To be honest with you, we aren’t experts in architecture, but really into it. Having been invited to collaborate with Newly Drawn, a group of young Finnish architects, we were taken by the opportunity to explore the topic from an outsider’s perspective, to interview interesting people in the field and dig deeper into our own surroundings as well as placemaking in China.

We started first by producing communications for Snowball architecture events organised as part of Finland’s cultural programme for the Shanghai World Expo, and ended up as editors of the Double Happy publication. Already in the beginning we came across the outlandish duplet: Finnish and Chinese architecture. “What could Finnish and Chinese architects learn from each other?”, we asked ourselves in the midst of trying to encourage Sino-Finnish architectural exchange.

Going to Shanghai in March 2010, we met with both Finnish and Chinese architects who told us about their projects and interests, providing answers to our questions. The discussions revolved around social and ecological issues and innovations, cultural differences and similarities, the potential for collaboration and increasingly crossing disciplines. The contrast between Finland, a small Nordic welfare state still dominated by a modernist stance on architecture, and China, a country undergoing rapid modernisation and thus pushing the boundaries of architectural design, proved to be big. While practitioners in Finland seem to long for a new air of dynamism and change similar to that of the post-war era, Chinese architects returning from their studies abroad are tackling the preservation and development of cultural identity in urbanising China.

For us, it felt natural to approach the topic of Finnish and Chinese architecture by investigating design processes rather than the end results. We set out to pinpoint areas that we found particularly important when it comes to improving life through architecture in Finland and China. Building inspiring and enjoyable cities with many layers and cultural variation as well as creating comfortable homes, work places and public spaces – and routes between them – are, in the end, objectives of architects in both countries. But while Finns know how to support privacy, the Chinese master communality. And while Chinese architects know how to tackle chaos and speed, their Finnish colleagues are experts in taking advantage of tranquility and empty space. These skills can be applied in both countries, even if the starting points and issues are completely different.

Double Happy includes stories that reflect some of the various facets of placemaking. Commissioned by Newly Drawn and head-edited by us, with writings and illustrations from a group of people invited to explore the topic, it draws a picture of Finnish and Chinese architectural environment today. Graphic design and art direction by Åh.

Contributors: Mathieu Borysevicz, Bryan Boyer, Christopher DeWolf, Che Fei 车飞, Pan Jian Feng 潘剑锋, Hanne Granberg, Hella Hernberg, Kaarle Hurtig, Martti Kalliala, Hertta Kiiski, Dylan Kwok, Katja Lindroos, Meri Louekari, Herman Mao, Song Min 宋敏, Bert de Muynck, Rami Niemi, Hans Park, Janne Teräsvirta, Tuomas Toivonen, Timo Tuomas, Valtteri Väkevä & Hu Yang 胡杨

囍 (‘double happy’) is a popular decorative design composed of two stylized characters 喜 (‘joy’ or ‘happiness’). There is a visual resemblance between 囍 and the two lucky digits ‘88’. In Chinese the word for number ‘eight’ (八) sounds similar to the word which means ‘prosper’ or ‘wealth’ (发).

The Snowball project aimed to bring together Finnish and Chinese architecture through two events: one in Kiasma, Helsinki on February 12 and the other in Shanghai on March 25-27, 2010.

The events promoted Sino-Finnish architectural exchange. Tailored for Finnish architects wanting to collaborate with Chinese clients and colleagues, they presented an insight into contemporary opportunities, challenges and ambitions in China and provided the possibility for Finnish architects to present their work to local practitioners.

Snowball Shanghai programme booklet asks what can Finnish and Chinese architects learn from each other.

OK Do edited a programme leaflet for the Snowball Helsinki event as well as a booklet for Snowball Shanghai including articles about the purpose and background of the event as well as a short introduction to the Chinese and Finnish participants.

We also commissioned the design of the event material from Åh who left off with the idea of a snowball effect – a process that builds upon itself, forming a virtuous circle – apt for the series of events bringing together thinking and doing from two cultures. The blue ink snowball grows in size starting from an advertisement and a programme leaflet for Snowball Helsinki and reaching its peak in a programme booklet for Snowball Shanghai.

A hill with a hole. "Paper architecture" by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin from the book Brodsky & Utkin: The Complete Works (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003).

The backward world

Recently in Shanghai, I saw many people walking backwards on the street and in the parks. As it turns out, they were following the footsteps of a mythic Chinese immortal, who could do it faster than the eye could see. In China, in addition to healthy exercise, walking backwards is also considered akin to a karmic reverse, allowing the walker to correct mistakes and sins of the past. But what is the world like in reverse?

All the time in the world

The weekend never ends in Berlin. There is no financial or social pressure to practice the everyday, so the outgoing Berliners work together to make the city more enjoyable, distorting time and typical etiquettes. In Berlin, a night out can stretch over days, weeks, and even years. As quantum physicists would say, probability is all we ever know about when it will come to an end.

Dream world

Last year, I read The Book of Scotlands, in which Nick Currie aka Momus uses negative space, or Ma in Japanese culture, to discover what his native country of Scotland could  become through writing about everything except the place itself. Like the surrealists – or Soviet “Paper Architects” ignoring the boundaries of possibility and gravity in their 1980s designs – Momus recognises the omnipotence of the imagined. “Every lie creates a parallel world; the world in which it is true,” he says.

The text was published as part of physics studies for the Science Poems book.

Here and there – Satoko and Kok-Meng's office mixes inside and outside spaces.

Thanks for inviting us over! How did you end up in Shanghai?

Satoko Saeki: I first came to China in 2000 for an internship, as a result of studying architecture under the guidance of a Chinese professor in Pennsylvania. Having lived in Tokyo and New York, I immediately felt that China was different. I was not interested in its architectural scene but more the atmosphere. Instead of being established and “ready”, there was an air of dynamism and potential – something was about to happen.

Kok-Meng Tan: I came in the end of 2003 to work on a large conservation project in the former French Concession. Then I met Satoko in a café where we both used to hang out. She had started her own practice a little earlier and asked me to join her.

Which café was that?

SS: It was a small casual café called Le Petite, run by our Japanese friend Noriko. Since then, she has made the place more private and moved it to her home. She used to work as a designer for Muji and has lived in Shanghai for many years. I can call Noriko if you would like to visit her.

We would, thanks (see the interview with Noriko)! Could you tell us about your design approach?

KMT: We are not interested in the kind of design that is currently hyped all over. We rather believe in the genres of “under design” (design that falls below conventional contemporary design as deemed too simple or too banal) “super design” (design that exceeds the conventional because it may be too extreme, too personal or just useless) and “non-design” (functional and straightforward items and ideas that were developed before the advent of “design”).

SS: We are also interested in creating experiences and affecting behaviour in spaces instead of designing expressive buildings.

“We believe in the genres of under design, super design and non-design.”

What kinds of projects do you carry out?

SS: We mainly do interiors and small-scale architecture because, as foreigners, it’s difficult for us to get hold of bigger development projects.

KMT: Lately, we’ve been working on a small housing project for two families based on the ideas of sharing and interconnection.

SS: The project is called Minus K House. In Japan, homes are often described as 3LDK (3 x Living Dining Kitchen rooms) or 4LDK, etc. But for these two houses, the kitchen is shared, and therefore not fully a K. In practice, all the 19 rooms of 3 x 3 square metres also function as passages: to move around the building, you need to pass from one room to another, and there are many ways to experience the house. One of the families uses their part of the building as a weekend house and the other part is used as a regular home. The openness allows each family to be aware of the other.

KMT: In the Minus K House, we also wanted to mix inside and outside spaces – to make the whole concept of ‘inside and outside’ insignificant so that the relationships between this and that, and here and there would become more important. When this happens, the walls become less important, even unnoticed, emphasising a communality in the space.

KUU is working on interiors and small-scale architecture for sharing and interconnection.

We definitely feel that Chinese culture is more inclined to sharing than our own. Could you tell us more about your view on the concept of sharing in Chinese architecture?

SS: After the Communist Liberation in 1949, families typically had to share their bathrooms and kitchens with others. This was not very convenient but people got used to it. Nowadays, Chinese people are wealthier, but through urbanisation, like in most of the other big cities, people have to move to tower blocks which diminish communality. We wish to bring the concept of sharing back to Chinese architecture, but in a more comfortable way than before.

KMT: We think that sharing, or the presence and recognition of somebody else, makes people more in touch with reality. In our office, a partially roofless space built in the 1930s for residential use, we can smell the cooking of our neighbours, see their underwear drying, and hear them chatting. We really like the setting because it reminds us that we are working in a real context, mixing the inside and outside spaces together.

“We wish to bring the concept of sharing back to Chinese architecture, but in a more comfortable way than before.”

How do you find clients and collaborators?

KMT: In China, everything happens through the people you know. Satoko just visited a really nice indigo dyeing workshop outside Shanghai which we found through Noriko.

SS: It’s a workshop run by a 75-year-old couple who use natural indigo and cotton and dye everything by hand. In fact, China is a great place for a designer exactly because of this: the craftsmen and manufacturers are near and it’s possible to work with them closely.

KMT: Basically, you can just make a drawing and take it to the product-makers yourself. In Japan and Singapore, we usually use catalogues for picking up construction material for our projects while in China we can work in close collaboration with the makers themselves.

You’ve also taught at the Shenzhen University’s architecture department as guest studio masters.

KMT: Yes, last year, we carried out a design studio called Shenzhen Super Stir with our students who were encouraged to give modern architecture a proper stir through a series of exercises. We asked them to rethink the idea of “clarity” – a common architectural notion that has been inherited from the early European modernists. The idea was to ask if an estrangement from clarity or definition could inspire us to new thinking about privacy, communality and boundaries – and ultimately to new kind of architecture.

What did the students think about the stirring?

KMT: The students seemed resistant at first, they wanted to make new things. In China, traditionally, students are taught to create form – and if the project doesn’t involve creating new form then the results are not considered new. We wanted to make the students see the value in designing new experiences, too.

SS: We also wanted them to experiment how cities might become interesting and more functional through the “misuse” of space. In the end, the students came up with great ideas for an old industrial block where spaces with different functions, such as education or trade, overlapped encouraging sharing and interaction.

Like you’ve discussed in your writing, in the West, people are also obsessed with new forms.

KMT: Yes, according to François Jullien, a French Sinologist (The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting), this has to do with the foundations of Western, in other words Greek, thinking where something conceptual or abstract always has to be manifested as something else – a presence of “this” means the existence of “that”. In traditional non-Greek thinking, such as the Chinese, there is no obsession with presence. Whether something is present or not is never asked, because it’s not part of the question. Presence and non-presence, form and formlessness, good and bad, past and present, big and small, you and me, and here and there all exist in the same dynamic continuum. According to the non-Greek logic, we shouldn’t even ask questions about form or non-form – it’s not about one or the other but they come from the same pre-differentiated source.

“In traditional Chinese thinking, presence and non-presence, form and formlessness, good and bad, past and present, big and small, you and me, and here and there all exist in the same dynamic continuum.”

How do you see the current mindset of creative professionals in China?

KMT: When we first came to China, there was understandably no layers – no historical thinking or understanding behind architecture and design. The work and discussions were either stuck in Chinese traditions or random references picked from the Western world – and these ideas carried no meaning, they were not progressive. But then things started to change rapidly.

SS: In the last ten years, big money entered China and there was a lot of development, a lot of big projects. But at the same time, more subtle cultural things developed, too. Chinese people started opening cafés with unique local character. Before, people always referred to foreign examples, but the younger generation has gained confidence – they look at their own culture, society and roots and take ideas from them to the modern context.

KMT: I think that many Chinese creative people feel like they don’t need to live in the West anymore. They’re making meaningful things in their own context and recognising their own environment as authentic. This is great because, in the end, people want real things. The fact that people are starting to be their own selves in China is a good starting point for newness.

Kok-Meng and Satoko's office is a partially roofless space built in the 1930s for residential use.

We agree, and it is interesting to see how many contrasting ways of living and working seem to co-exist, for instance, in Shanghai. It’s not so settled yet.

SS: Yes, many people live in a modern way familiar from Western contexts while many neighbourhoods also hold on to the old spirit of sharing and porosity.

KMT: We’re attentive to the behaviour of people in Shanghai – how they behave in different environments, at different times and with different types of people. Things are in a fuzzy and seemingly contradictory state. For example, Shanghainese interact with their family, colleagues, and shopkeepers in a very natural way, but at the same time they formalise their homes into abstract symbols of social status and taste. Our young clients don’t cook, but they still want a designer kitchen. They will move out in three years time, yet they worry about radiation from the marble. We need to understand this phenomenon in order to work with it.

Could you name some other things that interest or inspire you about China at the moment?

SS: Well, we’re interested in traditional Chinese landscape painting: how the use of ink on paper, a single simple medium, can create a world of many things based on gradations of tonalities, densities, dryness and wetness, becoming present and fading away, hazy and distinct, here and there, this and that. In the paintings, we can sense an atmosphere of an all encompassing world before things became differentiated.

OK, a street shop for xiaolongbao.

1. Street

In Shanghai, life extends from rooms to the street. From mahjong playing to washing laundry, people use asphalt as a base for carrying out daily activities together. Cooking, selling food and eating being some of them, we were taken by xiaolongbao as well as other local delights prepared on the spot.

One day, we tried to find a pair of Lilliputian stools which locals use a lot yet which don’t seem to be sold anywhere. The trick was to find one on the street and ask the owner if she wished to sell it. In fact, she wasn’t the owner of the stool, but a neighbour who happened to be the closest person standing by. In only a few seconds, she set up an ad hoc sales team: another neighbour brought a calculator for price negotiation, someone else went in search for more seats while a third person fetched us a carrier bag. Finally, the payment was delivered to the owner herself, busy doing laundry.

Instead of inviting friends to their homes, Shanghai people like to gather in some of the countless eateries of the city. Noriko Daishima, a Shanghai-based designer of Japanese origin (read our story about her), explains this through the fact that Chinese homes are very small, but also through the love of the streets. “I’ve heard that there are around 30 000 restaurants in Shanghai,” she points out.

Noriko shares a garden with her neighbours. It's both a meeting place and a working site.

2. Sharing

Sharing is caring, they say. Sometimes we got the feeling that Chinese people care about each other more than, for example, Finns. This caring and trust was manifest in doors that are left wide open in the middle of the city or a shop owner that left her outlet as well as a one-year-old child (slightly anxious) in our hands in order to go and find out whether another store had the product we sought.

The contemporary Chinese architecture is keen on addressing the concept of sharing, too. Metropolises in China are like laboratories where traditional practices of everyday life get tested against modern concepts and contexts. Meng Yan from URBANUS, the office behind Tulou low-income housing concept, has been surprised by the level of communality shown by Chinese inhabitants in their projects. “I know that it is crucial for many Chinese people to exchange information about jobs etc. with their neighbours, but the Tulou residents even take turns in cooking for each other.”

“In China, everything happens through friends,” describes another local architect, Kok-Meng Tan of KUU. We like the idea. A big city doesn’t have to mean a loss of trust towards others, or living detached from your neighbours. Having learned to be so independent, it might be the time to search the villagers inside us for the sake of “better city, better life,” as Expo 2010 Shanghai puts it.

Laundry day in the neighbourhood around West Mall.

3. Straightforward

“In Finland, people think a lot and in Shanghai, they do a lot,” our friend, a Shanghai-based artist and designer Pan Jian Feng reviews his experiences of both cultures. Although some areas of the Chinese society, such as doing bigger business in Shanghai, are extremely complicated, the methodology of daily life is often very straightforward – and extremely efficient. Working with Mr. Feng himself, we have found that plans are taken into action very quickly. While we might still be pondering which of the alternative concepts might work the best, he would have already tested them out.

Going back to the food, some of our favourite restaurants were tiny, anonymous noodle places where one would pick up the chosen ingredients (like pak choi, fried tofu and fishballs) in a basket and have them quickly turned into a soup by adding stock. Quick, flexible and uncomplicated. A recipe that, at times, works like a good design method, too.

When it comes to the relationship between design and production, China is full of opportunities for finding direct collaborators for handicrafts. People are still familiar with materials and accustomed to doing things with their hands. “Inspired by the traditional Chinese way of working, materials are my starting point,” says a Hangzhou architect Wang Shu. “I think we should look at rural construction methods and materials when trying to solve issues of, for example, sustainability. Hands are good for thinking.”

Goodbye Shanghai, so long xiaolongbao!

Noriko in her home and Le Petit Xiaoxiao café and shop.

Originally from Tokyo, Noriko, 42, has lived in Shanghai for 7 years. She first visited the city through her work for Muji, where she designed interior products and dealt with many Chinese manufacturers. “I have always been interested in production,” Noriko tells us. “The Shanghai area is special as there are many small factories here. I came to China because I wanted to learn the language and get to know the local producers and their thoughts.”

“I came to China because I wanted to learn the language and get to know the local producers and their thoughts.”

Noriko explains that she felt as if she was going back to her own roots when she moved from Japan to China. “Many cultural traditions in Japan actually come from here,” she notes. “I was also intrigued by the fact that Shanghai was so chaotic, so unfinished, and much more aggressive than Tokyo. You know, life easily gets shallow if everything is just beautiful. Here, it’s harder, but more interesting. However, Shanghai is starting to get more organised now, and people are getting more gentle. The city is developing, and maybe becoming less exciting than before, too.”

Noriko’s house is small and white. Built in 1948, it consists of two rooms – a bedroom and a living room where we sit drinking tea from cups hand-made by the host herself. The same cups are sold in Noriko’s home shop: a shelf of items from pottery to woodwork and textiles, most of which are designed by her and made by Chinese artisans – just like almost all the furniture in her house, too. Moreover, the shop selection includes some traditional Chinese everyday objects Noriko has found in random street shops around the city – beautiful and practical things that are often underestimated, and thus hard to find, in the globalising city.

Le Petit Xiaoxiao features ceramics crafted by Noriko and other products designed by her and made by local artisans.

“I’m very interested in primitive design and production methods,” Noriko explains her interest towards Chinese crafts. “In my own work, I try to combine traditional methods with new design.” One of her projects, factory-tshirt.net, sets out to create an online platform for designers and manufacturers to collaborate and learn about different design and production methods through the medium of a classic white t-shirt. On the website, Noriko presents her own T-shirt project involving indigo dying in a farmhouse in Zhoucheng, Yunnan and printing with plaster and soya in Tongxiang, Zhejiang. “It’s nice to know about things,” Noriko says.

The garden in front of Noriko's place is taken care of by her together with her neighbours.

In addition to more traditional crafts, Noriko is also interested in web design and programming. “I don’t like to distinguish between different fields of creative work – people are more complex than that,” she notes. Working at home and for herself, she also likes to experiment with the boundaries between labour and leisure. “I hate the office,” she says. “It’s the most uncreative place in the world.”

“I hate the office. It’s the most uncreative place in the world.”

Like us, many people found their way to Noriko’s through a friend’s recommendation. We heard about the place from Satoko and Kok-Meng, a Shanghai-based couple who met each other at Le Petit Xiaoxiao and later founded KUU design office together. “I wanted to create a small creative community by making my home a meeting place,” Noriko tells us about her activities resonating Chinese communality. “I have made many new friends at my place.”

Lessons learned is a series of writings by Hans Park depicting the life of a Tokyo architect. The part two of the series deals with people and places. Born to Korean parents in Stockholm, Hans’ personal history in places stretches from Finnish Lapland to Helsinki and Nairobi where he worked for the United Nations Human Settlements Programme before making Japan his home.

People making a place.

Shanghai

I worked one Saturday night in Shanghai to visit a computer graphics (CG) office which is the outsourcer of our outsourcer. I visited the CG office together with our office assistant and the director of our subcontractor. Our task that weekend was to oversee that the images produced for the 650 hectare urban planning project looked good and presentable for the local city council.

At the CG office I met with young people working on various unbuilt Chinese cities, constructing complexes, high rise towers and landscapes. It was a bizarre but fascinating place and truly an epitome of the modern society in the making. The people working there, crafters of 3D software and image manipulation, were quick, sharp and tired chain-smokers. The company we sometimes directly appoint to do our architectural renderings work in day and night shifts and operate from different locations. The 3D modelling and project management is done in Shenzen and the rendering and photoshopping in Beijing. This particular Shanghai CG company however did everything in one place making it easier for us to comment on the work due to an unusually tight schedule.

I made some comments on produced images and was told that it would take an hour or so to make the changes to the final renderings. Our office assistant, the director and I left for dinner while waiting for the results. The dinner ended up being a heated discussion over the future of Chinese cities. The director, a couple of years younger than me, started his practice with friends while studying architecture in Shanghai. Their company partners with big global architecture practices for extra large urban assignments as well as runs its own projects in China.

He explained to me the fundamentals of city planning in China emphasising that they are currently at the early stages of urbanisation. “First we will build eastern, then central and finally western China”, the director claimed. Building will take a lifetime he added when I wondered for how long China could go on building cities at the current pace.

Done!

I have only seen a fraction of urban planning processes in China yet have realised some key issues that come with the speed of building and the urgency to facilitate urbanisation. The speed leaves us with urban solutions and rules that cannot be agreed upon with the public. They are created and decided on the go, leaving little time to contemplate and benchmark the types of cities suitable for the early 21st century Asia. The speed and the volume of building shifts power. Those who are in power and who set the tone for urban design and discourse on urban issues regarding planning and design are not the world class architects and urban researchers but the middle class designers representing big, powerful and global practices. What the best architects and their bureaus represent today is a point of quick references and sources of inspiration (and plagiarism) for the generic practices busy coming up with new design ideas.

Helsinki

For the first time in my life this summer I visited Finland as a vacation destination to attend two weddings. I learned that friends sharing happy and important moments is an incredible thing and organising a wedding party needs great vision and great attention to detail. I found it incredibly reassuring that both wedding parties I attended relied so much on the guests. A party planned with an iron fist will kill the mood. A wedding with no plans is not a wedding. And so, from this I drew three conclusions. First I concluded that to organise and execute something like a wedding party is like running an organisation. Second, the role model to run an organisation should be the mother overseeing her child’s wedding. Why is this? I think mothers are usually excellent multi-taskers distributing work with care, following up on issues and they are respected across age groups and cultures, all qualities you want in a manager. Lastly, and probably most importantly the clue for a successful wedding or an organisation are the people.

People will participate and make an effort as long as the key issues are planned for them; be it fun seating arrangements, enough food and drinks at a wedding party or a right to a sick leave at work. With a bit of direction and room for flexibility and a healthy focus on people as the most important asset, the set is clear for an unforgettable wedding party or an organisation. Easier said than done, but definitely worth a try, I say.