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​Archive Gallery | Architect David Chipperfield @ WDCC

​David Chipperfield

​Principal and Founder of David Chipperfield Architects

David Chipperfield is a British architect and a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the Bund Deutscher Architekten. He has built a design methodology that is now used across four offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai.

In addition to design work, David Chipperfield has taught and lectured at schools of architecture worldwide. In 2012 he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale under the title Common Ground. He has published numerous books and articles, including On Planning – A Thought Experiment (2018), a publication that explores and theorises the urban qualities of contemporary urban developments. He was the 2020 guest editor of Italian design magazine Domus.

Curated by Xing RUAN, Dean and Guangqi Chair Professor of Shanghai Jiao tong School of Design, David Chipperfield was invited to be an expert of the Creative City Network of Shanghai Think Tank. He attended the World Design Cities Conference on 16 September and share his opinion on the role design is playing in Shanghai city construction.

(The text is provided by David Chipperfield Architects)

I am honored to be invited to speak to you today as a member of the Shanghai Creative City Think Tank, and as the principal of an architecture practice who has had the pleasure of working in this extraordinary city.

This conference and discussion are taking place is an example in itself of the energy and passion for design in Shanghai. Crucially, it is an interest in design rooted in a concern for quality of life, in harmonious co-existence, wellbeing and prosperity.

Over the next few minutes, I would like to share my thoughts on the role of design and the design profession on ensuring a positive future for Shanghai. Like many global cities, Shanghai faces many challenges and bears a responsibility to lead the way for other cities. I would like to focus on two key points. Firstly, the importance of a robust framework within which good design work can take place – planning governance, for instance. And secondly, the need for new attitudes within the profession and culture of design that focuses as much on process as product.

In many ways, the history of the city is a history of civilisation. This history has given us moments of great built creativity both in urban planning and in the individual components of which it is made: its architecture. It has supplied images and forms to our societies and cultures, defining a quality of life based on co-existence and shared prosperity.

But the reality of our cities, and even the idea of our cities, are being substantially challenged. Cities are the frontline of the wider social and environmental issues of our times. They are shaped not only by spectacular forces of migration, global markets, as well as new information technologies and digitalisation, but the powerful forces of investment and speculation.

At the same time, the environmental impact the construction of our cities, and the way we live in them, are finally being recognised. Their status as a generator of wealth, opportunity and innovation must now be considered in relation to the problematic environmental and social conditions that they produce. Given the dimensions of these challenges, we need new strategies for dealing with cities that go beyond the conventional disciplinary divisions and responsibilities of architectural or urban design.

Many of these issues can be confronted by the way we construct buildings and, more fundamentally, in the way we plan our cities. But to achieve this – in time and at the scale required – calls for a supporting framework of regulation and coordination to align interests towards common goals. We cannot rely on the willingness of the personal sense of responsibility of the designer or the altruism of the client alone. We must look for new ways of governance and planning.

Planning and regulation are crucial not only to the shape of the city but to its efficiency as a complex ecological system that draws on enormous resources, materials and energy, and depends on extraordinary infrastructures of mobility and services to protect and improve the daily quality of life. This in turn promotes the health, interaction, productivity and prosperity of its inhabitants.

When the city no longer aspires to be a good place to live for all its inhabitants, then so is the idea of the city itself lost. It must be used and built in a way that respects and promotes our ideas of community and diversity, that fosters interaction and respects (often invisible) networks that hold it together. It must demonstrate an intelligent, flexible approach to the challenges of construction and operation in the face of climate crisis. Moreover, we must see the city as part of the wider territorial context on from which they draw, consciously aware of their impact on the land and lives that surround them locally and globally.

Once the task of designing a building or a plot reaches the architect, so many fundamental decisions have already been made further upstream. Such decisions are increasingly dependent on quantifiable and monetised results over the softer qualities of society and community. The latter is hard to measure or assess but we know it forms the fundamental basis from which cities prosper. Though we might dispute the ways this can be realised in form, we know that promoting the connection between people is critical to creating resilient and productive cities.

As architects, planners and designers, we would like our work should be of value to others, not just as a consequence of practicality but of meaning beyond the individual task. We hope that through architecture, building spaces, the organisation of how we live and work, we might be able to confirm the tendencies and instincts that draw us to live together. I remain convinced that the built environment not only contributes to our quality of life and to our wellbeing but to the very physical expression of the idea of community itself.

So, what then is role of design in the city? It is clear to me that design can play a very important role. It should not simply be applied to important cultural buildings, focused on one district of the city, or one week of the cultural calendar year, but rather it should be embedded within the systems that shape the city, nourished by the city and grow from the city. Design is a negotiation between the visual, the substantial and the social. We certainly do not need to abandon our ideas of how the city should look or how it should feel, but we can see that this is not delivered solely by beauty or spectacle alone. We must broaden our understanding of what good design is, what it looks like, where it is needed and how it works.

Design culture must be willing to be involved in a radical shift that gives priority to environmental and social initiatives over commercial imperatives alone. We must avoid monumentalising architecture without understanding how it contributes to its context and towards the life of the people who live there. We need to moderate the desire for physical result with the appropriateness of the design process. Process is critical to design. We must reconsider the design intelligence not only of what we build but why we build, how we build and where we build. We can help towards this by celebrating examples of work that demonstrate good planning governance, that consider our environment, and that are responsible with resources.

The reuse of existing buildings – both monumental and mundane – is a central issue in this re-evaluation. As we increasingly question the detrimental environmental costs of construction, it is clear that reuse and modification of existing buildings is an efficient use of materials. There is also an alignment with the culturally and emotionally motivated concerns around the protection of heritage and the importance of continuity as a critical part of our sense of place. Our identity is formed by the intricate complexities of how we choose to interact with what we have inherited and the world we strive to create in the future. The city is a combination of the past and the future.

I am cautious here that I approach the issue of heritage from a Western perspective, but I think all cultures can find common ground in the concern to lessen our environmental impact, celebrate the unique qualities of a place and foster the vibrant communities that make up our city. What we have inherited needs to be understood and cared for not only as a record of history, but as a fragile ecology of our built, natural and social world. We must find tools and governance structures to ensure the built environment of our future can be planned considering the apparently conflicting pressures of development and protection, innovation and continuity.

My practice’s experience working on the Rockbund project in Shanghai has reinforced the value of persevering with the more complex task of reusing and restoring existing buildings over the seemingly simpler blunt approach of starting from a cleared plot. This project required investment in the design and research stages, expertise and skilled craftsmen, careful planning and mediation of decisions. However, I would argue that in the long-term, the effort to preserve fabric and a layer of the city’s history has enriched the identity and attractiveness of an area both for the present and for the future.

Recognising the design value of projects such as these is not straightforward as it is not simply a question of image, it is also a question of function, efficiency, experience and atmosphere. It is the result of process.

What does this mean for the role of the design profession? We must learn how to concentrate our skills and use our ability to mediate scale, from a consideration of the tangible and experiential to the conditions of community which involve proactive analysis and planning. Precision of idea and realisation are, of course, critical to our work. We are inspired by the consideration of the particular, by the material, by the visceral and the experiential. Our work is given focus by the interpretation of the task within these measures. This has long been the craft of architecture.

But we must expand these responsibilities beyond what we build into how we build and where we build. This is an opportunity to redefine our working processes and our contribution. New technologies of data analysis and performance modelling can make our work essential to the development of our built environment as well as the protection of the natural one and its vital resources. Truly engaging these technologies for more than the formal results might lead to environments and buildings that are more attuned to the ways we connect, not only through cables or fibre, but as communities and citizens.

I am speaking to you today from Galicia, a region in northwest Spain, where my team of architects is working with the regional government and communities to design initiatives and schemes that promote the quality of the built environment in the region. What started out as a project to address the quality of architecture and the abandonment of buildings in town centres, has led us into a range of interconnected issues such as transportation, local industry, social support systems and even agricultural processes. It is not work that has a single tangible outcome, it is not about a building that can be photographed, but it is design. This the type of work that I think the designers of the future will need to engage with more than my generation.

Shanghai is a dynamic city that will need designers who are able to think on multiple scales, and who are agile and eager to design robust processes as much as beautiful things. They must be supported by a framework of planning governance and regulation that aligns interests towards a concern for quality and long-term sustainability, that embeds concerns for the environment and society within every project, through procurement and through assessment. It will require the use of new technologies and an understanding of old ones, new materials and the reuse of existing fabric, vision and sensitivity. There is no model to follow, and ideas can be found everywhere. Designers working in some of the most impoverished parts of the world are developing ideas that are relevant to the most advanced communities. I would encourage Shanghai to continue being a city open to design talent from around the world and prepared to engage with the tangible and intangible complexities of the city.

I look forward to returning being with you soon in your exciting and wonderful city.

Thank you very much.