Published: Tuesday, August 15, 2006
By Julie V. Iovine, Travel & Dining - International Herald Tribune
Ben Wood has neither the theory-ridden vocabulary nor the matte-black wardrobe typical of maverick architects these days. With his gentle paunch, worn leather sandals and grizzly white beard, he comes across as more of a couch potato than a man of action, though the vintage Chinese army motorcycle and sidecar hint at an adventurous spirit.
Still, over the past five years Wood has transformed himself from a successful Boston architect into a Shanghai power broker whose designs translate into billions of dollars in development.
The profession's big players are flocking to China to compete for commissions. Even the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has raved about the opportunities to be had. But Wood is one of the very few allowed to build whole neighborhoods without a local associate or a government institute to sign the construction documents. At his occasional public appearances in the United States, architects line up to seek his advice on how to get in on the action.
"I'm trying to change China, and China has definitely changed me," Wood said during a recent interview on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, where he and his wife were camping in a safari- style tent. "People have no idea of the scope of the work that's up for grabs right now. It's like the Wild West was in America."
The turning point for Wood, now 58, was his 2003 Xintiandi project in central Shanghai, a $200 million two-block "entertainment environment" stuffed with modern restaurants, clubs, cafés and boutiques, accessorized with old bricks, stone gates and ornately carved wooden balconies from the dense warren of old courtyard houses that previously filled those blocks. Xintiandi proved so successful a model for urban redevelopment that it spawned at least dozens of duplicates across the country. Developers now use the term "to Xintiandi" when asking their architects for more aspirational China-lite designs.
Critics, however, argue that Wood has undermined the need to preserve China's fast-vanishing architectural heritage with a pastiche that is only one photo-op away from Disneyland. In The New Yorker magazine Paul Goldberger described Xintiandi as "a stage set of an idyllic past, created so that people in China can experience the same finely wrought balance of theme park and shopping mall that increasingly passes for upscale urban life in the United States." Qingyun Ma, an internationally respected architect in China, said that Xintiandi's influence "is such that every city wants to have one."
Wood has applied his formula to projects all over mainland China, from Chongqing to Wuhan to Hangzhou. In Hangzhou he adapted 10 blocks of a sleepy lakeside area into a resort with pagoda-style roof-scapes, trellis- covered walkways and a high-tech conference center. For his $80 million Cambridge Watertown project in Zhujiajiao, he has proposed narrow canals inspired by China's 13th-century water-town plans stitched together with picturesque foot bridges and semi- detached contemporary-style condos.
"Wood is a star in China," said Cliff Pierson, an editor at Architectural Record magazine who manages a biannual awards program for Chinese architecture. "China needed someone like Wood to show them you can make more money by saving rather than tearing down old buildings. No one had done that before because it was so much easier to work with a blank slate."
Wood casts himself as a kind of swashbuckling suit. After stints as a fighter pilot, restaurateur, ski bum and contractor, he earned his architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, when he was 37. He then spent 10 years working for Ben Thompson, the architect and mastermind of something known in the industry as the festival marketplace. Most visible in places like Faneuil Hall in Boston and South Street Seaport in New York, it is an economic juggernaut of arguable distinction wherein the dilapidated gives way to the upscale and the trendy, all with a dash of old-time historical flavor.
The call to go to China came in 1998, when Wood was running an architecture practice with Carlos Zapata in Boston. The two were invited along with several Western architectural firms to enter a Hong Kong developer's competition for a two-block neighborhood in old Shanghai. There was a catch: The site had to be cleared of undesirable elements. While other architects suggested tearing out the old rabbit warren of courtyard houses, built by the French in the 1860s on interlaced narrow lanes, Wood said he could design around and with them. He got the job.
Working in Shanghai was a revelation. He did not speak Mandarin, and he hiked around the city so he would be able to find his way back to his hotel without relying on a cab. To get a feel for the local vernacular, he asked guides to take him to places that hadn't changed much for a hundred years or since before there was electricity. He was especially struck, he said, by the street life along the narrow alleys in the older parts of the French Concession.
At Xintiandi, Wood fostered communal feeling in some notably un-Chinese ways. Despite having been warned that there is no Chinese tradition for alfresco dining, he designed the neighborhood to be chockablock with outdoor cafés. He also created a wide esplanade sweeping along the edge of an artificial lake.
Photographs show a waterfront view with a swath of well-kept lawn, a string of lampposts along a stone path and various high-rises twinkling at night in the background: hardly a traditional vista for Shanghai.
To make way for all this, many of the 4,500 people who used to live there had to be relocated to modern apartment buildings; those who did not want to go, Wood acknowledged, were likely to find their roofs removed. Such forced relocations are frequently criticized by foreigners. Locals, perhaps used to even more radical changes, seem to take them more in stride. Wood himself simply says that everyone was fairly compensated.
Local land values are now soaring. But Wood said he was most proud of the way that Xintiandi has attracted small entrepreneurs who are buying and renting shop fronts for their own boutique businesses.
"I was working in unknown territory, and sometimes it was scary," he said of that first project. "At the same time here was someplace where I could do more in 15 years than most architects do in their entire careers." So in 2004 he decided to move to China full time.
Two years later he still comes across as a hyped- up romantic who relishes the prospect of living big and does not overly concern himself with compromises that a more fastidious architect might refuse. Wood also said that building in China had an appealing immediacy. "In the United States you are not allowed as an architect to speak to a worker on a construction site, make a suggestion or help figure out a design flaw when it crops up," he said, lamenting the protocols regarding liabilities and the union regulations that govern most American construction sites. On an American project, "you can't say anything at all without a lawyer in tow," he added. "In China they often don't even bother with contracts."
Wood has opened a martini bar, called DR (for Design Research, in tribute to a store founded by Ben Thompson), in Xintiandi that has become a pit stop for architects and developers visiting from abroad. "It has a definite vibe, part SoHo, part Rick's Place," said Pierson of the Architectural Record. "A lot of expats go there, and Wood loves holding court. He wears that beard, and in China they tend to automatically respect people with white beards."
Pierson acknowledged that Wood's approach to architecture would not go over well with Western preservationists. "He keeps facades, moves pieces around, adds windows where there were none," he said. "If he were doing that with historic properties in the U.S., I would be more critical. But for China saving even bits and pieces is an important leap. Ten years from now when preservation there has become more sophisticated, they'll be able to look back and say this was the first important step."
For the next stage in his career Wood wants to design eco-resorts in Yunnan Province, a rolling mountainous and pasture region near the Tibetan border. He envisions visitors staying in tents much like his own on Martha's Vineyard.
He has also bought an old Tibetan farmhouse that he hopes to renovate and where he might be able to keep and fly a 1947 Seabee plane he has had restored. "I'm going to stay in China a while longer," he said. "There are limits to what I can do in the United States. I don't fit in with the CEO culture there. But in China being flamboyant is a good thing."
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