What Made Me Fall in Love with Architecture

"My interests are wide. Literally wide. If you love anything at all, come find me and let's talk about it."

That's how I introduce myself every time. And every time, the words feel hollow, weightless, a little too lazy. They're missing the heat in my blood, the sincerity and passion I feel for the things I actually love.

The new semester has rolled around, and it suddenly hit me that I have a public account where I can do whatever I want and say whatever I please. So why not unpack "wide interests" a little, and treat it as a way to start the conversation.

Tsinghua University, Sixth Teaching Building

The first piece in this series is about why architecture fascinates me.

Even friends who know me well might not realize that "fanatical architecture lover" is part of how I see myself. I've wanted to write What Made Me Fall in Love with Architecture for a long time. Now, stealing a moment from a busy stretch, I'm finally putting down a few lines. Call it settling an old debt.

What I love is not only the tall buildings, the theaters and the gardens. It's also the parks, the plazas, all the places we don't usually file under "architecture." And it isn't only the polish or the grandeur of how a thing looks. I care about how the space is laid out, about the mood of the whole. To put it in bookish terms, the "architecture" I love is the sum of every private and public space that human will has shaped. It's like the air. We live inside it every single day, and yet we never stop to think about how it shapes our daily lives and the way we think.

The first time I really started thinking about buildings, it was because a strange question leapt into my head. The houses people lived in long ago are nothing like the ones we live in now. So where did this thing we call modern architecture come from? Who first dreamed up the idea that houses could be built this way? At first I had no answer, but I had a faint sense of something: that there was a group of people, an era, a current of thought, and together they changed the entire world, making this world of manmade things look the way it does now instead of some other way.

Thanks to the internet, I found my answer soon enough. Bauhaus. The origin point of modern design, the line drawn cleanly between "pre-modern" and "modern," one crucial piece of the ultimate question that had puzzled me for years, "what does modern even mean?" The architecture piece of that puzzle.

The Bauhaus building in Dessau

Slowly I also came to understand that Bauhaus was probably not historically inevitable. In the same period it had rivals, like Art Deco. There was another way for "modern" to look. It's just that Bauhaus happened to be the idea that won, and it swept across the whole world with a conqueror's swagger. Over a long stretch of time, Bauhaus drifted from a functionalism where "form serves function" into a minimalism where "form matters more than content." It grew duller, more monotonous, more estranged from tradition, more concerned with surface than substance.

And so we get to watch Art Deco stage its comeback. A good deal of today's avant-garde architectural taste shares a temperament with Art Deco. It's invention and nostalgia at once, taking in everything, carrying a faint flavor of old China or of the Arab world, respecting tradition while staying fresh and alive.

©Glossier

Bauhaus has been explained on the internet more times than anyone can count, so there's no need for me to say much more, and bringing up Art Deco was really just a passing whim. What I want to say here is this: the history of how buildings change is of course part of the history of ideas. Human notions create buildings, and buildings in turn shape human notions. For years I've doubted whether Hegel's "world spirit" is real, doubted whether there's any such thing as a "spirit of the age." But the way buildings exist and shift looks so much like the outward face of some spirit. A building is like the silhouette of a spirit. Buildings in different places reveal the temperament of those places, and old buildings are living fossils of how people once thought.

There's a phrase I love: "the imagination of [some field]." I first ran into it in the book The Sociological Imagination. So let me borrow it, simplify it a little, and talk about "the architectural imagination."

The Place de l'Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe after Haussmann's renovation

When you look at an aerial photo of Paris, do you feel a kind of violence, a violence that drives out everything unclean and chaotic, that forces everything into rigid order?

Jinshan District, Shanghai

When you drive through the outskirts of Shanghai, do you feel the countryside waiting for modernity to arrive while also fearing the loss of its old customs and character, and the small, tangled feeling of hope and worry that grows from it?

The Forbidden City

Looking at the grid of a Beijing map, do you see the old capital's rigidly stratified imperial ideology, and do you feel the ancient palace city resisting the encroachment of commerce and capitalism, struggling to hold on to its dignity and its place on the map of twenty-first-century China?

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I could give plenty of examples. Every city has its own temperament and its own moods, but the reading is necessarily subjective. There's no answer key. How you feel a city blends together with your own mind, and so a thousand people see a thousand cities. I don't need to say much more. I'll leave the tasting to the reader.

Let me say it once more: an excessive sensitivity to things (acumen) is a luxury. Let your mind roam freely through buildings and spaces, and everything around you turns vivid and felt. That is the "architectural imagination," or you could call it the "architectural sensibility."

I love the Tsinghua campus. To me it's a living palace of art, gathering countless great buildings and great public spaces that make you gasp. Even better, these buildings aren't cold exhibits behind glass. As a student I get to interact with them, which carries a little of the feeling in that old line, "we look at each other, never tiring, only Jingting Mountain and I."

Tsinghua Xuetang

It's hard to describe what I felt the first time I went to study at Tsinghua Xuetang. For me it was nothing short of a pilgrimage. Carrying my books, I walked the corridors of Tsinghua Xuetang, taking in the flow of its space, the stairs and the railings, the desks and chairs and shelves. Reading is a conversation between reader and author. Walking through a building, then, is to be one small person in conversation with the spirit of an age. If a student treated this place as nothing more than an old house to sit and study in, that really would be a pity. But it's also fine, because the way a building works on a person should be gentle and gradual, like spring rain soaking into the soil. Even my standing here with this elaborate, bookish set of phrases is enough to disturb that "tacit" mood, and I deserve the scolding. Inside an architectural space, words are of course superfluous and pale.

Tsinghua Library

Another impression that stayed with me came from visiting the Tsinghua Library. In front of the scale model I paced back and forth, looking for a long time, until I was the only person left standing there studying it, and only then did I reluctantly move on to the next spot. I couldn't help marveling to myself: "The Tsinghua Library carries on the concrete, brutalist style of our old Soviet brother, fused with the garden sensibility and color palette of classical Chinese architecture, while keeping the restraint and seriousness of a great university. The library is the heart of a university, and the Tsinghua Library is full of ingenuity yet never showy, full of innovation yet deeply restrained. And so Tsinghua's scholarly spirit, one of action over words and openness to innovation, can be glimpsed in a single library."

So a life of study, even when you're racing on your bike to make it to class, is also appreciating art, taking part in art, dissolving yourself into art.

I love buildings, I love architecture, so let me wander this world a little more and look a little longer.

The more I know, the more I find I don't know, and the more beautiful the world becomes.

And a wish for you: may your autumn days be lovely.

Tsinghua Meteorological Observatory

I'm Ninganjinghai. Thank you for reading to the end.

References:

The Public Space of Great Cities and Its Rebellious Power by Dune Research Institute

Art Deco: Another Attitude Toward Design by Zhengyi Youth

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Image sources:

www.tsinghua.edu.cn

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