Penda is a firm on the up. The experimental studio, a global practice based in Beijing, China, and Vienna, Austria, has gone from strength to strength since winning an A+Award in May 2015 for the distinctive Ice and Snow Apartment in the Chinese capital. In the following six months, the architects have been hard at work on projects across Asia, developing new building systems that have the potential to change the face of architecture in the Far East and beyond. I chatted with founding partner Chris Precht on the firm’s award-winning project, their latest explorations into ecological construction processes, and the future for one of the globe’s most exciting young firms.
Paul Keskeys: First, I wanted to congratulate you on your A+Award that you won earlier this year! What do you think drew the public to vote for your apartment?
Chris Precht: I think the project is quite unique because, normally, when you design a residential interior, it’s the most difficult thing to do, it’s the most personal project you can work on. But, in this case, it was not really a residential project, it was more like a vacation home. Therefore, you can be a little bit more experimental as an architect. Normally, you design a center for life, but this one is just a center for a weekend a couple of times in the year, when the client goes with his friends to ski. So, therefore, we could give the interior a topic.
Ice and Snow Apartment, Hebei, China
You cannot usually do that with interior projects, but here we could have a themed concept that would allow the client and his friends to be fully surrounded by the winter experience of Hebei. This is actually the city that will host the skiing events at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2022, so it’s a nice skiing area. Maybe this one talks a bit louder to the audience; we were able to plan it in a way so that, rather than just experiment with materials, we could also experiment with form. This makes it more unique, I think.
PK: You’ve gotten many great projects on the go since receiving your award. The Rising Canes prototype is fascinating. What were your motives behind exploring a new kind of ecological building process?
CP: When I look out of the window at the moment [in Beijing], I’m surrounded by a layer of smog, and we almost never see the horizon. By 2050, we have an estimation of nine billion people on Earth, so I think there is a need to rethink the process of architecture. Architecture and the building industry is a huge factor in pollution, so I think that is a responsibility for architects, and the Bamboo City with its Rising Canes system is one project that aims to address this.
When we use one cane of bamboo, we have to plant two new bamboo to continue growth. So there’s always a circulation of building materials. This one is a more ecological way of growing a village.
Rising Canes Pavilion, Beijing, China
PK: That makes a lot of sense. It grows very quickly, so that can also help.
CP: Yes! Bamboo can grow up to 1.4 meters a day. Within a couple of years, the bamboo is ready to be used for construction. It’s a fantastic material, one that we want to explore more.
PK: How far do you think you can go with bamboo as a structural material? Can you use it for any height or size of building?
CP: I think how far you can go depends on where you are located on the globe. To have specifications, regulations, and code is extremely difficult with bamboo because there is no standard for the material. Its width and the thickness varies a lot. It works a bit more as an open approach to architecture, and it’s more usable in Southern regions. In the North, it doesn’t make any sense to use bamboo because you have to import it from the South, so the carbon footprint gets higher. Where you are determines what you can do.
Rising Canes Pavilion, Beijing, China
These are the next steps we are investigating — to work out how high you actually can go with this structure. It has structure capabilities of what steel has, so it’s possible to go up pretty high. We are exploring this in more detail.
PK: Can you tell me a little about your competition entry for the Bauhaus Museum?
CP: Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, said that pure beauty is a combination of form and technique. So, a simple form and a lot of technique, this was the principle of Bauhaus. We wanted to spin this idea a little bit further so it was truly communicated to people who are in the park and the people who are in the museum.
So we have all the public areas featured in two park pockets, which can rotate around their own axis and adapt to whatever’s happening in the surroundings. We spent a lot of time figuring this out because whenever you have rotating parts in architecture, infrastructure like electricity, water, and so forth becomes more complex. We didn’t get chosen, but it went on to the second stage of the competition out of 830 participants in the first stage. Although it didn’t get chosen in the end, it was a very fun project and very informative project to work on as a firm.
We’d like to explore transformable architecture some more. Modular systems like the Rising Canes, they’re also transformable because plants and nature can be implemented and they will grow on the structure. This will transform the outlook of the building. The Bauhaus does it more functionally when it transforms. I think transformable architecture is a big topic for us right now.
PK: You obviously learned a lot from Gropius in that process. Do you have any other architectural heroes that influence your work?
There are so many to choose from. I always loved Louis Kahn for his understanding of tangible and non-tangible spaces and how light actually weaves material and form. I was always very impressed by his work.
At the moment, I like Von Trong Nghia a lot. I think what they are doing in Vietnam is really fantastic and speaks exactly to this notion of architecture and nature getting in harmony and that architecture does not necessarily need to destroy nature in order to get built. This balance of keeping nature, or using architecture for plants to grow and so forth, is something I very much admire.
Exploratory model for Vijayawada Garden Estate, Vijayawada, India
PK: Do you have any exciting projects in the pipeline that you’re working on right now? What’s up ahead for Penda?
CP: We’re pretty busy at the moment, thank god! We are working on a couple of projects in India, which is very exciting because we are getting out of China a little bit, to the Southern regions of Asia. We are working on two residential projects there. We are also working on a small school in Singapore. We are working on a Buddha hotel in Beijing.
Vijayawada Garden Estate, Vijayawada, India
Buddha, in this sense, is a very calm place near the city in order for citizens to get out and leave city life behind. This is very important because, in Beijing, there are not many areas where you can really do that; you are surrounded by pollution and by noise. My partner Dayong is very influenced by Buddhism, so this one really closes the circle for the office. We are very excited to work on this project.