The great leap forward

The Commune by the Great Wall is an ambitious attempt to create a distinctive voice for contemporary architecture in China. Ricky Burdett reports (Ricky Burdett is the director for city planning program at London School of Economics). Photography by Todd Eberle.
To write almost anything about the Commune by the Great Wall - even for Domus - is to feel complicit in a well-orchestrated and seductive public-relations campaign. But that is exactly what the 'Commune' is about: a sophisticated real-estate operation with significant cultural content that places contemporary Asian architecture at the centre of a global stage. Not only was it the first major Chinese project to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale, but it scooped one of the event's three most prestigious prizes. Even before the announcement that Zhang Xin - the patron of China's most visionary architectural commission - had been awarded the 'Special Prize' by the Biennale's international jury, the publicity machine was in top gear.

When I visited this remote and exceptional site last June, before the project was completed, I felt I was not alone. In addition to an Italian film crew, a Japanese architectural photographer and a troupe of marching uniformed security guards, I encountered a cluster of sun-shade-carrying young women, estate-agent trainees who were being taught how to 'sell' eleven super-houses. Rugged, scarf-headed workmen looked on in the heat as limousines drove up and down the scenic drive, stopping briefly to allow their occupants to view the bright new structures dispersed in the voluptuous green landscape of the Shuiguan Valley, less than an hour's drive north of Beijing. As an architectural oeuvre, the Commune is an eclectic and intriguing collection of structures, of uneven quality and impact, that provides a rare cross-section of the expressive potential of contemporary architecture at a time of unprecedented social change in Asia's fastest-growing economy.

In his last speech as party leader, delivered at the 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November, President Jiang Zemin promised to 'respect private property and welcome middle-class professionals into the party'. Embracing the private sector is the next step for the party that still runs China with a firm hand after 50 years of socialism and reform. The impact of this opening on the residential real-estate market - let alone the social fabric of China's 1.3 billion people - will be profound. Like other post-reformist and aggressively pro-market initiatives, SOHO China Ltd., the forward-looking development company run by husband-and-wife team Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi, has been quick to respond to this expanding market, offering high-quality, design-led 'products' that appeal to younger urban professionals, such as SOHO New Town in central Beijing, a successful development of mixed-use lofts.

The Commune by the Great Wall is one of SOHO China's most ambitious projects to date. The $24 million investment - part luxury hotel, part holiday homes, part exhibition - is designed to appeal to the leisure and residential needs of Beijing's entrepreneurs. The financial model is as innovative as its architecture. Five of the eleven original houses will be reproduced and assembled in the neighboring valleys over the next few years. Unit construction costs will fall as the price tags stay high, ensuring a healthy return on the initial capital investment. The first phase will be operated as a luxury hotel, with independent villas rented out for weekends or short periods, supported by five-star service from the Seung H-Sang's corten-clad Club House, offering the restaurants, swimming pools, laundry and other facilities required by the wealthy patrons of Beijing's version of the Hamptons.

The hotel operation will ensure that more people have access to the architecture, satisfying Zhang Xin's desire to create a 'live museum', a showcase of contemporary Asian architecture, and, at the same, optimize exposure to potential clients and investors in subsequent phases of the project - a clever approach that satisfies the project's cultural and commercial needs.

The Commune's natural setting is intensely beautiful. The wafer-thin outline of the Shuiguan Great Wall, at once fragile and robust, appears on the skyline as the Badaling Expressway cuts through the nondescript landscape of Beijing's sprawling suburbs. The ancient manmade structure reinforces the profile of the hills and valleys, creating a sense of distance and perspective. Beyond the reconstructed 'traditional' gates of the Great Wall, with its mass of tourist coaches and retail outlets, the road narrows as it passes a hamlet of workers' cottages animated by a faded Coca-Cola sign and marauding free-range chickens. Then you enter a world that is both foreign (to the context) and familiar (to the visitor): security guards, fences and neat landscaped paths welcome you to a safe haven, a brave new world of architecture with a capital A.

Eleven houses, ranging in size from 300 to 700 square metres, are dispersed along the steep slope of the quiet valley, framing dramatic views of the sinuous landscape and the Great Wall to the west. A meandering road leads to dead-end driveways in an all-too-familiar suburban layout, designed by Rocco Yim from Hong Kong, that contrasts with the sharp modernity of the individual buildings. The architects for the houses were hand-picked by Zhang Xin and Yung-Ho Chang, a U.S.-educated professor at Beijing University, from a number of Asian countries, including mainland China, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. The intent was to foster a sense of Asian identity among the emerging generation of talented designers, and the brief was very open (perhaps too open), encouraging the architects to experiment and innovate on the 'house type' within given site constraints.

The first visual impact comes from Gary Chang's immaculate timber shoebox, which hovers confidently above the sloping terrain. A giant semantic statement that points toward the Great Wall, the oblong structure barely touches the ground. From the outside the Suitcase House only hints at its wonderfully perverse interior, where the main function of daily life are concealed within the deep horizontal section of the main floor. Pneumatically assisted floor panels reveal or conceal a sequence of sunken chambers that accommodate the messy activities of living, creating an uninterrupted sequence of free-flowing space (when the panels are closed) or a variegated inhabited landscape of existential pods (when the panels are open). While the building possesses undoubted iconic and poetic qualities, its intentional functional autism will ensure that this remains an architectural one-off, unlikely to be reproduced in the next stage of the project.

At the top of the valley, Yung-Ho Chang's Split House posits more challenging architectural questions. Designed as a two-wing structure than can be rotated around a central hinge element (where the entrance is located), the house can be designed to respond to different locations by placing the wings in linear, parallel, orthogonal or angled arrangements. This version is split down the middle, creating various angles and spaces within and establishing a complex but rewarding visual and physical relationship to the context. By placing the front door and a glass-floored vestibule above a small stream that emerges from a local spring in the hills above the house, Chang reinforces the 'sense of existence between the mountains and the rivers'. A minimally landscaped courtyard at the rear is framed by the steep, dense natural vegetation and the sparse architecture of the facades, while the terraces and windows exploit angled perspectives toward the open valley below. As a simple timber-framed structure with traditional clay walls, the house is an understated ecological statement that responds to extreme climate conditions and minimizes the use of embodied energy without resorting to technological gimmicks or bombastic architectural statements.

Kengo Kuma's Bamboo Wall is a strong architectural statement that reconciles Chinese building tradition and Japanese configuration with a neo-Miesian sense of space. Placed on a narrow ledge, the design reflects the contextual linearity of the Great Wall with a single-aspect structure that embraces and celebrates the exceptional views to the west. Kuma's ambition is to make the 'delicacy of the building conform to the intrinsic delicacy of the landscape', hence his choice of bamboo as an appropriate construction material (inspired by Chinese bamboo scaffolding) to adjust the level of delicacy. The 'Wall' is shrouded in a thinly spaced frame of bamboo poles placed around the facade and on the ceilings, filtering the light through its grain and rich colour, which contrasts with the dark-grey stone floor. Modeled on the traditional Japanese engawa, the west-facing open courtyard, with bamboo screens suspended over water, is the contemplative centre of the house that successfully establishes a dialogue between the inside and the outside, between the natural and the artificial. From this courtyard, one can see most of the other structures of the Commune. The pristine, rectilinear white forms of Kanika R'kul's Shared House contrasts with the heroic red neo-Corbusian volumes of Antonio Ochoa's grand cantilevered statement. Further down, the more precious forms of Cui Kai's See and Seen House and Chien Hsueh-Yi overly articulated Airport structure establish an uneasy dialogue with the formal simplicity of Shigeru Ban's Furniture House, a calm, neo-Palladian essay designed from the inside out rather than the outside in. Reflecting his interest in materials and production, Shigeru experimented with the structural and expressive potential of laminated bamboo plywood, normally used in China for concrete shuttering, creating a holistic environment where every item of furniture (cupboards, shelves, storage) is integral to its supporting structure.

The Commune by the Great Wall is a landscape of extremes. Nature and artifice, modernism and tradition, commercialism and communism all come crashing together. The personal history of Zhang Xin, the 37 year-old entrepreneur who masterminded the operation, reflects the peaks and troughs of China's recent transformation from communism to proto-capitalism. From a modest background and the dark days of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, she worked her way up from Hong Kong's tough labor market to study at Cambridge and work on Wall Street. Without a trace of irony, Zhang states that 'only through a process of commercialization can people be connected with each other' and that 'commerce is the most effective way to promote the art of architecture'. While she lists Peggy Guggenheim as one of the three most prominent figures of 20th-century art, alongside Duchamp and Picasso, Zhang is critical of any art form that is confined to the gallery, that denies the relationship between the artist and the real world.

The Commune is all about the real world, albeit a version of that world that blurs the edges between economic and social emancipation, cultural identity and architectural innovation. In a country that produces millions of cubic metres of vulgar postmodern buildings in the name of 'progress' and continues to pursue an aggressive policy of forced urban repopulation with the systematic destruction of traditional neighborhoods, the Commune represents more than a breath of fresh air. It is a mature and confident statement that reconciles the needs of art and commerce. But its very nature as an elite development, comfortably hidden away in a remote valley near the Great Wall, risks confining architectural innovation to a building typology that is devoid of social content. The real opportunity for Zhang and the new generation of Chinese developers is to apply the lessons of the Commune to the urban scale and reengage modern architecture with the problems of mass housing and urban infrastructure, just as China embarks on a period of exponential economic growth.