Tong Ming (born 1968 in Nanjing, China) earned his bachelor’s degree (1990) and his master’s degree (1993) in architecture from Southeastern Nanjing University.In 1995, Tong moved to Shanghai to pursue his PhD in urban plans at Tongji University.he received in 1999.Then worked at the Suzhou Design Institute until the creation of his own independent university firm, TM Studio in 2004.Also maintains another.studio UNO, Urban Network Office area in West Bund, specializing in organizing seminars, workshops, exhibitions and conferences.
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Tong is a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of the Southeast.The architect translated two vital e-books that were not previously available in Chinese: Peter Hall’s Collage City and Cities of Tomorrow through Colin Rowe.He wrote his own e-book From Mythology to Fairy Tales and published an updated Chinese edition of Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China, an e-book written by his grandfather Tong Jun (also known worldwide as Tung Chuin, 1900-1983) that was one of the first in China modern architects and one of the first Chinese graduates of the University of Pennsylvania.Ming’s projects come with URBANCROSS Gallery (Shanghai, 2017), TM Studio West Bund (Shanghai, 2015), A Courtyard with Lotus (Shanghai, 2011), Park Block Renovation (Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, 2007) and Dong’s House Tea House on Pingjiang Road (Suzhou, 2004).
We spoke during a WeChat video call about Tong’s joy as we ran at Wenzheng College in Suzhou before opening his own studio, his role in launching Wang Shu’s first giant building, his grandfather’s studies on classic Chinese gardens and his frustrations with the uncertainties of his own buildings..can replace their original use or even be discontinued.
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Vladimir Belogolovsky: Your grandfather, Tong Jun, one of the first fashion architects in China, have you thought about reading more than architecture?
Tong Ming: Certainly that fact alone was the ultimate vital explanation for why I entered architecture. But when it came time to decide my elementary school in college, I first chose math, which was pretty hit or miss. [Laughter.] I was very interested in that. In fact, in the 1980s, subjects like math, physics, and science in general were very popular. But my mom went to school with me and we had a verbal exchange with other people from the administration. She convinced me that I deserve to dedicate myself to architecture. She insisted that it was vital to bring our family tradition, even if my parents did not study architecture. This is how it all started. But I have to say that the first time I felt something special in architecture was a few years after I graduated. It was in 1998 that I still had the opportunity to paint at my first genuine job, the Wenzheng College campus in Suzhou. Even though it was a very big task, at that time I had no past pleasure in designing a genuine build. It was in this assignment that I invited Wang Shu to evaluate the design of the Wenzheng College Library at Suzhou University, the ultimate vital construction on campus. I am very proud of this construction because for either of us it has become our first completed task.
VB: Why did you decide for him as an architect if he didn’t have fun at the time?How did you know you could accept it as true?
TM: I knew Wang Shu well because we were classmates at Tongji University. I painted over the city doing plan assignments and he painted over architectural assignments. Also, we lived next to each other in the bedroom. I went to paint with a local design institute in Suzhou, in particular to lead the design for this task. I was invited there through a friend of my wife who studied architecture with me in Nanjing and we painted together at the Suzhou Institute. Since then he has left architecture. In 2004, I was asked to do another task: Dong’s House restaurant on Pingjiang Road, a small renovation task in a historic district of Suzhou. This commission led directly to the start-up of my own independent company, which I opened that year in Shanghai. The assignment was a conversion of a classic residential courtyard. It was started through the local government as an exemplary renovation effort to remodel the residential and commercial block that was converted into restaurants and bars to advertise the riverside street as a hot tourist area. I used classic fabrics in a cool way to create a series of indoor and outdoor decks. The main facade facing the river was lined with dark hollow bricks that allowed visitors to see the landscape from the inside. However, the wall prevented the interiors from being seen from the outside during the day. This device gave the overall design the appearance of a lantern at night and helped create a special atmosphere.
VB: Translated Collage City and Cities of Tomorrow by Colin Rowe through Peter Hall.Why did you adopt these projects and this joy have had a specific influence on your own paintings as an architect?
TM: These e-books are very important to me personally. I still go back to those texts because they are fundamental. It’s funny, I came across Collage City by accident, browsing through e-books in the school library when I was a graduate student. There were very few e-books in the English language section so it stood out. He might not read it at the time, but he was very curious. So I made the decision to translate it for my own studies, but also for scholars who might not otherwise read this vital work. One of the biggest influences on me personally was that conception cannot be reduced to purely formal exercises. Architecture is not about designing buildings as objects, but about creating an urban fabric, continuity, knowledge, understanding and appreciation of history, feelings, feelings and much more. This ebook broadened my brain and allowed me to make my creations differently, depending on very express situations. And when it comes to Cities of Tomorrow, it was vital for me to examine urban fashion models and those of the past. And what better way to explore a topic than to translate it into your own language? But I will also tell you that I will no longer have interaction in translations. [Laughter.] It’s a lot of work, but I’m pleased to have translated some very important e-books that weren’t available in Chinese before.
VB: You said that when your practice was just about you and no one else, you appreciated it to the fullest and that designing alone is the ultimate productive way for an architect to design, then there is no communication challenge and the architect can manage everything in his own.Still?
TM: Well, that’s what I said and I still think it’s true.[Laughter.] But now we have two offices: TM Studio and UNO, Urban Network Office, made up of several people.TM Studio focuses on architectural and UNO projects – on the organization and control of cultural events such as seminars, workshops, exhibitions and conferences.
Well, to answer your question, in my opinion, architectural design is a very private thing. The total procedure of creating an architecture is based on intelligent communication: from the moment you put your concepts on paper, you want to transmit them to the other people in your workplace, to your engineer, to your client, to finish with the users. , etc. Inevitably, everything is lost in all these stages. To keep your concept pure, you want to reduce those steps and restrict the number of actors involved. That is why I resisted expanding my workplace for 15 years. We are still small, but before working with fewer people. I made the decision to expand when working on the A Courtyard with Lotus assignment. I’d say it replaced my attitude towards architecture and even my character. It was a rural site, on Yuanxiang Lake, which was temporarily absorbed by the city of Shanghai. The original program was a resort and public baths. The assignment was designed and built according to my concept. But when it was completed, it remained deserted for 3 years. Then they took him through a restaurant. They replaced everything so you can believe my frustration. But then I gave up, as I had a revelation: architecture should not be just a non-public vision, intact through genuine life. Is not sufficient.
Today I am convinced that architecture must be treated as a social tool that has a purpose.And if you can settle for this fundamental idea, you can settle for any result.Changes are inevitable and necessary. I may be unhappy with my non-public vision, but I am grateful that my construction can be useful, so after this project, I started interacting much more with other people rather than relying on my original idealistic visions.Mature way of running and I feel more relevant.
VB: Your grandfather, Tong Jun, was a well-known fashion architect.You recently published an updated Chinese edition of his e-book Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China and Wang Shu wrote a preface because he considers your grandfather to be one of the main influences of his work.Could you tell us about the importance of Tong Jun’s contribution?
TM: My grandfather’s eeebook was first published in the 1930s. It was printed in English in a Chinese T’ien Hsia Monthly newspaper. Since then he has continued to paint on the manuscript of his life. In 1997 a bilingual eeebook came out, in which I contributed as an editor. So I was doing my PhD. The recent eeebook you are referring to was published in Chinese in 2018. Wang Shu wrote an advent because he felt indebted to him. Tong Jun believed that a lawn is a world. Also, in the words of Wang Shu, architecture is a world, which means that it is about creating a new world, not just some other construction or a town of buildings. Another vital point is that a lawn is a fragment formula. It is not intended to be a drawing or a symbol as a whole. Gardens are created over long periods of time and are made up of the roots of other plants. And as they die, they are replaced piece by piece. He compared to a lawn to a ruin, which is cultivated, regenerated and kept alive.
VB: You say a lawn is biological and an ever-evolving organism, right?
TM: Yes, you can say that. A lawn does not start from scratch; It’s an ongoing process.Therefore, for Wang Shu, a construction is like a living being or a component of nature.In other words, it’s an environment, not a thing. When a tree dies, the tree replaces it, this is the fundamental concept and that is what Wang Shu learned and used as a key precept in his own work, for example, he uses recovered fabrics to upload them to his own buildings, his architecture is a cycle of loading, reuse, rethinking and transformation.
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