Architectural Practice

Be it a jazz club in Beijing or a remote village in eastern China, Chiasmus Partners approaches each project as an invitation to explore, interpret and blur boundaries

Over tea at New York's Baccarat Hotel, James Wei Ke, design principal at Chiasmus Partners, shows me photos of his firm's latest project, a village in Zhejiang province that resembles a scene from a traditional Chinese ink wash painting.

Flanked by limestone cliffs and lush tea plantations, Chayuan Village dates to the Qing dynasty, but like many rural towns, it fell into disrepair as local populations, struggling to transition to the new economy, left to find work in larger cities. ‘Many of the village houses were in very poor and sometimes precarious condition,' Wei Ke recalls of his initial site visit.

Over the last four years he's worked to restore the homes, adding thermal insulation and modern sanitation and turning them into a destination for what he calls ‘slow tourism'. ‘The model is akin to the pensione in Italy,' he explains. Residents will remain in their own homes, and once the structures are renovated and, in some cases, rebuilt, they'll be able to rent out their extra rooms as hospitality spaces.

During the restoration, Wei Ke ‘intermingled' the new structures with traditional rammedearth walls and used as many local and recycled materials as possible. The beauty of the vernacular and the sense of timelessness are shaped by a fusion of old and new forms. ‘We really shunned the making of architectural statements,' he says. ‘Instead, we searched for a type of architecture that would blend into the existing fabric of the village and its surrounding landscape.'

The tranquil village is worlds away from the glass and steel peaks of midtown Manhattan, but Wei Ke, who founded Chiasmus with Hyunho Lee in 2005, appears to transition seamlessly between continents and cultures. His firm now has offices in Beijing, Seoul and Newport Beach, and works across a range of typologies and scales, from performance spaces and commercial towers to private residences in Asia and beyond.

In China, the firm has completed several highprofile performance spaces, including Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai and Blue Note jazz club in Beijing. For the latter, which is located adjacent to the Forbidden City, the firm designed long passageways with sudden turns and openings, a spatial unfolding conceived to echo that of Beijing's hutongs. ‘We believe the spatial and structural characteristics of a building are inseparable from its function and meaning,' says Wei Ke. ‘The boundaries between form and content become blurred.'

This blurring also occurs at Urban Hamlet, a residential commission Hyunho Lee recently completed on the outskirts of Daejeon in South Korea. Lee experimented with the concept of public versus private in the family context to design a home that is its own kind of village, with programmes that shift between intimate and personal, and open and communal. ‘Residential architecture should facilitate the relationships between family members,' says Wei Ke.

How this is achieved, though, varies from scheme to scheme. ‘To Chiasmus there is no such thing as ordinary questions and fixed answers,' concludes Wei Ke. ‘Each project is a new invitation, an opportunity for creative interpretation.'

US- and Asia-based Chiasmus Partners created the intimate Micro-Theater performance space in Beijing’s historic Liu Hai Hutong. The area’s urban typology of long passageways with sudden openings is echoed in the firm’s design of Blue Note jazz club in the same city Image copyright Chiasmus Partners

This page and facing page Chayuan Village in China’s Zhejiang province dates to the Qing dynasty but fell into disrepair as the population dwindled. Chiasmus co-founder James Wei Ke is leading a project to modernise the villagers’ homes and add new context-sensitive structures, with the plan to eventually take advantage of the spectacular location for slow tourism Images by Arch-Exist photography / YuChi Li