Artificial boulders fill the studio of Vector architects in Beijing, like the result of a dramatic landslide, their craggy polystyrene surfaces rendered with chalky grey plaster. One rock has a striking house sprouting from its summit, a group of intersecting cubic volumes crowned with a curving barrel-vaulted roof. Another has a cluster of industrial looking buildings nestled at its base, connected by an intricate colonnade. A third features a series of momentous terraces and rectangular pits carved into a gulley, with the air of an ancient burial site.
These are the enigmatic visions of Dong Gong, an architect who has risen to prominence in China as a conjuror of mesmerising spaces, crafting libraries, schools and museums that feel grown out of, or hewn into, their sites, built with extraordinary attention to detail. His seashore library in Aranya feels like a miniature jewel-like version of Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery, marooned on the beach, where daylight pierces through angled shafts and plays across the sculpted concrete walls.
His courtyard elementary school in Shenzhen is a protected oasis, its classrooms and running track wrapping a grove of mature banyan trees in the middle of the bustling high-rise metropolis, a world away from the usual state-mandated educational barracks. While Chinese cities continue to build at relentless speed, moving mountains and razing neighbourhoods overnight, Dong’s approach is to slow down, and draw on the value of what is already there.
“China’s current economic slowdown has actually been helpful,” he says, sitting in his office in Beijing, where a framed drawing of La Tourette leans against the wall. “It means we can slow down too, and rediscover a kind of thoughtfulness.” While big commercial offices that worked for the country’s major real estate developers are struggling, the likes of Vector architects see the current moment as a chance to take stock, recalibrate, and encourage their clients to approach things more carefully. Where demolition was once the default, the economic lull has given more currency to the option of retaining and reusing existing structures – a boon for both heritage and the environment.
Born in 1972, Dong trained at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and worked in the offices of Richard Meier and Steven Holl in New York. Returning to China to found his practice in 2008, he is part of a generation of Chinese architects, now mostly in their 50s, who, having worked abroad, came back with a different perspective on the country’s recent decades of rapid urbanisation. In contrast to the frenetic pace and vast size of city-building before them, they prefer to work at a smaller scale, exploring handmade materials and reviving vernacular techniques.
This generation came to maturity at an opportune moment, just as China’s central government shifted its primary focus away from high-rise mega-development towards rural revitalisation, with an emphasis on reinvigorating depopulated areas. This coincided with a widespread longing among burnt-out young urbanites for a more primitive, rustic life – a rural nostalgia, or jizhu xiangchou, for a simpler, slower, more meditative world, away from the stress of the city. And it spawned a strong appetite for a kind of architecture stripped back to its raw elements, with a renewed focus on soothing all the senses. “Architecture needs to reclaim its raison d’etre,” says Dong, “to soothe our body and soul.” His buildings, which put an emphasis on atmosphere, playing with light and shadow, and the haptic quality of materials, have clearly struck a chord.
His practice’s 15 years of soul-soothing, spirit-uplifting work has now been brought together in Vector Architects: Dong Gong and the Art of Building, a hefty English-language monograph, featuring about 20 projects built across the country. One of the most famous, which featured in a recent exhibition at MoMA in New York, is a hotel in Yangshuo, a paradisiacal place in the lush southern province of Guangxi. At a time when postwar industrial relics were seen as blights on the landscape to be swept away, Vector’s client proposed retaining a derelict 1960s sugarcane mill, and transforming it into an atmospheric place to stay.
The architects added a series of pitch-roofed wings on either side of the mill, fronted with perforated concrete blocks and connected by delicate bamboo canopies. It is impossibly photogenic, an instant hit on Chinese social media, its swimming pool framed by a colonnade of columns like a classical ruin, with jagged limestone peaks rising in the background. Like Vector’s fairytale chapel and library in Aranya, it became wanghong (internet-famous) overnight. But the projects aren’t just made to look good in photos, like so much Instagram-friendly fodder. They have an impeccable quality of finish when experienced in person – an exacting result that is due to intense on-site supervision. For the Yangshuo hotel, the architects couldn’t find a manufacturer who could produce the quality of the concrete blocks they wanted, so they made them on-site themselves. It was also a cost-efficient option that saved on transportation and allowed for adaptation and customisation on site.
“In China, the builders don’t necessarily look at the drawings,” says Dong. “It’s a constant battle, every day.” His solution is to send a site architect to supervise every stage of every project, from the manufacture of building materials, to the prototyping and calibration of joints and details, overseeing every stage of the construction process. They can sometimes be stationed on site for three years, far from home. “They become like the mafia guy,” he jokes, “reporting everything back here to the office, so we can keep on top of every detail.”
The scrupulous approach pays off. From the cast in-situ concrete to the timber joinery, Vector’s buildings are of a quality rarely seen elsewhere in the country, more akin to the level of finish you might find in Switzerland or Japan. Western architects working in China often bemoan how their precious designs are bodged by sloppy builders, but Dong’s work shows that quality is possible, if you take the trouble to fight for it.
It’s also a reflection of the practice’s hands-on design process. The Beijing studio is a wunderkammer of huge working models so they can be opened up and seen from the inside, and qualities of light and shadow can be tested. A model of the seashore library features handles that can be wound to slide the building apart, revealing its complex cross-section. Other projects, with their concrete waffle ceilings and brutalist bulk, look like they could be from another era, summoning strains not only of Le Corbusier, but the forms of Alvar Aalto, Louis Khan, or the muscular brutalism of Paul Rudolph, echoing an era before computers took over the manual craft of making spaces.
There’s a touch of surrealism, too, lightening what could otherwise feel overly dour. Dong prises another model apart to reveal a stack of three curious cylindrical spaces inside a tower-like structure. This is the Chapel of Music, completed last year, also in Aranya, one of Vector’s most theatrical creations yet. Ascending a long curving ramp, visitors find themselves inside a tall concrete chamber, ringed by a circular reclining bench. The domed ceiling is pieced by a halo of nine holes, about 20cm in diameter, marking the ends of long copper tubes, that poke up into the floor above, where further tiered seating surrounds a small performance space.
The room is capped by a large circular skylight, which can be raised so the sound of music can not only filter down to the listening chamber below, but also spill on to the public plaza outside. “It’s like music from heaven,” says Dong, with a gnomic smile. “You don’t really know where it’s coming from.”
The studio’s walls are covered with dreamy computer renderings of dramatic Piranesian spaces, depicting tiny figures at the base of deep concrete wells, at the summit of mountain-top concrete lookouts, or traversing vertiginous concrete stairs – vignettes for various museums, hotels and performance spaces in the making. They’re seductive images, but it’s an awful lot of concrete.
“We’re now trying to use less,” Dong says, “but it’s still the cheapest option here. The structural code for timber is not as developed here yet, but it’s on the way. China now has clear carbon targets, so I think it will happen.”
As the country ramps up efforts to decarbonise its power supply – boasting two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar projects under construction – tackling the embodied carbon of its buildings will be the next big challenge. Its up to Dong and his agenda-setting peers to show that just as atmospheric, seductive, soulful spaces can be made without resorting to untold tonnes of board-marked concrete.
• Vector Architects: Dong Gong and the Art of Building is published by Rizzoli.
