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v5: I think that is a really important point. Have the schools of
architecture, USC or SCI-Arc realized or formalized this type of
relationship? Do students get educational credit?
Yo: They should.
Paul: On this project we had to work as a team, and most schools do not teach that. It seems that in school everyone is trying to come up with their own design, but this was very team-based.
v5: Let's talk about the program you came up with. How did you develop the interior elements within the building?
Yo: We wanted to have each theater have a different character, but this was mostly functionally driven just by the range of theater type spaces they called for.
v5: The program consists of a menu of theaters, with the space between them forming the common space that makes up the concourse. That concourse forms the "Opera House". Is there a danger of not being able to make elements of interest from the exterior of the black boxes of which the scheme is composed?
Jeffrey: Well, the main concourse is park-like and lobby-like. It was activated by videotrons and I think of it as a People's Park with access 24 hours.
v5: v5: Would the screens carry what was going on inside or sample things from outside Beijing?
Paul: Both. This was a big debate at first, but in the end we felt that
it was very important that all people would have access and that it be an urban connector between the Tian An Men Square and the city. Not a parade area like the square, but a people area for gathering.
Yo: We went beyond the rules when we allowed that access. We thought about the public nature of the ground plane. We did not want steps dividing it from the upper area, so we curved the base plane. The whole idea is of ascending to the top of the curve where the two most important spaces, the opera house and the theater, were located.
v5: In a way this dissolves some of the kinds of hierarchical devices used in the Forbidden City. The devices that create precinct and distinction are gone.
Paul: Yes, exactly. Our decision was not to break the form of
convention, but to use the same forms of convention to show that the social implications had changed.
Yo: As a counterpoint to the base, we developed a roof structure that would allow for access and ascent.
v5: Did you know what the jury process was going to be in China?
Paul: One has to understand the Chinese culture and current society; if they had announced who the jury was, this thing would have turned into a major "connections" issue. Who do you know? I think they've purposely done it this way so that problem can be prevented.
v5: I remember Tony Lumsden talking about the Saarinen office and how they won so many of the competitions that they worked on. He said that the first thing they would do is research the jury! Then they would decide if they should vest the time into the project.
Jeffrey: Yes, Zoltan, Yo and I looked at a competition in Melbourne, Australia. Daniel Libeskind was the "name" on the jury. We got half way through it and realized that we were not going in a direction that would win this thing, and we stopped. There are those sleepless nights and you just know that you can not do it for a Daniel Libeskind who will not recognize your work.
Paul: Even given the history behind the project, we knew that in the end the final decision on this project would be done by the central government. In the end I think we just decided that this one has to come from us; whether we won or not, at least it came from what we believe.
Zoltan: My folks came from a communist country and nothing is ever done there that is vaguely honest so we knew going in that we could have the best scheme and not win. I hate to be too blunt, but that is how things work.
Yo : Part of the excitement of it was that we were competing at such a high level with other great firms.
Paul: Yes, the biggest joke was when you looked at the list of entrants and saw our name! We were the big unknowns.
v5: How did you feel when you saw the other entries?
Yo: We have only seen the photos Paul took - he went to China and saw the set up of the projects. We really have not seen the work. They say they'll do a book, but we are not sure if that will happen. But from the images we did see, I did not think that the other projects were better that our scheme.
v5: Did you see any other entries that had developed a strategy that your team had looked at and then moved away from?
Paul: I was given one hour to see all the work, but what came through was most of the schemes were identical in concept!
Jeffrey: The worst part about this competition is that they didn't pick
any winner. If you look at the volume of design from 40 international firms, all this work, all this effort. People losing sleep, losing blood, and they don't have the guts to pick a winner after five
competitions!
I think there are three or four ultimate conceptual responses from the program. I wanted to create the best state-of-the-art theater facility in China. Take the limitation of the overall problem and then the limitations of the theater design, and you'll see a lot of similarities from people that took these same precepts.
Inferring from the program, they've done a lot of analysis from theaters all over the world. But often, what they wanted was too much for one theater. For example in the theater specifically for Chinese Opera they wanted to have a thrust stage and a typical procenium style stage, and also wanted typical cinema projection which tends to compromise the stage configurations, so it was very hard.
Paul: What they really have done in China is they sent a team of
professionals throughout the entire world to analyze and bring back all the different code books from every part of the world. That is a huge amount of knowledge to translate, and for the short term right now in China the building code is basically the hardest sections of different codes throughout the world all put together! I think the Grand Theater program was constructed the same way, which is that they grabbed and pulled together whatever they saw out there.
V5: When we spoke earlier you told me a story about being on an
airplane and opening a magazine....
Paul: Yes - but first, this story has to be taken from an understanding that there is absolute animosity between the cities of Beijing and Shanghai. Historically these two cities, since the early 1900s, have competed with each other to be the center of culture of all China. Shanghai was the more modern, Beijing has been the one with the tradition and the culture. In fact, people working in Beijing will never get a job in Shanghai, and people working in Shanghai will never get a job in Beijing. Yo and I will remove any project in our portfolio that we have done in Beijing if we are showing it in Shanghai, and vice-versa.
So I was on a plane waiting, and I saw an article in the in-flight
magazine about the grand opening of the Shanghai Opera House and there was a little photograph of it; the architect was a French designer.
Well, it was basically the same scheme as ours! It is much more
compressed and smaller but unfortunately it is built, and it is built in
Shanghai! I asked our counterparts in China if they knew about this
project and they said they did but had not passed on the information to us!
v5: Are you going to stay together as a team doing competitions? Are you looking for another one?
Yo: It was a challenge, and a lot of things compounded the
difficulties, but in the end I'm just glad we finished and we came up
with a product that we all feel good about. The production and the hard work were a challenge and we were up until two and three a.m. each night. I still do not think I have recovered.
Jeffrey: As a team, whether we agreed with it 100%, we worked toward a goal, and that was critical. Whether we liked it or not wasn't an issue anymore; if the team made a decision, that's what we went with, and I think that really worked. But I am very disappointed that the Chinese government did not select a winner.
v5: I remember the famous landscape architect Lawrence Halprin talking at our school 18 years ago, and he had just won the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial competition. It had been given two or three times and congress would not put the money up for it. It was a real fight. That memorial just opened last year. So things do get kicked around a lot. It is an exhausting process. If you are a firm, just how many times can you do this? Is it a good use of development resources?
Jeffrey: A competition of this size with the resources we had is hard on a firm our size. I do not ever think I will do it again...(laughs)
Zoltan: You learn from this kind of experience, and if you learn from
them you learn some architecture, you learn something about the
technology, you learn how to put a new type of project together. So this has great value. But you also learn how you can work and how you can't work. Hopefully next time we will choose a competition that is better suited to us and win that one.
Paul: Well, I think regardless of whether we win or not, we got a lot
enrichment from this project - an enormous amount - and to me that's what we were winning.
Yo: It was a very long and difficult process, but it is almost magical
what comes from this type of effort.
v5: Thank you
Volume 5
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