China Boom Benefiting Smaller U.S. Architecture Firms – NYTimes.com
Kyaemon
==
This article is especially posted for our TALENTED AND ENERGETIC MA WEI WEI and our other gifted Myanmar Architects. Her additional Chinese language skills is a real plus. The similarity of Myanmar and Chinese cultures and close neighborly proximity are extra assets.
==
Even western architects made a fortune during the Beijing Olympics, Shanghai Expo, … with China’s opening up and booming economy.
Myanmar architects can even work for Western architects in China, in various capacities, even as liaisons, or starting from draughtsmen/women to get a foothold.
==
Through the Western Architect firms, you might even obtain an H-1 work visa, etc to emigrate to USA, Canada, and so on. Stuart Silk’s address is on most pictures.
China Boom Benefiting Smaller U.S. Architecture Firms – NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/business/16build.html?ref=world
IT was an unusual commission, unlike anything that Stuart Silk, a Seattle architect, had been offered in his quarter-century of practice: design three high-end custom homes for clients he would never meet. Although there were some specifications for functions and dimensions — total square feet, for example, and the number of bedrooms and baths — there wasn’t a clue as to style or a construction budget.
“A lot of emotions went through my head,” Mr. Silk says. “Disbelief was one of them. Then the anxiety that comes along with the responsibility to do something without direction. But ultimately it was very freeing and intellectually exciting.”
The commission came from Shanghai, where a Chinese developer was beginning work on a community of villas bearing stratospheric prices — 50 million to 100 million renminbi, or $7.5 million to $15 million.
How did Mr. Silk get the job? A consultant for the developer had simply seen a Palm Springs, Calif., house that he had designed, liked it, and offered him the project. Before long, the three villas expanded to nine.
Mr. Silk’s 17-person firm is among scores of small to midsize architectural practices across the United States that are enjoying a startling boom in Chinese projects — whether in spec mansions for sudden multimillionaires or quarter-mile-high skyscrapers. Although a handful of big firms, like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago and HOK of St. Louis, have extended global tentacles for generations, it has been only in the last half-dozen years that Chinese projects have gushed down to their smaller brethren.
These firms are grateful for the commissions, and not only for the obvious reason — that the Chinese work has helped fill the void left by a listless American economy. More intriguing, the architects say, is that Chinese developers and even government agencies are proving to be better clients than their American counterparts. They say the Chinese are more ambitious, more adventurous and even more willing to spend the money necessary to realize the designs. This thrills the architects, who have artistic undercurrents that often struggle to find an outlet.
The Zhongkai Sheshan Villa project, recently completed in a scenic suburb of Shanghai, provides a window onto the unusual workings of some architectural commissions in China.
This luxury development occupies 45 acres and comprises 80 custom villas. Wang Qian, a consultant for the developer, the ZK Real Estate Development Company of Shanghai, toured luxury communities in Palm Springs, Los Angeles and Toronto in 2003 and identified 17 North American architects, including Mr. Silk, to design the homes. The list eventually narrowed to 10.
“I have no idea whether Chinese architects can do this,” said Mr. Wang, in an interview from Shanghai. “Maybe they can — but I didn’t want to take that risk. In China there was no development like this. The villa market is rather young in China.”
Each of Mr. Silk’s nine designs was required to be distinct, but no stylistic guidelines materialized. For the first time in his career, he wasn’t an architect interpreting a client’s tastes and personality, but an artist facing a blank canvas. “It opened up a part of my brain that hadn’t been exercised in a while,” he says.
Mr. Silk visited the Suzhou gardens, west of Shanghai, where he encountered signs interpreting the landscapes; they were written in poetic language. That prompted the idea of writing story lines from which each villa design could bud. His narrative for one home, called Bending Paths, begins in a meditative vein:
“Like rings from a stone dropped into a pond,” he wrote, “curving walls create a journey and define space.”
On the aesthetic side, Mr. Silk says, the developer “really stayed out of it — if anything, they helped us more fully realize our ideas.” As the design progressed, however, new requirements popped up, some calling for substantial redesign. Mr. Silk was surprised to learn, for example, that traditional Chinese feng shui principles meant that a front door couldn’t be positioned at the foot of a stairway, lest good fortune tumble d
ownthe stairs and roll out the door.
But over all, he said, “Working in these narratives turned out to be a real win. It’s an opportunity we don’t get in the programs we usually work with here.”
- 1 2 3 NEXT PAGE »
Please go to the above Xinhua link and read pages 2 and 3.
============
Please click above link for more beautiful buildings.
Personally, I believe you can design a “Burmese style” house to a Chinese millionaire(s). They want unique and spectacular designs that other Chinese millionaires don’t have as yet. They can pay you good money.
If it didn’t work out, no harm. Treat this like Wei Wei’s Tibetan travelogue and enjoy the beauty and styles of the buildings. Maybe, some inspiration to achieve and surpass these western architects, too.