Nicholas de Klerk reviews a new book on the work of Gong Dong and Vector Architects, asking whether its themes of materiality, place, and the poetic in architecture adequately respond to the profound challenges of our time
Writing a review of the monograph on the work of Gong Dong and Vector Architects has been something of a throwback to a time during my undergraduate studies when Juhani Pallasmaa, who has written an essay for the book, and the search for a haptic poetics of architecture were very much the discussion of the day. If not a rejection of more conventional programmes of form and function, then perhaps a new way of engaging architecture at a human, sensory level. It is perhaps unsurprising that these themes are important for Dong, given he is the same generation as I am, and it is possible, if not likely, that we share some of the same influences. Reading through this book, however, it is almost as if the world has not changed.
If the book has a shortcoming, it is this, because the world has changed, irrevocably. Climate breakdown is no longer just a threat but an actual lived reality in many parts of the globe. The world is ever more geopolitically unstable (as I write, the US appears intent on initiating a trade war the likes of which has not been seen in more than a generation), democratic systems are in retreat, and wealth is ever more concentrated in the hands of a small minority of individuals.
All of which makes the buildings in the book, many of which have decidedly esoteric or quixotic programmes, seem slightly quaint, out of step with the times in which they are built – mostly over the last decade or so. This may be entirely intentional, a redoubt against the world we now find ourselves in – one increasingly defined, architecturally at least, by a coarse and vapid meme-style discourse that attempts to posit itself as critical or engaged. If that is indeed the case, I am sympathetic to pushing back against a deeply unserious discourse, fatally unsuited to the existential challenges we face at both a local and global level. The problem is that, in large part, neither Vector’s architecture nor the essays in the book ever really do this.
This is a genuine pity, as the architecture described in the book is a mature, consistent body of work that I might once have found compelling. Whereas you could previously have admired the artfully lit spaces and the endless surfaces of board-marked concrete warmed by the sun, now you question the extensive use of concrete and its appropriateness in the context it otherwise seems so responsive to. I am not sure I would ever have thought that building a library – however spatially inventive and beautifully detailed – directly on a beach was a good idea, but the practice’s 2015 Seashore Library on Bohai Bay seems entirely oblivious to the sensitive biodiversity of the fragile ecosystem into which it has been landed so unceremoniously.
Vector’s 2018 reimagining of a 1960s sugar mill and processing plant, abandoned in the 1980s, into the Yangshuo Sugarhouse Hotel suggests a shift in direction that offers the potential to reconcile these conflicts. The existing building, set on a riverside in a picturesque valley, all decaying concrete and degraded steel gantries, is largely retained intact. The refurbished mill building is repurposed as the main public area of the hotel and complemented by two new wings on either side, which mimic its form with simple volumes topped by pitched roofs. They are formed in the same in-situ board-formed concrete that the practice has deployed elsewhere but are here wrapped in a lattice of hollow blocks manufactured locally on site.
Views from individual lounge areas within the new buildings, designed to echo caves formed in the nearby mountains, as well as the outlook from individual guestrooms, frame views of the surrounding landscape. Guests here approximate Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, looking out over the sublime landscape, possibly contemplating their own irrelevance in the face of immense limestone mountains formed by erosion over millions of years. This sense of the sublime is echoed in the architecture through its materiality, evidenced by the rehabilitated ruin and by deep, dark spaces that train the viewer’s eye out into the landscape.
It is in this way that Vector’s haptic, tectonic approach to design has delivered a genuine sense of place, so prized by hoteliers. It is not mentioned in the text, but there is an obvious sustainability benefit in retaining and reusing the mill structure, whose carbon budget was spent decades ago, and in manufacturing the hollow blocks locally, which avoids supply chain miles and may well have contributed to developing local skills and craftsmanship. The patina of age creates the same haptic sense as carefully crafted new architectural elements but has a deeper connection to the site and local history, however palatable that may or may not be.
There is evidence of this approach in some of Vector’s other larger projects, some of them also hotels, and it seems to me that this is where the discourse around the practice’s projects ought to be – describing a genuinely situated practice that faces the challenges we all do, poetically.
Postscript
Vector Architects: Gong Dong and the Art of Building, edited by Botond Bognar, is published by Rizzoli International Publications.
Nicholas de Klerk is an associate partner and head of hospitality at Purcell Associate.
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