Interview with Yung Ho Chang, FAIA

Yung Ho Chang, image courtesy FCJZ.

Yung Ho Chang, FAIA, is the Founding Partner and Principal Architect, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ). Concurrently, he is the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong and Emeritus Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Educated both in China and in the US, Chang received a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Since 1992, he has practiced in China and established Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) with Lijia Lu in 1993. He has won a number of prizes and recognitions, such as First Place in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition in 1986, a Progressive Architecture Citation Award in 1996, the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, and the Academy Award in Architecture from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006, 2016 China Architecture Media Award Excellence in Practice Prize, and Honorary Membership of AIA Hong Kong. FCJZ has been recognized as one of the 100+ Best Architecture Firms 2019 by Domus magazine. Jishou Art Museum has won the American Institute of Architects (AIA) 2020 Architecture Award and the ArchDaily China Building of the Year 2020 Award. 

Yung Ho Chang published several books and monographs, including Design as Experience Research in Chinese/English, World Architecture special issue – The Modernity of Making: Yung Ho Chang in Chinese/English, Yung Ho Chang / Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice in English/French and Yung Ho Chang: Luce chiara, camera obscura in Italian. He participated in many international exhibitions of art and architecture, including six times at the Venice Biennale since 2000. He has taught at various architecture schools in the USA and China; he was a Professor and Founding Head of the Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University from 1999 to 2005; he held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard GSD in 2002, the Eliel Saarinen Chair at Michigan in 2004, and between 2005 and 2010, he headed the Architecture Department at MIT. He was also a Pritzker Prize Jury member from 2011 to 2017.

SKYLAR YU: As one of the first international students to study architecture in the U.S. after China's reform and opening up—how did this experience influence your understanding of architecture?

YUNG HO CHANG: My experience in the US made me who I am today. I was fortunate to have certain teachers, such as Rodney Place, Lars Lerup, and Stanley Saitowitz. Rodney introduced me to modern art, Lars taught me conceptual thinking, and Stanley inspired me to have an independent practice.

SY: After returning to China, you established the first independent architectural firm in China, FCJZ. What boundaries of traditional architectural practice did you want to break at the beginning?

YHC: At that time in China, architects did not pay much attention to engineering and construction. I wanted to return to an ontological approach to architecture, meaning starting design from the essential issues such as material, structure, craft, space, etc. but not form, image, or style. FCJZ – Feichang Jianzhu – means very architectural besides abnormal architecture, as my architect father would like to put it.

SY: How does your architecture firm work?

YHC: Our practice is private but more importantly we operate in a way that is different from the state-owned design institutes, starting from the small size and the studio format; meanwhile, most of the private offices were big corporations and organized similarly to the state owned design institutes.

Vertical Glass House, 2013, North facade. Photos by Lyu Hengzhong. Below: Vertical Glass House, 2013, views of the storage, bathroom, etc.

SY: Since the beginning, FCJZ has explored and presented experimental projects such as The Vertical Glass House and The Bicycle Apartment, how do you balance the challenges of experimental design and practical implementation?

YHC: Without a client nor site, I drew the Vertical Glass House with technical details including plumbing before Lijia and I established our practice in Beijing. To present, it is important to put ideas down in drawing and/or model forms. With my colleagues at FCJZ, we recently designed a Halfway Glass House. Like the Vertical Glass House, Halfway Glass House can be built when the opportunity comes. I hope that one day Bicycle Apartments and Bicycle Houses can be realized too. 

SY: Tell us a little about Halfway Glass House.

YHC: The Halfway Glass House studies an architectural prototype that is halfway transparent in the vertical direction. Glass as both an enclosing and a dividing material extends up universally from tabletop height at approximately 850mm above the floor, drastically contrasting from the concrete-based, solid lower-half walls, creating an interesting image of a house with a cut-off top. Residents thus enjoy panoramic, uninterrupted views at eye level, yet the refractive and reflective properties of glass limit transparency beyond a certain distance to ensure privacy and security. Functional utilities such as electronic appliances, furniture, and plumping systems are in turn concentrated on the lower half of the house. In this way, the Halfway Glass House explores behavior-driven, material division as a function of distance to the floor.

Half-Way Glass House:The structure is rotated by 45 degrees and positioned on the site to maximize its distance from surrounding buildings. ©FCJZ Below: Different views and plans of Half-Way Glass House.

SY: The Studio Houses at Dongqian Lake in Ningbo has been described as “a courtyard house that has been conceptualized for nearly 30 years”, which originated from your ideas such as “split house”and “cruciform space” that you conceived in the early 1990s. Can you share the process of transforming this long-term thinking into a spatial language?

YHC: With the Studio Houses I designed in 1991, I focused on two aspects of a dwelling: the ritual of everyday living as you mentioned, such as crossing the courtyard on the way to work and again on the way home. and the spatial structures, especially the ones with a courtyard, so the spatial language and experience through indoor to outdoor were already there and no transformation needed by the time of building.

Bird's eye view of the four Studio Houses. Photo by Tian Fangfang. Below: Drawing of Courtyard House Study by Yung Ho Chang, 1991 ©FCJZ and House with Walkable Beam; view from the walkable cruciform beam. Photos by Tian Fangfang.

SY: Your designs have often been described as "outside of cultural symbols", but you have always been committed to the inheritance and development of traditional Chinese architectural cultures, such as the aesthetics of Chinese gardens, oriental philosophies, and the reuse of materials. But at the same time, you refuse to categorize architecture as "Chinese" or "Western". Does this idea of de-labeling stem from a reflection on the proliferation of post-modernist forms?

YHC: Architecture is spatial as well as temporal thus there is no place for symbols, which become merely decorations. Architecture is to be experienced through time and space, which is where culture lies since time and space are perceived very differently in the East and West. The No-Name Art Museum in Wuzhen we designed, which remains unfinished at this point, addressed this issue.

No Name Art Museum, 2021. Overlooking the exhibition area, photo by Tian Fangfang.

Bird’s-eye view of No Name Art Museum and surroundings; photo by Tian Fangfang.

SY: FCJZ not only designs buildings but also ventures into furniture, installations, exhibitions, theater, and even clothing. Is this cross-media practice exploring the deeper connection between architecture and lifestyle? How do we understand that FCJZ "makes imaging how people may engage design a part of design"?

YHC: We don't differentiate "design for living" and "design living." Interestingly, we are now engaged more and more in the design of the content of architecture rather than just the building, such as the China Academy of Art at Liangzhu project in Hangzhou, for which we designed the educational system along with the campus.

SY: Can you briefly describe the design part of the education system? 

FCJZ: Liangzhu is an area in the city of Hangzhou where a new campus of the China Academy of Art (CAA) is situated. At Liangzhu, this art-based comprehensive university plans to have four academic divisions, which are College of Innovative Design, College of Art Management, College of Foundational Education, and College of Continuing Education, and will house 3000 full-time students and 1000 continuing education students. The four main objectives of this new campus include developing interdisciplinary innovative talents; promoting design and informational economy; integrating artificial intelligence technology and setting another benchmark for contemporary design education.  

At the stage of the campus design competition, CAA asked the participating architects to envision an educational system that would meet the mandates given. We understood that deciding a major while entering college is no longer the best way for today's higher education and proposed a conceptual framework for learning that is defined by the following:

1. Use head and hands. Every student, regardless of his/her discipline or concentration, has to take courses that engage making— from drawing/painting to design/architecture, as part of the foundations.

2. Classes as research projects for advanced level, which allows students to acquire skills to work as an interdisciplinary team and solve real-world problems.

3. Abolish departments so that knowledge is not compartmentalized. 

Horizontally connected studios, photo by Tian Fangfang.

The campus, photo by Tian Fangfang.

Design reviews in the studio, photo by Yan Fei.

SY: Your father, Zhang Kaiji, was the designer of the Tiananmen watch stand, and his classical ideas clashed many times with your modernist experiments. How did this confrontation shape your view of architecture?

YHC: I had a Classical training at the Nanjing Institute of Technology just like my dad (the school was called the National Central University when he studied there and is now Southeast University) and for a long time I tried to rebel against it. Today I understand that time is continuous and Classicism and Modernism are not necessarily oppositions rather a development and evolution from one to another.    

SY: As a scholar active in both China and the USA, how do you define your cultural identity? Has this duality been an advantage in your creative career?

YHC: We have gone through a long period of globalization and everyone, including myself, is a cultural hybrid to some extent with a varied mix, be it more East less West, or vice versa, which makes us different from the previous generations but may not be better.

SY: As a judge of the Pritzker Prize, how do you see the changing role of non-Western architects's voice and impact in the world of architecture?

YHC: We are transitioning from a Eurocentric period to a multicentered one in history. Non-Western architects are making outstanding buildings and constitute an important voice on the world stage today and will be more so in the future.

SY: In your article Object Cities, you criticized the "without fabric" of modern cities. What do you think is the biggest challenge in urban design today?

YHC: The biggest challenge for urban design is automobiles. We have to get back to designing urban spaces for pedestrians, not cars, as the human race did in the past.

SY: You were the first Chinese head of MIT's Department of Architecture, and you promoted the educational goal of "training craftsmen who can think and thinkers who can do". How does this philosophy challenge the formalism-driven teaching system in the West?

YHC: The MIT architectural education at the time when I arrived there followed more or less the head-to-hands model of other East Coast schools. What I proposed was to have head and hands meet in the middle, which turned out to be truer to the MIT motto: Mens et Manus (Mind and Hands).

SY: You have criticized Chinese architectural education for "focusing on artistic expression rather than constructional logic", and called for the curriculum to return to the core of the architectural discipline. The Architecture School of HKU has placed great emphasis on international cooperation in recent years. As the new Dean of the Architecture School in 2025, how do you plan to merge the strengths of architecture education from the East and the West?

YHC: At HKU we walk on two feet: While we are firmly rooted in our particular geographical location, namely Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area, we are expanding our collaboration beyond the current partners in Europe and the United States and also with architects and schools in Mainland China as well as in Asian region. In the fall semester of 2025, we will have an international symposium on contemporary Chinese architecture, and in the spring of 2026, another on the material. As you may notice, we are truly making knowledge exchanges.  

SY: What do you think is the most important crisis in current architectural education? Is it technological dependence, market orientation, or the loss of the core of the discipline?

YHC: It is difficult to imagine that with all the advanced technology we have, design, engineering, and construction are very much disconnected. What I want to tackle at HKU is the integration of design and engineering, which is critical for substantially improving our living environment and lowering carbon emissions.

SY: Are there any particular design ideas that you would like to put into practice at the moment?

YHC: At FCJZ, day after day we toil over the same things: material, structure, construction, space, etc., and are currently working on some exciting ideas about building sections as well as different ways to deploy concrete and brick. You will see them when the projects are completed; however, unfortunately, none of them can be described verbally or textually, which shows the limitation of the present artificial intelligence, which is primarily text-based.

Bike Apartment façade ©FCJZ

Bike Apartment, Sectional axonometric ©FCJZ

SY: As today's global trends, the influx of various cutting-edge technologies, new materials, the development of artificial intelligence, and facing the wave of digital and parametric design, does it pose a challenge to your design concept or teaching philosophy?

YHC: Digital technology provides great design tools, such Building Information Modelling (BIM), but still tools. Creativity is beyond logic and comes from us, at least for now.

SY: How do you want Yung Ho Chang to be remembered in the future? an architect, educator, or a promoter of certain ideas?

 YHC: It’s not bad if people would remember me as the person who loved life.