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Made for China: Localizations of International Architecture in China, 2001-2018

To date, the story of architectural production in 21st century China has focused on institutions and actors in an ever-globalizing system of practice [1–4]. This worthy approach nevertheless obscures opposite yet equally significant trends, namely the localization of architectural products. Architectural practices are indeed becoming more global, and yet their work is—with notable exceptions—more frequently convicted of a necessity for localization, such that two buildings designed by an American firm, one in California and the other in Shanghai, should not be indistinguishable from each other. Thus, a more complete telling of this story demands an investigation of how the local and the national are represented materially in work that is, structurally, international. Through a close reading of several iconic buildings in China designed by international architects, this contribution proposes a framework for categorizing localization strategies. In addition, it investigates the origins of the localization imperative both in general and specific to China. These findings amplify architecture’s cross-cultural vocabulary and improve the ability of architectural practices to consider the cultural sited-ness of their work not only in China but around the world.

Architecture across Boundaries relationships, it nevertheless impoverishes discussion and further entrenches the problematic boundary between academy and practice. Conversely, academic architectural language suffers from that painful upshot of cross-disciplinarity whereby terminology is imported haphazardly with neither a complete understanding of its original meaning nor a mature integration into the rest of architectural discourse. In its remoteness from the realities of architectural production, this convoluted terminology-including such recent examples as telemetry, syntaxis, and performativity-also contributes to the divide between the academy and the profession.
When practicing architects do employ more specific words in the design process, they most frequently use them as forces acting upon the architecture, rather than descriptors inherent to the architecture itself. For example: because there is an easement that runs through the southern end of the site, therefore the building is located on the northern end. Another: because the client had a limited budget, therefore the building is built out of simple materials. A third: because the predominant views are to the south, the building is arranged as a long bar so that each room has a southern view. This reductionist causeand-effect language, while not untrue in its description of the process, reduces a place's identity to the sum of decisions made about it. More importantly, by privileging process over product, this type of narrative ignores the end user, who neither knows nor cares what frustrations and victories were part of the creation of the building.
This division between designer and user is one of architecture's fundamental boundaries. It has resulted in misunderstandings that range from the amusing to the tragic. The failures of modernist urban planning lay fundamentally in the discrepancy between how people live and how designers think people live. Fortunately, this is a course from which architects are currently overcorrecting, most commonly by trying to involve end-users in Architecture across Boundaries However, citizenship is a problematic concept when addressing a globalized architecture. It implies a sense of belonging, of rights and responsibilities, largely absent for architects in transnational practice, and sometimes absent for clients and end-users as well. The globalization of architecture creates another boundary, a sum of differences in geography, technology, nationality, language and culture. For architects, there is no dearth of boldness in crossing over this boundary, as the large number of foreigndesigned buildings in China attests. However, crossing over this cultural boundary highlights certain problems. The sheer size of the crevasse is demonstrated by the different epithets which attach to cross-cultural buildings. For example, the CCTV tower in Beijing, designed by Dutch firm OMA, was described in the New York Times as "the greatest work of architecture built in this century," [6] whereas most Chinese know it by its playfully pejorative nickname, the "big underpants (大裤衩)". What is significant is not that this building has a humorous sobriquet, but rather that the vast difference in assessment of the building between Western critic and Chinese public points to a fundamental difference of experience. Although they are looking at the same building, they are seeing different things, a difference revealed in the words used to describe the building. Indeed, each of the spheres mentioned above-designer, public, criticis delimited by its vocabulary. Cross-cultural architectural production only adds to the number of boundaries to be negotiated.

Position
By intentionally developing our vocabulary outwards towards others, rather than insulating ourselves through self-referential complexity on the part of academics; discoursearresting simplifications on the part of practitioners; cutting witticisms on the part of the public; and either reactionary xenophobia or perfunctory xenophilia on each side of a cultural divide, we can gain a clearer understanding of the boundaries in which our relationships are entangled, respecting those that are valuable and dissolving those that are not.
While this paper aspires to help bridge all aforementioned boundaries, it does so through the lens of cultural boundaries. More specifically, it looks at international architecture products in China and the phenomenon of their contextualization, of their "Chinese-ness." It seeks to create more specific answers to the question, "How is a building Chinese?" and in so doing clarify more broadly how designers of cross-cultural products contextualize their work. Crucially, it does so in a way that is accessible to architects and academics, the public and critics, Chinese and Westerners. In method, this paper privileges product over process for the reasons described above. Following John Berger, it looks carefully at built and proposed work to discern cultural meaning and the presence of cultural boundaries. This attentive looking is supplemented by sparing textual research when it helps to further elucidate the meanings and boundaries present in the tangible work.

Imperative "Chinese-ness:" Contributing Factors
Not all transnational architecture is as tightly enmeshed in a web of cultural boundaries as that practiced in 21 century China. The many factors that compel these buildings to project a strong cultural identity can be roughly categorized as historic, domestic, and international. These pressures lead architects-especially foreign architects, and especially architects designing iconic buildings-to employ 'localization strategies' that identify their buildings as Chinese.
Historically, after 1949, China adopted the Soviet principle that cultural products should be 'socialist in content, national in form.' This drove the creation of Socialist Classical buildings exhibiting iconography and ornamentation that was identifiable as Chinese, such as many of the Ten Great Buildings of 1959. This 'national form' has been a continuing driver in Chinese public architecture, visible in examples such as the 1996 Beijing West railway station. It's legacy is also evident in the project brief for the China National Grand Theater, in which Paul Andreu was asked to design a building "that people knew at first view to be a theater, a Chinese theater, and a theater beside Tiananmen [square]." [7] This historic context undergirds contemporary calls for a recognizably Chinese architecture.
The domestic factors emphasizing a recognizable Chinese identity include client desires and a milieu of government, academic, and public opinion. My own professional experience in China confirms the frequent request of clients, especially government clients, for buildings that are somehow Chinese. The reasons for this direction are complex, and should not be simplified down to a single government edict. National pride certainly plays a part, and a desire to counterbalance potential criticism about hiring an international design team. Many clients have complex, even potentially conflicting desires for their buildings: that they be futuristic and rooted in Chinese culture, worldclass and representative of their own city, etc.
Finally, the curiosity and interests of international actors also drives buildings towards a Chinese identity. Western architects have an enduring interest in an often-exoticized Chinese culture with which they are eager to engage for creative inspiration. This interest was already present in the Republican era, when architects like Henry Murphy used traditional motifs such as large, sloping roofs and lacquered columns to effect "a modern renaissance of [Chinese] architectural heritage" [8], and it continues with contemporary architects like John Van De Water and their studies of, among other things, Feng Shui and Daoism, in an attempt to "penetrate the Chinese surface" [9].  Cultural adoption (文物借用) deals with form as well, but selects from a society's material culture rather than its buildings. This category continues to broaden as digital technology makes it possible to create a wider variety of forms on a large scale, and it seems a very popular choice for foreign architects. Herzog and de Meuron have remarked that their Olympic National Stadium (the Bird's Nest) resembles a Shang dynasty ritual vessel [11]. Other buildings have been designed to look like Chinese lanterns or traditional knots. The Ren building, so named for its unmistakable resemblance to the Chinese character for "people" (人), is a layered example of this type.

Localization Strategies: Five Differentiations
In a video on the architect's website, the camera zooms around a digital model of the building as different symbols are overlaid on top of the form. First is 人, clearly visible in a frontal view of the building. This is followed by overlays of a triangle, square, circle, undulating line, and a rectangle, each shape emerging in succession as the camera moves around the building. Each of these shapes correlates to the five elements in Chinese cosmology: fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. Thus, the building is represented as a harmony of all five elements as well as a union of the mind and body (one leg of the 人 building is programmed for "mind" activities, such as office space, while the other is for "body" activities such as a hotel and gym). Implicit in this representation is the union between East and West. The mind-body dualism of Western philosophy is not as present in Chinese philosophy, which is more monist [12]. This slick notion and applies it to biomes, so that a farm, marsh, lake, mountain, forest, savanna, loess ravine, and desert ecology exist within one park (the ninth "continent" is the architectural pavilion). The design is particularly appropriate as part of the Chinese pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, an event on Chinese soil that showcased international variety yet united it in a single Chinese place. Landscape architecture and garden design may be more likely than architecture to utilize conceptual adoption in a Chinese context, because there are more foreign-language materials on Chinese gardens than on Chinese architecture. A hypothetical example of cultural adoption could be the spatial arrangement of a progression of courtyards. Deeply rooted in concepts of Chinese space, it is also flexible enough to accommodate modern programs of shopping, office work, multi-family housing, etc. The conceptual adoption method of cultural response requires a more nuanced knowledge of the culture one is responding to, because not every theory or framework would be appropriate for every project.
Fourth, there is critical adoption (批评借用). This category is a catch-all for projects that choose to respond formally to conditions of the Chinese city or building culture.
While all buildings are conditional, formed as they are by a relationship among designer, client, contractor, user, and regulating body, critical buildings respond to these encounters intentionally. Steven Holl's Linked Hybrid would be an example, designed as a continuous flow of public space in reaction to the gated communities preferred by the growing Chinese middle class. The CCTV tower is also critically adoptive. Koolhaas' vision for the project was "to create ambiguity and complexity, so as to escape the constraints of the explicit" [13]. This stems partly from his own design ethos, but also from his belief that China has an unhealthy obsession with stability [14]. By housing China Central Television, one of the most stabilizing forces of Chinese society, inside an ambiguous structure, the CCTV tower is reacting to an institution that might rather have seen themselves in a towering skyscraper, keeping close watch on the city below. Wang Shu's reuse of traditional roof tiles in his contemporary facades is another example of critical adoption, a comment on the amount of destruction present in the modernization of Chinese cities. site, but also about details of the city he has come to know personally. To him, the Guardian Arts Center matches "this granular, small scale texture the hutong has," while also complementing the phenomenological aspects of Beijing, which is "a very strong city…a very monumental city, [where] things are of large scale and things also have a very interesting sense of gravity, there's a weight to them, to the way in which they sit firmly on the ground" [15]. The embedding of these urban observations in the design for the Guardian Arts Center is an example of experiential adoption used to contextualize a project. Three caveats to this system of cultural response must be mentioned. First, the categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, grey brick could be used in a project because it is a traditional building material for China (built adoption), but also because it is a common material, readily available yet rejected by enterprising developers who crave steel-and-glass swoops that exude modernity (critical adoption).
Second, every architectural project is a complex endeavor with countless factors at play, many of them more important than cultural sensitivity. Often, the discussion of cultural fit occurs towards the end of the process, once the design has been published.
Thus, the cultural dialog is often a mediation among client, designer, and public, rather than something inherent to the building itself. I think this could be the case with the Olympic Stadium (Bird's Nest) and the architects' remarks that liken it to a Shang dynasty bronze. Much of the discussion early on pertained to an operable roof that was removed from the project due to budgetary constraints; the now-familiar web of steel that gives the stadium its nickname was originally designed to screen the operations of this roof. While consideration of "Chinese culture" may have been an early interest for the architects, it was brought out later to appease a nationalist outcry from the public. This justification of form through cultural reference is difficult to decipher. It is hard to know whether the architect is post-rationalizing or expressing the honest intentions of the design. Thus, explanation of a cultural response-in any category but particularly cultural adoption-can feel like a palliative. The most successful projects are able to stand up to criticism with or without the use of metaphors, which can fall flat if misinterpreted.
The final condition is that architectural acculturation is not exclusive to designers outside of that culture. Chinese architects, too, address their own inheritance in the above ways, although they have different preferences for which methods they select.
For example, cultural adoption is much less popular with Chinese architects, while conceptual adoption, critical adoption and experiential adoption are used much more frequently. The differences between how 'native' and 'foreign' architects utilize these adoptions is a topic for further study.

Conclusion
Architectural production will continue to globalize. While in the first two decades of the 21 century it has been commonplace to find European and American architects working in China, India, and the Middle East, in the near future the hierarchies will flatten. With increasing normalcy, Chinese architects will be working in Africa, African architects will be working in South America, South American architects will be working in Europe, and everyone will basically be in everyone else's backyard. As this new state of transcultural practice emerges, it brings with it the threat of perpetual misrepresentation, so that all cultures-but especially one's own-become unrecognizable. The goal of this paper is, in a small way, to combat that threat by promoting a more specific vocabulary of contextualization, one that allows us to see not only 'if,' but also 'how' a building adopts a cultural identity. It is hoped that these common tools of communication will reach across the boundaries of academic and practitioner, public and critic, culture and culture.

Conflict of Interest
The author is employed by Overland Partners, Architects. The views expressed in this paper are solely his own.