South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 16 November 2011 China’s Diaspora designers face stiff competition in the UK, but offer hope for development despite trouble shaking off the Made-in-China tag In a trendy industrial space bordering a West London canal, an eclectic series of objects sit on podiums, amid coffee drinkers and creative-types at work. Among them are a ceramic Chihuahua in a neckerchief, labeled as a home accessory; a delicate, extraterrestrial-looking table poised as if for lift-off; a panel of architectural designs for a Buddhist temple in the heart of London; and a stool in mint-green metal entitled, fantastically, the ‘Silent Farter’. These are just a few recent offerings from London’s Chinese Diaspora designers, and they signal a growing creative confidence amid a challenging landscape. “The Made-in-China tag has brought some difficulty to Chinese designers trying to work in the ... Read the full article

Find my full series of articles written for this US-based publication here, including on Steven Holl's Linked Hybrid in China, Norman Foster's Beijing Terminal 3, China's emerging generation of architects, Alaska's Museum of the North (also covered for TIME), and Berlin's Grand Central Station.

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 4 March 2011 Philosopher Alain de Botton is bent on revitalising British ‘comfort’ architecture For those who live in it, and visit it, British architecture is a wellspring of nostalgia. Spare a thought for the landscape here and you will likely envisage Georgian manor houses amid rolling hills, or perhaps the sooty brick-and-mortar of Sherlock Holmes’ London. And while this has long been good news for the tourist board, for writer and popular philosopher Alain de Botton, it is an endless source of frustration. “Liking modern architecture is a kind of sect here,” the Swiss-born de Botton complains from a cosy brickbound office in north London. “It’s like witchcraft, or something slightly unusual. Because Britain industrialised so fast there’s a tremendous desire for history. But there’s a reason things become history.” As a writer, long based ... Read the full article

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 22 April 2011 A humanitarian design group is redefining crisis response across the globe, writes Jo Baker. Twelve years ago a designer caught in a disaster zone might have been at rather a loss at how to pitch in; but when the quakes hit Japan last month it took very little time for the architects to rally. There were readymade chapters in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto with access to a global network of nearly 5,000 volunteer design professionals, a template for crisis response, and an online bank of designs, all relevant to post-crisis reconstruction and free for the download. And joining all these dots was the only international humanitarian-oriented organization to have pioneered design as a tool to fight disaster: Architecture for Humanity (AFH). Throughout the last month AFH has been working to link ... Read the full article

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 25 June 2010 British designer Tom Dixon brings his glam rock style to Hong Kong It isn't often a designer has to rein in his vision for Hong Kong's high-end club scene. Yet as Tom Dixon surveys his latest landscape, he has a few lingering regrets. Tazmania Ballroom in SoHo, the latest nightclub from the creators of Dragon-i, already boasts geometric wall buttresses, clustered globular chandeliers and brass pool tables, with imitation book shelves in white plaster that give it an ironic scholarly tone. Yet, "I was thinking water dripping down granite, and moss on the walls", Dixon laments. "And there was going to be a small fish and chip shop. But there wasn't enough ... Read the full article

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 10 May 2010 For four decades Maya Romanoff has been leading interior fashion into realms both bizarre and beautiful Brace yourselves: tie dye is back and it is trying to take your home by sneak assault. Wall-ware emperor Maya Romanoff may be best known for surfaces swathed in Swarovski crystals and tortoiseshell, but he has marked his brand’s new milestone with a nod to simpler times, when he was largely known as the man who could tie dye a wall. Celebrating four decades, the brand’s Anniversary Collection brings back the psychedelic patterns of its seventies debut, but contemporized and camouflaged with colours by New York-based designer Amy Lau. It is a nostalgia being indulged. New York’s Museum of Art and Design ... Read the full article

Prestige, Hong Kong, October 2009 US-trained designer Lyndon Neri had a hard time getting used to the mainland, but now he's revelling in the challenges. Though passion is imperative in any good designer, it can be taken too far. This is something Lyndon Neri learned on the day he accidentally collapsed his own lungs. “I wasn’t well and I hadn’t slept for three days straight. So I spent two days in hospital then went straight back into studying again,” chuckles the designer of his breakdown at Harvard. “It probably wasn’t the best approach.” Back then the man who would later co-found the Neri and Hu Design and Research Office in Shanghai had been throwing himself full tilt into his thesis, about a pocket of a Californian Chinatown ... Read the full article

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, April 24, 2009 Architecture with a lived-in touch is winning hearts When architect Bill Bensley was asked to design a hotel in Phuket not long after the tsunami, he found himself wanting to give it a deeper layer of meaning. That layer was found by his team of Thai and Indonesian designers at salvage auctions in the area, where they bought driftwood and other bits of wreckage wrought by the giant wave, and incorporated them into the hotel, Indigo Pearl. “We picked up a whole lot of materials and in various innovative ways reused them, in the structure, in sculptures,” he recalls. The hotel, which also uses a lot of old tin in tribute to the area’s tin ... Read the full article

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, March 27, 2009 Keeping it simple is the order of the day as people seek comfort in uncertain times The opening of high-end serviced apartments in Sheung Wan last month saw a rare aesthetic for Hong Kong: the Yin’s 42 studios offer glimpses of brickwork, flashes of exposed piping, and baths carved out of stone blocks. This kind of warehouse-hip has been run-of-the-mill in other cities for years, yet in Hong Kong it has always struggled, and usually drowned, under heaps of suede, crystal and polished wood. Still, Philip Liao of design firm Liao and Partners thought that now might be the time to give it a go – albeit with a sanitized and slightly Zen-like twist. “I ... Read the full article

Silkroad Magazine, Hong Kong, September 2010 Three top landscape architects are breathing new life into urban areas Yu Kongjian returned to China with a doctorate from Harvard in 1997 and the firm belief that ‘beauty is the by-product’ of good architecture. After founding Turenscape, China's first private landscape design firm, he also became a professor at Peking University. . “In China, there are two landscaping cultures,” Yu explains. “There is the elite, high-class culture of gardening and then is the vernacular culture of farmers and fishermen. This ornamental culture of landscape design nethereeds a lot of resources - it’s not sustainable.” Instead Yu takes his inspiration from the practices of China’s farmers and the “beautiful, productive paradises” they can create from a working ... Read the full article

Perspective Magazine, Hong Kong, December 2008 Along the Aegean coast an intriguing new boutique hotel seeks to celebrate and reinvigorate traditional Anatolian-style architecture with a contemporary twist and a healthy injection of Turkish art When the world "homey" is used to describe a hotel it rarely applies to anything bigger than a few thousand square metres; very few people, after all, can call a manor house home. But for the non-mansion dwellers among us there are hotels like Casa Dell'Arte on the Aegean coast. When the world ‘homey’ is used to describe a hotel it rarely applies to anything bigger than a few thousand square metres; very few people, after all, can call a manor house home. But for the non-mansion dwellers among us there are hotels ... Read the full article

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, December 5, 2008 Asia’s designers find a silver lining in the credit crunch Speakers at Hong Kong’s Business of Design Week have long pushed design as a money-making tool, but this year audiences will probably be listening to the advice more closely than usual. With big business in trouble, the question on everyone’s lips at the event, December 8 to 13, will likely be, how are we going to weather the storm? Developer Morgan Parker thinks designers are in for a leaner time. Having spent more than 13 years in Asia developing luxury real estate, he is now the president of Taubman Asia, which is behind Macao Studio City and Seoul’s flashy Songdo IBD Shopping Center, both still underway. “Business is the ... Read the full article