Recently appointed Chair of the MIT School of Architecture, Yung Ho Chang is highly regarded both as a working architect whose projects range from single-family homes to master-plans for entire cities and as a provocative social and architectural critic. Born in Beijing in 1956, Yung Ho Chang moved to the United States in the early 1980s. After a period of teaching at Ball State University, the University of Michigan and the University of Berkeley, Yung Ho Chang opened the Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (Atelier FCJZ) in 1993, the first private architectural practice in China.

His first projects in Beijing such as the Xishu Bookstore (1996-2000) and the Upside Down Office for Cummings Asia Headquarters were small but notable for their inventiveness and wit. Another project that has attracted international attention is the Split House, 2002 which was designed for a single family as part of the Commune on the Great Wall.  Despairing at the rapidity with which the urban fabric of China has been destroyed and the dysfunctional cities that have emerged from their ruins, Yung Ho Chang has proposed an urbanism that respects the complexity and rich texture of urban life. Buildings like the Morningside Center of Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1998, in Beijing recreate this experience within the confines of a relatively small, compact building. More recently he has turned his attention to the solution of problems presented by the devastation of the landscape by greedy developers as in his proposed Bamboo Sea-Castle-Towns in Liusha, Nanning, 2002. In this case he aims to restore the land to life by the extensive planting of bamboo and the sequential building of related structures over a period of years.

Yung Ho Chang has a wide range of interests, not least of which is the visual arts. He has designed a Small Museum of Contemporary Art (SMOCA) for the artist Cai Guo-Qiang and has designed the installation of major exhibitions such as Cities on the Move (Vienna, 1997 and Louisiana Museum, 1999). Most recently he has been selected as one of the artists representing China for the 2005 Venice Biennale. His bamboo structure will serve as the Chinese Pavilion. A video of the entire process will be shown at Chambers Fine Art during the exhibition, converting the gallery into a satellite of the Chinese Pavilion in Venice.

Yung Ho Chang is also particularly interested in disseminating his ideas in non-architectural contexts. The present exhibition consists of six boxes containing architectural design projects of Atelier FCJZ in the form of models and drawings. Among the six projects are the Villa Shizilin, Beijing (built) and Club by the Canal, Beijing (design stage). As described by Yung Ho Chang : "All the designs embrace a notion of Micro-Urbanism, which perceives urbanity as a set of relationships - spatial, physical, social, political, economical, and cultural - and attempts to establish such relationships within individual buildings." The six cubic boxes are first used as containers for international transportation. Each box opens in a different way so that "the basic tectonic form becomes a unique theater for the display of architectural ideas."

Catalogue Available