20 women architects shaping China’s future through buildings big and small
China’s urban landscapes are transforming at dizzying speed, and, inspired by Zaha Hadid, women are behind some of the country’s most exciting new buildings
Changes unleashed by Deng Xiaoping’s economic opening up let them claim a place in the profession, and elbow aside male engineers who dominated construction
Gary Jones
Published: 3:00pm, 23 Jun, 2019
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default...3&v=1561342006
Zhang Di’s Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art, in Ningxia Hui autonomous region. Photo: MOCA
With just an hour to go before the China launch of New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future, the book’s British managing editor, Austin Williams, is explaining why he wanted no mention of females on its cover. Although the full-colour volume is hailed in marketing blurb as “the first of its kind detailing the lives, achievements and ambitions of 20 successful, influential women architects living and working in China today”, he would have preferred no gender-revealing spoiler in its subtitle.
“I envisaged this book being called ‘Twenty Chinese Architects’, full stop, because if you saw ‘Twenty Chinese Architects’ as the title, and you opened it up and they were all men, you wouldn’t give it a second thought,” besuited Williams says. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if you then discovered that they were all women.’ That might give you cause for reflection on how women are seen to participate in this industry.”
Invited to China in 2011, to help establish the architecture department of Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), in Suzhou, Williams is an honorary research fellow at that college as well as a senior lecturer in architecture at London’s Kingston School of Art.
He stresses how time frames are compressed in fast-changing China, pointing out that the country’s first private architecture practice in the modern era was opened only in the early 1990s. “This is not like the West, with 200 years of playing around with this stuff,” Williams says. “We are talking just 25 or so years.”
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default...72x_100628.jpg
Qi Shanshan’s Nine House, a boutique hotel and gallery in Xitang, Zhejiang province.
One consequence of this squeezing of time is that women are already playing a pivotal role in Chinese architecture, and realised projects spotlighted in the new volume include everything from rural schools to gargantuan commercial developments in major cities.
Among them are architect Qi Shanshan’s Nine House, an inviting boutique hotel and gallery in the ancient water town of Xitang, an hour’s drive from downtown Shanghai, in Zhejiang province. Qi is the founder of Studio Qi, in her hometown of Hangzhou, also in Zhejiang, and Nine House won an Urban Environment Design magazine accolade as China’s Most Charming Boutique Villa in 2016.
More monumental assignments in the book include the 13,200-square-metre Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art, in northern China’s Ningxia Hui autono*mous region, by architect Zhang Di, of WAA Architects in Beijing. Her massive, swooping, otherworldly structure sits beside the Yellow River, its shape mimicking surrounding sedimentary rock formations.
Meanwhile, the solemn Yanan Revolu*tionary Memorial Hall – by Zhang Jinqiu, who has worked with China Northwest Architecture, Design and Research Institute for more than 50 years and is now in her 80s – is a political pilgrimage site in the Shaanxi province region that Mao Zedong made his Red Capital from 1935 to 1947.
The book’s launch and an accom*pany*ing exhibition are being held at Shanghai’s sprawling West Bund Art Centre, which is housed in what was once an aircraft factory, beside the Huangpu river.
Although Williams’ name appears on the book’s cover, an all-female team of XJTLU students carried out much of the research and interviews, and some of the fresh-faced youngsters make last-minute adjustments to architectural scale models spread throughout the exhibition space, while wall-mounted profiles describe the career trajectories and design philosophies of the included 20.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default...2x_100628.jpeg
Zhang Jinqiu. Photo: Wei Ping
It seems only fair, then, that New Chinese Architecture’s publisher, Thames & Hudson, plumped for “women” on the book’s cover, differentiating the slab-like tome on bookshelves. All statistics suggest, after all, that men have historically dominated architecture not only in China, but worldwide.
In September of last year, The New York Times noted that “architecture was long viewed as a ‘gentleman’s profession’”, and had “systematically excluded women for most of its existence”.
“As late as the 1990s, the percentage of architecture firms owned by women in the United States was still in the single digits,” the Times continued. “Today, less than a third of the American Institute of Archi*tects membership is female, and a survey of the world’s 100 largest architecture firms by the online design magazine Dezeen found that women occupied just 10 per cent of the highest-ranking jobs.”
A month earlier, art-industry website Artsy pointed out that, in the US, “women make up nearly half of the student body in architecture schools, and yet those numbers drop off dramatically in the professional field, where women make up a paltry 18 per cent of licensed architects”.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default...72x_100628.jpg
Zhang Di.
“The situation is changing more quickly in China than in America,” says Williams, who also accepts that deep-seated cultural constraints persist in much of the People’s Republic, particularly in the agricultural hinterland. “Respect for elders, getting married, not being a ‘left-behind woman’ – there is still that social pressure.”
And then there are the temporal demands of what is a punishing industry the world over. “Even though [Chinese] employment law is moving in line with the global economy, women have kids and so take time off, so historically it’s unlikely they would have been employed in architecture in the first place. There is definitely this thing in architecture: there is no time off. It’s not a nine-to-five job; this is a midnight-to-midnight job.”
Talented exceptions break such rules, however, and Williams says Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid greatly inspired the most recent generation of female Chinese practitioners. (The aforementioned Zhang Di’s Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art clearly owes a debt to the woman celebrated internationally as the “queen of the curve”.)
In 2004, Hadid became the first female to win the Pritzker Prize. (Two others have since won architecture’s highest accolade, but only jointly, with men: Japan’s Kazuyo Sejima, in 2010, and Carme Pigem of Spain, in 2017.)
While her notable projects include the 2012 London Olympics Aquatics Centre, the National Museum of Arts of the 21st Century, in Rome, and the Al Wakrah Stadium, in Qatar (an under-construction venue for the 2022 Football World Cup), China was very much Hadid’s early-21st-century playground: Guangzhou Opera House, Beijing Daxing International Airport, Galaxy SOHO and Wangjing SOHO, also in Beijing, Morpheus hotel at Macau’s City of Dreams, and Jockey Club Innovation Tower, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, all bear her unmistakable stamp.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default...72x_100628.JPG
Jockey Club Innovation Tower at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, designed by Zaha Hadid.
Despite Hadid’s death – at the age of 65, of a heart attack, in March 2016 – Williams occasionally refers to her in conversation in the present tense. “It’s almost the fact that she’s a rarity that gives her more power,” he says, adding that a busy Hadid had agreed to write the foreword to New Chinese Architecture. “I wasn’t going to pester her. I thought I’d give her another month, she will come back to it, and in that month, you guessed it, she died.”
Foreword duties were instead covered by Zhang Xin, co-founder of mainland uber-developer SOHO China.
Williams also points out that Hadid, in keeping with the spirit of his book, “always argued that she does not want to be viewed as a woman architect but just as a good architect. And that is what gave her renown: that she was ****ed good, even if you didn’t like what she did. She knew what she wanted; she was an authoritative figure”.
“This is a tough business and she was a tough businesswoman. She made things happen.”
Williams says modern China’s development threw up differing societal expectations for men and women, and this can be seen in their approaches to building design, or at least in how they rationalise their work. In New Chinese Architecture, he writes: “Until the first decade of the new millennium, engineering was deemed to be a core skill for China’s rapid urbanisation and development. After all, until only a few years ago, the Central Politburo of the Communist Party were all engineers, as their aim was to rebuild the nation.
