GSD Alumni and Friends
“Consider Xu Tiantian. The 29-year-old architect was educated at Harvard's Graduate School of Design; after a brief stint working for Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, she returned to Beijing and in fall 2004 founded a practice called DnA, for Design and Architecture. The firm has completed a gallery in Beijing, a cultural center in Tongzhu and a museum in Inner Mongolia, among other projects.
“It is at work on several more museums and cultural centers as well as a stacked complex of apartments and art studios on the outer edge of Beijing, near the new Sixth Ring Road. A dramatic rendering of its design for a visitors' center and viewing platform in the mountainous resort town of Baixi- in northeast China, near the border with North Korea -- has been widely published in the Western press, becoming an emblem for the growing visibility of young Chinese architects.
"'I think of what's happening now for me as a very intense training session, and I don't have to pay tuition,' she told me when we met at a Beijing Starbucks to discuss her work.
“She added that she had benefited from a recent shift in the attitude of Chinese developers: 'For a while, everybody wanted a foreign firm. But now clients are looking for domestic architects.' The only problem, she said, is that those clients also push to complete buildings at lightning speed.
“When asked how she saw herself and her firm in five to 10 years, she laughed loudly enough to turn heads at the next table. 'Five to 10 years? That's the next lifetime. Ask me about five to 10 months!'”-Christopher Hawthorne, Design Critic, Los Angeles Times
[Los Angeles Times; August 6, 2008]
For the complete article: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-youngbloods6-2008aug06,0,7323041.story?track=rss