- Finding my voice
continues to be a process.
As I've worked in architecture,
there are certain common
threads in my work that
I've begun to discover
and I suspect it will
take my whole life to truly
find what my voice is.
My name is James Leng
and I'm an architect.
I was born in Guangzhou, China.
My parents went to the US to
study abroad when I was two,
so I was largely raised by
my maternal grandparents.
We lived in several small
apartments in the city.
As the surrounding areas became
modernized with expressways,
the area I lived in, this
village, was preserved.
It was more tailored to foot traffic.
It had these meandering alleyways.
In 1993, I came to the US.
It was my first time
flying and when I arrived,
I found my parents waiting for me and
I had to recognize them through photos
because we had been apart for seven years.
Going from such a dense city
to a very suburban environment,
it was an interesting transition for me.
There was never a single
moment when I realized
that architecture was the thing to do,
rather it was an accumulation
of early experiences,
childhood art lessons, high
school photography classes
collectively guided me.
Photography has also become a technique
through which I conceive of space.
The idea of having a blank slate to
design from is largely a myth.
As cities grow, infrastructure, roadways,
and any other hidden systems,
become more and more pervasive.
We need to think about them
in a very intentional way.
I'm very interested in
the stage of architecture
in between obsolescence and renewal.
This term that I'm calling
the architectural afterlife.
You're not quite sure if something
is obsolete or abandoned.
It's often in this vague middle zone
that begins to find a new meaning.
Hollow Grounds is a proposal
we did for re-imagining
the Detroit Packard Automotive Plant.
The idea there was, instead
of building something new,
why don't we study the
strategy of demolition
in a more precise manner?
Can you begin to take away
material in order to create
new spaces, larger spaces?
I've become very interested
in affordable housing.
There is very real lack
of supply right now.
Crest Apartments was a project which I was
project designer for at
Michael Maltzan Architecture.
It's a building for former
military servicemen.
The building mass is lifted up to allow a
continuous landscape to run
across the ground plane.
There's more potential for
creative experimentation
in affordable housing because the end goal
is not to maximize profit.
I want to create an
architecture that is engaged
with the public and community.
An architecture that is
bold and experimental.
Over the next year, I want
to set up the framework
for starting a practice.
It's a necessary step
to develop my own voice.
