He Xun: "I don't want to be trapped by the tight hoop curse, I have been breaking the circle." ”
Buildings should not be cold, but should have fireworks and a sense of culture. Architecture should be alive and it can talk to people. A good building will leave a mark on people's lives and give people a strong spiritual force, and every user is a judge of this building.
Forget the tight curse of being paradigmized by education
Relax and let the building convey the message of "people"
What I'm most interested in than architecture is actually people. Architecture needs to inject discipline and reason, and it should also have a subtle relationship with the emotions of the connotation of the place. If the architect can give the field so emotional characteristics, the user must be able to perceive it, although not necessarily a completely consistent feeling. The completion of the house is not the end of the design, but the beginning of a new life, which is tested in the life dimension of the city, and the real judge is not the expert, but every user.
Beijing's Farthest Study - Homestay Series (P-photo taken on the way)
This group of homestays designed in the mountains west of Beijing has witnessed a "phenomenon". When the homestay becomes a trend in an instant, becomes the object of capital chase, the homestay as a real differentiated experience attribute, transformed into a superficial alternative decoration style, when the homestay becomes a hot spot, almost all the homestays are already pseudo-homestays. The homestay itself is "true, good, and beautiful", and all the homestays have become an illusion and a symbol.
The farthest Zen room in western Beijing
What will it turn out? The observation of this phenomenon itself intrigued me. More interesting is about the operational boundaries, we can obviously save, why waste? Obviously you can use demolition things, why not use them? If you want to meet the needs of punching cards and pursue the sense of image, you must not use the existing materials, because the material itself has nothing to do with the effect of the Net red you want to achieve, and it must use the lowest cost, low cost simple operation of stealing beams and changing columns, so that the building loses the original complex relationship and time imprint.
He Xun's "Zen Room Homestay" series, the farthest place in western Beijing
The famous works of many foreign masters are houses designed for mothers and friends, because that is the ideal state that can be operated with limited money. Whether I am doing design or not liking repetition in my own life state, I want to make infinite feelings in limited life and projects. I may feel this time more strongly, life is only once.
I think I'm not the same as Mr. Qu Lei, a bit like the Hupai Fa'er who doesn't rely on Mahjong 13, he is more rigorous and prefers traditional architects. I always go back, back and forth between the origin and the end, the architect needs to perform in a certain category, a certain prescribed action, and from time to time I withdraw from the state of the professional architect, forget the inevitable identity, and see my own state of participation as a bystander, sometimes philosophical questioning, sometimes poetic.
At the beginning of the design, I was always full of curiosity and excitement about the scene, which was the state of finding the origin of the design. Where is the origin? What is the relationship between my origin and the inevitable origin of the project? Because with this point there will be an end. This is a propositional essay, and at the same time it is a time-limited essay. If I had given 10 years, the things I would have made would have been different, we would always be in the process of change, and I wouldn't know where I would go. I embrace change, I will allow myself to relate to this thing, and I hope to forget myself and throw myself into it, to find the point of convergence in the dimension of time and space.
Don't look at me like a little woman, as a professional ideal, I have to the heart of the world, and from time to time I have the grandeur of a great man. The architect seems to be a free creator, but in fact, he can't speak insincere, just like Sun Wukong is trapped in the circle and lets the Tang monk chant. I don't want to be limited by the golden hoop curse, I've been trying to figure out how to break the circle. Different people and different places bring me a sense of conflict, and sometimes conflict is also a kind of inspiration that is ignited.
Use a little color to knock out the imprint of life
To reshape the memory of the city, it should be somewhat romantic and poetic
Architects need courage to deal with color, need to constantly break themselves, I am sensitive to color, and subconsciously continue to train myself in my daily life. Now most architects dare not use color, afraid of timidity, the pursuit of safety, the building is cold black, white, gray system. I dress up at the site every time, except for formal occasions when I wear black, most of the time I like to wear clothes with prominent colors. The color is more emotional, and from another angle, it can be said that it is more creative, more challenging, and more courageous.
Young people photographing wedding dresses in the courtyard of the Old Simon Bowl Cuisine Museum
I hope that the essence of architecture is the truth of life that suddenly and directly hits in front of me, to have no makeup, I like simplicity and innocence, which is a pursuit. Deeper down, it is a philosophical proposition about life. The whole life or the city has its inevitability and contingency, and I like this interdependence between the whole and the part, the necessity and the accident, all chaos is not whole, it is all rigid, it is jumping without unity. Therefore, the design is a kind of enemy in and out, fighting wits and courage, you have me, I have your hand-to-hand combat.
Go to the countryside to find the prototype of the hut
As a building, if you only stay in solving functional problems, then the building is a square box, there is no need for an architect to appear, the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of the sunshine, spacing, and depth of the opening, the accounting is good. Design is a particularly complex thing, such as the drinking cup in my hand for drinking tea, is used to hold water, water is a function that must be satisfied, as for what it is made, whether it is double gallbladder, whether it is insulated is not important, in addition, transparency is also important, because transparency goes beyond the simple water function.
The traceability of the essence of architecture is the quality of architecture and the professionalism of architects. For the house in Changde, red is art, authenticity is philosophy, and containers are architecture, with at least three dimensions.
My thinking is not purposeful, so I can't focus on a point to think about a thing for a long time, which is my weakness and strength, so what I make will be more flexible, not so much burden. I don't like to repeat it, I want to keep it on a horizontal line, but it's colorful, I'm like a person who plays three balls, always in one sport.
Old West Gate in the original streets and alleys - dried radish
A moat in the original streets of the old West Gate
Huang Bo said in "Journey to the West": "People are poor, even basking in the sun is second-hand", and the poor boy he played could only use a mirror to reflect the sun's rays into the hole, which impressed me. Our experience of all of them, many are second-hand, now the Internet seems to give us unlimited information, but in fact those things are indirect, second-hand, not real, such as the architectural model in the computer, completely can not replace the complex reality of the city, renderings are made the same, the sky P is the same, pure and beautiful, is completely the illusion above the illusion. However, the condition around the building is often not a cluster of green trees and ceilings, nor is it a low grass blown by no one. The surrounding environment has an objective impact on people, but it is P off.
In the old Simon, the problem is not lost, you must face life head-on, you can't escape. The architects of the "Side of a Thousand Cities" do not recognize it themselves, nor do the people, but everyone is doing it, and we do not know how to resist, and we do not know how to flirt with ourselves.
The old Ximen shantytown was demolished before the full view
Old Simon is not mysterious at all, there is no high-tech thing, the cost is low, the design method is ordinary, so outdated, so modern. However, I do not force others to be like me, I have the right to choose the state of life, and others have the right to choose the state of life. Architects are nothing more than a job, but our profession, not our whole life. I just take it as wishful thinking as a projection of life at this stage, others can not do so. I myself don't have to be like this forever.
Old Ximen City Wall Ruins / Anti-Japanese War Bunker / Silk String Theater / Stop Bookstore
We make choices all the time, assuming that there is a choice in my life, between professional attributes and a sense of value, it may be 50 to 10 relationships. For example, the old Ximen did it for eight years, ordos Airport did it for four years, and many buildings did it without any problems, what a collapsing profession. So I will choose those 10 meaningful projects, discover and give value, and establish a deep nested relationship between the meaning of my life and the design I do, parallel proof and indexing. That's going to be fun, I'm going to face it with caution, it's meaningful to me, it's the carrier of my life, and I want to build my relationship with it.
Old Ximen from the February Bridge under the water's edge to see the final completion of the fourth phase of the relocation building
Old Simon is a complex phenomenon, not the attachment and presentation of a single discipline, but a kaleidoscope, a fancy solution to the problem, seemingly casual and substantive, but each in its place, each leading the way. It is not a one-man show performed by an architect, but a group dance directed by an architect.
It is equivalent to putting a living building carrier into the city. This state has several dimensions, I believe that a good city is alive, and I have this belief. The memories I have remembered since I was a child are a kind of inevitability that makes me what I am today: the wooden door panels of the shops that are dismantled every day, the long spoons of bamboo handles used to beat soy sauce, the water that shakes up from the bottom of the well, the countryside mixed with the city through which only a bus passes, the bibimbap with lard, etc., which constitute my childhood memories. One day, an architect said to me, "You know what? You gave the kids here a kind of childhood!" I got goosebumps.
I had no idea that what I designed would become a part of someone else's childhood! What an inspiring award it was, I will always remember. When childhood is not accompanied by homogeneous and standardized products, but the works of one person and some people, will you be indifferent and blind? The old West Gate belongs to all, it is not just a walled high-end residential community converted from shantytowns: it is a park for all. Moat park, commercial park, place for morning practice and square dancing, there is a bookstore and a piano room.
Unfortunately, I can't get along with my design day and night, it is too far away from my life, "living elsewhere". Life is everywhere, but there is nowhere to send poetry, I can't do "the boat has passed away, the river and the sea have sent the rest of my life".
Old neighbors who gather by the moat and children take photos on the bridge
I am very sincere with architecture, sincerity itself may not be able to reach the depth, but on the contrary, without sincerity, it is impossible to touch the essence and core of things, I care about the profundity of life. Some people live without emotion or without emotion, and that is also his fateful choice. It is the result of the closed loop of my thinking logic, which is parallel to the trajectory of life.
I think every architect's career choices are the same as his life choices. Some people are willing to write, some people don't write, you can't force others to write poetry because you write poetry, that is an addition to the profession. There is no good or bad in this world, only choice, and "fit." But great architects are certainly poetic. For example, Zumto and Jean Nouvel were also poets, not to mention the philosophical and poetic nature of the works of architects such as Tadao Ando, Mies Van der Rohe, Herzog and De Meron.
The bridge of the old west gate and the sound of the piano on the bridge
If life is a coin, it seems to me that it has both the attributes of AB two-sided life. Occupation is our A-side (positive), A-side is professional, B-side is non-occupational, it can be a whiteboard, it can be art, philosophy, sociology, business attributes and so on. I like to see coins, banknotes from different countries, and the head of the great Le Corbusier printed on the Swiss $10 bill. Wright's head was also made into a stamp, and many of Corbusier's designs were listed as cultural heritage in France, and the value of the B side created by these great figures far exceeded their A side value.
For example, the face of the coin is 1 yuan, there is no difference, it is all Arabic numerals, and all mankind is the same, just as we regard architecture as a scientific moment. The other side of the coin, however, is very different. Some have a five-pointed star printed on the back, some are kings or queens, some are printed lions or tigers, or eagles. That is an important imprint extraction of the country's history and culture, for me the A side is the design, then the B side is my life.
Beam Ceremony with The Temple House Museum
Luban characters and the house of the crater
Now there is architecture, but there is no culture
What kind of destination does Chinese architecture need?
I am very fond of "museum", a long time ago, on the way to the museum wrote an article, in fact, travel is to visit the museum, the museum condenses time, condenses art, so it is the best way for you to understand a place, is the most essence of the place, the most condensed summary, can enter the museum of things are infinitely selected.
The last hut in the old West Gate
We design in Changde's district of Jinshi (County), as usual, looking for characteristics and inspiration in broken houses. They were demolishing the old town, and when I was filming, people didn't know what I was shooting. The whole scene is a broken house, the whole area is an old neighborhood. I have a special love for the old neighborhood, the reason why I took pictures inside is also very simple, related to childhood memories, seeing a street corner with a place that looks like a small shop, I began to shoot wildly.
The faith of the 90-year-old grandmother's family in the last hut
The imprint of faith in the primitive streets of the old West Gate
There are no commercial facilities in that place, there is a person who is half asleep, and the whole dilapidated dark room is a window, and the window door panel may be removed when it opens. In fact, it is a very small shop with a black hole in it, and I don't know what he sells, probably selling a cigarette or something, and there is nothing to sell.
But I just thought it was a very peculiar state, and it was very real. It is so much in line with the reality of China's shantytowns, which, although at the "city" level, are the kind of broken neighborhoods in forgotten counties. At this time, a girl and an aunt came over, and the grandmother said that there was something to photograph in this broken thing? At this time, the younger young girl, about twenty or thirty years old, said to Grandma, "Old things are worth a lot." "In fact, this is a great misunderstanding, the old does not necessarily mean that it is a cultural relic, between antiques and garbage, it is also a thought."
Old Simon Bowl Dish Museum with Old Wall
The museum is a container of time, and the city is the largest museum. Do you have to have exhibits to be called a museum? For me, the answer is no. The museum is actually a kind of memory and commemoration of time, if you are touched in the space, the soul and the scene have tremors and resonances, and the ancient memory is related, it is enough to represent that this is the museum.
The original mission book of the Ryokoya Museum was the sales office. The function of the sales office is limited and temporary, while the museum can become a sales scene, but it is not limited to the sales, so it has a more permanent life. Otherwise, there would be no hut in Changde, and everything would only return to zero. The hut was once a landmark building in the ancient city of Changde, with a heavy cultural heritage, but unfortunately, during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, most of the huts in Changde were damaged, and the traditional huts in Changde have disappeared, which is the last one. It is not a pure traditional Changde hut, but a collective memory of all the huts in western Hunan Province.
The Ryokan House Museum
The old west gate is wrapped in a 600-meter long moat, occupying almost 1/3 of the edge of the old city, the old west gate has no museum, no kiln houses that can witness history and the existence of the riverbed that reproduces, we give the shantytown residents a new home, a new soul watch.
I think people are particularly interesting, every time they go to a place, they always think about what they have by talking about a relationship, or buying things and other behaviors. I think the state of each person is very concrete, and this is very important. The unique sense of closure of the house creates a special atmosphere of independence and independence, alluding to its identity. Just like this museum was very specific for a while, it is a space for collections. No matter from the form, the material, from the outside to the inside, from the light and shadow, the depression, its mottled sense of time, everyone who passes by is reading, everyone is interested, always want to look around, we can't stop it, men and women, young and old want to come. Everyone wants to go inside the courtyard, the old wooden house, and the sky-covered atrium to find out.
Old Ximen Hulukou Square
The bridge of the old West Gate
"Craftsman Spirit", as a summary of old Simon, is a kind of praise, in my opinion, a microscopic perspective. If you look at the timeline of 100 years, it is the evolution of the discipline of architecture: the process of deduction from technology to symbols. What role does old Simon play? Is it worth scrutinizing? In what dimensions and levels are examined. In what scenes do "craftsmen" and "spirits" appear?
Secondly, the emergence of the discipline of Chinese architecture itself is very short-lived, we are directly transplanted from the West, if we put ourselves in this discipline into China at the time point to see, we can see very clearly, it is only a little more than 100 years, when our grandfathers, the architects of the grandparents, what are they doing?
In the thousands of years of human construction history, in the long buildings without the name of the architect, how many cultures and rituals, symbols and symbols, exist in the negation of the city, and are they all included in the architectural education system we are subjected to?
What we Chinese architecture needs is a destination, and the spirit is the starting point and fulcrum, not the attachment of interpretation. We don't grow into the faces of Westerners, the DNA is different, the food is different, the language is different, but why are the buildings the same? This makes me incomprehensible. There are codes and meanings in the buildings of our ancestors, but now we have pulled them all out.
For example, the courtyard is for living, but why does the gate rotate in a different direction, facing the place where the two mountains meet? Why have a weeping flower door? Why is there a second door? Why not sit south facing north? Why sit north facing south? Why do you fall back? Why do workers have to live in the first courtyard? Why don't the servants open the window in the south direction? Why is there a sculpting? Why is there Wenfeng Tower, Beacon Peak? Why plant flowers and return to the church before the court? Because these are our cultures, there must be exquisite in them, so exquisite that today's buildings seem bloody and pale, so it is not necessarily a good thing that the word "craftsman" is over-interpreted.
This part of the work done today is actually a whole inside and outside, and all projects must make a "whole expectation". I am doing my best, not only as a whole, but from "thought" to "action" to the whole, I have to understand. It's not that you start by telling me to "make a cup" and then start making it for you, but you have to ask why you want to make a cup as soon as you come up? Why make a cup instead of a bowl? What we question is whether this cup should be made into a work of art, or whether this cup is a vessel for eating and drinking tea.
Drinking tea, in itself, is already a cultural phenomenon, eating is just needed, should have been designed as a meal. This is the case with the mansion, which is not originally a museum, but a sales office. As a museum, it can be compatible with sales offices, tea houses, restaurants, and can also be made into hotels, starting from high-dimensional culture, it can be compatible with any level of practicality, but the reverse is not. Here you can go back to the ancestral hall, the museum can almost be said to be the ancestral hall of the modern city.
The real estate era is a strange phenomenon, and architects collectively lose their voice. The logic of the apartment type, the logic of orientation, determines the principle of simplicity. The eagerness of the audience and the gap in expertise also make intensive farming redundant. Even if it is intensively cultivated, it is also a kind of narrowness, no matter what material style can not bring a sense of belonging and happiness, where should the content of the humanistic scale be placed?
The reason why I like to go to places that have not been developed and have not been eroded by modern times is because it has pristine organizational relationships. For example, the yard in the residence, the yard is the yard, the commercial street, the commercial street is the commercial street, the water is the water, the bridge is the bridge, the decoration is desperate to carve, but where the rich people must have wood carvings and stone carvings, although the south and north of the sky are roofs, but the degree and details of the bells and whistles are different. The alley is narrow and narrow, it is certainly impossible to pass the fire truck, the railing is low, absolutely can not fall to the death, and the railing is unreliable to die no matter how high it is. So it has not been polluted by modern disciplines, it is so natural, carved by time into the unique appearance of houses and streets in the city.
The south bank of the old West Gate - by the Yuan River
The ancestral hall is the most representative. The ancestral hall is the school, the banquet hall, the funeral home, where birth, old age, illness, and death are all there, and all the red and white wedding ceremonies are in the ancestral hall. It is even an administrative place, because the family rules are set here, and those who are expelled from the village are also set here.
Ancestral halls in the village as a spatial type is a set of physical representation of social relations organized by the autonomous organization, such as the guild hall, the two Jin guild hall, the two Guangdong guild hall, the Hunan guild hall and the like, the cultural convergence of urban attributes, in today's society have disappeared, replaced by other ... Is it the current clubhouse? opera house? museum? Or the mall? We don't even have this now, and there is no such a place as an "ancestral hall", which is quite sad.
Every good architect has a path of self-training and self-becoming. For me, architecture is a kind of prop for my life practice. What you encounter in the process of exploration may be failure, all resistance, it is difficult to meet Zhiyin, all you encounter are pain, failure, and not being understood, which is the norm. Therefore, I always feel that the reason why there are no great people in our time may be because there is no war, which is the paradox of life.
Heidegger said: "Poetry occurs in language because language preserves the original essence of poetry. On the contrary, architecture and painting have always occurred, and always only in the open realm of taoism and naming. ”
All the poems I create never call them poetry, I call them engineering records, because if you look at it from pure literature, you should see in my poetry that it should be pictures, not words. But in other words, it's weird, because words, whether you define it as prose, poetry, essays, or whatever? The important thing is not that it rhymes, but that it creates a kind of communication ability that carries your moment and the words, what it can convey, poetry, is my time sketchbook.
We may feel that a word or two words may have more power than any truth. Graphics, too, have the power to strike at people's hearts. Essentially, I'm still an architect, so something that touches me, definitely has something to do with graphics, it's natural.
The use of words or architecture to express life is itself an instinct, because architecture is language like words, what does language express? Of course it is something that touches the soul, and that is loneliness and pain.
You can have an aesthetic because of a comparative sentence, but for the author, it is an unsolvable loneliness, a stinging pain that goes deep into the bone marrow. So human literature produces tragedy, doesn't it? Everything is also because of pain, the real pain and relief of each house being tortured, and what others see is precious.
The old city walls were protected from rainfight with a cantilevered structure
From 2011 to 2020, we have done a total of more than 100,000 square meters of buildings in the city of Changde, and we are doing it one after another, but it has not been completed so far, and it may take another 3 or 5 years? It may never be done. This project is not big or small, from the point of time presentation can be divided into several phases, the first phase is the three high relocation buildings and the manhole house museum constitutes an area, as the first phase of the three high-rise residential buildings is necessary, because the mission of the old West Gate is to relocate, is the transformation of shantytowns. So, the presentation at the end of 2015 met the vast majority of the relocations, and the demand actually made two huts, one of which is a serious eight-hundred-year-old mansion museum, and a center of two L-shaped buildings, which is a community center. Because the street paving business outside is valuable, but the inside is worthless, we hollowed out the gourd and enclosed it into a built-in courtyard, which became a place like the central ancestral house of Yongding Tulou.
The third phase is the theater, surrounded by this area, including the ruins of the city walls and the bookstore. The fourth phase is this slab building, along the main street of the city opened a bunch of serrated windows, because the house is east-west, protruding serrations to solve the problem of orientation. The fifth phase is this piece, the ground is the city wall site museum, the underground is the supermarket, the cost of demolition is very huge, there is no return on investment, so the final demolition can not be demolished. At first, it was because the price of the demolished household was too high, and finally it could not be discussed, and then it was shelved, and when he regretted it, the opportunity had been missed. I think this may be a particularly absurd reality.
The building is its own museum
It is also a museum of the city, superimposed with the imprint of ordinary people's lives
This red concrete house was not deliberately made into a museum, perhaps because party A may have gone out to visit a museum one day, and when he came back, he said: "Can we also make a museum here?" But in fact, we do not have this condition, first of all, the space of this place is separated from the commercial subject along the moat, it is outside the entire linear space, can be independent into a courtyard, we wanted to do this courtyard, in fact, it can have any commercial format, but we want to give it a theme of the format, that is, catering, and is to make bowl dishes.
The bowl is simmered over a low fire, which is a relatively good dish, such as goats, native chickens, turtles and other noble dishes, which will be stewed with time with charcoal fire, which is very delicious. This so-called "Ding Food Culture" is a kind of thing with a sense of time and ritual, so we will carry it up to a museum. We don't have bowl dishes exhibits in the strict sense, but more of an association with "soil" and with bowls.
Bowl dish and Ding food culture
In fact, we do not have exhibits, because its source is related to the "bowl", is burned clay, the bowl itself simmered is more delicious, must be a bowl itself played a role, it is loose clay, neither porcelain, nor the current stainless steel, so it will taste. The bowl should have pores in the taste of the ingredients, and if it is explained very directly, it is a response to the bowl of Ding food culture, but it does not directly make a large pot. Later, according to its relationship with fire, I formed the "red" corresponding to the "change of fire" in the clay, and these responses are actually a metaphor. A feeling, there is no need to be too real.
When it really became a museum, many people's lives began to relate to it. One day, we went there and saw the traces of someone writing on the red concrete, and we felt that it was carved by children with knives, and we wrote there crookedly: "Goodbye, Yuying Elementary School." Yuying Primary School is a primary school next to this, and it is very famous, many people buy this house to let their children go to this school, so I speculate that it must be written by a child, and he will engrave his life node mark there. Although this is an indecent selfish act.
Goodbye Yuying Elementary School
Another time it was even more magical, looking out from the window of the house opposite, I found some middle school-like children dancing in the street, with a ring on the top facing the sky, and they were very excited to go in, and the workers were there for a lunch break during the construction. So, there's a lot of magic going on here. On the day that Li Honggu, the editor-in-chief of Sanlian Life Weekly, inspected the old West Gate, he stood at the stairwell entrance that rose like a chimney and said: "I feel that there is a kind of "spiritual impact."
Our architecture, ideally, should bring a kind of spiritual power, but it is not necessary for you to worship or kneel. Here in the Bowl Dish Museum, there are traces of time, there are memories of travels in India and Nepal, there are traces of modernist design, there are inspirations from the tomb of Mawangdui Han, however, not only these traces are more mottled and imprinted. We want you to disappear and get caught up in a labyrinthine adventure. So you can find a secret in the corners of the courtyard crumbling floor. It's called "secret garden." Once I was on the roof and heard a small child running down the stairs shouting, "Daddy, come on, there's a magical place!" "Children are happiest here.
This place originally had no road, we designed a courtyard road; this place originally had no garden, we designed a mysterious garden; the red house of the old West Gate originally had no bowl dish, no museum, eating, where can not go?
Old Simon in time
Old Simon originally did not exist, no matter the name or place, the coordinates of things in the world are wandering, completely determined by the scale and angle of the selector, there is no absolute coordinates and origin, however, I have repeatedly tried to find the origin of life, the starting point of the project. In this way, I can allow myself to settle in life, so that I can settle my career in my own life.
Old Ximen is far away in Beijing, but my studio is spiritually with Old Ximen. And the 3 yuan straw mat when I was teaching at a university in the south, the steel structure tea table in the studio that was retained in Beijing, the small table table of Nanmu, the root wood tea tray that was dug back at the foot of Mt. Fuji, and the shadow of each scroll of the old West Gate, are all written and smeared by different story moods in the same picture scroll, diagonally diagonally in time, coiled, and mud and sand in the stubbornness of the last resort and spirit.