by Ali Jeevanjee

At the end of this past July, as we were wrapping up the Summer Exploration program at the USC School of Architecture , myself and the other faculty had our students bring all of their final models down into the Watt courtyard to photograph them in the sunlight. It was a wonderful conclusion to the four week program as the students could see the work of the other sections and the sum of the final production of the program was out for all to see by the light of day. As we were instructing our students on model photography techniques, Dean Ma arrived and was inquisitively surveying the student’s output.

Over the course of the program I had had the opportunity to meet Dean Ma, and to go down into the Topping library in the basement of Watt Hall to do some research to find out for myself more about the Dean. The more I scratched the surface of his immense production, the more it became clear that the architecture community would benefit greatly from getting to know him even better, and that conducting an in-depth interview with him on Archinect would be a step towards achieving that. As he was surveying the student work that day last July, I pulled him aside and asked if he would be at all interested in sitting down with me for just such an interview, to which he responded enthusiastically and said to speak with Zelda, his assistant, and schedule a date.

Qingyun Ma was born in Xian, in China, and received a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering in Architecture from Tsinghua University . He went on to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania , after which he went to work for several years in New York at the firm Kohn Pederson Fox . He also became closely involved with Rem Koolhaas on the first Harvard Project on the City, which he coordinated and which resulted in the book “The Great Leap Forward ”. In 1996 he founded his firm, MADA s.p.a.m. , which has built over 1,204,000 square meters over the last six years, with many groundbreaking and iconic projects including Qingpu Community Island in Shanghai, the Centennial TV and Radio Center in Xian and Tianyi City Plaza in Ningpo. Ma has taught architecture in China at the University of Shenzen; in Europe at the Berlage, the ETH, in Paris and in Germany; and in the United States at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia. In October of 2006, Ma was announced as the new Dean of the USC School of Architecture .

On August 23rd, on the eve of Ma’s first full academic year as dean, I went up to the second floor of Watt Hall for our scheduled meeting. As I was ushered into his office, Ma was busy at work on his ‘vision’ statement, and he collected those papers off of his conference table where we sat down to talk. Which we did, for over an hour. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, broken up into the three major subjects that Ma addressed. In Part 1 we focus on his practice, and his observations from operating first in the East and now in the West. In Part 2 we discuss the future of the urban condition, both in China and in Los Angeles. In Part 3, Ma addresses architectural education, how architects need to recalibrate their role in society, and his vision for USC.

[…Continued from Part I ]

AJ: You made an interesting point with Frances Anderton [“The Wild West Meets the Wild East”, ­Design and Architecture, July 17, 2007] last month that you expect in the next twenty years about one-half billion people to urbanize in China, and you said that that would require a new urban culture. How do you envision this urban culture?

QM: Well, I think this urban culture would be highly different, or radically different, from the way we live today. It has to be based on two things, I think, high density, for sure, and second is highly coordinated intensified urban living.

AJ: The coordination of what?

QM: The coordination of resources, accommodation, social provisions and social welfare. Highly coordinated because of the density of it. That means that density and coordination is going to challenge the social structure today as well. I think that the social structure is not really being coordinated well enough and the resources are still being looked at as something that is differentiated by wealth of people. But I think that in the future they will be differentiated by the densities of living. So that is the urban culture that I think it would be made up of.

AJ: That’s very interesting to me because you arrive in Los Angeles at a moment where Los Angeles is experiencing this sea change in the structure of the city. It seems to me that LA is discovering for the first time what it means to be urban. You speak frequently of your resistance to Chinese urbanism[‘s wish] to emulate the American suburban model, but what do you see as the trajectory of Los Angeles as it transforms from a suburban model towards an urban model? Do you see yourself playing a part in that? Do you see your practice playing a part in that?

QM: Well, I can see, definitely, that on the education front that is something we are going to focus on as a school, as a program. It’s constantly searching for new paradigms, searching for new trajectories that the city is not going to just accumulate at the default of the current structure, both in terms of the physical infrastructure and the social infrastructure. If it’s just a kind of improvised accumulation of it, I think the problem is going to be worsened. But what’s the solution? I have to say it needs an intense social reform; it’s not going to be a technical issue. I don’t think that any planners will achieve it, and it is way beyond architects’ ability given what architects are doing today. Architects today are… I have to say that the state of architecture practice is really bleak and we’re willingly giving up our right to participate in decision-making. We’re voluntarily isolating ourselves from all of the other forces which we claim are not humane. Willing, or not, they are the ones really making the decisions. So I think that it has to be a social reform where, I don’t understand the American political system well, I suspect it’s somewhere between a very creative community level initiative and [that which is] sponsored or supported by the social stratum that is tremendously wealthy and influential. It’s the short circuit of those two players that is going to make reform. I don’t think, politically, that the U.S. government has enough strength to initiate this reform.

AJ: That’s interesting that we are talking about the political aspect because you talk about how in China there’s difficulty in resolving the capitalist political system and the communist political system where the capitalist is about the individual and the communist is about the top down government. So do you see this as, in the larger sense, a political problem in the U.S.?

QM: Once again, I am not claiming that I’m politically informed or experienced enough to make any resolutions but my speculation is this- American free-market based democracy is actually not free-market, it’s never been a free-market. So, therefore, the consequence of a real free market which is balanced, harmonious, reflexive, all these qualities, is really a better result of all forces. But I think it’s hardly free-market here. It’s market driven, but driven by only a few. That almost has no difference from a top down political system, whatever you call it. It could be Communism, Socialism, It’s not too much different. Of course the top down, authoritarian or totalitarian, political system is not perfect for the market economy either, but, what I am saying is, not perfect or not good for free-market, but it’s still a market. So the problems are similar and the difficulties are similar as well. But China still has, I hope, a chance to modify it, to improve it, where the U.S. is more difficult to improve. China’s chance to improve itself relies on two very hard facts. One is the fact that the land is still public. I think the future, the new global culture, has to rely on public ownership of land. That’s the future. Wherever the land system is still publicly owned, that’s where the future is. Because there is always a second chance to correct [things]. Okay, you can screw up badly, but the intelligence, the knowledge, the world concerns, if they lead to a better solution, it can erase itself and do it again because the land is public. This is actually, really, the key element for the Chinese improvement.

AJ: But will the Chinese land stay public?

QM: Yes, it’s always state owned. Whenever it is developed, it’s with a long term lease, you don’t really own it forever. So there is always that chance to improve it, to modify it, to approximate towards a better, stable, solution. I think the second possibility is on the people. Chinese people are, Chinese culture is, very tolerant and extremely forgiving. So what I mean is, on one hand you can really screw it up. And on the other you can be more creative because being creative means you can screw up, right? So if you don’t have that kind of tolerance for screwing up with good intent, then nothing will really dare to experiment.

AJ: That makes me jump to another quote; you are quoted as saying that in China failure is always a positive…

QM: Totally. I say that always. The infrastructure of tolerance for failure is really positive.

AJ: It allows one to take risks…

QM: Yeah, Totally.

AJ: So, back to Los Angeles. You say that in China there are no urban leftovers, and I do not know if that is a function of the public ownership of the land…

QM: That’s definitely part of it.

AJ: Because Los Angeles right now has many urban leftovers, and they have come to the forefront of the discourse right now. The LA River, The Cornfields, all of these leftover spaces surrounding downtown are now part of the discussion. Do you think that these result from a kind of societal flaw here? And what do you think that it would take to make something of them, or to prevent more of these from forming?

QM: Well, in China, the reason for no leftovers, you’re right, is because of the public ownership of the city. As long as it is anything that does not belong to any enclosed use, there is always a possibility that people will use it. People just make uses for every corner and every crease. It’s really fully consumed and utilized, which is a great thing and provides such an optimal performance of the city. And also provides such a public quality of the city. In the U.S., because land is all privately owned, if there is any threat, or unbalanced financial sheet, anybody can stop doing anything on it. If an owner stopped doing anything on their land, nobody else can do anything. So that’s really where the difference is. Another thing, it’s actually very simple, is in China the density is so huge, it’s just saturated. The city is saturated with density, it’s just pervasive. Pervasive program, pervasive uses, pervasive human bodies, everywhere. Here you just have an open horizon, if you don’t like it you can just move away and find a new spot. So it doesn’t really generate circulation, its always extending out.

AJ: I think that is what is interesting here is that even the land that is public is so highly regulated that it cannot function in the public sense in the way you speak of it. If a vendor will set up a stall on the sidewalk, the police will come…

QM: In China it’s what we call ‘black businesses’, they are really the ones that occupy and offer a great service to the city. Once in a while they have some crackdowns, but most of the time it resolves a basic public need. So the economy is very localized, very internalized, by being illegal.

AJ: What I find interesting is that you have so many thoughts on both the American urban condition and the Chinese urban condition, and you have over the course of your career done several speculative research projects on the Chinese urban condition, such as A Long Leap Forward and your Urban Steroids project. I am wondering if you have any ideas in mind or if you have already started pursuing any here in the U.S.?

QM: Yes, Yes. I have been speculating on this remodeling of Los Angeles idea, which is- the feeling of Los Angeles is excessive surfaces… for driving. The urban surfaces in any part of the city that you got to, at least forty percent of the open surface to the sky is for automobiles. Okay¸ fine, that’s Los Angeles now, I know the purpose of it. But, imagine one day when the automobile is obsolete, and we are not going to use it anymore. So, then, the city as a physical being, how can you densify the city with the surface of the road? My speculation is that, with the amount of road that’s now in Los Angeles, Los Angeles can grow four times more than it is, in different spatial allocations. So it’s basically a very pragmatic… just how the city starts to be serviced by the highways, by the land.

AJ: Do you see this as a shift towards public transportation, or how do you…?

QM: That’s definitely a part of it. Public transportation, distance of traveling, better allocation of work and living, and schemes that would prevent people from going from area to area. But, I will live in Pasadena, I love to be able to go to the Westside all the time. But I don’t think that freedom is healthy. I imagine if the city of Los Angeles can develop into seven or eight cities, and when you cross them you have to pay and it creates such a difficulty when you go there. So I think the unlimited freedom of automobiles is going to be the end of it, it will come to an end.

AJ: Yes, it already seems to be coming to its natural…

QM: So I think, then, if that happens without destroying the city, how can the city be remodeled based on the amount of infrastructure. The idea is the amount of infrastructure now happening can support three more Los Angeleses, so you can imagine this kind of vertical Los Angeles, by stacking them together. That’s the very speculative take. The other thing that I have been constantly thinking about is what I call ‘urban swap’, where we borrow a problem from Paris and inject it into Los Angeles based on the hypothesis that a bacteria in one biological body could be a vaccine in the other body. Which means that cities start to trade problems, not treasures. Because poison can be extremely good. So it’s basically strong medicine, which could be poisonous to another city. Basically they just exchange problems.

AJ: What problem would you take from Paris?

QM: Well, Paris, I would take it from this deadly ‘museumalization’. Which means, really, to capture things, not to have them move out. I would inject the automobile into Paris.

AJ: Would you inject the ‘museumalization’ into Los Angeles?

QM: I would actually inject people into Los Angeles.

AJ: That’s a revolutionary concept.

QM: Yeah exactly. So I would do experiments. Los Angeles has a lot of areas that are really unoccupied. If you would just introduce Asians, have them come in, give them a limited time permit, have them live there, you would enliven it. I’m sure. Asians seem to be a culture that just generates population. You know why that is? I don’t think that they’re actually strong, they’re just happy. When you have more children, you create happiness out of tough life. And that kind of intrinsic happiness is what every culture needs now. By possessing that basic happiness, you tolerate a lot of conceptual problems. We can start to create reversed colonies in areas here that are not so desirable and start to invite immigrants, in an organized way, not illegal, but a temporary concession. I would introduce the concession ideas of Shanghai to L.A.

AJ: So what are the concessions?

QM: Concessions are foreign living compounds. In the Qing dynasty there were French concessions, English concessions. L.A. concessions, that would be nice. Because it’s there. L.A. has the most diversified immigration composites. So why don’t we organize it so that it benefits our urbanism rather that spreading our territories of suburbanism.

[Read Part I, The Idea Behind s.p.a.m.… ]
[Read Part III, Ambition vs. Vision; Career vs. Leadership… ]

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