UQ Architecture Lecture presented on 21 March 2017 by Wenhui Lim and Stephen Pimbley
Transcript
Architecture Lecture
Presented on 21 March 2017
Presented by:
Adam Jefford
Manager, APDL,MC
Jane Cowell
Executive Director, State Library QLD
Sandra Kaji O’Grady
Head of School, UQ Architecture
Kelly Greenop
Senior Teacher
Wenhui Lim
Director, SPARK
Stephen Pimbley
Director, SPARK
Adam Jefford:
Welcome. Great night for it. I think the rain has held off, but it’s still quite humid, uncomfortably.
My name is Adam Jefford. I’m the Asia-Pacific design library manager. It’s my pleasure to welcome you here tonight.
I’d like to commence by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land, the [0:07:33] andYuggerapeople and pay respects to their ancestors who came before them and to the Elders still living today. The location of the State Library on [0:07:42] Point was historically a significant meeting, gathering and sharing place for Aboriginal people. We proudly continue that tradition here today.
Actually, I’m feeling a little old tonight. I know I don’t look old, but for the last 15 years I’ve been teaching in high schools in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and I saw a student that I taught about seven years ago here tonight. He tells me that he is now in a firm, which I think is fantastic. Vince, I’m trying to embarrass you. Where are you? There you are. Thank you. Hi Vince.Great to see you.
Having said that, I’ve got to admit to you that I am petrified of talking to a room full of architects. My usual audience is year 9 students, so you’ll have to be a little kind to me.
The series. It’s a stalwart in the architectural events calendar and we are fortunate to have the first two lectures of this series as part of the Asia-Pacific Architecture Forum. We think that this is a fantastic opportunity to hear from esteemed architects who are pushing boundaries in our region.
We would also like to thank our event partners, in particular, the UQ School of Architecture, staff and students who have assisted us to deliver such a high calibre of programming. You might be aware of archispy. It’s a little Instagram thing we do. We encourage you to go out there and take beautiful pictures of buildings, tag it “archispy”. I would participate, but my Instagram got hacked by Russians last week, so it’s currently closed. There was a lot of pictures there that I did get a message in the morning from my mother saying “I think you need to check your Instagram”. I won’t show you the picture, but it was definitely not me. The other thing that they did is they classified me as an athlete, which I thought was fantastic.
I have a little bit of housekeeping to do. The toilets are located on levels 2 and 3 and they’re directly adjacent to the entry. In an emergency please move to your nearest exists, down the stairs and gather outside Gomer, which is directly behind us. I hope your phones are on silent, but we would encourage you, of course, to use the hashtags that you can see on the screen in the bottom right-hand corner to tag the event tonight.
We are filming this for a Design Online. It is streaming on Facebook as well as a few websites right now. There will be a recording of this event up in a couple of weeks as well for anybody who isn’t able to join us tonight.
You can also go to designonIine.org.au for the reading notes, the transcripts and also information about the CBT points for you.
I would like to introduce Jane Cowell, our executive director from for engagement and partnerships here at the State Library of Queensland. Thank you, Jane.
Jane Cowell:
Thank you, Adam. I too would like to acknowledge traditional owners and pay my respects to elders, past, present and future.
Vicki McDonald, our State librarian, extends her apologies as she was not able to attend tonight, but she wanted me to convey our gratitude to the School of Architecture from University of Queensland as we’re a very proud partner in this series of lectures. The State Library is committed to working in partnership to deliver intellectual interesting programs for our audiences. Without such committed partners such as the University of Queensland we wouldn’t be able to deliver these types of series.
I did ask Liz today and she tells me it’s our fifth year of partnership. We’ve grown over that time and we’ve got better and better and I think this fifth year will see an amazing series.
I would like to also invite you all to experience our Asia-Pacific design lounge on level 2 of State Library over the course of this series of lectures so that you can experience the resources, both online and physical, that we have. It’s a curated collection that’s selected just for design, architecture, fashion. All things design is in the collection. Please engage with our Asia-Pacific design library staff, ably led by Adam, to connect with the library. We really do invite you to really connect with us as well through this series.
Once again, thank you so much to the school of architecture and all of the work that you do with our team to deliver this series. So thank you.
Adam Jefford:
Thank you, Jane.
It is now my pleasure to introduce Professor Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, who is the Dean of architecture and head of school at UQ. Thank you, Sandra.
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady:
This is a bit of an up and down bit at the beginning where we all thank each other. So my job is to thank the library, of course, because we couldn’t do this sort of event back on the peninsula. It’s really important for us to be in this cultural centre for this kind of occasion and to extend our resources out into the community in the way that the library makes possible. So for both the library and for us, we share the ambition of being a platform for intellectual discourse around design, for debate, for ideas, for inspiration, and this is a really lovely opportunity for us to come together to do that in a shared and interesting way.
I thank the audience because, of course, it’s not possible to keep doing this without your enthusiasm. Every week we have fabulous people up on here, but we have great people out in the audience. The conversations that we have beforehand and after are incredibly important for me and for all my colleagues and also, I think, for our students.
Make sure you come week after week and keep an eye on the tickets and the emails to you.
I would also like to thank Kelly Greenop, my colleague in the School of Architecture, because putting on a series of lectures like this takes a lot of effort and thought, thinking who should go in what order, who should we invite, and Kelly has done a fabulous job in year, as I’m sure you’ll agree when she comes up and talks about what’s ahead. So thank you, Kelly, for all the effort you’ve put in year. We try and share the tasks, so it’s been different people each year and that also keeps it very fresh, but thanks very much. I will ask Kelly to come up and talk about it.
Kelly Greenop:
Hello, everyone, and welcome. Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge again the traditional owners of Kurilpa, the original name of this part of the city that we’re in tonight, and express my gratitude for their millennia of caring for country where we’re gathering right now.
Tonight’s a really exciting evening, the first in our eight-lecture series for 2017, beginning with a joint Asia-Pacific architecture forum event. The lecture series unfolding ahead of us is ostensibly curated by me and carry some of the interests I’ve long held: women in architecture and architecture focused on housing and humans and, of course, beautiful buildings. Really, I’ve had a lot of help in choosing the speakers and managing to secure such a stellar line-up with some well-placed emails and emails addresses from our colleagues.
We have three international speakers in the series this year. We have Melissa Liondo of [0:16:02]Liondo of Jakarta, Alexis [0:16:08], Istanbul, and tonight’s speaker, Wenhui Lim of SPARK, Singapore.
But we also have more. We have some fresh local talent, the exuberant and innovative practices of [0:16:22 Maytree]Studios and Artelier Chen Hung. They’re performing in a sort of double-header on emerging practice, which should be fantastic.
We’ve got new academics and practitioners to our school, [0:16:34 MugayBelec and Fred Fiallo]of UQ Architecture and their practice F Flat, very recently of Istanbul and now of West End. They’re coming to speak just Easter.
We’ve also invited some interstate colleagues to join us, of course. In two weeks we have Jeremy McLeod from Breathe Architecture. He is going to speak about the architect as develop a model of nightingale which is the talk of Melbourne and is also currently keeping planning authorities there very busy, but it’s attracting unprecedented interest. He hasn’t spoken in Brisbane before. I’m sure that’s going to be a really important and exciting lecture. So look out for when those tickets go online in a couple of weeks.
To complete the series we’ve got Chris Welsh of Welsh & Major who will be giving us a tour of some of her gorgeous heritage adaptive reuse projects and other Sydney projects. We finish all the way off in May with William Smart of Smart Design Studios speaking about, amongst other things, his award winning Indigo Slam project, which has been a real highlight of the past 12 months in architecture, especially in terms of awards.
What’s the theme here? We’ve had some wonderfully clever themes in the past that some of my colleagues have managed to encompass the aims of the series, but to be honest, I had a fairly simple set of criteria. I wanted to bring in people whose passions were strong and evident in their design, whose desires to change or work at the edge or work intensely are really clear. What you will see is a collection of eclectic but excellent work, from great practices from a wide range of settings and studios. Our collaborators in the Asia-Pacific design library here at SLQ put this neatly as those pushing the boundaries in architecture at the moment. I think that’s really true.
In also ties in, of course, with the regional boundaries being pushed into Asia with the APAF and tonight’s speaker Wenhui Lim.
Wenhui is a director at SPARK Architects who operate in Singapore and Shanghai and a little bit in London sometimes. After graduating from National University of Singapore, she spent two years working in a Singapore-based architecture practice prior to joining SPARK. She oversees the graphic identity of SPARK studios as well as parallel roles in design leadership and client liaison. Wenhui is responsible for the conception of many of SPARK’s award-winning projects, including Fai-Fah in Bangkok, Starhill Gallery in Kuala space Lumpur and CapitaLand’s Raffles City Ninbgo in China. Please make her welcome.
Wenhui Lim:
Hello. Good evening. Do you mind if I take a picture of you? It’s for my Facebook. Okay. One, two, cheers. Perfect. Thank you.
So, perhaps, best known for designing Clark Quay in Singapore, Stephen and myself have been working in Asia for the past 17 years. The projects that we are known for the Shanghai International Cruise Terminal. We also work a lot in China designing Raffles cities. So we have done about three and one in Singapore as well. Some of the projects that we have built in India, in China, in the Middle East, what you can see on the screen, they are in excess of about two million square metres.
So the skill that we work with range from master planning huge city centres - this is in Abu Dhabi - to designing handbags.
Most of our work is located in mainland China. Some of the skill that we work with could be mind-boggling. Just two months ago we were working on a mixed use project of over half a million square metres, comprising of offices, service apartments, residential and shopping malls.
One of the characteristics of working in China is the fast pace of construction and the very condensed design process. This is not uncommon to get a comment like this from the client. “Please give me five ideas in a week”, or “Please can you complete the design development in two weeks”. Having worked in China for a long time, we have learnt to deal with it in a very positive light.
This is a typical design process that we go through, perhaps, for the rest of the world - concepts, schematic - and then you move on to the tool design tender and then construction. In China sometimes they take your concept and go straight to construction drawings. This gets passed on to the contractor who then produces contractor drawings that we have to check and it gets built. Of course, case in point, I’m going to show you a project that went through exactly that.
This is the [0:22:15]Gallery located in Nanjing. You can see this over here. This is a new city quarter in the Nanjing south railway station. It is a high-speed rail. The design process from start to finish took only about three months. We were appointed in August and the building was finished by the beginning of December. Extraordinary. By then we had worked in China for about 12 years, so we knew what we had to do. We had to make quite efficient, quick decisions. We knew what materials were readily available in the marketplace, so we knew how much they were going to cost and how they will turn out.
We started by considering, as any architect would do, on the design of the building. Because of its location right next to the train station, we had to consider that the building will be perceived from a variety of skills and distance, so, obviously, the passengers from the passing train will be looking at this building, so you would need to have quite a sculptured form, something interesting in the horizon, and also people driving past and people walking from the train station. To our skill, and perceiving this building from a variety of distance, is quite important.
Taking inspiration from the Taj Mahal which is a sculpted form from a distance and there is a filigree of detail as you move closer to it, we decided to use the moiré effect as a screen material. So the moiré effect is, effectively, the same pattern overlay on top of each other that creates a shifting pattern as you move around it. It’s a little bit like the LV façade that you may be familiar with. It’s constructed from aluminium panels, which is relatively cheap in the marketplace.
We did a lot of the testing, very intensively, for a variety of scales, patterns, colour. You can see my colleague looking very stressed. Then quickly get it tested on site. Based on site samples, we decided what colour to use and what scale the perforation should be. Design development drawings were quickly produced in the space of two weeks. This was the finished result.
It was quite exciting for us that we get a call from the client saying “Oh, you know, could you help us out with this project?” and then suddenly three months later you have it ready for publication. That is the excitement and challenge of working in China for us.
As you can see, the form is quite simple and sculptural, accentuated by this line of light in the evening. This is the façade facing the passing train, so there is a big LED screen that advertising on the larger commercial development and the plaza in front of it. Because of this layering of the screen, the colour sort of changes as you move around the building as well, which is why we quite like.
The next project I’m going to show you is of exactly the same scale, just under a thousand square metres, a very small building, but it’s in a different part of the world, in Bangkok, and of a very different nature and program.
Fai-Fah[0:26:14]is a community project, is essentially the refurbishment of two shop houses to house a free school for underprivileged children. It’s located in the [0:26:29] district, about an hour’s drive from Bangkok city centre. This is what it looks like. This is not a conservation building, so we were free to do structural changes for site changes. This is just one unit. So imagine two of these units with the wall knocked down in between. The client asked us to design a building for this project. The client is the TMB Bank. They’re not developers. They’re sponsoring the project because of the corporate social responsibility. They want to appear as not just about making money.
They asked us to design this building. We thought it would be a great idea if we could get the children from the community to contribute to the design process. We held a number of workshops over a few weekends with the children to conjure some ideas of what they would like to have in their school. It’s been a very, very rewarding process.
Architects tend to be a little bit boring after a while. We’re always wearing black, we are worried about using colours in buildings. Children are not afraid to express what they think and they draw whatever they like. There are some great ideas in some of the drawings that we translate into the building elements. Nice colours in the building and then having the name of the project on the façade, having a screen. It’s just not encumbered by all the baggage that we adults have.