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 II ]

AJ: So, to shift topics a bit, going back to your interview last month with Frances Anderton [“The Wild West Meets the Wild East”, ­Design and Architecture, July 17, 2007], you talked about how in China ambition is not explicitly stated in a program, a program for a building, but that you have to do your homework to discover it. And you have said that the “USC School of Architecture is positioned to take a leadership role in formulating the critical discourses and practices of the international architectural movement.” [“Innovator Named Dean of Architecture”, USC News, October 6, 2006] Would you care to share with our readers your ambitions for these discourses and practices?

QM: I think in all cultures ambitions are dangerous. Ambitions make you vulnerable. Because if you show your ambitions, and your ambitions are not commonly… the best ambitions are never really commonly agreed upon. But when you spell your ambitions, then your enemies will kill your ambitions before they kill you. In corporate practice, ambitions are always concealed, and translated into various forms of statements. One of them being called vision. [laughs] So I don’t have an ambition for the school, that would make us vulnerable, but I do have visions for the school. The reason visions are safe is because visions are so untouchable, vision is something that is constantly changing, it’s a range, you never really know what a vision is. So I think the vision, being abstract, for the school is actually two things. One is what I call ‘creative future’. Which, basically, specifies a future which does not grow out of the momentum of today. Because we know today is not perfect, and how do we expect the accumulation of imperfect today to give us a better future? So I think the future has to be creative, creative in the way that we live. So we don’t have to live in large houses anymore. We can live three-dimensionally in some kind of amazing manner, and supported by public provisions and being happy, just basic happiness. Having a lot of children, as in Asian happiness. So it’s ‘creative future’. And the second part of the vision is the ‘global culture’. So it’s ‘creative future’ and ‘global culture’. And by ‘global culture’ what I mean is the arts, cultural assets, everything not related to a sentiment that one culture is superior to another. It’s really a kind of mutual respect of all the people who come from different cultures. And the more we actually do that, the less we will blend them together. So I think that ‘global culture’ is really a globalism that actually ends up with diversified cultural strengths. Both of them are quite polemical and antithetical, but I think that’s exactly the quality of a vision. That’s for the school. I think that globalism is at a point where you have to deal with it. I mean, ten years ago if you talked about globalism you felt it’s really not your business, it’s somewhere else. But now globalism is really… lead based paint poisons our kids in the states. There you go, you have to deal with it. How you deal with it? You can’t capture the factory owners in China, you don’t even know who they are. The way you resolve it is by making policies for transportation, import and export. To actually implement new rules for import and export you have to deal with Congress and all that. Globalism is there, you just have to…

AJ: How do you see an idea like ‘global culture’ expressing itself in a place like this?

QM: Specifically, I think we need to not only address problems of Southern California, Los Angeles as a specific setting. We will keep doing it, but, this is not enough because whatever happens here as a problem is linked to another part of the world. Sustainability, ecological issues, it’s not really a local problem. More than half of the steel is used up by India and China. You can’t really just look at your backyard. So our studios are going to be based on problems that are coming from other parts of the world, with the studios that focus on L.A., together in one building, there you have a tremendous exchange. So my ‘urban swap’ can take place already. Another thing I want to emphasize is the integration of technology, that’s something I’m really keen on. I think that the integration of technology has been talked about too much, but not really exercised and committed.

AJ: What type of technology?

QM: Building technology, construction technology, environment technology, and all the technologies that relate to the quality of the built environment. They all must be integrated now because… We’ve talked about it, but we’ve never done it, for three reasons. One is that we don’t have a platform where we can share information so easily that the coordination, integration, becomes the natural flow of work. Now we have that. Computation and the sharing of information have become so unprecedentedly ready. And the second, previously all of the disciplines in technology were so defined by their own trade, by their own criteria. I think now it’s very difficult to see that one thing is better only by its own merits, it has to be related to the others. And then lastly, and very importantly, the reason that we have not integrated is because we haven’t had a big enough crisis. Things are more integrated and united under a bigger crisis, not under pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t unite people, pleasure only creates problems. But crisis creates unification. So now the crisis that is so big is the environmental crisis. This crisis will unite us, integrate all of the engineering aspects. So now I think that we have one criteria to measure every discipline’s excellence. At USC we have a very strong traditional foundation in the integrated technology approach, so this is actually a new push to really lead that trend.

AJ: Do you see this as a platform for integrating across departments and schools here?

QM: Yes. Research into integrated building sciences, building technology. So those are really the two specifics.

AJ: You have also spent time teaching in Shenzen, is that right?

QM: I was associate dean for a semester.

AJ: How do you see architectural education in China differing from here? Do you see positives that you would bring here or that you would bring back to Shenzen?

QM: It’s very difficult for me to compare educations… That’s a difficult question. The reason it’s difficult is because in China the training is so basic, tough, disciplined, no theoretical debates, no open-ended discussion. It’s really skill-based and you have to go through them. It’s like our undergraduate, in a way. But, the result is, you really don’t lack talented designers, really capable designers. But here, in the states, it’s more individual based, idea based, a lot of discussion, a lot of debate, but in the end the results are quite similar, I think. So in a way you can’t say that one education is more advantageous than the other. So [when it is] difficult to compare the two, you always have to bring a third element in. So the third element is the social responsibility, it’s not something in the education per se, but it’s how you see an educated mind, what the society expects from an educated mind. In China, the educated minds, or college-educated minds, are expected to be the leaders of the society. The society relies on those smart people, it’s always [been like] this, through the history- the Chinese exams. You probably know the Confucius exams, the government official exams. If you passed the exams, you became the county head, you became state governor, you became president. You don’t have to be a politician, you just have to be a good, informed man, you’ll be a political leader. In China we call it ‘ru’, ‘ru’ is what the society expects educated people to be. It’s a leader of the society. We have to educate leaders. Here, you fight for that leadership, there you’re expected to be the leader, entitled to be the leader. In that way, Chinese educated people have more sense of their behavior and their activity, their achievement, related to social advancement. So it’s not technical, it’s not about career. Here we talk about career. There, educated men talking about careers is a shame. No, really. Career means that you can clean my clothes, that’s a career.

AJ: Do you think that we have much lower expectations of the educated class here?

QM: Yeah. Very low. We’d like good workers in a firm. But that’s not enough.

AJ: So you think that it would be important to raise the expectations?

QM: Expectations and trust and entitlement. To lead. That’s why Chinese culture is never… it depends on princes, emperors, social elites, which is very archaic but that’s what the society still is. It used to be the royal families but now it’s the educated men.

AJ: Let’s talk specifically about architecture school here in the U.S. Architecture is a profession with a specific skill-set and so on. So we are educating people to join this profession. If we are to talk about the university as being a place to educate leaders, how would you see architects taking on the role of leadership?

QM: I think it’s very simple. It’s really, really simple. The simplicity lies in this. It depends on how we see architecture. We invariably think architecture is to do with a building, to build something. But architecture is a form of knowledge, it’s actually a quality of anything that we’re dealing with. That’s why I advocate that architects are not really creating architecture, they are making decisions that have architectural qualities. Politicians must make decisions that have architectural qualities. Financial analysts must make… Architectural qualities are beauty, commodity and firmness. That’s architecture. That’s the qualities.

AJ: Is that Le Corbusier?

QM: That’s Vitruvius. But when you analyze the three notions, nothing about them is about building. It’s just about essential qualities of everything. So I think if we just slightly shift to see architecture as a decision of architectural qualities, then I think we can be anything, we can be politicians, we can be bankers, we can be… So I think that’s where we’re going to shift. Really simple shift. So I think the obsession with good looking buildings is only part of it. But [making a] harmonious, balanced decision is something that we are so able at doing better than the others.

AJ: I think that that would do so much to empower our profession in this country. Because we are so often seen as building ‘designers’.

QM: We are designing this tangible thing. But we’re not designing decisions. If we’re designing decisions then we’re going to be so much… So that’s exactly what I mean by leadership and it’s not really difficult. It’s not like you go there and you’re yelling at people to listen to you…

Welcome to the faculty. Which year are you going to teach? Can I interview you now?

AJ: I’m teaching second year.

QM: Second year is our cool year. Second year is where you guys are constantly creating troubles. [laughs] Good troubles. Then we open up, then we discuss. Otherwise it’s boring.

AJ: We have to have some failure.

QM: No, totally. Failure is… failure is nutritious. Particularly for school, school is where I think failure can happen. It doesn’t cause social damage.

AJ: Can I ask you one sort of gossip-y question? In The Architect’s Newspaper a few months ago, it can be quoted as saying “we’ve been hearing rumors that the UCLA ensconced Thom Mayne is being actively wooed by USC. We’ll see which institute makes Mayne a true believer.” [“Eavesdrop”, The Architect’s Newspaper, May 2, 2007] Is it true that you were pursuing Thom Mayne?

QM: Of course, I would love [for] Thom to come here. But I think it’s also a problem to have him over here. Well, it’s impossible. [laughs] I can tell you that it’s impossible to have Thom. I think partially it’s because I’ve come to the conclusion that Thom should really stay distant from the school.

AJ: Why is that?

QM: Because I think distance creates more potentials. Because if Thom comes here we are so familiar with him that we may lose that real influence. Yes, I am very close on a personal level with Thom, I constantly talk with him about possibilities. I just like him to say ‘no, no, no’. I offer him, every time I meet him, ‘will you come to be our director of M.Arch?’ He goes ‘no, no, no. I can’t do that. You don’t want me to do it. I’m going to screw up your program.’… The rumor is actually based on real… it’s not a rumor, I am pursuing him.

AJ: What’s the…?

QM: The result? The result is that he’s not going to come. But, the second half of it is that he’s closer to us. Because he’s not coming. Because he refused me, therefore he owes me.

AJ: Thank you for delving into the gossip-y topic. One more quote that I would like to ask you about is, you have said that “complexity, magnitude, multiplicity and greed are not attributes encouraged by sophisticated society or good manners…” I am curious why you group those four attributes?

QM: What are the four words again?

AJ: Complexity, magnitude, multiplicity and greed. Greed in particular, I am curious why greed gets grouped with those three?

QM: I think greed… I think that complexity, magnitude, multiplicity, are veils of essential greed. Greed, when I said that, I meant the intention of wanting more. It should not be encouraged by sophisticated society, because sophisticated society is really a kind of equilibrium. Sophistication is really equilibrium. Equilibrium doesn’t tolerate never-ending greed. So that was the context. It’s referring to the social condition now in China because there is a lot of greed developing. I don’t know about here, here may be the same, but here there is a mechanism where wealth and the accumulation of wealth is constantly returned to the society through pledges and gifts. There are always channels to allow people to give back to the society. But in China at this moment the accumulation of wealth is so fast and so multiplied and the channel back to the society has not been constructed yet.

AJ: Okay, good. Well, I think that that covers most of what I have come to talk about. Is there anything else that you would like to say, or anything that you would like to ask me?

QM: I just want to say one thing. I’d like your students, or our future students, to know that design, or architectural design, is probably the last business that has the capability of synthesizing, hybridizing and balancing. It’s a wonderful business, we just have to realize that we’re the ones, in the future, that are able to synthesize and to bring things together. We’re not inventing anything, for god’s sake, whoever has said architects have invented anything, I will argue to the end of it. But we’re inventing relations, we really, really are synthesizers, we should always remember that. And with that, everything will be fine. That’s really our intelligence.

AJ: Very good. Well, I think that that’s a great note to end on. So, thank you very much, Dean Ma.

QM: Thank you. That was fun. Was that working? I saw you constantly looking at it.

[End recording]

[Read Part I, The Idea Behind s.p.a.m.… ]
[Read Part II, The New Urban Culture… ]