People's Architecture
	BIO  |  QUOTE     LIANG JINGYU + GU WEI    APPROACH ARCHITECTURE STUDIO I have been working in different international environments for a considerable amount of time and realized and experienced at first hand the difference between the Western practice and the way the Chinese architects have been practicing during the last decade. As for the Chinese architects, they try to do more or less the architectural design work; at the very beginning of the commission they already have a final image of what they want to build. This is because the clients approach them and say here is a photo I took in Disney land, can you build this for us? This is of course an example, but illustrates the essence of the situation. This gives a lot of the local Chinese architects the illusion of doing their own design. From there one their line of thinking is the following; they first come up with a very big idea, they show the clients perspectives, nice models, and all the rest. If based on this the clients likes it, they take it and implement a post factum analysis to it and fill in the image with functions and programs. So this is the kind of Chinese way. But in another part of the world architects seem to do it differently; first of all the clients approach the architects and ask them for a result and image without any preconceived ideas at the very beginning. The clients come to the architects for solutions or suggestions, so architecture is more or less like a workshop; first you analyze the site, take the client demands into consideration, as well as the zoning plans and the restrictions imposed by the government. So your design process follows the way of the workshop, through the discussion and through your analysis gradually some ideas emerge and this you show to your clients as a proposal. But I also realized that this is not typically to the Chinese context and not even the best way to practice in contemporary China situation as this way is too slow. The workshop is usually very time-consuming and not even affordable, so the way we do it we called it Approach. Approach means you have a certain goal, like the western way, when you start from the middle of nowhere and from there try to search and find out your goal. As architects we already have a blurry image of the final things; we use the workshop to sharpen our target, to find accuracy in a non particular Chinese way. Chinese architects suffer from a very clear image of what they think they should be doing but we don't; we only have a blurry image, an approach and then we try to sharpen it from both sides. This makes us save some time, save our energy and we experience this make our clients more comfortable. Liang Jingyu / Approach Architecture Studio, interview with People's Architecture, Rotterdam, June 11, 2006