Good evening and good morning
wherever you are, welcome to the
USC School of Architecture
Fall 2020 Digital Lectures and Events
Series.
I'm Milton Curry Dean of the USC School
of Architecture in Della and Harry
Mcdonald Dean's Chair
in Architecture. USC School of
Architecture is a premier
global design school drawing from the
dynamic urban environment of Los Angeles,
USC Architecture is committed to making
a tangible difference
in its community and throughout the
world. Through a range of programming
and led by purpose-driven faculty and
students,
USC Architecture fosters a greater
understanding of the complexity
of our ever-changing and ever-evolving
urban landscape.
We embrace a multi-disciplinary approach
that encourages architecture students,
scholars, and practitioners to find
meaning in their role as citizens,
influencers and advocates across a range
of architectural practices now
and into the future. It's no secret that
USC
is situated in the dynamically diverse
City of Los Angeles.
Positioned West towards the Pacific Rim
and inextricably connected to our
neighbors South in Mexico
and Latin America with a statewide
population that draws from Black
Americans who ventured West to migrate
from the American South,
Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Chicanos and
Latinx populations representing
the full diaspora of South in Latin
America,
the indigenous population, an Asian
diaspora from Japan, China
and South Asia and white European
immigrants.
USC in Southern California is truly a
multiplicity of cultures
and identities. Building on this reality
of the emerging American story and our
closer connectivity to our global
neighbors, West and South,
USC Architecture is launching the Asia
Cities Initiative
and Latin American Cities Initiative in
order to marshal our intellectual
capital
to speculate theorize and better
understand these global phenomena
and to make our students intelligently
worldly.
Tonight's program focused on Asia cities
is presented in partnership with the USC
Board of Counselors
and the Asia Cities Initiative.
Indeed, new methodologies need to be
deployed to increase equitable
distribution and access to public goods
and resources,
diversify housing supply to address
cultural and economic nuances
of regional populations and our school is
committed to utilizing design studios
increase global study abroad and
partnership programs
to investigate Asia's mega cities,
spatial mappings of access to public
goods/services,
public and civic space mappings and
understandings of urban
mobility and public transport
infrastructures
and analyses of economic development
connected to urban design
and the aesthetics of space.
Consider tonight's panel as a down
payment on many more events and
activities to come
in this regard. Tonight, I'm very excited
with the panelists that we've assembled.
They include some of Asia's top
architects and developers, global top
architects and developers.
I'll give them each several minutes to
describe a project that represents the
work of their respected companies.
We'll then have an open conversation
about how their work and activities
relate to one another,
issues that cut across different cities
and those that are city specific
and what lessons can be drawn now and
for the future in terms of high-end
consumer behaviors,
urban housing, physical retail, and
hospitality, 
co-living, the role of the arts culture
and civic space.
And then I'll point to I'll go to the
chat room
and Q and A and take questions from the
audience and continue the discussion.
I want to briefly introduce our
panelists in the order that they will
speak to us and I want to start with
Grace Chung,
co-founder and principal at X-Range
Architects.
Grace was born in Malaysia, immigrated to
Canada. She holds a Masters in
Architecture from Columbia University.
She's a U.S licensed architect with
extensive international experience from
Pacquiao Architects
in Vancouver, Bernard Chummy Architects
in New York,
in OMA Asia in Hong Kong and Rotterdam,
all this before co-founding X-Range in
Taipei
in 2003. X-Range is a design practice
that encompasses
master planning, architecture landscape
and product design
to establish a critical inimitable voice
with the methods and materials
of architecture. Grace also serves as
vice chairman of the Hong
Kong Foundation and has initiated ground
groundbreaking support programs
for contemporary art to great acclaim
since
2015. Kenny Gaw is president and
managing principal of Gaw Capital
Partners.
He graduated with the Bachelor of
Science degree, Magna Cum Laude from
Brown University in 1992
and then went to work at Goldman Sachs.
Subsequently,
he co-founded Gaw Capital Partners in
2005
and is currently president and managing
principal.
Gaw Capital has raised equity in excess
of 14.2 billion
US dollars so far and currently commands
assets of 24.8 billion
U.S under management. Gaw Capital is
uniquely
is a uniquely positioned global private
equity real estate fund
management company. The firm has raised
commingled funds targeting the greater
China and Asia Pacific regions
since it's its inception and manages
opportunistic funds in Vietnam
and the US along with the Pan Asia
hospitality fund and European
hospitality fund.
Notable transactions under his direction
include
acquisition repositioning of Pullman
Hotel-G Patia
and Pullman Hotel-G Bangkok, Thailand AIA
Tower in Macau
and Global Gateway 68 Yi Wu Street
building and Club Lucitano building and
Kowloon City Plaza.
Since 1994, Kenny has been managing
director of Pioneer Global Group,
a Hong Kong based investment holding
company on the Hong Kong
exchange. Adriel Chan
is in Hong Kong as well.
He holds an EMBA jointly awarded by the
Kellogg School of Management at
Northwestern University
and a BA in international relations from
the University of Southern California.
Since 2010, Adriel is executive director
of Hang Lung
and Hang Lung Properties, where he has
held roles in finance,
leasing and project management and was
appointed to the board in 2016.
He is responsible for development, design
project management, cost controls
and shares of sustainability and
enterprise enterprise risk management
committees.
Adriel is a member of the executive
committee of the Real Estate Developers
Association of Hong Kong,
Advisory Council of Hong Kong University
of Science and Technology
Business School and Committee of
Overseers of Morningside College
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Stephen Wong is licensed--
Stephen Wong is a licensed architect in
California and holds a Master's degree
from the GSB,
Graduate School of Business at Stanford
University, where he was a Sloan fellow.
He holds bachelor's degrees in Business
Administration and Architecture
from the University of Southern
California. Stephen is the chairman
of Chongbang group in Shanghai and
managing director of Chongbang's parent
company,
Edward Wong Development Company Limited.
Based in Shanghai,
Stephen is responsible for the overall
planning, finance and operation
real estate investment and development
activities. Since the 90s, Stephen has
been a catalyst for the group's
investments in China, U.S and Canada. In Shanghai, Chongbang
was one of the early investors and
partners
of the Xuan land now listed on the HK
Stock Exchange.
In the US and Canada, the group has been
active in both investment
and development activities through its
wholly owned subsidiaries, the Atelier
group of companies.
Stephen is a non-executive director for
HSBC
Bank in China, a member of the advisory
board of the Stanford Sloan
Sloan Program Graduate School of
Business,
a member of the Board of Counselors,
proud member of the Board of Counselors
of the USC School of Architecture and
the USC Price School of Public Policy.
Ladies and gentlemen, our panelists today
and I'm pleased to
welcome them and have them with us and
look forward to the discussion
and i want to start with inviting
Grace Cheung to give us some remarks.
Oh okay so i'm going first, let me
just
break to my slide
Can anyone see
yeah okay, Just to give
everyone a brief intro introduction
to some of our projects.
We have been in Taiwan for 17 years and
our work is really quite varied, we
have done
single family homes, boutique
resort to high-tech headquarters,
residential complexes. We have also done
large urban block renewal and reuse
public landscape projects,
large-scale urban installations, bespoke
pavilions
and even currently a spatial theater
and stage set. I think I want to
kind of bring bring it up that
practicing in Taiwan has really allowed
us to
build on the very rich body of ideas and
expressions.
I think the more humane pace of Taiwan, 
direct access to manufacturing or making
diverse microclimates grand landscapes
with earthquake and strong cultural
heritage, I think all this
definitely enabled us to create
projects that would not have been
possible outside of Taiwan
For today's talk, I want to share two
projects with everyone.
These are still working projects, work in
progress.
The two projects present very exciting
opportunities not just
from an architectural or development
view, but also from an urban and cultural
aspects.
So the first one is the Sky Typing
Project.
It's in the heart of Taipei most upscale
international area the shiny district
it's currently under construction you
will have two five-star hotels in there
the park hyatt and yandas
it's a 100 million dollar project
involving several
architects um so our portion
of the design is actually on the podium
level at the
third and fourth floor which has been
planned as a
as a fnb flip and beverage floor
our design actually goes beyond the
commercial interior
to connect to the park directly outside
of our
our site via a
pedestrian bridge which will be
connected to
the skywalk system of the entire chimney
district
i think our design transforms the park
um
into a modern cities and friendship a
friendly place the goal is to create
a rich urban experience and this idea
actually extends into
the interior so inside this is one of
the public plaza
a little mobile eating experiences
um and then the sculptural pedestrian
bridge that connects to the park
which brings us to an urban theater
where you can sit and enjoy a
performance
this theater is also a homage to a very
beloved
public theater a performance theater
that was demolished
to make way for the redevelopment so in
a sense it's really giving back to the
city
and there is also water play
wildflower valley in the heart of the
city to
make this a connected and enjoyable
urban experience um so i think here the
discussion
is really about creating a dynamic
authentic urban experience rather than
just
interior styling or making themes for
150 restaurants
and eateries so reviving the park as a
public focus
for the end goal of encouraging the
retail business
to better succeed and long term i think
it's really
um a win-win scenario and there is
also going to be public art program on
the site
so it's actually a very exciting project
for us because it really
the first time putting everything
together
so the interior the retail kind of
public aspect to the park
so we're quite excited about this
project so
hopefully as time goes on and a couple
of years we'll have more to show
the second project i want to share is
slightly
a bit larger um it is a
a new city development that will have
about eight to ten towers
we are starting to develop a master plan
for it the site is in new taipei city
it's about 20 minutes from downtown
taipei for those of you who have been to
taipei it's basically
the big area in the yellow circle so the
outside area is largely called in taipei
city
my client is a multi-national billion
dollar company that has been in taiwan
for
50 years so after moving their factories
out of taipei
they want to rezone the land as
commercial residential development
so we started the project in may but by
june
debates and discussions on a new type of
urban space
um has already exploded all over the
world so as you can see here
these are from paris's 15-minute city so
from london to paris
urban institutes to uh to mainstream
media
so there are calls for rethinking our
cities ideas of the 15-minute city where
everything is within walking distance
human scale diversified services
so with an eye on this future trend our
client has really commissioned us
to explore new ideas of working and
living specific to taipei
and to propose new types of urban spaces
and possibly typologies for the future
i think you're sorry you're uh your
slides are not advancing
um right where are we at now
we're still in the slide first slide
yeah oh my god um um
so what to do let me try again
did you try restarting it sorry yeah so
let me stop sharing
okay is it going on yeah
advance to the next one it's already
advanced
oh no it's not uh oh
so any ideas what to do here
escape try again i mean here we can see
the whole
the whole row of slides okay you know
what let's do this
let's it's not ideal but
can anyone see it yes
uh we can see the whole we can see about
12 slides
um
oh why is it not working uh
anything okay i've got the first one
is
grace there's a message here that says
if you stay in powerpoint
and not hit play you have to stay in the
powerpoint
keynote mode and not hit play
and not hit play yeah yeah just don't
hit play you'll have the column of
slides on your left
so uh can anyone see it now
is there a slideshow
there is but obviously it's not advanced
that's not bad
can you see it that works yes is that
where it works yes
okay all right so just briefly some of
our projects
and then so the project that i was
sharing this is the taiping sky tower
project
and so our design portion really
involves an interior
going to park via pedestrian bridge that
will connect to the entire city urban
walk system
the idea is to revive the park and
therefore bringing more
foot traffic and create a kind of public
focus
in the heart of chinese district which
is the most upscale
neighborhood of taipei so some of the
highlights
in the project so we have a puppy plaza
inside mobile eating experiences
um sculptural bridge that brings you to
the park below
and an urban theater so the theater as i
mentioned earlier is really a homage to
a performance theater that was
demolished to make way for the new
development
so this is a way to kind of give back to
the city
there's also water play some wildflowers
in the heart of the city
so again as i mentioned earlier so this
is
a kind of putting together an authentic
urban experience
it as a way to make sure the retail
business
has a great chance to survive so i think
it's really a win-win situation
from from a kind of urban and cultural
standpoint
so the next project that i was going to
share
okay so as i mentioned before this is a
project that is
we'll have about eight to ten towers it
is outside of taipei city
um for those of you who've been here
it's about 20 minutes away
the client is a multinational billion
dollar company he's been in thailand for
50 years
and they're moving their factories
outside of the city
and to rezone this land for commercial
and retail
so we started the project in may and so
by by june there are all these ideas
uh bubbling all around the world so from
um the mayor of paris from to london
urban institutes mainstream media
they're all talking about
ideas for new living new urban living
and working
the 15-minute city where everything is
within
walking distance human scale diversified
services
um so with an eye in the future our
client has really instructed us
to explore ideas of working and living
specific to taiwan
and to propose new types of
typologies so we are now
looking into some of the taiwan paradigm
for urban living and working for example
the patio shop houses which are
basically a combination of street patio
shop or work and home and also embedded
within its form they're like
cross-ventilation courtyards
um organic roofline which are all
traditional responses
to mitigate density and climate
and also our multifunctional street
this has really been a part of how the
city
uh has worked for for for years
um for those of you who's been to taiwan
i'm sure you've seen some of this
um the street alleys are really where um
where the lifeblood of the city is
and so as we move forward
we'll be looking into mixtures of living
and working
scenario co-living regen housing
high-end condos with river views mid and
family housing
community art centers well-being
facilities etc
i think this new city cannot be just a
green city this obviously
is no longer enough but a green city
that can unite
some some of our traditional wisdoms and
our cultural future
so in essence a place where we can all
work and live so these are the two
projects that um for me today so sorry
about the
slight mishap i hope that wasn't too
troublesome fantastic grace thank you
uh kenny okay hope it works for me
wait a minute how do i get out of this
okay
i'm trying to get to my my own screen
how do i get out of this uh oh here
okay
sorry i did this
are you seeing my screen oh no
no slides
uh no not yet
that's a problem okay share screen
are you seeing my screen
not yet
that's a problem
i'm pressing the share screen button
right
and then you have to select one of the
windows i think there's a small pop-up
and you select which which screen you
want to share or which window you want
to share
yeah there we go there we go yeah yeah
okay good
all right um so i'm not going to really
introduce myself because um
uh dean curry already did
shit how to advance now
okay but this is some of the projects we
have done
basically we invest pretty much across
the entire spectrum of real estate
from office buildings to shopping malls
to hotels
to industrial warehouse and data centers
but today i want to talk about an
interesting project of ours maybe it's
not as
fancy or glamorous but i think it's
pretty interesting from
urban redevelopment standpoint it's a
big portfolio of community malls
in hong kong which is attached to public
housing public housing estates
so just to give people context i want to
give a brief history of
public housing in hong kong basically
from
1945 to 1949 during the chinese civil
war
after the second world war a lot of
immigrants or refugees
moved from china to hong kong and they
lived all over hong kong in a lot of
these shanty towns
and a big fire destroyed one of the big
shiny towns called shakib may
in 1953 and there was the birth of the
public housing project in hong kong when
the government built
a public estate on top of that site
to house the homeless and over the years
the hong kong government
continued to build a lot of these
housing and up to 1997
approximately half of hong kong's
population live in these public housing
projects
and the population here are generally
working class to lower middle class
type residents so it makes up a big part
of the social fabric of hong kong
and but this building of public housing
stopped around 1998
during the asia financial crisis when
the public housing
uh where they when the private housing
market collapsed
so the government put on put a
monatorium on the construction
of this public housing and that lasted
until i would say about five years ago
uh and that kind of sold the seeds of a
lot of the rising housing crisis
um uh and and also the uh
the the private housing prices also
going through the roof
creating a lot of social unrest and
protests which we saw last year
and in these public housing estates even
though the government stopped building
by 2016 still about 45
of hong kong hong kong population live
in this public housing
and there's about 3.3 million people and
within these public housing in addition
to uh the accommodation
there are also a lot of retail centers
pretty much in all of the
major housing estates they are retail
centers which were originally designed
as an integral part of the residential
communities
and they provide kind of day-to-day
retail needs
and also recreational spaces and
because they were subsidized by the
government and essentially run as
government facilities um they were
typically poorly maintained
and operates uh very inefficiently but
they charge
well below market rents and because of
that it actually makes for a high
potential for uh
sn enhancement asset enhancement uh also
a lot of these estates uh are built
uh in congested urban areas um
and they're all very well connected to
public transport systems
so in 2005 when the hong kong stock
market was launching the
real estate investment trust product the
government hiked off
151 of these retail facilities from the
housing community housing authority
and put it into a new company called the
link reit
and there were 150 of these facilities
plus 79 000
parking spaces that again makes a big
part of the parking space
public parking space in hong kong this
company was listed
in 2005 at a valuation of 2.8 billion
uh and over the next decade it underwent
major
asset enhancement project asset
enhancement works
on a lot of these properties not all of
them but maybe to a third of them
and just doing that um the latest
valuation has risen to 16 billion
so financially this has been a very
successful uh enterprise
however it has also been quite
controversial um there's been a lot of
protests in the society about the high
rents that they charge
and also the dominance of large chain
stores in these
malls and the disappearance of the mom
and pop stores in the
and the old neighborhood so basically uh
the backlash over it's a backlash over
gentrification
something that we've seen not just in
hong kong but also in other parts of the
world
so because of that the lingerie has
decided to
basically stop uh doing a lot of these
asset enhancement work
but selling the assets uh to other
investors
uh and then we divert the proceeds to
other other parts of the world
as investments and that's where we came
in
in the last two years we bought in two
two big transactions
29 of these shopping malls in a total
transaction size of about
close to 4.5 billion u.s dollars
and these mods that we bought uh 29 more
spread across
nine districts in hong kong as i said
4.5 billion us dollars
total gfa of 3.3 million square feet
uh 15 000 leases and
13 000 park spaces and it serves around
a
immediate population of 400 000 people
not including
all the surrounding population around
these estates
and these are all built beneath public
housing estates
the catchment as i said is low middle
class to working class population
very strong daily traffic flow
and many of these have rooftop
recreational facilities
which i'll talk about later and the
trade mix is typically
supermarkets fresh food markets
convenience stores
mom-and-pop type of restaurants and
other shops
and because of the context of where all
the criticism
in society about what language did we
had a
hard thought about what we want to do so
our goals so first of all we want to
make this a
project of revival so revival and old
community
so there will be new designs and new
attractions
but we are not going to throw out the
old neighbor throughout the neighborhood
second is we want this to be an
inclusive place
so this would be welcoming to visitors
but most importantly it's going to be a
place for the community that lives there
and lastly we want this to be a social
place so it won't
only be a place for commerce but also
as a gathering place for the community
to uh to play and to enjoy
and we also came up with a brand uh for
this group of
shopping malls we put a place called
people's place
and in chinese it's called manfon in
cantonese
so means people or citizen and fong
means uh gathering place
and in terms of product we wanted to
build community hubs
so like i said it's a it's a hubs for
the community to play and to enjoy uh
and to show up
and to uh live the daily lives
and some of the examples so this is
actually a place that dean curry uh
i took the inquiry for lunch uh it used
to be in on the screen
metal panel box we turned it into a
container park theme shopping mall
and this design theme also extends to
the interior
this container theme and industrial
theme
and some of the empty spaces we also we
also decorated with the same kind of
design concept and also put benches
for local residents to rest in the
comfort of
air conditioning space another photo of
the old to new
and this is the interior of the old web
market area
you can see there are a lot of empty
stores already
in the past which we have turned into a
vibrant
fully air-conditioned modern fresh food
market
and on the other side of it we turn it
into a large food court
with a large variety of food choices
the number of eating spaces went from
two in this entire mall to 16
a different kind of restaurants and
eating places after we did the
renovation
and we also made sure we kept some of
the old popular stores
so this is a old newspaper stand which
has been there for decades
and we made sure that we brought them
back into our new new space
this is another one of the old store
which has been there for like 30 years
selling like hardware and households and
household goods
we also brought them back this is
actually
a separate building which used to house
an old
chinese restaurant oversized chinese
restaurant which is not doing very good
business
uh with a food court bringing bringing
in all the new restaurants
we feel that we don't really need this
anymore we turned this into a senior
citizen care center
uh plus an ngo which which gives
vocational training to unemployed women
and
housewives this is another of our malls
which we just opened uh a month and a
half ago costil hey
this is how it looked in the past and
this is how it looks now
uh these are old uh badminton chords you
can see that not even nuts on them so
pretty much nobody use them
we turn them into a multi-purpose uh
recreational space
with uh sitting areas for people also
when they go into the um
in to the food court they can bring out
food and eat here also
another picture of what we did and this
is how it looked
inside inside this wet market area which
we turn into a modern food court
and this is how it looks now how it
looks in the past
and how it looks now
again part of this model which we
upgraded oh and this is
another one of the old shops which was
very popular with local residents
again we brought them back into the to
the new space
this is another one of our malls called
hands in fact this is the hands market
which um which link read actually
upgraded but we found that we could
still improve on it
and we rebuilt it into a fantasy land so
this is actually a
fantasy land which is also attracting a
lot of uh young people
where parents bringing their kids to
shop as well
this is how it looked before and that is
how it looked after
and these are some of the examples of
the old shops that we brought back
one of the interesting one is this tea
house to the right uh which is in uh
another one of our malls called the
checklist
in the checklist market inside the
chevrolet mall this is a famous um
tea shop in hong kong in fact we found
out after the fact after we bought these
malls that one of our five-star hotels
in hong kong
we have a michelin star restaurant um
chinese restaurant
where the tea sommelier told us that
this is the place he goes to buy
uh premium tea so we also kept the shop
in this old shopping mall um
and in addition to the shopping mall and
the markets we also put a lot of
emphasis into upgrading uh the sporting
facilities
so the first project we did is called
the kaiye recreational area recreational
center
and this is a famous street basketball
street basketball venue because of this
iconic
cage-like architecture for the
for its fans they call them we got this
place the the golden cage
so for the koda for the golden cage what
we decided to do is we want a theme of
hong kong and our basketball home home
ground
and the idea is to use a placemaking
plus street vibe
to renovate this court and with this for
this purpose we've worked with
one bike which is an up and coming small
hong kong design firm
and also slab which is a group of
hong kong young people who grew up in
these public estates
and they are also street basketball fans
they published a book about all the
street basketball venues across hong
kong
so where were these two groups to to
reposition this uh
sport cord these are some of the
pictures before and after
this is how it looked before and this is
how it looks now
before and after
and this has been rebuilt into a
multi-purpose recreational space for
children and also
uh uh outdoor as an outdoor gym
and for this we won the 2019 uh urban
land institute
asia pacific award award of excellent
excellence
and this i think is the only project
that uh from public housing project that
ever won this
uh award uh this is another project
which we did uh in sioux hay uh an old
sports ground that we renovated
how it looks now
and before and after
and this has become this was actually
also just opened about a month and a
half ago
and has been a very uh popular instagram
instagram spot
in hong kong a lot of people taking
drone shots of these uh discords
and then uh in addition to building the
courts we also want to make sure we have
community engagement
so this one we are running a youth
empowerment program in our suh
court which we just renovated another
one of our
important initiative is we we started a
local basketball league for young high
school students
for the first season we have eight teams
that came from each of them came from a
different of these public estates
and this photo came from the the final
day which is the final playoff event
and this is a team that i sponsored
called the mengta warrior
and we won the first running first
runner-up award from this
tournament if you look at the
the board in the back you can also see a
lot of large corporates like ubs
white and case they're all sponsors of
of this
uh of this league each of them
sponsoring a single team
uh and because of the success of this
event uh this coming season we're gonna
have
we're gonna grow this league from eight
teams to 24 teams
and each of the team are coming from
different housing estates
and each of them will have corporate
sponsors
and these are these are the
event calendar from the last two months
during the summer as you can see it's
populated with uh young sports youth
sports training program
and also a red bull half court
championship
uh some of the future projects uh this
is a fisherman wolf
themed project in uplay chao next to a
fishing community
uh this is um next to one of the
oldest temples in hong kong called taiko
mew and that's why we built it as
a as a temple theme
and this is a play uh this is in
shackley market and the play on
nostalgic hong kong
so building a new space uh locate making
to look
old and these are projects coming in the
next few months
so hopefully that gives you a good sense
of what we're trying to do here
thank you
thank you kenny it's great adriel
thank you dean curry um very good to see
you all let me try to share my
screen is this uh showing up
yup and let me try playing this and
we'll see if that works out
all right so are you guys seeing this
all right is it moving
yes okay perfect so um my name is adrian
chan uh i'm a usc grad
very proudly so so uh welcome fellow
trojans
um i'll start off really quick by just
blasting through some of our projects
um it's just photos not too much text
this is a map of china
with the cities that were present in um
you'll notice it's mostly along the
coast which is where
most of the commercial activity takes
place uh we're right now
in le 10 cities with
about 11 projects in mainland china plus
a portfolio here in hong kong
um this is a grand gateway this is built
in nine
opened in 99 and it was recently
renovated just uh two years ago
it's an interior this is also in
shanghai plaza 66
most of our projects are retail malls or
mall anchored
and mixed use projects this is an
interior of plaza 66.
palace 66 is in xinyang which is up in
the northeast of
china it's roughly at the same latitude
as connecticut
um i'm going to come back to this in a
second because there's something uh
you know really relevant i think to
architects in this
uh park 66 this is in jinan um jinan is
the
uh capital city of the province of uh
shandong which is where qingdao beer
comes from for those of you who
appreciate qingdao form 666 this is
another project of ours in china this is
a hotel and an office on the left as you
can see
on top of a luxury mall on the bottom
it's an interior
uh center this is in wuxi
which is also offices and retail this is
riverside 66 i'm going to come back to
this in a little bit more detail in a
second as well
it looks like either a big cucumber
or a dagger depending on you know what
you're predisposed to seeing
this is just a retail shopping mall this
is the interior
um olympia this is up in dalian uh which
is a different city in liaoning province
also in the northeast of china where it
does get very cold
this is an interior shop spring city
this is quin ming we just opened this
last year
this is something i'm really proud of
it's a kpf project
for those of you who are looking at
architects architecture firms
pete galleria this is a project here in
hong kong the only one i'll kind of
cover
uh heartland this is wuhan where
a lot of you will have now heard of
because of covid
um this is something that we've been
building and uh during
even this pandemic we've been uh it's
been a challenge but it's really
interesting so this is opening up
later this year and then this is one
that's still in
under construction this is in hangzhou
which is in jojan province
which uh is under construction and
hopefully will open in a couple of years
so i'm going to jump back quickly to
palace this is in
liaoning province like i said it's
roughly the same latitude as
connecticut um it's a beautiful
structure it echoes the old
chinese palace which is next door to it
and you can kind of see that in the roof
lines but
um if you look at this shenyang up in
the far northeast
you know what what this is uh is a glass
ceiling
uh with these beautiful louvers which
are supposed to be automated and
which move to provide sunlight and shade
at the appropriate times
there's some pv panels on the roof as
well but it's basically a glass roof
the facade is mostly glass as well as
you can see
it's of course a shopping mall so you
need to be able to see what's inside
the mall and you want that interaction
between the
the content and the passer bias
passers-by
and i mean this is kind of weird uh
you'd think
have you seen any buildings in the the
latitude of connecticut
uh which are completely glass curtain
and uh
glass ceilings um you know this is one
of the fundamental issues in uh
architecture you know it's their context
what's your context and
the weather here gets down to negative
30 degrees celsius which is about
negative 22 fahrenheit
uh and to have a glass ceiling is just
kind of
ridiculous um so this is going to be a
pretty
unconventional presentation i'm actually
going to highlight on some of the
strange decisions that my predecessors
and our designers have made
so with negative 30 degrees celsius you
definitely don't want
glazing or you want as little glazing as
you can get away with
to retain heat and to reduce your energy
bills um so this is something that
you know i've seen where our designers
have
uh not taken the context either fully
into account
or sufficiently into account
next is the riverside so in tianjin this
is uh
not quite as far north but it still gets
down to
negative 10 15 degrees in the winter
this is also a completely glass
facade it's all curved um you know this
is
kind of ridiculous when you think about
it um it's beautiful and i love the way
it looks it's won
numerous architecture awards um but it
just
isn't practical
one thing uh which is even kind of more
ridiculous about
uh what we have in tianjin is if you
look at this map you see the river
um up here which and this is a
photograph this is the river and then
this is our project
you know you have to ask you know we're
this far from the river
uh there is a history of this river
overflowing
and flooding the neighborhood um yet
we've chosen to create a product where
you can
see the glass it comes all the way down
to
ground level there's no steps there's no
grade change
uh here as well in the front you can see
that people walk
completely seamlessly in this is great
for customers
and really good for the brands but
not really good when the river is
flooding once a year
um and so you know this has become an
issue where we've had to install flood
gates
and additional provisions
to protect the asset from a
natural disaster or otherwise what would
be normal flooding
another issue i want to talk about very
quickly on this floor plan is
you know this is what it looks like on
plan you'll notice that it's
very long and very narrow but the plot
is a little bit wider it kind of points
up in in the north
while this is beautiful uh
architecturally
and it provides a really interesting you
know both sidelines and also
a landmark for the city
you know you look at it from a leasing
perspective so we operate our projects
it's very small and narrow shops along
the left
side the narrow side and a couple only a
few
larger shops both in the belly in the
center and towards the right side
um and retail
for those of you who have learned a
little bit about it you know you need
that floor space you need that shelf
space
you need space that's inviting and that
allows people to browse and walk
and generally speaking those spaces are
not going to be just a few meters deep
you need much deeper and bigger spaces
for that so
um this is something that looked
beautiful on floor plan and
in renders but in practical uh
operations has been sort of challenging
um so you know these are a couple of
things that i wanted to run through very
quickly um on the other hand one thing
that we do
have is in the bottom right corner you
see this little um
gray box this is part of our management
but not part of our ownership so what
that is
is a old uh bank this was from
i believe the 1800s um it's a
historic building so it's under
protection which means there's
big there's a lot of regulation about
what you can and cannot do what you can
kind of touch how the space can be used
um
on the left that's what it looked like
while we were under construction and on
the right
is uh what it looks like basically today
and you'll notice that
it's actually we've turned a large part
of it into a starbucks
this is the interior before and after i
think
i give a lot of credit to the starbucks
architecture and real estate team for
coming up with such a beautiful design
they've used a lot of the existing
structure as much as they could
um they've had to do a lot of unusual
protection from
coatings to you know these
polyurethane protective layers and uh
they've
put in a bar uh i don't know if you can
see
they're in the back in the center which
is really
um a great translation and and
reuse of this bank space
so that's something i thought was really
really cool
uh unfortunately since i've done that it
will not move anymore anyway so
um that's a very quick overview of our
projects and some of the
notable points i think when it comes to
what architects might be thinking about
um you know the context as they've
learned is so important and
it will always be important and you can
never ignore that um
so i have a lot of other things that i'd
love to talk about and you know we can
talk about luxury we can talk about
equity
uh those two things sound like they're
in contrast but you'd be surprised i
think there are some
some points to to go down um but i know
we're running short in time
so i will stop here i'll pass it to uh
steven and then we can get into this in
the q
a thank you adriel that's great
stephen
you can see the screen guys yes we can
see it
great uh again thank you guys uh uh
my name is steven wong also graduate of
ufc uh i've been there for a long time
and a long time ago
i've decided to take this uh in a
different spin is coming in from
architects point of view as to what
development is like and what can we do
as an architect to
influence developments from start to
finish and hopefully we can actually
implement our
ideas realize our ideas more effectively
so i'm going to take you on a very quick
uh hold on let me just slow the screen
here
a visual tour of what we do at italian
capital partners at the
genetic level and then i'll move on to
the corporate issues and then obviously
the projects afterwards
so this is what we do as an architect
middle of the night a lot of drinks you
know a lot of drawings
a lot bs and then we try to do something
together
obviously we learn how to do buildings
and components on buildings this is
christopher alexander's
pattern language
and then we learn about cities how they
are put together
in many ways this is actually where the
genetics
of real estate comes in and then we
learn about components urban
proportions activities on the streets
and modern cities as well in a different
scale and proportion as well
and how civic spaces fit in
obviously materials uh integration with
men with the built environment
but what we do as we all know are
important but
architecture alone as as you can see is
not enough as adria has
alluded to there's a lot more issues at
play
so what we learned in architecture is
about history
all these typologies skill proportions
we know quite well as architects
um this is actually a diagram given to
me by mr gordon wu
uh of hopewell uh he said stephen you
know don't think about architecture
because ours slice in the food chain is
very very small
it's encapsulated within the yellow
lines
but there's a lot of stuff that happens
before and after if you look at the
the red line it's actually owner's
equity being deployed
and he calls it march to death valley
until you actually
finish your project we assume that
like studio if you don't get it done uh
you know sound or you're gone right
so what we do at italian capital
partners is actually use architecture as
a base we call it architecture plus
it extends our impact uh beyond
beyond architecture in the value chain
by extending to strategy formulation all
the way through
development cycle uh stabilization
ongoing operation management obviously
liquidity event
until you actually reach the end we all
again assume that
what that involves is actually a whole
lot of other things beyond architecture
as you can see on the list strategy
formulation you name it we got it
so what we have decided to do at that
point in time was uh
this is early uh probably late 80s uh
early 90s you know let's not just do
architecture let's actually become a
player in development
and be an investor become an operator as
well
afterwards so we integrate everything
under daily capital partners
and our kpi is actually measured by
impacts that we have
on on on buy our project on the
community
and we believe we did it right money
should follow
and these are the cities we're working
in right now
and again cities are all different it's
quite impossible to generalize so we
localize our strategies accordingly
so let me give you example what we do in
shanghai this is back in the early
2000s this is actually
view of shanghai from the air from the
iowa pilot it's a city of 24 to 25
million
you know more than two thirds of the
size of california
and one of the key cities in the uh in
the world in
1930s so it has a lot of history it's
the main
name card for china to integrate back
into the world
it's a gold city going through massive
amount of changes
it has a huge wealth gap so
when we actually start looking at
shanghai you know the question is how do
we
how do we approach it you know so i i
learned this from the navy seals you
know
how do you how does one eat an elephant
well we try to do it one bite at a time
it's possible but you can't rush it so
what we did was we actually
uh consolidated our experience in
shanghai
uh one of the projects we we invested in
and actually worked in
heavily it's actually shinton d project
whom some of you might know
it's a targeted market is actually
high-end expatriate
uh along with offices retail and
residential
with a big amenity uh public space in
the city which is the main main lake in
the middle with parking underneath
shinkandi and taiping chow project this
is again early 90's uh early 2000's late
90's
uh project and then we actually start
implementing that in around 2001.
and we offer a lifestyle along the way
the question we have at the time is now
this is mainly for expats can we
actually offer that to the locals which
the local markets were under served
so we came up with the idea of retail
and commissions uh we call life ups
where
people live work and play the question
we have
at that time was you know can our life
ups deliver lifestyle
free for all to the locals can this be
backyards for local residents can we
actually deliver product
at local pricing as well at uh in the
long run on daily basis
and can we actually start implementing
in one of the poorest neighborhood of
shanghai which is called japanese
district at that time
obviously internally we came a whole
bunch of kpis ourselves in
terms of measuring our successes
architecturally financially and also
our ongoing management that we need to
take on the project in the long run
so this is the alpha version what we do
uh this is a startup with two other
other architects uh from usc uh again uh
lifetime lifelong buddies
we found this site this is what this is
what
the excuse me uh this is what the site
looks like uh in the 90s
it's really a city block uh
size with a lot of possibilities around
350 meters on one side 400 meters on the
other side
so there's a lot we can do we can't
really just master planet that
uh you can't really generalize it i
think that's the point this is actually
another site that we
we have uh because there was a site we
bought and we
couldn't really figure out how to um
how to have a good handle of the size
and proportion so we look out the window
here's another block
which is precisely the same size as ours
you know that gave us a whole bunch of
goosebumps
because there's a lot we must do and we
we should do and to pay attention to
what
we can deliver so what we do is
we start thinking about impacts uh
obviously starting with architecture
uh i'm gonna run through these slides
very quickly in the interest of time
we went through we went through the
whole uh diagram
uh massing skill in proportions
circulation uh a civic space design
layout
again uh the working models in every
space that we have
every level that we have and again these
are stuff that
all of us in the architecture have
experienced
oops sorry
modeling and they obviously went through
construction which we uh uh construction
managers
construction manager as well directly
and in 18 months we delivered the
project to the locals at their own
pricing
and obviously this project was one of
the uli uh
global war finalists our next project
actually won the global award
from your life afterwards in the same
idea and this
became the study case for uli also in
2014
and we checked our boxes again and we
pretty much hit every box we have
that we laid out in terms of delivery
so you may ask you know uh again i i
i echo what uh kenny and adrian was
saying you know
these what we do is nothing new we're
just about the evolution
uh uh is really about evolution of the
city we go back to the basics
if you look at the painting by old
chinese painter uh
in the 11th century soccer
all the urban living
existed at that time
this is urban living in this in
different mode in different format as of
today
so like human city evolves and what we
do at delhi capital one is we just focus
on incremental change
one project at the time which is part of
that process
so since then the project in 2009 like
uh uh jing chao won the uli award again
in the same format i won't go into
details
and keep delivering and improving on our
ideas and
obviously evolving with the with new
technology and everything else
under construction right now is another
life hub that we have in shanghai
again in a rather old neighborhood
that's actually developing
at a pace that's behind the general
market
it's a project that we use all our skill
sets again uh with
preservation that coexists with new life
ups
so the takeaway the architecture plus
idea is you know architecture
is not enough and what do we do and
also we find a good team that you can
stay with and contribute
these are the two books that influenced
my career quite a bit it's actually
pattern language from christopher
alexander and also
architects as developers by john portman
that's for me
for everybody's on on the call i think
in some ways
architecture plus something else plus
interior plus construction
there's a whole lot we can do with
architecture and architecture training
you find a good team again likes the
starlings and
and and uh these uh fish that uh protect
and sell you know
again try to stick together with the
team
avoid collisions with one another swing
in the same directions
you create a force that you can actually
make some changes with
again never ever give up because this
process is not supposed to be easy
you know we are assuming that until
we're done
and with that you can actually achieve
new heights
again i rush these slides through quite
quickly any questions
please feel free to contact me in
whatever way you can
thanks
thank you all thank you steven um
really an amazing uh array of projects
and strategies and i think what what
makes
perhaps this conversation different from
from others that might focus uh strictly
on the real estate assets is
is the um intersection between design
and and also the processes of thinking
about
things like gentrification and so forth
so i want to ask um
you to contemplate a couple of questions
um
grace you talked about kind of
developing authentic urban experiences
and i think kenny you talked about um
the way in which the um
government policy um you know in a way
producing certain kinds of
contemporary civic unrest and um
i guess i want to ask you both and all
of you
how do you what tools are you using to
perspectively
imagine the future of these cities where
um
the cross crossing of classes
is something that's not um antagonistic
but in fact
um a natural kind of synthetic organic
experience within an authentic urban
context are you using the tools
primarily
of design to achieve that or the tools
of real estate finance
and how you're how you're financing
projects that are
that are as much about the public good
as they are about
um making profit um what are the
specific tools that you think
are the are are going to pull the levers
in the future for
advancing a notion of an equitable city
where we have all classes living
uh in a certain kind of harmony but also
a certain kind of social equity
sure sure ladies first
um i think um it's actually a very good
question
how do you create that authentic
experience i think from
for an architect's point of view really
we're working from the ground up
so i think some of the things that i pay
attention to would be
the kind of material solutions that are
really embedded in how people use the
space
uh and very often you've been to taipei
and taipei is really called
one of the ugliest cities but if you
really look into
how these spaces have been used or
appropriated
i think there's a lot of intelligence in
it um
and so these are kind of you know
collected
over kind of generations over the entire
culture
so these are the things i find very
interesting i've actually given a ted
talk on it
but so coming back to projects i think
one of the things that um
tools that i use would be the materials
and the experience that
are associated with it in a way to try
and see
if there's a new way to to redesign or
rethink or represent that
so that it gives people kind of a
new pride in what they have or or what
is already
there but really is something that they
could claim their own
and it's going to be as good as whatever
they find in paris or another foreign
country
so it's really looking for these um
local intelligence
and really giving it that um that
critical edge
i think in terms of being rigorous about
detailing being rigorous about structure
how these material come together and
what they mean to the space and to the
texture and experience of it
it's really it's something that i'm
always fascinated with so
i know it's very minut but i i think
that sort of level of
tactile quality actually goes a long way
in terms of
directing uh how you would experience a
place and once you experience a place
i think it really it really goes much
deeper and
and it really affects all of us
yeah i think uh from the project that
i was talking about um is one of the
first time we
we truly thought about a project in a
more holistic
way uh and and also the context is
because we've seen
um the change in the society in hong
kong
uh of what you're talking about that i
mean in the past hong kong was
a place all about profits so when you
build a project
all you think about is i'm gonna do
something new
and i'm gonna target these customers and
these cup
and because these customers are going to
bring about the best profits for me
they may not be from that region they
may not be from that community
but it doesn't matter because i want to
make the most profits
but because of what has happened in hong
kong the last few years
um i think people need to or developers
is needs to start to
change your thinking so the project
cannot be about
only the new customers that you bring in
but there are a lot of people
who are living around there that uh your
project would affect
and i think it's the same thing that has
happened in around the world in a lot of
gentrification projects uh in the
beginning of course uh
people applauded it because the streets
look more beautiful their new buildings
going up
uh crime rates go down which is a good
thing
but after 10 20 years
people realize communities get displaced
the social fabric
changes so i think uh developers they
just
start to think about this more
holistically how to balance uh
profits when they bring in the new uh
that also provides
that doesn't uh throw out the old
community or the old neighborhood
the other thing that we found is we are
we are trying to use design and
architecture first of course
is big picture is eye-catching
uh and because today there are a lot of
social media
uh and when you create something
eye-catching it becomes very
instagramable
and that becomes free advertising for
you so a lot of the projects that we did
within this uh people's place project
has has that in mind so there's a lot of
place making type of uh
ideas uh that creates a lot of instagram
moments
uh and we've seen that to be uh quite
successful also
through this process
stephen and adriel i want to ask um
how are you seeing the the the
relationship between
um the the aesthetics that are
uh surrounding the context of your
properties and your properties
um are you elevating
uh do you find you're elevating rents uh
and and pricing around your projects or
are you entering into a market that's
already
priced similar to the product that
you're bringing in into market and then
secondly i do want to follow up on
uh the thought of uh what can what can
we learn i mean i'm
interested in this oscillation between
um class in the city you know
a wonderful array of projects where
i think the aesthetics of the kind of
super graphics and
um this instagramable moments as as
kenny was talking about
um and in a way the aesthetics of
luxury is becoming more and more
experience based
and i think that in this
global capital environment we you know
luxury borrows tactics from
uh lower end retail and
lowering retail borrowers tactics from
high-end retail
so that's one element that i'd like to
kind of delve into how are you finding
your projects fitting into the existing
uh context
stephen and adriel
hey do you want to go first
um no no please why don't you start okay
um i think being curry i think the real
question
is really about what we're trying to
achieve as a team as a project as a
company and aligning all the interest
that's
actually integratable to the local
community and that's actually how the
project will survive
in the long run so you know in what we
do the aesthetics
is actually temporary because we design
for flexibility
uh because the market needs to change
the market will change if you don't you
know your project will be obsolete so
it's up to the management to be leading
that process
post construction to get it done so
obviously you know if you look at
piccadilly circus
or other neighborhoods that globally you
will you would like to visit
it changes over time but the place
remains so i think what we what we
normally do is actually think about not
just a temporary
aesthetics that we look at but the scale
and proportions
uh one thing we found in berlin uh in
germany for example in southern
uh germany uh obviously a lot of
building
there's a lot of building codes there's
a lot less building codes but more
buildings are being preserved
accordingly if you look at berlin
uh some parts of berlin have the parts
of berlin that has
actually a lot of codes of preservation
more stuff get destroyed
so what we believe is actually the
market forces who drive
the preservation and the aesthetics so
the question for us as architects
and development community real estate
value chain is how to actually cope
and integrate ourselves with that change
through time and if we don't do that
again i think part of the comment i
totally agree with kenny
is if we just if our kpi is purely
profit we make decision accordingly if
your kpi is actually
other things for example we actually
measure ourselves in terms of housing
prices
increase for the first alpha version
project done in
life of adani when we started the
project uh just for benchmark sake uh
housing prices were approximately local
roman b
four to five thousand square meters it
doesn't it doesn't sell
and we are done it's selling for sixty
thousand a square meter and you couldn't
buy them
obviously right now it's closer to
eighty ninety thousand square meter
so it's really an issue of using those
pricing benchmarks as the kpikers when
when the local actually retain uh their
wealth
they can then spend obviously they can
call the place home so on and so forth
everything actually integrates to that
strategy
thank you just a quick quick comment um
i noticed that there's a question from
john dutton which
dovetails very nicely with what dean
curry had just asked and
what we're talking about so you know
aesthetics versus context
i think what we build it tends to be
luxury high-end malls
obviously people associate that with
wealth and the wealth gap
um but at the same time i think what
what you
in reality what you notice is that the
real estate prices in
the adjacent to your projects are
actually going up too so you're helping
create wealth
for the neighborhood for the community
um this
ties in so much with the gentrification
and you know how the development of
communities and urban redevelopment uh
and
you know there's this there's this
tension there's always going to be this
tension between
uh what is charming and authentic and
what was
and what is economically viable or what
is
uh you know business uh what is good for
business
um i think that's about finding that
balance between
what is charming and you know what is
good for the community
uh what's good for business and what's
uh good for the environment
um so these tensions i mean it is kind
of like luxury
um and uh wealth disparity and
it's it's it's a very complex question
with a lot of
moving parts um but i think that
there is something to be said about
developments and
the contributions to the development of
their
economy in their immediate surroundings
i wanted to ask two questions one about
preservation because it it
it appears in uh stephen your work the
last project that you showed
and um grace uh in your work
and in um kenny's work that uh and and
actually in adriel in your project as
well the starbucks said
um the notion of uh
building a new on a kind of blank slate
is something that architects
salivate over at the same time
uh notions of adaptive reuse have been
around for quite a long time
but um if i could try to connect the
tactics of preservation uh
with the tactics of limiting dislocation
i.e gentrification and how how real
estate could suture those things
together so
a lot of the conversations in this
country
around some approaches to preservation
is that uh you know things like land
trusts and things like
passive equity
passive equity investments from a from
an entity other than
a developer with the developer as a
partner
could help retain people who are living
in that community but also
retain some of the authentic fabric of
that community while
increasing um the value of assets so
um auctions and and air rights and
uh things like that that that that
generate revenue for
public entities could be there so i'm
wondering are you
looking at or thinking about tactics
that allow you to
use some of the tactics of
historic preservation but for actual
communities and people
any for anyone i would go first as uh
well we're still uh in development of
that idea
um but i think one key point to point
out is that the second project i share
it there there is nothing to preserve on
that site um currently
it's just huge metal sheds or factories
um but that entire neighborhood is
really typical of sort of the
the dense urban suburb of taipei
it's older you know uh it's much more
chaotic
is it's less planned than taipei proper
a lot of the buildings are older so when
we
look into it i mean we were really uh
trying to look for
a new way to insert into this kind of
giant development so as opposed to for
example
transporting a giant high-end mall
you know black box or whatever onto
there we felt that there is an
opportunity
to um actually engage with the
some of the smaller scale sites and so
the building surrounding the site is
it's really currently they're
like five to six stories tall you know
they're typical with the kind of shop
houses
so we really wanted to find a way to um
to rethink and
and modernize um these these old wisdom
and plus the site is really
in the worst spot in terms of taipei's
heatsink kind of problem
so it really gets so incredibly hot if
you do a climate analysis so
the idea is also to try and work with
the wind path
and the kind of the solar orientation
and then take in some of these wisdoms
from i mentioned earlier um so for the
shop houses
uh there's cross ventilation you know
the form is interesting
it's very organic people generally live
and react better
better to this and plus it also allows
for
a lot of variety in terms of experiences
so
we are looking into how we can give this
um like a modern edge like if we are to
do this
2020 or 2030 uh what would this type of
construction look like
um but again you know it has to make
development sense which is kind of what
i'm excited about because it's not
really about
keeping something new and renovating it
but it's really about uh
innovating and rethinking from the
inside out
and so i i'm optimistic and i'm really
hoping that we would have some very
exciting
new urban spaces or new typologies or
combinations
uh to show you guys in the future yeah
so
um in our experience we've actually done
quite a lot of um
heritage building uh preservation uh
even in la
uh we we own the hollywood roosevelt
hotel in hollywood which is a pretty
well-known heritage uh hotel there
uh and i'm sure you guys have seen the
changes that went through that
that building uh of the that tip we use
i think we did a and we also did a uh
one of our first in fact our very first
project in shanghai
was a uh repositioning of an 80-year-old
department store plus office building
into a modern
shopping mall on nanjing east road
called plaza 353
also did a renovation of a heritage
hotel in
yangon in burma which is over 100 years
old
as well so we did a lot of these
projects i think in the beginning we did
these
kind of repositioning upgrade projects
um also because uh we come from the
background of private equity fund
management
so a lot of our kpi
is tied to finance and it's tied to irr
uh and when you have irr that means you
have a time clock
uh every every year or every day uh
makes a difference to your returns uh
when you when you buy a piece of land
go through planning build it stabilize
it
by the time you do all that is at least
five six seven years down the road
uh and if you if you know finance
usually after five years it's pretty
difficult
to achieve a 25 so uh
so just by necessity we typically go for
these um
renovation projects which takes less
time uh but there are more restrictions
but the other interesting thing that we
found is um
because developers tend to like to do
ground up development from scratch
they find these kind of renovation
projects too
tedious uh and and it's just not
something that they like to do
and because of that it carves out a
niche for us also to go for these
projects and we don't see a lot of uh
a lot of competition great i'm going to
go i'm going to
combine a couple questions in the q a um
and one is uh you all received
privileged education from western
universities
uh have you ever questioned the design
approaches you learned
as being culturally appropriate
sensitive and authentic to the specific
chinese context
um and also do you see
um well it's a question do you see the
presentations as east
learns from the west or west can learn
from the east um
combining a couple questions there
maybe i'll take a quick stab at this one
um so i
studied at usc and uh kellogg and i
think any time you go into a different
cultural context
or even geography you know it there's a
there's a big part of learning and
respecting what you've just stepped into
so when when i moved into mainland china
back in the mid 2000s
it was a huge cultural shift i realized
that a lot of things that i
learned well first of all you realize
outside of school
that a lot of what you'd learn isn't
directly applicable you have to make a
translation
um and it's the same when you walk into
a different culture there's a lot of
principles
and i suggest that you do stick to your
principles but you have to translate
them
into something that is relevant locally
um when it comes to east learning from
west west living from east
it's actually to me it's actually kind
of irrelevant i think everybody should
be learning from everybody
in this context um what you know the
west is
the quote unquote west is more developed
than the east and so
it's natural for the east to look to
what's been done in the west and to to
take away
um what's worked and what hasn't worked
um and you know so
what i focused a little bit on was what
didn't work for us um
which i think is maybe a bit more
unusual so it's really about keeping
that open mind
and uh being critical about yourselves
and about what you've seen
um i'd like to uh kind of share with you
my own experiences
um i think curry mentioned i actually
was born and grew up in malaysia
so we immigrated to canada when i was
17.
so for 17 years of my life it's
definitely a traditional
asian style education in fact i don't
even remember that i could speak english
you know
so from 17 onwards then it's all western
education so i think i really embody
uh the half and half you know so if you
talk about the kind of east and west i
think that really
is me and then i never thought i would
move to taiwan
by working in asia and moving to taiwan
so um
i think when when you are kind of living
um in this sort of situation
you don't see it as a as a fight or a
conflict as adrian just said i think one
of the one of the most influential thing
that i
that the thing that influenced me the
most is really um
you know really looking at how how grand
cole house
uh how he approaches uh what you call
non-western culture and giving it that
sort of
uh detailed uh study or
observation um that most western
education would never even bother to
look at and so i think he's already
broken many grounds in that
and so i think that has been always an
inspiration and so really
establishing in taiwan i mean who knows
you know that i would be here and
and have my office here but but i think
it really puts me in a very exciting
position in the sense that i can come
from all these different angles
and really try and create something um i
think that could be
very meaningful to to a large group of
cultures
uh or a large group of people so um so i
actually see this sort of east-west
thing as as an asset
um and so that's just my thing
that last question was from mina i want
to credit people on their questions
very good question i'm going to combine
a question from alvin huang and and yo
hakamori maybe the equitable urban
environment is messy
uh messi to allow for various
socio-economic classes to exist
we see that many asian cities as well as
here in l.a
perhaps city ordinances need to allow
for this hybrid type of
use of urban spaces that's a question
last statement
and and to add on to that alvin
says that in asia there are fairly clear
attitudes that retail
space doubles and doubles as public
space that shopping malls and retail
developments have secondary and tertiary
civic uses as public gathering spaces
how are these attitudes incorporated
into the design of large-scale retail
projects
in asia and how can these approaches add
to the health and success
of the urban conditions so the messiness
of urban environments
um providing that equitability and the
notion of kind of how
retail functions in the asian
marketplace
stephen it's called cold calling right
um let me let me sort of take a step
back on this i think
the question is really about
localization and generalization
we never really uh in our in our search
for our strategy formulation
and what to do in certain cities we i
think the first thing we normally do is
actually
not look at me is look at us us meaning
the local community and ourselves what
can we create
and one of the examples is actually uh
usc had the italian
rome program uh back in nowadays you
know and we stay in a little uh
place called uh uh lunetta
and next to is a place called uh uh
piercer campbell de fioli
uh that's where we get our food local
localize ourselves you get our bread in
the middle of the night you know it has
it has all kinds of stuff each that
place changes about five times a day
into or even seven times a day in terms
of usage
you know lunch time it can be lunch
place you know in the afternoon can be a
soccer field for
for kids coming back from school in the
middle of night is actually a night
market
so i think the real issue is how do you
utilize those spaces in the local
context that's actually important
as architects can we enable that
flexibility to happen
but the problem i think what we see in
modern architecture is very specialized
usage for certain type of stuff you do
it over here at a certain point in time
and it's very inflexible from that
perspective so i think in many ways i
think retail open spaces can also can be
very easily integrated
internally we have a phrase that we use
a lot is organized chaos
can we actually create that and yet let
the city and that the
we build the stage and let the the
occupants actually do their play
i think there's a whole lot a whole lot
of work you can do here that's actually
quite quite sustainable
there's a question thanks coming through
for all the projects
are there from oscar wong for all
projects is there any
are there any examples of some type of
rapport the local community
for instance surveys or seminars that
influence the process and design to give
a higher degree of civic sense
how do you on the one hand get
get past the public entities that have
to approve
projects uh and and on the other hand
how do you
proactively seek uh community buy-in
on the kind of projects that you're
doing um
i'll take on that um actually just on
the project that
i um i showcased just now about these
community malls
we actually have had to do a lot of that
um as
as i said some you know 45 percent of
hong kong population actually live
in these uh public estates so it makes
up a very big part of the uh
the society of hong kong uh and
in the local uh district elections
basically all the all the elections are
done
or all the other votes are basically
coming from these housing estates so in
almost
all of our shopping malls there are
district councillors
which are pop which are elected locally
by the local residents that represent
them
so one of the big jobs of our
pr marketing department is actually to
deal with them
uh and instead of dealing with them and
antagonistically uh
we go and engage them and we talk to
them we understand from them what their
constituents want
and we often we work with them some a
lot of times it's our ideas we give them
ideas and say we tell them hey this is
what we're trying to do
and we're going to do it for the good of
the community
but why don't you take credit for it so
by doing that they actually help us
spread
what we want to do and get buy-in from
the community
so it's kind of a uh a two-way street of
uh
of um of communication but we
but it's managed and we manage it that
way
and just a quick comment on this i think
it's so important and as architects you
have to think about
your communities and you have to take
their input into mind um but when you
enter uh your practices or developers
what you'll realize is the time cost of
money
and opportunity costs are huge i mean
these projects we're talking
hundreds of millions of dollars billions
of dollars in some cases
and um you know a day's worth of
interest uh like interest rate on that
is
is a lot of money so um in reality there
you know while we all want to do that
and you know i'm all for supporting
communities
um it has to be done in a very effective
and sort of
quick manner um and sometimes you get to
do more sometimes you get to do you
don't get to do as much
um so just in re you know in a business
context
um there's so much more that comes into
this than just
you know what is that ideal level of
integration and
communication and feedback from your
community
so i want to um we can indulge for
another 10 minutes or so um i want to
shift to kind of
um we're an architecture school but
we're very interested
in the capaciousness of our students and
faculty around
um you know making the ideation
of concepts uh design concepts come
alive
um at at much smaller scales in some
cases
um aspirationally than the work that
great work that you all are doing
but also um you know we're
i think the beautiful thing here is
people can see an arc towards
um an aspiration of doing the kinds of
projects that you're doing but
i'm wondering i'm going to be haunted by
our march
to death valley slide from stephen juan
that was a cautionary tale for for
architects um
and i want to maybe think about that in
the context of of
of our school and say um you know
we have a generation of students that
that
are very interested in taking the
strategies that you're using
uh and and and
super uh the reverse of super scaling
bringing them down to a very small scale
that they can
actually develop within four or five
years of being out of school
um with a small property and i'm
wondering what advice you have
for starting
in linking development and architecture
in a small way with
and what kind of education you think
architects need to do that um and
i wonder if you have any um any thoughts
on that
uh how much time do you have dean perry
i can go on for years on this
let me take a quick quick step at this i
think it's really a process of
actually exposing yourself to what you
are passionate about
um everybody has a personality you know
uh in what we do everything is in the
details so so i think the first thing is
don't lose the details
but in the meantime keep track on the
big picture as well you know in terms of
development i i knew quite early on i
was not
right for an architect who draws stairs
every day for the next 30 years
and i was very interested in the process
of building and making it happen so
development was the natural way to go
the question then becomes how do i get
there so again how do you eat an
elephant you know
so i decided to take it one bite at a
time and also take the development route
in building companies that does one
project at a time
so obviously other people will have a
different route and the key on that is
really exposing yourself while you're in
school
to other disciplines that's happening
around the world
be digitization be it urban planning
be a business school be it music
everything has a role to play in
development
so so i i would suggest really a a very
interdisciplinary
mindset expose yourself and really just
don't rush it you know is
it don't get to the ir as kenny rightly
said so the minute you have an ir in
mind
uh you might as well get into production
line of just building projects for the
sake of money
but what we do is actually much more
lasting in terms of impact so
i tend to say it is a really
optimization process
into the skill set building a team rely
on your team
and do good work through time i think
that's really how i would advise
and find your team early uh
there's a lot of trust in the team as
well that you need to have
so we've seen massive urbanization in
the markets that you you all work in and
i'm wondering
um as you look at other asian cities
that aren't as developed as the ones
that you're working in
um and maybe not as as prosperous um
what are the lessons that they could
take from um
the work that you've done and the kind
of accelerated
pace of development that's happened in
in hong kong and shanghai in taipei
um i'm going to go first because our
projects have ranges from
very high budget to very low budget and
in taiwan most of the development of
money of course is in the north
taipei but we've done projects sort of
to the south of taiwan
outlying islands and very quickly it
becomes very clear that we are really
building in a whole new different
culture
um the craft there there is no
professional builder to speak of
you know these are just local guys and
putting things together
and i think so very quickly you have to
find a way to
to get the project to a certain level
but then you will find that these local
forces
you can't beat they're gonna build what
they uh what they can and how they build
there's a whole culture of
construction that will greatly impact
the building
but but i think i've learned that that
could be of a great benefit
like the the boutique uh resort that we
just completed
it's done extremely rough in terms of
construction because we have known this
uh as the fact that we must accept from
day one
so we kind of built into that sort of uh
vibe
as a kind of main characteristic of the
building you know the concrete is like
super rough there is no interior blah
blah
but then really to focus on creating a
strong identity and a story
within within that beautiful nature you
know i was looking at
countries like uruguay where they don't
have a lot of money but they're building
fantastic buildings
um mexico in the 60s brazil in the 70s
so i think
um as architects or or maybe developers
are always working with sort of these
high-end high scale
but i think i've i've worked with that
but i've also worked with very local
and and it does bring a very different
characteristic
and and i think that it actually
surprised me because then it would
transform your building uh to become a
kind of different level
so i think that is a good lesson to take
um wherever you work
is going to be the the same issues but
but really the thing is to be very smart
about
the resources that you can use um you
you have to kind of go with the flow
a bit because if you fight it then then
then actually nothing will get done and
everything turns negative very quickly
um so that's just from really practical
experience but
having said that of course i don't mind
having a huge budget to do
more fantastic work can i just put in
one quick word as the developer i think
um you know when i work with architects
though the ones that i work
best within the ones that i've found to
be the most successful are the ones that
listen that really listen
who are taking your needs into account
as a business
right you learn about function and
beauty but you don't learn about return
right and ultimately the people who are
paying you are looking for a return of
some kind it may not be financial maybe
community
or something else but you know as an
architect you have to
listen very well and be able to
translate what you're hearing into
that product that you're creating um
project management the ability to manage
resources and prioritize are just so
important and um you know if you can
really
hone those skills uh in school you'll
you'll be a leg up when you graduate
um let me add my my two cents worth is
you know
architecture is a service at the end of
the day
uh while capital can go global and
services are usually very locally
delivered
uh i think we need to be mindful so i
think just making sure that we are honed
into what we can deliver consistently
over time it's actually critical
i want to ask um maybe the the next last
question here
uh if there's no more questions please
put questions in the
in the chat or the q a um adriel i
i sensed a self-critique of of that
project that was uh
near the canal and and uh perhaps
you would have done some things
differently um in terms of how you're
dealing with
potentially flooding and so forth
and i'm wondering um you know we look at
something in the united states like
hudson yards which is
uh for us in the u.s a big project
that project came with massive uh public
investment uh in the form of tax
increment
uh finance other other kind of benefits
um
but it also came with um the task of
of taking a kind of unusable
public right-of-way and infrastructure
and upgrading it
and um so i'm wondering if
with the massive amounts of projects
that flow in massive amounts of money
that flow into projects
such as the ones you're doing whether um
you know delving into that critique that
you made of your own project
whether infrastructure is
an additional role that very large-scale
projects can take on
um adding some benefit to the public
good while
um creating you know new environments
for you know potentially economic
ecologically better
environments not only for that project
but also for neighboring projects in the
entire waterfront i'm wondering if
if your critique is leading you to
rethink the way in which you develop
projects particularly
in contexts where the the ecology is is
challenged or
could be given the circumstances of what
we're going through
absolutely um oftentimes in when we take
on projects were asked
uh either explicitly at the beginning or
sometimes implicitly towards the end
to take on parts of the infrastructure
um you know we're
developing city blocks at a time in some
cases you know more than a whole city
block
and um drainage uh electricity you know
right away
uh automobiles everything at least
within the immediate vicinity you have
to consider
if you don't have enough electricity you
know we've been in positions many times
where we actually build substations
for the government and in return for you
know
they can't pay upfront so it might be
delayed payment in form of tax breaks or
things like that um and you know it's
it's it has to be planned it's all part
of the
earliest stages of your your investment
you know do you have enough
uh drainage do you have enough
electricity um what are the sunlighting
implications
um for your neighbors because we built a
lot of skyscrapers uh
you know uh sunlight is a public good
and you have to respect that and you
have to be cognizant of what your effect
is
on that so these are all things that do
take place already
there are codes in place uh i think one
of the things i think
are most challenging is when those codes
as well meaning as they are sometimes
just aren't practical
uh you know it's good when governments
have the ability to be flexible um
ultimately
we need to do things that are good for
our communities because we're there for
the long term we build assets that are
going to be there for 50
100 years and if we're not good to our
communities how can we expect them to be
good to us
and infrastructure is an integral part
of that
thank you um on that i think we're going
to close out i want to thank
steven grace adriel and kenny
for really some amazing projects and
some amazing thinking
in the work that you're doing and i
really appreciate um
the time i've spent with you um uh in
in asia has been has been mind-blowing
and
and i think uh i look forward to
continuing the relationship with the
school
and and what we're doing with our
students and as we move forward with
this initiative
um i really um would appreciate your
continued involvement with us because i
think
um all the points that we discussed
today
um warrant longer conversations um
studios um faculty engagement um
so we're so indebted to you for taking
the time today would be with us
and really look forward to continuing
the conversation so thank you for
joining us
um tune in next week for i feel like i'm
on television tune in next week for our
uh
our next uh lecture by catherine steven
norton catherine
steven norton uh we'll be talking about
her work in landscape architecture
and um thank you for all for joining us
good night
