This newsletter for the week of May 26 looks at a recently published monograph on Zhang Pengju, an architect practicing in Inner Mongolia. Buildings that merge into the landscape is his forte, so the book from the archive is a related book on the “topographical arts.” In between are the usual headlines and new releases. Happy Memorial Day to my US readers, and happy reading to all!
Book of the Week:
Genuine Construction: Zhang Pengju’s New Regionalism in Inner Mongolia, edited by Zhang Pengju (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
For about four years now, I’ve maintained a spreadsheet with of list of projects that could be called alternately landscrapers, landform buildings, or topographical architecture. Whatever the preferred term may be, it refers to architecture that is part building, part landscape, where one does not take priority over the other. These could be buildings carved into the earth, sloping structures topped by green spaces, buildings that terrace up from the ground, or some other variation in which there is (nearly) as much accessible exterior space as there is enclosed space. As my list of 21st-century projects, both built and in-progress, has grown to around 200, a few repeat architects with a penchant for such an approach have jumped to the fore. Snøhetta, to cite one example, built an opera house in Oslo that people can walk atop and is now realizing the low-slung Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota. Fittingly, Snøhetta and other repeaters on my list are multidisciplinary, with landscape architects working alongside architects. Additionally, there are also places where landform architecture is in abundance, as in a number of houses dotting Greek islands.
One architect who is joining the list with multiple buildings is Zhang Pengju, whose firm, Inner Mongolia Grand Architects, clearly indicates where he works. I say “is joining” because, before receiving the new monograph published by Park Books last month, I was familiar with just one of his buildings: the Hohhot Sculpture Gallery, which has won or been shortlisted for a number of awards in recent years. Little did I know it, but Zhang Pengju is something of an uber-landscraper, an architect who melds building and landscape in many of his firm’s designs, all of which are found in Inner Mongolia, a locale that is apparently as receptive to such an approach as are the Greek islands. Of the seventeen completed projects documented in Genuine Construction, seven of them are now in my spreadsheet—more would be listed if I relaxed my criteria for what fits the definition of landscraper/landform/topographical architecture.
The first of the seventeen projects in the book’s chronological presentation spanning approximately fifteen years is in fact the Hohhot Sculpture Gallery, which was completed in 2023 in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, a naturally beautiful but also highly industrialized region of China. While Hohhot Sculpture Gallery is carved into a one end of a large urban park that is bordered by row upon row of the mid-rise housing Chinese urbanization is known for, most of the projects that follow it are located in remote areas. Quite a few of them are visitor centers: entrances to scenic natural areas that cater to Chinese tourists. Neither imposing or alien, the visitor centers are integrated into their respective landscapes formally, through their materials, and via circulation. The Mazongshan Visitor Center (above), for instance, which sits adjacent to a skiing area, features buildings and terraces where every material is covered in brick. The more remote Jiulongwan Visitor Center, which provides the book its appealing cover image, sits at the convergence of two roads, so it appropriately splits itself into three stone-covered volumes oriented to the T-shaped intersection.
Another standout project is the Qingshuihe County Museum (above), located on a sloping site in Chengguan Town, south of Hohhot. The site moves from a road paralleling the Yellow River up a hill that leads to a city park beyond. The zigzag path is cut into the landscape like a canyon, and the building proper continues that approach, with the museum spaces on one side of the path and offices on the other. Stone is used for the plinth, while earth-colored concrete walls lining the “canyon” give a cave-like impression to the museum’s interior. In his foreword to the monograph, David Leatherbarrow (see also bottom of this newsletter) describes the museum as a “fascinating case of topographical arts […] with its reversals of expectations, improbable but fascinating combinations, and diverse elements that have been brought together to crystalize the landscape in which the route up the hill is situated.”
Even when Zhang Pengju isn’t scraping or forming land, if you will, his buildings are still rooted in their respective sites. This quality arises from the choice of local materials, usually stone and/or brick, a preference for predominantly low-rise volumes, and the provision of generous outdoor spaces, often in materials echoing the walls of the buildings they abut. There is even one instance of adaptive reuse in the book: the transformation of the Wuhai City Yellow River Chemical Plant into a vocational school, where old equipment and spaces are skillfully combined with new construction. Documented with brief descriptions, many photographs, a few drawings, and at least one axonometric detail per project, Genuine Construction provides the most in-depth presentation on Zhang Pengju’s architecture outside China. The ancillary texts focus on the themes in the projects, but missing is autobiographical information about the architect himself and the firm he leads. But given the way his modest buildings defer to their landscapes, I’m not surprised the monograph puts the focus on the projects rather than the architect.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States; a curated list)
-
Le Corbusier’s Millowners Association Building: Between System and Improvisation, by Mehrdad Hadighi (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Millowners’ Association Building in Ahmedabad, designed by Le Corbusier and completed in 1954, has rarely been published, but is nevertheless considered an important milestone in the architect’s work. In addition to numerous scaled drawings, newly produced models clarify the most important design aspects of the building.”
-
Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, edited by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina L. De Leon, Michelle Joan Wilkinson (Buy from The MIT Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A powerful collection of perspectives on the contemporary and evolving meanings of home, and how they capture both the shared and conflicting narratives that impact our country today.” A companion to Making Home, the Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt.
-
Large, Lasting and Inevitable: Jorge Silvetti in Dialogues and Writings on Architecture as a Cultural Practice, by Jorge Silvetti, et. al. (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A journey through the influential work, ideas, and trajectory of Argentinian-born architect Jorge Silvetti articulated through a revealing collection of recent conversations and a selection of his writings.”
-
Play!: A Cultural Perspective on Design of Playgrounds, by Janna Bystrykh and Sanne van den Breemer (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for nai010 Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “With photo documentation of over 200 playgrounds across Rotterdam, Play! records and reflects on the accumulated urban environment of play, annotated with insights from interviews with playground makers, designers and urban thinkers.”
-
The Global Turn: Six Journeys of Architecture and the City, 1945–1989, by Tom Avermaete and Michelangelo Sabatino (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for nai010 Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “An investigation of globalization’s effects on architecture and urban design between the start of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
-
Towards a Nude Architecture: A Visual Compendium of Japanese Hot Springs, by Yuval Zohar (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for nai010 Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Combining photos, drawings, collages and diagrams from over a decade of travel across the country, Towards a Nude Architecture explores [Japan’s hot springs] through an architectural lens, presenting a visual journey of water and steam spanning centuries and geographies.”
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
-
As part of PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, the US Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, Places Journal curated a library on the theme of “the porch.” The list.
-
Over at Common Edge, Michael J. Crosbie reviews Carl Elefante’s Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future, published last month by Island Press.
-
The blog of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah highlights Age-Friendly Futures: Equity by Design, co-authored by Valerie Greer and Linda S. Edelman.
From the Archives:
One of the contributors to Genuine Construction, this week’s Book of the Week, is David Leatherbarrow, the Penn professor best known for two books with Mohsen Mostafavi: On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (1993) and Surface Architecture (2002). His contribution to the monograph on Zhang Pengju most likely stems from his book Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture, which was published in 2004 as part of the “Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture” series edited by John Dixon Hunt. Books on buildings that merge with the landscape have been published before and since Leatherbarrow’s book—most notably Aaron Betsky’s Landscrapers: Building with the Land (2002) and Bjarne Mastenbroek’s Dig it! Building Bound to the Ground (2021)—but while they survey architecture to describe “topographical architecture,” or whatever one wants to call it, Leatherbarrow’s book theorizes toward shifting the practices of architecture and landscape architecture closer to each other.
Simply put, he argues that instead of considering the two professions as the same or different—the prevailing views, he writes—they are actually similar. His aim is “to show that only when architecture and landscape architecture discover the full scope and complexity of their relationships to each other, only when gardens and buildings acknowledge and seek to express their topographical character, will both recover their standing and role in contemporary culture.” Leatherbarrow goes back centuries to explore “how topography changes in time,” “how topography varies from place to place,” and “how topography conceals [and reveals] itself,” but he focuses on just two contemporary projects as bookends to his argument: the Neurosciences Institute (1995) by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and the Wexner Center for the Arts (1989) by Peter Eisenman and Richard Trott with Laurie Olin. The TWBTA project is described in the first chapter as an “earthwork” and an example of topography as “a mosaic integration of the contrasting settings that give life its texture, richness, and spontaneity,” while the forecourt of the Wexner Center appears in the conclusion as a means of summarizing Leatherbarrow’s view of “landscape and architecture as topographical arts.”
It seems to me that in the twenty years since Leatherbarrow’s book the similarity of landscape and architecture has been embraced by some architects—Zhang Pengju and Snøhetta, but also Weiss/Manfredi, WOHA, LANDPROCESS, Nieto Sobejano, and others—but too often landscape is still treated as a layer added to a building, rather than as an integral aspect of it. A true topographical architecture would result from a considered, multidisciplinary approach, not—sorry, Mr. Heatherwick—by topping a building with a thousand trees.
Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome—thank you!
— John Hill
