ARCHITECTURE IN THE
CLASSROOM:
Shanshan Qi completed her major and degree requirements at Barnard last fall; this fall, she will be a graduate student at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (GSD).
THE STUDENTS
One semester shy of receiving her degree, Shanshan Qi '06 traveled to her homeland for a life-changing experience. Here, she talks about her interest in practicing and teaching architecture.
I'm originally from China, I came to the United States when I was 14. When I applied to Barnard, I didn't know what to major in. I thought about premed. Like all first years, I wanted to major in everything. I took all kinds of classes my first semester, including an introductory philosophy class and an art history class "Roman Art and Architecture" which I knew very little about
My first architecture class was a studio class called "Perceptions of Architecture." Once I took it, I realized architecture is a combination of many majors: there's art , history, and science, and you think about time and space. Through architecture, you become attached to a society, its culture, and its building environment. That's why I decided I wanted this.
I took an optional studio class in the fall of 2005 with Janette Kim, who was also a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). RPI has a relationship with Tongji University in Shanghai, and Janette was taking 16 RPI students there in the spring of 2006. I talked to her about going as a teaching assistant and translator. It was almost a sudden decision. I had my plan set: I had finished all the major requirements. I took the GRE I was going to apply to graduate school so that I could start this September. Then I stopped that process. I thought about the opportunity, and the chance to see and exchange ideas about architectural education and practice in China. My Centennial Scholars project was also about a very old type of Chinese residential architecture called Hui and its well persevered villages Hongcun and Xidi. I was studying the boundary shifts between private and public spaces due to its recognition as World Cultural Heritage Site by UNESCO and the villages' changing to public museum and popular tourist sites. All these curiosities were behind my decision. I talked with my advisor Karen Fairbanks, my parents, and Dean Schneider. They all supported me.
Once we got to China, I wound up working as an instructor with a group of six students on a ten-week architecture/urban design project. We had a site in Shanghai , which is alone the Suzhou Creek, including the Si Hang warehouse. The site is bigger than Columbia's campus. We had to think about how the site relates to the city, historical preservation, and transportation systems, and how the creek affects the people around it, and how to use the site for leisure-that was our theme. We had to redefine what leisure is: some people think leisure is wandering around without doing anything; others think leisure is spatial, a difference between inside and outside. So there was analysis, in which we interviewed people in the area, put our observations and imaginations into graphic presentations and designs. As a studio critic, I explored how everybody thinks, and.. When we were in China, Janette and I, with Jason Anderson (another architecture professor who was teaching at Beijing University and Tsinghai University at that time) have also put together an interactive website, www.zhuanpan.org, a database of sites throughout China that reflect the exchange between architecture and cultural values, and encourage dialogue between China and the world.
Before this experience, I thought I'd become a professional architect. Now I'd like to teach and practice. I really enjoyed the teaching. Every day, I saw how the students communicated with each other, how they thought about the project. There were a lot of similarities, maybe because we were all about the same age. But there were differences, too. The language was a struggle; they thought they understood each other, but when they saw each others' designs, they realized they hadn't. The experience taught me about sensibility and responsibility, not just for myself, but for others. There is a lot of philosophy in architecture: about how it relates to society, how it relates to how people think. It's not just about buildings, and calculating numbers. It's really how you think about everything else around you-the world and the future of the world.
— By Shanshan Qi as told to Dimitra Kessenides