To say that Tian An Men Square is the major common space in the capital city of the world’s largest country is to under estimate its size and importance.

Pages and pages of program diagrams make up a part of the handout that is given the design teams by the Chinese government’s committee. Spaces that are required, their size and the relationship (s) that they must have to each other are diagramed here.

A  two dimensional chart is not a great tool to understand the complex sets of spaces. The HPST team build 3d models of this  information.

v5: We'd like to hear about your experiences in the design competition for the National Grand Theater in Beijing, China. To start with, how did you first find out about the competition?

Paul: I was in Beijing working on my own project when the principal architect for the Beijing designs came to me and said that there is now officially an open competition for the National Grand Theater in Beijing. He gave me some history and encouraged me to see if I would participate. When I came home and thought about it, I decided that this was something that I wanted to try. So I called Yo and asked if he was interested in doing it together. Yo then contacted Zoltan and Jeff. After going over the program, looking at the possibilities, we decided to go ahead and do it. By that time Yo and I had already registered for the competition.

v5: How did you build out your team?

Yo:  Paul brought in two students at the very beginning, and then as the work progressed, there were even larger amounts of work to do. Both of us are teaching at USC, and Paul has been there longer than I, so he knew a lot of upper division students that he brought onto the team.

Paul:  In the beginning we weren't sure how many people we needed, I was actually more optimistic in thinking that we could get it done with fewer people. At first there were two students, Danny Cerezo and Maili Sekiguchi, who did the preliminary ground work to allow us to look at the overall process. I was in Europe and China when the full team kicked in.

v5: What were the different roles within the body of the team? How did you divide work? What was the design process like?

Paul: Yo and I first discussed what we thought we were able to do on the project, then we sat down with Jeff and Zoltan and we all worked out a schedule.

Jeffrey: Despite our schedule, we ate up a lot of time in the beginning.
There are three steps in the process of a competition: the first step is
the gestation, which is basically when you get together, argue and talk,
trying to come up with an idea collectively. Then there is the development phase. Paul had already left when we had a basic diagram but really hadn't formed any iconography. It was important for Paul to be there for the gestation phase. Then there is the end which is the mad march of death: production.

Paul: There was a lot of discussion during the gestation stage. We talked about everything, we talked about the relationship between different ideas of what we though was considered "Chinese Architecture." There was a funny request on the program that the project had to address the historic fabric and significance of the Tian An Men Square area, but at the same time needed to look forward to the year 2000.

Zoltan: We really felt that we had to do what we were interested in. That was the bottom line at the end of all the discussion.

Jeffrey: At the first meeting I brought out a history book just on Chinese Architecture. There was this quote to the effect that Chinese civilization hadn't changed until into the 20th century. That was actually what sparked my interest: that many underlying ideas in Chinese architecture truly had not changed. There was a lot of discussion about if and where we were going to break those rules. There was never a clear interpretation of modern architecture in Chinese history.

Paul: We were looking for precedents. We realized that Chinese historical architecture had never changed, and that there is not a clear sense of what is modern Chinese architecture. We were trying to figure out what that was, how we understood it, and how what we were doing would contribute to that new understanding of modern Chinese architecture.

Paul: Our research brought out what has been done in architecture in
China in the last 20 years, and we realized that it was a lot of bad stuff! So that brought us back to what Zoltan said about it having to come from us.

Jeffrey: Well, the Cultural Revolution completely wiped out any sense of continuity of culture. We saw this as an opportunity, and wanted to re-explore the readmission of that continuity. We were interested in the permeability of the site vs. the wall of traditional Chinese architecture. We talked about all of these concepts, but in the end they had given a very defined program. We did not let that overwhelm us, but it was so detailed and rigid that most of our time was spent dealing with programmatic issues, which limited the ideas too much.

Paul: Before the jury reviews the project there is a team of specialists, technical support staff, who would go space by space and word by word and calculate the square footage, like a plan checker. At that point they will say if it has met their criteria. This is common for this type of competition in China.

v5: Was this an open competition?

Paul: The competition had started to be invitational only, but then they wanted to open it up. However the government never agreed to that, so it became a qualified competition. You had to submit qualifications and a statement of interest. Based on these statements they nailed it down to 43 international teams.

v5:  Was it clear what you had to produce for the submittal? The types of required drawings, models and project statements?

Zoltan: No. They said they wanted plans and sections and they said the scale of the drawings but they did not say "five boards" or "ten boards" or anything like that. In the end we sent 22 boards and two large models!

Jeffrey: I thought it was okay. They said they wanted a night view, a daytime view from the street, and so on. They didn't say how many boards they wanted you to present, but they knew what they wanted and they said so.

Paul: It was equivalent to a design schematic submission to the building authority in China. Which is really too much. It was far beyond what an ideas competition should be.

Jeffrey:  It was excessive. In the end, it hurts an ideas competition.
The hurdle is too high, there are so many details.

Yo took over the large portion of the overall planning. I was much more involved in the theater itself and analyzing what they were saying in the program. Students did a lot of research on things that were important to the overall planning.  The students also helped with a massing model of the program for analyze.

Yo: It was very helpful.

Paul: Yes,  because everyone realized that our site was packed.

Jeffrey: At that point we stopped talking about certain things. We just knew that we could not use some of our ideas. There is a very clear height limit in the city.

Paul: Nothing in Beijing exceeds the height limit of 45 meters. Supposedly it is the elevation of the foot rest in the throne room of
the emperor in the Forbidden City.

v5: So conceptually, even in Communist China, these limits are
important?

Paul: Well it was reinforced back in the early 1980's when I. M. Pei came to China and the leadership asked him what he thought and he said 45 meters sounds like a good number! (laughs)

v5: So after the research and analysis phase you started to develop strategies for the design?

Yo: Well, we really did these things concurrently. Students were helping us with analyzing all the information, then there was a moment when Zoltan made a real good conceptual model that drove the direction from then on. So we were all working kind of together but separately, and we would come together at the meetings.

Zoltan: Ultimately it was basically a simple grid of columns with a roof on it, and that's what we ended up going with.

Yo: At that point we stopped working on the other schemes and focused on this one.

Paul: But I have to say this, that in hindsight, the period where we all sat down and talked about the progression of space from the street to the park then the entry court and so on ... This entire ritual, the ceremony, is the thing that is important and is in fact a key element in Chinese design. It may be the one remaining thing that is present in all Chinese architecture. It is not about tiled roofs and that stuff but about sequence of space and ritual.

Jeffrey: There was also a lot of discussion about the tectonics of the building.

Paul: We had a discussion about the walls. Historically most walls
structures in China had been to keep people out or keep people in. The transparency in the scheme was very important.

Jeffrey: What was forbidden is no longer forbidden, and that is where the culture is changing or should change. It is just a matter of time.

v5: So do you see a clear polemic embodied in the scheme?

Jeffrey: We were very careful about the politics of it, because we knew that we didn't want to be involved in the political side, and wanted to
concentrate on the project.

Paul: Plans for the project had been in place since the 1950's. They had gone through five different rounds of competitions domestically, and each time when a winner was selected the central government decided that it was not appropriate. It was not until early this year that some kind of major committee, and in fact it might even have been decided at the last Chinese Communist Congress, decided that if this project is to be as important as it is, it should be opened up to international participants. Therefore the decision was to make it into a international competition.

Once this decision was made, the time they had to prep for it was
relatively short, and that may have contributed to the bad translation. I remember looking at the Chinese text and the English text and thinking that they were saying two completely different things!

v5: Did they offer money for the development of each of the 43 teams that participated? Was there some allowance that you had to work with for development?

Paul: Not for us. if you qualified there was no compensation for it. If you were invited from the beginning you had a twenty thousand dollar stipend on the condition that you met all their criteria, which you don't know till the end. Based on the letter we've received we are not sure who got that money or if anybody did.

Zoltan: Probably nobody received the money. Based on the way they phrased it in the letter, they basically said that of all the teams that entered, nobody really met the program. But we still feel they may pick five or six people to go back for a second round and do it again.

v5: This is a capital city and a major performing arts based program. In the history of international competitions there are not very many that rise to this level. The competition for the Pompidou Center in Paris was won by a young Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. What was your commitment in terms of time and money to be able to produce in this major international competition? I will ask it in a "Hollywood" way: what do you have to bring to the table to be a player at this level? (laughs)

Paul: We had budgeted approximately ten thousand dollars to do it, and we ended up spending about that. That's not counting labor hours at all, and we used our own studios, our own equipment, hardware, and software. Strictly hard costs directly related to the competition, the model-making and other materials costs and shipping costs. We paid the students a little, but not very much because of our budget.

v5: So the model we see in the pictures was done in-house?

Yo: Yes. One of the reasons that I wanted to work with Zoltan and Jeff was that they have a capacity to produce on the computers, which I though was very necessary. I looked at the schedule and I thought there is no way that I'm going to do this with a couple of students, it's not going to happen.

Jeffrey: We had Master's and Bachelor's candidate students helping us. We had 27 students working for us, even students that graduated in China and were assisting us just to get the experience, and they were very happy about it.

I must say, though, that sometimes working with students can be counterproductive. Students are not used to working with each other. Here we had an enormous team and it's not individual work anymore. The files in the computers had to be set in all the right places, and every student had to know where to locate the files. Basically it was a team effort. There were minor discussions and the students started to get familiar with all the diagrams so everybody was on the same page. In the time period that I call development exploration, the decisions were all really critical points, the concepts of the exterior and interior. But what it does say is that a small firm with student help and a basic computer infrastructure can play with the "big boys."

Next Page