint California-UK initiative around global climate change. So here you had a state governor negotiating directly with a head of state.

This is no surprise, economically – I haven’t checked the numbers lately, but if California seceded from the United States it would become the seventh largest economy in the world. In the piece I just wrote I mention that the Bay Area alone would qualify as the 25th largest economy, larger than that of Taiwan. So, as city-states and regions understand and appreciate the degree of their economic power, it’s inevitable that they’re going to exercise political power.

What’s the role of the virtual in the emergence of the city-state?

The arrival of the World Wide Web in the mid ’90s really changed things. Cyberspace’s implications for urban planning can be summed up in one sentence: In cyberspace there is no distance between two points. You may be halfway around the planet from someone else, but in cyberspace you’re one click away.

I watched this up close and personal in my work in the ’90s when I was going to China and India pretty regularly. I can remember in India particularly, in 1993, around the time that the Babri Mosque was torn down, I was in Mumbai for an extended period. You’d have all these young Indians who were really bright but kind of clueless. They had all sorts of screwy ideas about the world, and this was because there were no good communications. They were doing their best to understand what was going on elsewhere, but not really getting it because they were reliant on the Indian press. By 1999 that had completely changed. Now you had this whole class of young connecteds who were reading the Web and understood exactly what was going on and were up to the moment. Today, of course, that’s absolutely unremarkable.

Right, and I suppose that access to outside information separates the individual citizen from national narratives, in a way similar to the decloupling of city and nation that you mentioned before.

It creates a culture where people may have more in common with a culture that lives entirely in cyberspace or is thousands of miles away than they do with the local culture.

Right around 1997, Fremont, which is one of the cities along the Bay Area here, built the largest cineplex in California; the largest movie multiplex anywhere in California and all it showed were Indian Masala movies. So you have the kind of diversity where people in Fremont are deeply engaged in Silicon Valley – including the politics of Silicon Valley – but then after that their main focus is India and they’re not paying a lot of attention to the United States overall and really don’t have much to say to a white Southerner living in Alabama.

So in that sense this class of people that you describe, who are closely connected to digital culture, are in their way undermining the nation state.

Oh yeah. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that any city built in the next five years in China will outlast China as a nation. And I realize this is sort of a ‘third rail’ and a difficult subject to discuss, but China is becoming the largest nation state on the planet and in many ways the last nation state to truly come together. In the United States, we killed off our Indians 150 years ago; the Chinese still have their frontier and are still trying to integrate their people, and I suspect that just about the time that China finishes fully integrating, it’s going to discover that this notion of the unitarian nation state is really an experiment left over from the twentieth century.

It’s interesting that you say that, because in the West I think the decline of the nation state is very clear. In the European Union it’s self-evident fact and even in the US there has been for a long time a deeply engrained resistance to having a strong central government that can dictate life for all the citizens. But here in Asia, China is being identified as an example of the virtues of maintaining a strong state that can implement large scale projects, can think beyond a four-year election cycle, etc. In some ways I think the weakening effect of a diminished state is being exposed by China’s rise.

Absolutely. The trend I’m identifying here has nothing to do with the dyspepsia you see in the United States toward the central government. And I don’t mean that the central government disappears completely. It’s rather that there’s going to be a competition between different governmental units for primacy. I’m not a believer in a China collapse scenario. I think it could be a gradual evolution where the central government gets weaker. It maintains the important functions that only central governments can do, but more is dictated by the mayors. To me, the big difference between China and everywhere else is not the relative power of the central government, but who is doing the running.

If you look at the US congress, the majority of members by profession are lawyers. In China the central government has a head of state who was an engineer. In China you have engineers running the country, while in India you have professional politicians running the country. I realize this is a gross overstatement, but if you consider that America is run by lawyers, China is run buy engineers and India is run by politicians, you can understand some important things about the three countries and the way that they make decisions.

One thing that you mentioned before that I’d like to return to before we finish is the effect of cyberspace on planning and the built environment. This topic has come up again and again in this series, and I’m curious to hear more of your thoughts on it. One point in particular that I’ve heard from architects is a concern about the effect of the virtual in diminishing architecture’s role, primarily because we demand less of the our physical and urban spaces because we can do so much socializing or learning or even decorating in cyberspace. So I wonder what you think about this subject and how you would suggest architects get more involved in defining virtual space.

It seems to me that architects have gone from having one client – or perhaps no clients – to having hundreds or thousands of clients. When people can actually design their own buildings and design their own spaces – basically the culture of Make magazine which is about amateurs doing their own thing – that makes people more sophisticated consumers of expertise. Before desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s nobody even knew what a font was. A font was a different type of ball on your IBM Selectric [typewriter], but otherwise nobody had any idea what it was, much less things like kerning or justification or leading. Then, along comes desktop publishing and all of a sudden everybody got really interested in design, and for the graphic designers who were willing to participate there were enormous new opportunities and audiences. This is what turned people like [the typographer] Sumner Stone into stars. So the message to the architects is: get out of your offices and get into cyberspace. Engage with the enthusiastic masses who want to know more about your profession.

But I’m assuming you mean an engagement that goes beyond self-promotion.

No, this is a way to have a conversation with the people who live in the buildings you build. It’s not a PR strategy; it’s a whole different way of working. The age of Frank Lloyd Wright getting rich people to pay for your weird buildings disappeared a couple of decades ago. It’s hard to imagine even the life of IM Pei happening now. Now it is about deep public engagement.

And that public engagement would also extend beyond the individual building to effect how cities operate and evolve…

Yes. The one other piece of technology that really is hugely important to this issue is the rise of sensors and the connection between cyberspace and the physical world. We once had the physical, which we called ‘reality’. Along comes cyberspace and it’s this parallel universe that we visit by peering through the portals of our computer screens. It couldn’t even look back, so what was going on in cyberspace had no idea about the real world. Now, with the advent of ubiquitous sensors over the past decade and a half – whether it’s RFID tags or video cameras on poles, etc. – cyberspace and the physical world are interfingering together. A good example is using Google Street View: how many times have you been walking down a street and you’re wondering, Where was that shop? So you call up Street View and you’re standing there using Street View to see what is half a block away. Or GIS [geographic information system] information: the combination of seeing the map in realtime on my screen with the option of saying, Just tell me where the Starbucks are. Cyberspace and the physical world are interfingering to such a degree that we’re going to be constantly surprised by moments when all of a sudden a big chunk of cyberspace protrudes into our physical world. And vice versa.

When I was an advisor to the Pentagon in the ’90s we talked about something called the ‘Ender’s Game scenario’ – Ender’s Game being a novel by Orson Scott Card. It refers to a situation when people are in a simulation and think they are running a simulation but are in fact effecting things in the real world. The Pentagon had something called SIMNET, where you could have pilots sitting in a simulator virtually flying but they are interacting with the data flows of real planes flying out there in real space.

The example I’m waiting for is this: at some point here we’re going to have a murder case where someone doing something in cyberspace, thinking they’re doing Dungeons and Dragons or World or Warcraft or something, inadvertently kills somebody in the physical world and they don’t even know they did it. It’s weird and futuristic-sounding, but the fact is that architects and urban planners need to thoroughly understand cyberspace, not just because it’s a fast-growing thing, but because cyberspace and physical space are colliding together and are going to be in twenty years virtually indistinguishable.

Originally published Domus China 51 (November 2010)

The Making of Ai Weiwei’s Unilever Commission

I arrive at Ai Weiwei’s studio on a weekday in June. It’s a warm, uncharacteristically clear morning in Beijing and I find Ai sitting outside, in a T-shirt and shorts, with three young assistants. We exchange pleasantries and then the talk turns to business. I’ve been invited to write about a new work that Ai is developing. I know where it will show and when the show opens, but very little else.

What little I do know is based on a chance conversation I had weeks earlier with Inserk Yang, one of Ai’s collaborators. He’d spoken about the work in impressive, unclear terms. It was a very, very big production, he’d said. That didn’t surprise me. Ai has done some big projects in the past, and the venue seemed to demand a tribute of scale. When I asked what the content was, Inserk was cagey, but he gave a clue. ‘It’s not something,’ he said, ‘it’s many things’.

Ai is more direct. Ceramic sunflower seeds, he says, 100 million of them, each handcrafted and spread across the floor of Tate’s Turbine Hall like stones in a Zen garden. I’m not sure how to respond. Sunflower seeds. I search my thoughts for some personal associations and come up empty. But I know enough about Ai’s work to see where they fit in. For years, he’s been rendering commonplace objects in precious materials – coal hives[?] in bronze, junk doors in marble, and watermelons, backscratchers and even urine in porcelain. The sunflower seed is next in line. There must be a connection.

‘I think it’s interesting that you’re not an art writer’, the artist says. ‘You can talk about other things.’ Like a commissioning editor, Ai begins offering possible angles: ‘The social involvement is important’, he says. ‘I like that the project involves so many people.’ Then, ‘It’s made in a very traditional location.’ Finally, ‘Each piece seems identical, but they’re all different.’

We head inside to see a mock-up of the installation. I’m not sure what to expect. What I find is hard to describe. The floor is covered in an unidentifiable, granulated gray matter, about ten centimeters thick. I try to place its look, but again draw a blank. It doesn’t look like seeds to me. From a distance, it appears totally generic, a kind of placeholder substance, something you might use to pave a driveway or line a coat.

We don’t spend much time in the studio. After briefly stomping on the seeds, I accept the assignment and say goodbye.

———-

I return to the studio a couple of days later. It’s early morning and the place is mostly deserted, but Ai has been up for hours already. I find him at his computer, enthusiastically composing a Tweet. Beside him is a plastic bag with a few steamed dumplings inside. He hands it to me, and I watch him type.

I’m better informed this time. In the forty-eight hours since our last meeting, Inserk has sent me a PDF entitled ‘1 – 125,000,000’. It’s an illuminating read – part proposal, part polemic, part memoir – penned by Ai in passionate, imperfect English and intended to explain the installation to its commissioners.

‘The times I grew up’, it begins, ‘[the sunflower] was a common place symbol for the People, sunflower faces the trajectory of the red sun, so must the masses’ feeling toward the communist party.’ Beside the text are the lyrics to a children’s song of the time:

When the Chairman goes past waving
Brilliant sunshine fills our breast …

Chairman Mao, Chairman Mao
You are the reddest red sun in our hearts!

I have a weakness for Cultural Revolution stories, so I decide to start our sunflower-seed discussion there. Ai obliges.

‘When we grew up,’ he says, ‘the Communist society had a very limited vocabulary. We didn’t have many images, besides the hammer and sickle, Chairman Mao’s book … probably ten images or less defined that time. Everywhere – in children’s books, on posters and in newspapers – we saw the same images, and one of the most important was the idea that Chairman Mao is the sun and we’re all sunflowers. The idea was to represent how loyal people should be during the Cultural Revolution. It’s a very, very nice image.’ I ask for more.

‘Even in the remote part of Xinjiang Province where I grew up, if Chairman Mao uttered a new instruction from Beijing in the afternoon, by the next day we’d all wake up to the sounds of drums and cymbals, and people would march in the streets, shouting this new sentence. ‘We have to insist on class struggle!’ or something like that. Then we’d dance and shout this slogan. It was very brutal.’ Ai takes a bite of dumpling and offers the bag to me again. It’s early still, and the office is empty, just us and an orange cat who is enthusiastically ripping up a sheet of newspaper by the door. Outside, several conversations are taking place and beyond that the clanging sound of construction. I ask how it felt to be a part of these events. ‘As children we felt a kind of release of our pressure and anger,’ he says. ‘Because you could really yell out, even though you didn’t know what it meant. It was a strange way of surviving.’

‘After this slogan was announced, the commune would organise its own gathering, and everybody had to attend, from old to young. Every commune had a big hall for this. Ours was empty, like a gallery, but huge and rough, made from red bricks. The floor was dirt, and there were no chairs, so everyone brought a stool from home. Then they’d sit down and start to eat sunflower seeds from their pockets.’ He finishes his dumpling. ‘Because they had to do something. Normally those meetings made everybody very nervous, because nobody knew what would happen. So people ate sunflower seeds and everybody would have a pile of shells in front of them and you could see immediately who was the most skilled, because their pile would be much bigger. My mother can eat them very quick. And her shells would be very clean, never cracked – like a bird.’

What were you doing during these meetings? ‘The children would sit there watching the adults’ activities. I normally felt very sleepy – sleepy mixed with scared. Because my father would always be singled out. They’d say, “OK let’s bring all the counterrevolutionaries onstage!” and some people would have to stand up and be insulted. There were ten to twelve people in the village like this. They were from the five bad categories: former landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists. My father was a rightist. Those people are the enemies of the state and the people. And their children are also bad.’

All this he says with the detached, deadpan expression with which he often describes his work. But, as in his work, there seems to me so much smoldering beneath the flat surface of this anecdote. Within a single childhood memory, so much insight into the spirit of a time: the radical reduction of symbolism, the atmosphere of uncertainty, the threat of violence and frequency of celebration, the fervor and sanctimony, the deliberate opaqueness of the directives, providing their author plausible deniability and their enforcers maximum creative licence, the pseudo-statistical identification of five ‘bad categories’ and transfer of guilt to children. And somewhere within all this, the humble sunflower seed – snack, symbol and sedative.

‘That’s all they had’, he says, and I’m not quite sure what he means. ‘The seeds were the only little treasure they had.’ He is speaking with objectivity but his tone has softened. ‘Sunflower seeds were a part of conversation; it was a very natural act. On the train, on the bus, waiting for the bus, everywhere. Of course, at weddings and any celebration, you’d see them. You’d feel a natural connection eating them with someone.’ One of Ai’s assistants comes in with news of an upcoming appointment. I think I’m beginning to get it: during the Cultural Revolution, the sunflower seed was a kind of peace offering. In an atmosphere of pitched ideological struggle, it soothed and built intimacy. I begin to wonder if, despite its revolutionary symbolism, the sunflower didn’t subvert Mao’s fundamentalist programme, and whether the sharing of seeds wasn’t a form of passive resistance – a way for would-be adversaries to acknowledge their common humanity, a subtle means for even the most zealous Maoist witch hunter to show compassion for a bad element like Ai Weiwei. ‘But of course,’ Ai continues, ‘it was all unconscious. You wouldn’t think about who’d passed them to you.’ And there the conversation cuts off, overtaken by the artist’s obligations. I pledge to return the next day to spend some time testing his mock-up.

———-

When I arrive the next morning, the compound is already active. An antique dealer has laid out several pieces of Neolithic pottery in a column along the wall. A brown dog is inspecting a mound of bubble wrap by the front gate. Ai is conversing with a middle-aged man who is holding a life-sized replica of a surveillance camera carved out of marble. The artist orders a few adjustments, then leads me into his studio and onto his latest work.

I ignore the visual this time and focus on hearing. Each step produces a satisfying crunch. It’s a familiar sound, disarming and rural, evocative of country lanes and gravel driveways, and the more I walk, the richer the accent becomes. Different motions produce different effects. A sweep of the leg brings a thin, shimmering sound; less natural, almost digital. A kick scatters seeds in all directions, each landing with its own trebly tone depending on the distance. I grab a handful and shake. They clack like dice. I drop them back. They sputter and snap like a Geiger Counter.

I pick one up and take a look. Almond shape, slightly thicker than the sunflower seeds I’ve encountered in nature. Clearly ceramic – smooth, hard and off-white – with a pointed oval painted in charcoal-coloured ink on each side. It is coated in a light powder that stays with me after I’ve dropped the seed. I begin to wonder about the social involvement that Ai mentioned.

The production of the seeds is taking place in Jingdezhen, a small city in the south famous for its porcelain. All of Ai’s ceramic works are produced there and from what I’ve heard there’s a small army racing to complete this one. To understand this work, I think I need to see the process. I find Ai and he offers to set up a visit. Coincidentally, Liu Weiwei, his long-time collaborator and the man responsible for the seeds, is at the house. ‘He’s leaving tonight’, Ai says. ‘Can you go tomorrow?’

———-

Jingdezhen is the pottery centre of China and the original home of the world’s porcelain industry. It has held this position for hundreds of years and changed remarkably little even amid the turmoil of imperial transition, foreign invasion, Communist revolution and post-communist reform. It owes its preeminence partly to geology: Jingdezhen has a natural advantage over China’s other ceramic-producing cities due to its ample, easily accessible supplies of clay and feldspar, the essential ingredients of porcelain. The low, rocky hills surrounding the city have been mined continuously for generations and yet these raw materials are almost never in short supply. The miners have to dig deeper now, their work is more dangerous, but it continues to yield the precious minerals on which the city’s reputation and livelihood depend.

To reach one of these mines, Liu Weiwei drives an hour or so outside of the city. In Jingdezhen, the line between urban and country is sharp, and crossing it feels like time travel. The high rises and sooty buses and busy people disappear and you suddenly find yourself in a medieval world of rice and tea, lethargic oxen and stooped labour. The air feels cleaner; the stink of the city – exhaust, spilled fuel and sulphur – is replaced by the earthy smell of wet roots and peels. The buildings are made of wood and roughly mortared brick, and even those that are undergoing expansion have an air of decay. As you drive further, the road gradually decomposes until you find yourself on a narrow dirt lane that stops abruptly before a heap of broken rock.

The mine itself is fairly unremarkable. The entrance is inconspicuous: just a small arched opening on the side of a hill, below a sign that reads SAFE PRODUCTION. The ground is tracked to allow for mine carts, and the roof drips water. According to Liu, the shaft extends for two kilometers, but we don’t take more than a few steps in. I had hoped to speak to someone, but the place seems deserted. The only indication that the site is still active is a small shrine built by the miners. A slight scent of incense still hangs around it, so I assume it’s been in recent use. A small sign above it reads 有求必应 (Ask and ye shall receive). I ask Liu what the miners wish for. He says, ‘Safety’, and we leave.

On the train from Beijing I’d read an account of the porcelain manufacturing process written by a missionary stationed in Jingdezhen in the early eighteenth century. It is a fascinating text, a mixture of ethnography and industrial espionage in which the author describes in detail the arduous process through which hunks of raw rock were turned into the milky chinaware coveted by his European readers. It describes Jingdezhen as a marvel of mass production – a city given over to a single industry, operating at an enormous scale through entirely pre-industrial means. I’d read the piece mostly for entertainment, assuming that the procedures it described were long since outdated. This is not the case.

Not far from the mine is a small plant where the excavated rock is processed. I suppose you would call this place a refinery, although that term evokes heavy industry and air pollution. This place is not like that; it’s all natural. Its heaviest piece of equipment is a wooden, water-powered machine that pounds porcelain stone into powder. Liu’s assistant says that this device has been in use for over a thousand years, and it looks that way. He explains how it works. The pieces of stone are first broken with iron hammers, then the fragments are collected in mortars where trip hammers pulverise them. The hammers rise and fall based on a system of levers connected to a small water wheel. A stream feeds the wheel and provides perpetual motion. It is a clean, efficient operation that apparently requires very little human supervision, because the plant is empty.

Making powder constitutes step one of the refinement process, and there are several others, the products of which are visible in piles and stacks along the walls and on the floor. To understand these, I rely on the missionary account, which, despite its 300 years, I now assume is still relevant:

The powder is then put into a great vessel filled with water, and stirred vigorously with an iron shovel. When it has been allowed to stand several minutes, a kind of cream forms at the top four or five fingers thick; this they take off and put into another vessel full of water. The mixture in the first vessel is stirred up several times, and each time they remove the scum that gathers on the top, until nothing is left but the larger particles, the weight of which makes them sink to the bottom; these are finally taken out and again pounded.

This skimming process produces a thick paste, which resembles meringue. Enormous gobs of it are laid out on tarps in the centre of the plant.

This paste is then thrown into moulds, which are a kind of large and wide wooden box, the bottom of which is a bed of bricks with an even surface. Over this brick bed a coarse cloth is stretched, up to the sides of the case; this cloth is filled with the paste, and soon afterwards they cover it with another cloth on the top of which they put a layer of bricks laid evenly, one by the side of the other. This helps to squeeze out the water more quickly without losing any of the porcelain material which, as it hardens readily, takes the shape of the bricks. Before it has become quite hard the paste is divided into little bricks, which are sold by the hundred.

These soft, off-white bricks are stored on racks and lined up on the floor. From here they are shipped to porcelain factories, where the powder is further refined, then mixed with clay to form a cohesive, camel-coloured material that I will watch Liu hand-press into a sunflower-shaped mould later that day.

———-

Liu is forty-nine. He has a plump face and a low, gravelly voice with a slight lisp. He speaks in short declarative sentences and dresses in casual luxury brands. He was once a dealer of Chinese antiques, but now spends most of his time creating porcelain artworks for Ai Weiwei. The courtyard of his home is filled with fruits of their collaboration: a cobalt blue orb (‘Ai showed me beautiful photos of these on a beach in Miami’), an oil droplet (‘It was supposed to be bigger, but it always cracked, so the size had to be reduced’), human organs (‘The most difficult piece we’ve ever done’), a grid of interlocking tubes (‘These are in an exhibition in Basel right now’).

He doesn’t speculate on the significance of the work, and says that he and Ai don’t discuss it. He considers himself a producer and he does his work with care. He’s happy to work with Ai. They’ve been friends for sixteen years and the collaboration is a natural extension of that friendship. It started small and gradually built up, each successful realisation leading to another. ‘You could say he’s my boss,’ Liu says that night over tea in his courtyard, ‘but he’s never bossy to me. We’re friends first.’

———-

It’s my final day in Jingdezhen and we’ve been through all the major production steps, except one. Why this was left till last I don’t know, since it’s the step I’m most curious to see. Back in Beijing, Ai had spoken passionately about the painters. ‘Each one is different’, he said. ‘You show it through your own control of the brush and your breath and your own body gestures. You pick a seed up and you put on ink, more ink or less ink, lightly or thickly painted. Then you have to turn it over and place it down. It’s such a beautiful act.’

The painting takes place in an unfurnished two-storey house on a leafy street somewhere in Jingdezhen. We pull up in Liu Weiwei’s van and one of his assistants immediately starts unloading sacks of unpainted seeds from the back. Through the windows we can see groups of women – only women – hunched over plywood tables. The air outside is filled with the smell of alcohol-based ink and the soft sound of female chatting. We enter without introduction. When the women notice the visitors, they become quiet, diligent.

Before each of them is a pile of blank ceramic seeds, like the ones we’ve just brought over. I’m not sure where to look, so I watch the woman closest to me. She’s wearing black jeans and a slim-fitting polo shirt with bright stripes. Like most of the painters, her hair is black and tied back. To her right is a shallow bowl of black ink and beside that an identical bowl filled with water. To her left is a flat wooden ring half covered with painted seeds.

She places a finished seed on the ring and immediately picks up a blank one. She holds it in her left hand, between the thumb and index finger. Her right holds the brush, which she grips like a pen. As she paints, both hands work in tandem, the left gently gliding the seed beneath the brush while the right holds it steady. She ends each stroke with a slight upward flick of the wrist. Four strokes and one side is done.

Liu Weiwei is no longer in the house. He is outside discussing the work with a woman whom I presume to be a supervisor of some kind. They’re bent over a sack of painted seeds. Some are OK, he says, but some are not. The bad ones can’t be used.

Across the street is another house where more painters are working. It’s dingier than the first one and not as well ventilated. The women inside range in age from late teens to early forties. They’re sloppier than the other group, and chattier. I start asking questions.

Q: Do you know what these seeds are for?

A: Adornment.

One word, then back to painting. I’ve started off on the wrong foot. I try another approach.

Q: Is it hard work?

A: It’s OK, the time is flexible. We can also work at home.

Maybe this more sympathetic question has warmed the atmosphere, because all five women now look up from their seeds.

Q: Are you all painters?

A: Not all.

Q: What did you do before this?

A: Some of us used to paint porcelain.

Q: So this is much simpler than that?

A: Yeah, it’s easy once you know how to do it.

Q: How many do you paint in a day?

A: Two to two and a half kilos. On average, each one of us has painted over 500 kilos.

500 kilos. At about 700 seeds per kilo that’s 350,000 seeds. 2.8 million brush strokes. It’s hard to fathom in this tiny, ink-scented room. I take another shot at discussing the significance of their work.

Q: Do you know where these are going and what they’ll be used for?

A: No, we don’t know, but we know they’ll be used to make money.

Another brief, withering response. And, again, my impulse is to retreat to tame personal queries.

Q: After all this, do you still like sunflower seeds?

A: Yes. These are more beautiful than real ones. Hahaha …

An icebreaker! I try to probe deeper.

Q: How do you feel about doing this work?

A: To me, if people understand art, they might enjoy it.

———-

As we head back to his house, Liu Weiwei begins to speak about himself. He doesn’t have creative aspirations of his own, he says. Although he’s one of Ai’s co-creators, Liu is foremost a businessman and he describes his creations not as works of art but feats of production. From this perspective, the sunflower seeds are his masterpiece: never has a single project required this much investment, organisation and overseeing. ‘I had to buy five vans to transport the seeds’, he says as we pull up to his front gate. Then, with less emphasis, ‘More than a thousand people have worked on this.’

A thousand? And this for a production that, from what I’ve seen, barely uses electricity. I ask how he maintains quality with such a large team. He says, ‘We have many people taking care of the quality. We’re all very strict. If we see bad ones, we just throw them away. That’s a loss for me, but we have to be tough on this, otherwise it would be hard to control.’ I’m finding my emotions somewhat hard to control. Despite its superhuman scale, nothing in this production is automated. The seeds are handcrafted: the porcelain stone is excavated by hand, pulverised, and mixed by hand. The clay is hand-pressed into millions of pieces that are baked and dumped into large sacks that, despite being made of woven Polypropylene, appear to be hand stitched. These are placed in vans and hand-delivered to studios, where each piece is painted by hand, then sent back for another firing, after which it’s hand polished and dried. For someone like me, a digital labourer whose work is based on remote communications and impossible-to-understand search algorithms, the directness, intimacy and raw human power of this production is overwhelming.

———-

When I get back to Beijing, I go to visit Ai again. I tell him I’ve seen the manufacturing process and am amazed that it’s so productive and so low-tech. That’s what makes Jingdezhen special, he says; it hasn’t lost its primitive ways. ‘In the culture you see in Jingdezhen, there’s really no deficiency.’ As before, he’s speaking objectively, but not without feeling. ‘You can be handicapped or weak, but still there’s something to do and, by doing it, something beautiful can come.’ He pauses, as if to make certain that he possesses all the correct words to say what he wants to say. ‘Value isn’t just measured by competition – that creates too much waste. The tradition you see there was the same a thousand years ago, during the Song Dynasty. It survives because it’s so efficient. It doesn’t need electricity. Everything that’s done is necessary. You cannot beat it.’

It’s an unusual argument: an ancient social philosophy expressed through the concerns of the modern business leader – reducing waste, increasing efficiency, saving energy, adding value … But this apparent mismatch is to be expected; it’s simply one of the dozens of incongruities that spring to mind when considering his sunflower seeds – millions of pieces of ceramic, mass-produced but handmade, inspired by Communist symbolism but sponsored by a capitalist conglomerate, produced through pre-modern methods and displayed in a post-industrial space. The overlap between supposed opposites is fertile ground for Ai. He is continuously exploring it, intervening in it, inviting others in. It’s a contaminated area, strewn with preconceptions and misunderstandings, and its impurity is what attracts the artist. As Ai speaks, it dawns on me that his installation is essentially an elaborate device for producing this condition inside the Turbine Hall; all of it – the mining, the moulding, the painting, the five vans, the thousand workers, the 100 million seeds – all of it amounts to a single attempt at creating an environment in which incompatibilities meet and multiply.

In the hope of developing the thought, I ask Ai a final question. He’s taking a photo of my T-shirt. I say, ‘How do you think the visitors are going to react?’ He replies, ‘I don’t know.’ Silence. I remember the painter’s response when I asked her to speculate on the work, and in that instant of reverie Ai has posted his picture of my shirt on Twitter. Then, as if fulfilling a terms of use agreement, he responds some more. ‘I think people will be charmed because they can walk on it, and when they first enter the hall they’ll think it’s real, then realise it’s not real, then they’ll wonder if it’s machine-made or hand-made or painted.’ He looks blankly at a group of students fidgeting in the doorway. ‘Those things all affect perception. We only remember a piece by how it alarmed us and showed us unsafe conditions – the way it made us question our original concept. I feel very charmed by that.’


First published in The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei, edited by Juliet Bingham. Published by Tate Publishing (c) Tate 2010

For photographers, this golden age of voluntary and involuntary surveillance presents problems: Now that pure documentation is declining in value, how does one show China in less objective terms? Now that the backdrop is familiar, how does a photographer present a place not as simply a habitat for humans but as a showcase for their humanity?

I started shooting portraits from behind almost immediately after moving to China. Initially I wasn’t so interested in backs, but I found that whenever I tried to take a photo of someone’s front, the presence of my camera and/or blue eyes and orange hair drew attention and deformed the moment. So I adopted a less conspicuous, slightly creepier technique, sneaking up behind the subjects, capturing them before they noticed me. As I took more and more back photos, I noticed that they contain something frontal images don’t – space for imagination. By minimizing the subject’s personality, they encourage the viewer to envision the subject’s experience. These are some of the my favorites from the “Back Mania” series. Through them I’ve tried to background detail and foreground emotion, to capture China not as it looks, but as it feels (to me at least).

Originally published in Urban China 29 (July 2008)