Atelier Deshaus

Yung Ho Chang

OCULUS & ZEPPELIN A QUICK SKETCH OF DESHAUS

I have known Liu Yichun and his partner Chen Yifeng for so long that I don't recall when we first met. In 2018 nevertheless, in an exhibition entitled "House Vision China" in Beijing, our pavilions were next to each other, so we became neighbors, for a period of time. On the opening day of the show, Yichun invited me over to the Deshaus pavilion (officially House ATO) and offered me a tour, which ended on the upper level under an oculus.

OCULUS

A circular skylight topped the extremely thin, tent shaped roof of "des Haus". Despite the size of the temporary project, this upward aperture constituted perhaps a Pantheon moment, and more. I didn't bother to ask Yichun if at all he had the great Roman monument in mind when he designed the experiment dwelling for the future. If he did, it wasn't about making a historic reference anyway; if he didn't, his understanding of architecture as a body of knowledge would enable him to embrace and consider, very carefully, any tectonic element with an open mind and a critical eye. It is not hard to see in the work of this Shanghai-based architectural office a refined taste but it is apparent too that a good taste, and being modern stylistically, is not enough. Deshaus sees itself as a practice that approaches architecture as poetic construction, which means that they take paramount care in the way how a building is put together. To be sure, this is not a new position. It is rather what architects-builders-craftsmen from around the world have been doing throughout ages. One only needs to look at Fo Guang Si (Light of the Buddha Temple) constructed during the Tang Dynasty, or the Pantheon in Rome, to imagine that. Unfortunately, in the present days, that long fine tradition is losing its momentum, too fast. I believe that Yichun and Yifeng are among the few surviving (for lack of a better word) "hard-boiled" architects today. I remember very well how exited Yichun was when he shared with me some "secrets" of in-situ concrete he discovered while working on the Long Art Museum in Shanghai. Yet I don't want to be misleading. By no means, Yichun is a technician. I already mentioned before the word "poetic", and the word "eye". Presently, he and I are still standing under the oculus or the architectural eye and looking outward. Yichun was searching for something, what specifically I didn't know but I did know that the duo wouldn't be happy if they saw a repeat, a familiar device or design known to them. They want to invent.

Yung Ho Chang

ZEPPELIN

Yichun can articulate his thoughts with no problem but usually is a man of few words and certainly not rhetorical. While underneath the piece of cobalt blue in circular form that was turning increasingly darker, we exchanged briefly what we would love to see up there and agreed on one object: a zeppelin. Either of us offered any explanation why an airship. That evening Yichun sent me via Wechat a perfectly Photoshoped image: A zeppelin flying pass the oculus right in front of our gaze. Now the why question comes back. Since Deshaus is the subject of this short composition, I may try to come up with a couple of possible scenarios for Yichun: Was he imagining a building that can actually fly? Probably not. I don't think he is into things that fantastic. How about castle in the air? I mean Henry David Thoreau's castle in the air: "If you have built Castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." I'm not surprised by the way Thoreau phrased his Castles in the air: Basically, it is idea first, then followed by substantiation. After all, he had the experience of building something, a cabin by the Walden Pond. I hope it's okay to label Thoreau an idealist with pragmatic footings and, as a matter of fact, to describe all good architects, including Yichun, as such. With Oculus, I presented him as an architect well grounded in the culture of making; with Zeppelin, I'm tempted to peel off the gentle, quiet facade of his to reveal a Quixotic heart, which is passionate about ideas and envisions a Brave New World architecturally, maybe futuristic or almost weightless from time to time and with no rooms for nostalgia. Castle, a building type from the Middle Age, seems to be the wrong term for Yichun after all. Intellectual-architect might be more right as a way to portray him: Well cultivated and informed, culturally and socially engaging. With that cause, he would deconstruct the Chinese character She, which means house and is the second word of the firm's name in Chinese Da She or Big House so that the old can marry the new to produce a structural diagram or allow a Mies inspired plan to be transformed into vaulted space for the Modern to meet the Classical. I am thus suggesting Yichun, as well as Yifeng, are at the same time very global and very local, locally Shanghai, locally China, as critical-minded contemporaries ought to be. I don't believe there exists a hundred percent thoroughbred these days. I do believe one must have learned to be cosmopolitan. Yichun and Yifeng both have.

Back under the oculus, we were staring at by now the nightly sky. My Zeppelin came to mind from the world created by Francios Schuiten in his graphic novels, in which past, present, and future are always mixed up and populated with figures wrapped in Renaissance robes riding in winged flying machines. The craft Yichun was engineering mentally, must have been built with structural members with cross-sectional dimensions never exceeding five centimeters and is about to land in a new reality, beautifully ruinous (perhaps in the spirit of Blade Runner ?) and just emerging on the horizon, where he fixed his eyes upon, or so I assumed.

Oculus & Zeppelin

Li Xiangning

FROM STRUCTURE TO LANGUAGE: THE ARCHITECTURAL REALIZATIONS OF DESHAUS

The realization of Chinese architecture today, manifests a kind of recall of the modern development of the West, especially expressed in the re-acquaintance with the language of modernism. On such foundations, it also accompanies a self-awareness of architects and a recognition of the value in Chinese traditional culture. Whether it is the localization of the language of modern or contemporary architecture from Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn to Koolhaas, or the contemporary translation of construction knowledge and resources that originate from systems such as that of traditional Chinese timber constructions, the tradition of Chinese garden spaces, and the attitude toward nature that adapts to the local, they all lead to a kind of architectural realization with both contemporariness and Chineseness. Just as the British newspaper The Guardian commented on the Chinese pavilion's exhibition at the 2018 Venice Biennale, "contemporary architecture in China has transformed from a testing ground for foreign architects to a place where Chinese architects have sensitively responded to their own cultural context."

Under such a context, the realizations of Atelier Deshaus cannot be overlooked in any conversation on contemporary Chinese architecture. The tireless pursuit of the cultural and the investigations of the relationships between structure, materiality, and form in their works, have already become flagbearer for contemporary Chinese architecture. They have subtly reconciled the normative language of modernism with that from China, or more precisely, from the cultural DNA of Shanghai and the Jiangnan region, shaping a unique ambiance of elegance and refinement. At the same time, quite different from the works of more conventional architecture offices, Deshaus, through encompassing the research of contemporary art, installation, architectural culture and theoretical discourse, has contributed an exceptional value to Chinese architecture, design and contemporary culture.

FROM "DESHAUS" TO ' 大舍 '

In the naming of the design studio, architects often hope both that it could reflect a kind of attitude towards architecture, and also could be fun and memorable. Wang Shu named his studio Amateur, while Yung Ho Chang has named his studio Feichang Jianzhu, both expressing a kind of cultural positioning that consciously maintains a distance from the mainstream architecture profession and its realizations in China. As early as 1993, Liu Yichun already used Deshaus

Atelier Deshaus

as name for the studio he set up with two colleagues at Guangzhou Design Institute. It was afterwards in 2000, when the three founders Liu Yichun, Chen Yifeng, and Zhuang Shen decided to leave the state-owned Tongji Design Institute to establish their independent private design office, they continued to use Deshaus as name. This rarely used name, especially amoungst the Chinese architectural offices, and coming from the German language, no doubt hinted at a certain type of link to German lineage. Liu, Chen, and Zhuang had received their five-year architectural education at Tongji University. Tongji originates from the Deutsche Medizinschule für Chinesen, or German Medical School for the Chinese founded by the German physician Erich Paulunin 1907. As for the architecture school, it could trace its lineage to the St. John's University established by Huang Zuoshen, who had studied under Walter Gropius. These two origins make Tongji especially unique in Chinese architecture educational system that had been dominated by Beaux Arts influences. The three founders of Deshaus have once recalled, even in the 1980s and 1990s when Postmodernism was trendy for architecture, the architecture education at Tongji remained firmly based on the Modernist traditions of the Bauhaus. At the time, Liu and Chen both received their architecture education with German as primary foreign language.

The architecture education at Tongji no doubt deeply influenced the ensuing works of Deshaus. Even though many would be reminded of Bauhaus from Deshaus, to them, 'Deshaus' must first be understood as "having to do with the Haus", from the genitive form of Haus in German. This straightforward and humble explanation hints at a kind of attitude towards architecture: architecture is not only an expression that is about grandeur or superficial, but rather must return to its origins. Without doubt, these characteristics appeared in the early works of Deshaus: whether the Tri-house, or the Dongguan Polytech building from the same period, these projects used a concise and clean formal language, clear volumetric relationships between the public and private, as well as rigorous and rational orthogonal grid and architectural spaces, to respond to the logic of the use, consciously showing the outstanding traits of Modernism.

However, even when the Chinese pictographic character '舍 ' that corresponds to 'haus' is used, in the way it approximates the pronunciation and meaning of 'Deshaus' , its use nevertheless more or less anticipates the transformations to their architectural realizations. In the works of Deshaus, they continue to try to integrate some of the traditions associated with China with the formal language of modernist architecture. Perhaps because Deshaus, unlike many of the Chinese architects of the time, who have spent time in Europe or America to study and live, and had to deal with the identity anxieties of being in another cultural context, their strategies were more often roundabout and indirect. Between 2003 and 2010, in the series of projects completed including the

2003-2005 XIAYU KINDERGARTEN

Huale road, Qingpu New Town, Shanghai

Floor Area: 6328 m 2

↑ West elevation along riverside

Xiayu Kindergarten is sited on the edges of the Qingpu New Town. Qingpu is one of the few satellite towns of Shanghai that has still retained some of its vernacular residences typical of the Jiangnan water town. The Qingpu New Town, however, was built as Greenfield development on farm land, with quite a bit of distance from the historic town. The site of Xiayu Kindergarten is thus palpably without the influences of an existing context, surrounded by open land. In a context lacking urban ambiance, the elevated highway in the east and the river on the west side of the site are instead decisively influencing the design proposal. Though a source of waste gas and noise, the elevated highway also allows the new building to be seen at different heights and from different speeds. The river, on the other hand, is a landscape resource, with considerations both for security of the children and the gesture of a riverside architecture.

T he kindergarten has a total of fifteen class units, each of which requires its own activity space, dining area, bedroom, and outdoor playground. The fifteen units and the teachers' offices are clustered together within a massing formed by two curves, with solid and transparent interfaces demarcating the two different uses. The class units are wrapped by curved painted solid walls that land on the ground, while the offices and special rooms are enclosed by U-shaped glass walls elevated above ground.

In the design of a class unit, the activity room is placed on the ground for its adjacency to the outdoor playground. The bedroom is located on the first floor, and wrapped in a brightcolored façade. The bedrooms appear as independent units, structurally separated from the façade and the roof terrace of the massing below, emphasizing the floating and detachment of their individual massing. This detachment and ambiguity in scale lend the clustering a perception of impromptu. The bedrooms of every three class units are connected by elevated passages lined in wood, relating the exterior spaces on the roof terrace to the units. Tall trees are planted in each of the 10 courtyards, with the tree crowns dialoguing with the colorful box-shaped volumes atop the terrace. The trees are also enlivened by the architecture in which they are part.

The ground and first floor of the building are interspersed with spaces of different densities. The inward-looking courtyards on the ground and the outward-looking volumes on the first floor together form an equilibrium between open and closed.

↰ Semi-underground art gallery

↲ U nderground art gallery

↑ Section 1-1

↓ Galler y on the ground floor

2015-2019 TAIZHOU CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

Shameng Food Warehouse, Fengshan Road, Jiaojiang District, Taizhou, Zhejiang Gross Floor Area: 2454 m 2

Taizhou Contemporary Art Museum is located inside a cultural and creative park that was converted from a former grain storage. The compound includes a number of factory buildings and warehouses of the Soviet style, which have been renovated into shops, restaurants, and offices. Though the renovated park is full of life, the feeling of the original grain storage was not well preserved. The Museum is newly built on a vacant site in the compound and faces a small plaza. From the site, one could see the continuous Feng Mountains on the east side behind a row of two-story buildings.

With a total floor area of 2,454 square meters, the Museum has eight exhibition spaces. Since each exhibition space is small in area while high-ceilinged, interlocking levels are used to decrease the overall height from the lower halls to the upper ones, and also modify the promenade rhythm. The spatial overlaps of the exhibition spaces on different levels create a dynamic spatial sequence as well as rich experience for museum visitors. The museum's barrel-vault cast-in-situ concrete ceiling creates a unique ambience. The linear barrel-vaulted structure not only accommodates the exhibition lighting system, but also links the inside and the outside of the building. The circulation sequence begins with the exhibition space facing the plaza, as suggested by the barrel vault's orientation, and then ascends and turns. The sequence ascends to the top exhibition space, facing toward the Feng Mountain, to which the top barrel vault is also turned, shaping a dialogue between structure and landscape. Similarly, the south facade of the Museum is composed of concaved curves, which appears to be extending the inner barrel-vaulted structure, and renders the frontality of the Museum to the plaza.

Taizhou Contemporary Art Museum

Atelier Deshaus

↑ The top floor exhibition hall opening to the mountains