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    China Home: Inspirational Design Ideas
    China Home: Inspirational Design Ideas
    China Home: Inspirational Design Ideas
    Ebook347 pages1 hour

    China Home: Inspirational Design Ideas

    By Michael Freeman

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    About this ebook

    With rich, detailed photographs and insightful commentary, this Chinese interior design book will provide you with plenty of fresh and colorful decorating ideas.

    China, long dormant in the world of design and residential architecture, has recently burst onto the world stage. Like everything else in China today, contemporary Chinese design combines elegant and deep-seated traditions with the exploratory ideas of a younger generation of designers.

    From revitalized hutongs in Beijing and lane houses in Shanghai to shiny new villas in Pudong and sleek urban apartments in Hong Kong, the best modern Chinese interior design blends the legacy of the past with a fresh appetite for the new. China Home explores this burgeoning phenomenon with images taken in more than 100 gorgeous homes, and will become an indispensable source book for everyone looking for ideas to create and re-work their living space.

    Design topics include:
    • Designing the Contemporary Chinese Home
    • Entrances and Living Spaces
    • Dining Rooms, Kitchens and Studies
    • Bedrooms and Bathrooms
    • Furnishings and Accents
    • Courtyards, Gardens and Terraces
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTuttle Publishing
    Release dateJun 26, 2012
    ISBN9781462908653
    China Home: Inspirational Design Ideas
    Author

    Michael Freeman

    Michael Freeman is a forensic epidemiologist and consultant in forensic medicine, working in civil, criminal, and academic venues. He has provided expert testimony more than 1,000 times in a wide variety of civil cases, including injury and death litigation, product liability, toxic tort litigation, tobacco litigation, medical negligence, as well as in homicide and other criminal matters. Dr. Freeman has more than 170 published scientific papers, books, and book chapters, primarily focusing on issues relating to forensic applications of epidemiology and general and specific causation. He has published research on the topics of traffic crash-related injury and death, injury biomechanics and injury causation, genocide, cancer epidemiology, chronic pain mechanisms, and adult autologous stem cell therapy, inter alia. Dr. Freeman holds academic appointments at the CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care at Maastricht University Medical Center, Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, and Aarhus University, Department of Forensic Medicine. He serves as an Affiliate Medical Examiner with the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's office in Pittsburg, PA. Dr. Freeman holds a doctor of medicine degree (Med.Dr., Umeå University), a doctorate in in public health with a major focus in epidemiology (Ph.D., Oregon State University), and an MPH degree (Oregon State University), inter alia.

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      Book preview

      China Home - Michael Freeman

      DESIGNING THE CONTEMPORARY CHINESE HOME

      Homes are fundamentally spaces, and the traditional chinese conception of space demands an appreciation of unity, wholeness, balance and symmetry. In the chinese world-view, there is interconnectedness, and the home—how it is arranged and what it contains—cannot exist independently. We can see a recurring and well-defined spatial theme in chinese history that covers philosophy, religious thought, art and design. Spatial qualities are rhythmic, and crisscrossed and interwoven into a fine texture that mirrors nature, a tapestry comprising yin and yang, wuxing (the Five elements) or the phases of the dynamic sixty-four trigrams. In this sense, the traditional chinese house is predominantly based upon a planar spatial schema, with orientation a key element. The axis was the primary orientational reference. From the records, east– west orientation once occupied the principal place in chinese culture instead of north–south orientation. Such traditions, over time, became the ordering structure in interior layouts; for example, in the inner halls of chinese houses, the west was usually reserved for sleeping and the east for daily activities.

      Equally important is an understanding of the chinese physical environment as a result of a syncretic relationship between confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. one of the effects of this was the way in which the home space was related to the surroundings, which affects not just the architecture of the buildings but also the view from within and how that connects interior with exterior. The influence of the concept of the courtyard house is hard to overestimate, even though such courtyards themselves are absent from the majority of contemporary homes. One of the functions of the courtyard was to ensure privacy for the family, of course, while creating a common area onto which individual interior spaces opened. But it also fulfilled the important function of reminding and emphasizing the oneness of man and nature. The enclosed open space within a home is a microcosm of the natural world, bringing the symbols and details of nature into a shared space. Courtyard in this sense also stands for gardens, terraces and even balconies, and in the details of structure we can see how architects and designers work to make sure that the interior and exterior interpenetrate each other. Bringing the natural world into the home, even if in symbolic form, such as carefully chosen rocks, is the legacy of this original chinese idea.

      The entrance hall to the Beijing house of artist Shao Fan, which he designed himself. A freestanding wall clad in dark gray wood follows traditional principles of breaking a straight-line view from the door, behind and into the house and courtyard.

      The Bamboo Wall House, designed by architect Kengo Kuma, makes deliberate use of cheap construction materials—the poles used in scaffolding—but integrated with smoother and softer materials, such as the plastic box wall encasing feathers and the cloth-upholstered sofas.

      These values of space inherited from tradition are now being reinterpreted. The scale of this was heavily influenced by the first round of real estate development in china, which since 1997 awoke a certain awareness of design and architecture, with the launching of magazines in this domain that began to explore what should be china’s own way of contemporary living. This was accompanied by the end of the traditional welfare housing allocation system in chinese cities and the large-scale residential development of Bi guiyuan in Panyu in guangzhou. Two particular events reflected this change. One was when the now hugely successful Soho developers Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin commissioned architect Yung Ho Chang to design and construct a country villa for them, creating a vogue of modern architectural design which broke the popularity of the european classical style. A second was the reconstruction of abandoned warehouse space along Shanghai’s Suzhou creek by Taiwanese architect Deng Kun Yen. Despite initial resistance, this sparked a re-examination of abandoned aesthetics that showed the possibility of integrating old and new, and made a positive impact on later interior design. At that time, Wang Mingxian wrote in his Fragments of Space History, it expressed the participation in current culture with avant-garde colors which embody a brand-new space concept.

      We say ‘traditional’ but this does not mean past and gone. Despite the huge, century-long disruption of chinese society and culture, there is now a revival of interest in the rich history of chinese belief, thought and artistic sensibility that are ultimately expressed in a way of life. That way of life is naturally reflected in the home space. With the current rapid social development and changes, many chinese are eager to trace and recover lost cultural traditions and to redefine a chinese sense in their homes, as a kind of ‘oasis’ in the strange and fragmented outer world. Chinese architects and designers operate in this context, and the best of them are working in ways that attempt to integrate international design vision and professional experience into china’s reality for chinese living. Naturally, their views vary in how to balance international concepts—for which read Western, essentially—and chinese sensibility. At one end of the spectrum, Shao Fan, whose house appears here, believes that a true fusion of Western and chinese art and design is not possible, and that the chinese should concentrate on articulating their own cultural legacy. This means understanding not just the history of artistic and design development over the dynasties but also the world-view that these express. As an internationally recognized artist, designer, architect and garden designer, in the tradition of the literati (wen ren), Shao is particularly well-placed to comment on the contemporary development of chinese ways of living. He claims to be an unrepentant classicist, and draws strength and ideas from as far back as the Song dynasty, as evidenced in the houses he has built for himself and his friends. Like fellow artist Ai Weiwei, his self-designed house is a contemporary evolution of the traditional courtyard house, in gray brick and using modern materials as appropriate to create a series of interlocking spaces that turn the dwelling into a varied, comfortable and even philosophical experience. In both Shao and ai’s concept of this form, interior volumes have been enlarged and simplified in terms of actual space and height, and in the way they draw in more light than was traditional.

      Others see the ideal as a response to a new interpretation of chinese lifestyle, one that fully embraces certain international modern aspects. How to bring about the integration of modern needs with traditional values is problematic, and the relative proportions accorded to modernity and tradition vary widely throughout this book. Both Zhong Song and anderson lee, for example, work conceptually with traditional chinese techniques of space management, and bring this design economy to bear on modern apartment dwellings. The result according to casual observation shows more modernist sense than chinese, with a marked absence of well-known chinese traditional design motifs, yet this is the result of integrating modern and traditional at a deeper, conceptual level.

      The Zhong Ya Ling apartment in Pudong uses white as a foundation for a geometrical arrangement of elements. At the entrance is a display area, a full-height mirror and an antique jacket in the stairwell.

      Renovation of existing architecture and style has been another significant strand, but one that came relatively late. Deng Kun Yen, mentioned above, who moved from Taiwan to Shanghai, played a key role with his conversions of warehouses along the Suzhou creek,

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