jianwai soho + zumthor

Jianwai SOHO – An Art of Experience

On case study from Yamamoto and theories from Peter Zumthor

Nicholas Socrates

AR1Ad040 Architecture Reflections

(2009-2010 Q4)

Teacher: Nelson Motto

12 January 2011

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1. Introduction

Memorable experiences of architecture break through our consciousness. People who visit,

work and live in architecture identify themselves within the space. Architecture is the art of

bringing together beings and the world, and this intervention takes place through our senses.

Experiencing architecture is multi-sensory. Qualities of space, matter and scale are measured

together by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle. Architecture strengthens

one’s sense of being in the world, and this is basically an enforced experience of the self.

Instead of mere vision, or the use of the five classical senses, architecture can involve several

realms of sensory experience simultaneously, which interact and fuse into each other.1

“There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it. Sometimes I can

almost feel a particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a

spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still

seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I

remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I

can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter

the kitchen, the only really brightly lit room in the house.

[...] Memories like these contain the deepest architectural experience that I know. They are

the reservoirs of the architectural atmospheres and images which I explore in my work as an

architect.” 2

Light, form, colour, sound, movement, texture and smell, are examples of how architects have

created certain atmospheres. These atmospheres are the stimuli in Peter Zumthor’s basic

model of emotions. Similarly, architect Riken Yamamoto also has this way to feel and design

architecture. In this essay, I am going to explore the case study Jianwai SOHO designed by

Yamamoto combined with Zumthor’s theories on experiencing architecture by all the senses.

1 Experiencing Workshop, Available at:

http://issuu.com/simondroog/docs/workshop_experience?mode=embed&layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml&showFlipBtn=true&AID=10829131&PID=3662453&SID=skim725X515840

2 Peter Zumthor, “A Way of Looking at Things” (Spon Press, 2006), P 1.

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2. Background

“Large, high French windows let the sunshine in, bathing the rooms and reflecting off the

white surfaces. This technique is widely used in Japanese interior design, and Riken

Yamamoto makes better use of it than anyone.” 3

Jianwai SOHO is located at 39 East Third Ring Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing (opposite

the China World Trade Center). The buildings have a total gross floor area of 700,000 square

meters on a site of 169,000 square meters. Jianwai SOHO includes 20 high rise towers and

four villas. There are 20 rooftop gardens and 16 pedestrian lanes. This Project was completed

in 2007.

Redstone Industrie invited the Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto to design a project in

Beijing. Beijing is where Riken was born, and the project was where he could realize an

architectural concept that he had failed to achieve in Japan. This concept was SOHO, standing

for “Small Office Home Office”. This architectural concept was in line with the philosophy of

Pan Shiyi, chairman of Redstone. Jianwai SOHO, is a housing project which combines

housing and working space through the adoption of information technology. The high-rise

SOHO buildings, together with the China World Trade Center, lend Beijing a cosmopolitan

air. 4

There are several hundred stores at Jianwai SOHO, including Starbucks Flagship Store,

Tongrentang Flagship Store, Yuxiang Renjia Flagship Restaurant, Dong Tian Image Styling,

Markor Furnishings, Ajisen Ramen, Wendy Wu Restaurant and many other stylish boutiques.

These shops, along with the several hundred companies that have moved in or signed leases,

have turned Jianwai SOHO into one of the busiest urban centers integrating residential areas,

offices, recreation facilities and retail outlets. An increasing number of commercial, cultural,

and fashion events have taken place at Jianwai SOHO. At the Jianwai SOHO Summer

Carnival, which runs for four months each year, pop stars, poets, artists and writers present

concerts, poetry recitals, street displays and theme salons to audiences who come in large

3 Jianwai SOHO: Leader in a New Way of Life, Available at: http://www.sohochina.com/en/news/detail.asp?id=21487&cid=12

4 Jianwai SOHO Official Website Available at: http://www.sohochina.com/en/jianwai/index.asp

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numbers from all over the city. Fashion shows of famous brands have also been held here.

Each year, Jianwai SOHO plays host to over 40 events of various types. Jianwai SOHO has

introduced not only a new style of housing, but also a new way of living.5

The building and all its spaces and elements make up a total environment where every detail

belongs to the same family of forms. Every object relate to its neighbouring objects. Even the

SOHO’s smallest interior details, lounges, chairs, signs, and telephone booths were designed

to harmonize with the shaped buildings. He wanted passengers passing through the building

to experience a fully-designed environment, in which each part arises from another and

everything belongs to the same formal world.

Thirteen pedestrian streets connect the fourteen buildings at Jianwai SOHO. The design of the

underground garage includes a sunken grass field, lending the whole area the quality of a

three-dimensional space. Jianwai SOHO is located in the Beijing Central Business District

(CBD), but its streets are filled with human activity, in strong contrast to the unfortunate

situation of lively daytimes but lonely evenings common to US and European CBDs. Riken

explained that his design of the streets was inspired by his experience of Ceuta's traditional

alleyways.

“I would like to build Jianwai SOHO into a place with alleys running between buildings for

people to explore. I do not want to call it a street block because it is not a closed, monotonous

space, but rather an open place with department buildings, stores and offices in it.”

“I gained my inspiration from a Moroccan city called Ceuta. Every possible thing--human

beings, donkey’s dancing, sheep’s bleat, shops, ancient houses mosques, restaurants, the

fragrance of mint and tobacco, and the odor of human bodies--were mixed together

indiscriminately. Passing through an alleyway lined with souvenir shops aimed at tourists

and brushing away the importunate hands of vendors, I suddenly arrive at a street of houses.

There is an entrance to a mosque, well ornamented with strikingly beautiful tiles, and then a

small square. Corridors of houses cross casually overhead. In no time at all I feel lost. The

entire city is a maze.” 6

5 Jianwai SOHO: Leader in a New Way of Life, Available at: http://www.sohochina.com/en/news/detail.asp?id=21487&cid=12

6Jianwai SOHO/Riken Yamamoto, Available at: http://www.chinese-architecture.com/jianwai-sohoriken-yamamoto.html

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Yamamto himself says about his design: ‘…buildings in which the architecture combined the

surroundings would express the drama and specialness and excitement of travel… a place of

movement and transition…’ Movement, as one of the architectural means that Yamamoto

used to create specific architectural atmospheres, can elicit specific emotions.

As we have said, the majority of people consider architecture and space as an essentially

visual experience. But in this case, Yamamoto design Jianwai SOHO not only as single

building blocks where space in between the buildings is the emptiness, but also as a great

environment for life; an environment that is stimulating to the senses. It is obviously light and

shadow, proportion and colour, perspective and decoration, sounds that reverberate, surfaces

that our feet walk upon, textures that we touch, temperatures that determine our degree of

comfort and smells that surround and seduce us. All these things together multiply one

another into an ensemble that we perceive as a whole SOHO surrounding us, the movement of

life; feeling and experiencing it as a whole.

3. Case Studies

The buildings in Jianwai SOHO can serve to move occupants emotionally and elevate their

experience. Every space is about the layering of perceptional stimuli for all of the senses. Like

a musical composition, spatial features come together into a symphony for occupants to

experience. In Jianwai SOHO, there is a sense of pressure, a sense of balance, a sense of

rhythm, a sense of movement, a sense of life, a sense of warmth, even a sense of self, which

psychology is beginning to recognize. 7

3.1. Sight

The eyes want to collaborate with the other senses. They define the interface between the skin

and the environment between the opaque interiority of the body and the exteriority of the

world.

7 Rasmussen S.E., “Experiencing Architecture” (The MIT Press, 1962)

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While Zumthor imagines his childhood experience by visualisation by the other senses,

Yamamoto was also firstly touched by seeing Ceuta’s busy and amazing city image and then

he went on to design Jianwai SOHO.

Jianwai SOHO has a greatly appealing image because of its variety, eventfulness, possibilities

of choices for walking through and the stimulation of an intense atmosphere that each

individual can explore a specific and unique story by themselves. For many visitors and

residents in SOHO, these paths are dominant elements of SOHO’s image. They observe this

SOHO city while walking through it. It is designed as a maze which can be explored by

visualisation.

There is a potpourri of every conceivable thing. It is not just the roads that crisscross. Paths

along with the other environmental elements are arranged and related. The passageways,

small squares, public green spaces and shopping streets all do so, sometimes drawing the

pedestrian unknowingly into a building. From a street so narrow two people can barely

squeeze past each another, one enters a square where people are gathered. Every step forward

brings a change of scenery. The pace is dizzying. Moving through these spaces, one can

almost feel the SOHO city breathing in and out.

People walking in SOHO can also visualize the neat planning grid of the district planning by

looking at the “edges” of SOHO buildings. By edges, I mean the linear elements of façade of

the SOHO buildings. One edge closes one block off from another. The similar façades of the

SOHO buildings as a whole give us a “break-linear” image, like a dash line, to some extent

leading people in certain directions of this city maze. These edge elements, as dominant as

paths, are for many people important organizing features of the SOHO city.

As a district part of Beijing, in a sense we deem that the SOHO maze is composed by several

elements sharing similar characters – similar overpasses, similar facades and etc. Despite the

similarities existing everywhere in this district, Jianwai SOHO still stands out in the

surroundings while still in keeping with the similarity of its neighbourhood by a ‘30 degree

strategy’.

In order to eliminate interference from one building upon another, Riken Yamamoto shaped

each structure to be slender, and angled them at 30 degrees eastward. In this way, every

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apartment will boast access to both moderate sunshine and privacy.8 Overpasses extend over

them, so that one has the impression of being in an underground passage, but in the next

moment the sun in beating down from directly overhead, making everything a dazzling white.

This feature was highly appreciated in the bidding evaluation and might be called a minor

invention at least in Beijing where history animates the present, almost all buildings are

oriented on a north-south axis and nowhere can we find any large buildings that are even

slightly angled.

3.2. Hearing

“I gained my inspiration from a Moroccan city called Ceuta. Every possible thing--human

beings, donkey’s dancing, sheep’s bleat, shops, ancient houses mosques, restaurants, the

fragrance of mint and tobacco, and the odor of human bodies--were mixed together

indiscriminately.”9

“I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet; […] I can hear the heavy front door

closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen…”10

Hearing is another way of experiencing things or architecture supported by both Yamamoto

and Zumthor. In terms of architecture territory, sounds measure space and make its scale

understandable. Sounds reflect in a space, and that way it gives us an impression of its form

and material.

When we stand on the ground floor outside Jianwai SOHO buildings, we can “hear” the

people of this area, as internalised by Yamamoto. People are given a parallel experience by

closing their eyes and putting themselves in their surroundings, especially at night. Hearing

busy shops besides them and people talking and walking through the over bridges connecting

buildings above the ground, they can imagine the layout of this area, and enjoy a spatial

experience by listening to the seeming remote traffic sound and construction sound nearby.

They can hear how spaces or buildings radiate out from themselves by different echoes.

8 Jianwai SOHO Official Website Available at: http://www.sohochina.com/en/jianwai/index.asp

9 Jianwai SOHO/Riken Yamamoto, Available at: http://www.chinese-architecture.com/jianwai-sohoriken-yamamoto.html


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“The live reflections of echo and re-echo within a stone cathedral increase our awareness of

the vastness, geometry and material of its space. Imagine the same space with carpet and

acoustically softened… a spatial and experiential dimension of the architecture is lost. We

could redefine space by shifting our attention from the visual to how it is shaped by resonant

sounds, vibrations of materials and textures."(Steven Holl)

“Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-

directional”.11 One regards an object, while sound approaches; the eye reaches, while the ear

receives. SOHO buildings don’t respond to our stare, but they do send back our echo. Every

particular building has its own characteristic sound because of different volumes that they

have, which forms a grade of intimacy of distance, an invitation or rejection. Through its echo,

a space is understood as equally as through its visual shape. This is often unrecognized by

people because the acoustic observation is generally an unaware background experience. But

still, this is one of the goals that the designer wanted to achieve—to make people listen, listen

in the maze.

3.3. Touch

“Sometimes I can almost feel a particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped

like the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden.”12

The skin reads texture, weight, density and temperature. ‘The only sense which can give a

sensation of spatial depth is touch, because touch senses the resistance and three-

dimensionalality of shapes and material bodies, and therefore makes us aware that things

extend away from us in all our direction.’13 Vision exposes what the touch already knows. We

could consider the sense of touch as the unconsciousness of vision.

In Zumthor’s theory, “touch” is an important way to feel/design architecture. Despite that this

point doesn't seem to be an indispensable means of Yamamoto’s designing, we still can find

out one or two in the deisgn of Jianwai SOHO which is involved with “design via touching”.

11 Architectural Means, Available at: http://experiencingarchitecture.com/2010/05/18/architectural-means


13 Architectural Means, Available at: http://experiencingarchitecture.com/2010/05/18/architectural-means

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The first way to experience SOHO by “touch” is “texture from touch” which refers to the

processing of information about surface material and microgeometry obtained from tactile

exploration. Though textural information can be obtained both visually and auditorily, touch

yields much finer and more complex textural information than do the other sensory

modalities.14 When we run our fingers across a surface of the SOHO buildings, we perceive

the surface as being rough, like sandpaper, or smooth, like glass; the surface may also vary

along other sensory stimuli, such as hardness (e.g. facade texure) vs. softness (e.g. grass in

green space), stickiness vs. slipperiness. Also, whether a texture is thermally isolating or

thermally conductive (like metal) contributes to the textural percept. Different aspects of

texture are encoded by different populations of receptors.

Large, high French windows let the sunshine in, bathing the rooms and reflecting off the

white surfaces. People touch the sunshine and feel the warmth---this is the second aspect

which is associated with “touch”. This technique is widely used in Japanese interior design,

and Riken Yamamoto makes better use of it than anyone. In Riken's design, whiteness, light

colors and decent furniture have formed an unprecedented fashion in exterior and interior

decoration in Jianwai SOHO. No matter what Colorfulness called it, 'whiteness guided' or

'whiteness dominated' for the texture of building is not only the interior that is gray and white

but also the whole building.

3.4. Smell

[…] restaurants, the fragrance of mint and tobacco, and the odor of human bodies--were

mixed together indiscriminately.15

[…] were hard and unyielding under my feet, and a smell of oil paint issued from the kitchen

cupboard.16

The most determined memory of any space is often its smell. ‘A particular smell makes us

unknowingly re-enter a space completely forgotten by the retinal memory: the nostrils awaken

14 Rebecca Maxwell , Peter-John Cantrill, “Beyond Appearances - Architecture and the senses” Available at: http://www.ebility.com/articles/beyondappearances.php

15 Jianwai SOHO/Riken Yamamoto, Available at: http://www.chinese-architecture.com/jianwai-sohoriken-yamamoto.html


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a forgotten image, and we are enticed to enter a vivid daydream. The nose makes the eyes

remember.’17 Memory and imagination remain associated in the meantime.

Jianwai SOHO is a combination of multi-functional buildings. People walking by can “smell”

the “function” of SOHO city. It is not complicated for people walking to be aware of the

location of the restaurants, clothes shops, copy shops, supermarkets and central green space.

In light of this, smell is a last but not least way for people to experience Jianwai SOHO by

stimulated olfaction.

4. Conclusion

Our experiences are the result of our perception with our senses. We experience by what we

see, what we hear, smell and touch. Without our senses there would be no experience. From

our childhood on we learn from our experiences with the world around us. Rasmussen says:

“By a variety of experiences (the child) quite instinctively learns to judge things according to

weight, solidity, texture, heat-conducting ability.” All this also holds true for architecture.

The stimuli we perceive with our senses tell us all we need to know about a space.

In architecture all senses are important, but the sense of sight is very dominant. The other

senses are underappreciated in architecture. We could pay more attention to the other senses,

as the combined perception of all the senses gives us our total experience of a space.

Researches show us that perceiving solely with vision gives us a distorted perception of

space, especially in comparison with the separate use of smell and touch. They tend to

describe space a lot more accurately. We leave so much of our spatial experience to chance if

we leave the other senses untouched during the design process.

“[…] modern design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but has left the body and

the other senses, as well as our memories, imaginations and dreams, homeless.” (Pallasmaa)

Bibliography:

Books:

17 Rebecca Maxwell , Peter-John Cantrill, “Beyond Appearances - Architecture and the senses” Available at: http://www.ebility.com/articles/beyondappearances.php

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Peter Zumthor, “A Way of Looking at Things” (Spon Press, 2006)

Rasmussen S.E., “Experiencing Architecture” (The MIT Press, 1962)

Article in Books/on Internet:

Kevin Lynch, “The City Image and Its Elements”, Melville C. Branch, Urban Planning

Theory (University of Southern Califonia, 1975)

Rebecca Maxwell , Peter-John Cantrill, “Beyond Appearances - Architecture and the senses”

Available at: http://www.ebility.com/articles/beyondappearances.php (Accessed 9 January

2011)

Internet:

Multiplicity and Memory: Talking About Architecture with Peter Zumthor, Available at:

http://www.archdaily.com/85656/multiplicity-and-memory-talking-about-architecture-with-

peter-zumthor (Accessed 10 January 2011)

Experiencing Workshop, Available at:

http://issuu.com/simondroog/docs/workshop_experience?mode=embed&layout=http%3A%2

F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml&showFlipBtn=true&AID=10829131&PI

D=3662453&SID=skim725X515840 (Accessed 10 January 2011)

Architectural Means, Available at:

http://experiencingarchitecture.com/2010/05/18/architectural-means (Accessed 8 January

2011)

Jianwai SOHO: Leader in a New Way of Life, Available at:

http://www.sohochina.com/en/news/detail.asp?id=21487&cid=12 (Accessed 11 January 2011)

Jianwai SOHO Official Website Available at:

http://www.sohochina.com/en/jianwai/index.asp (Accessed 1 January 2011)

Jianwai SOHO/Riken Yamamoto, Available at: http://www.chinese-architecture.com/jianwai-sohoriken-yamamoto.html (Accessed 1 December 2010)

jianwai soho + zumthor

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