St. Louis Architecture Firm Growing With China

The Olympics this year are expected to showcase the “new China” that is fairly vibrating with innovation and energy. Many companies in mature Western markets want in on that sizzling economy, and one Western design company that is well placed to the sizzle is St. Louis-based HOK.

China’s government, as reported in the China Daily News, says that its economy grew 65 percent in the last five years, for an average annual growth rate of 10.6 percent. The United States Central Intelligence Agency ranks the Chinese economy as the second largest national economy in the world, and The Economist magazine projects that China will move ahead of the United States into first place within 12 years.

“It is amazing how fast things move,” said Glenn Wing, vice president and director of interior design of HOK Hong Kong, and president of the Hong Kong chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He recently stopped in St. Louis for a couple of days and spoke to CNR about working in China. Wing spent 20 years working in New York City after getting his graduate degree from Columbia University, and then he was recruited by a Chinese company and moved to Hong Kong in 2002.

“I thought Manhattan was as fast as life gets, but it is faster in Hong Kong. Clients come at you faster, they want the property faster, and they want the product faster,” he said. It is not that regulation is any less – it actually is similar, he said – “there is just a vibe and an energy there to get things done.”

Wing joined HOK in 2005, shortly after the company had begun what would turn into a major growth spurt in Asia. HOK opened its office in Hong Kong in 1984 when it was designing the Hong Kong stadium and master planning the new airport. In 2003 HOK opened a second Asian office in Beijing, following that with new offices in Shanghai in 2005, Singapore in 2006 and Ho Chi Minh City in 2007. The last office puts the company in a good position to enjoy Vietnam’s economic ascent, which some analysts predict will be the world’s fastest over the next decade.

“We have 5 offices and 150 people, offering full planning and design services in all locations,” he said.

Although many of HOK’s clients in Asia are multinational corporations with global standards for all their offices, there still are cultural differences that anyone practicing design in Asia has to be aware of, he said.

 “Whether you are in Hong Kong, Taipei, or Singapore, you have to pay attention to feng shui, which literally means wind and water,” Wing said. “It is a form of geomancy. The idea is to balance out energy, called “chi,” which has to flow smoothly through the building interior or your company’s fortunes will fall. This comes into play even with multinational companies because the locals strongly believe in it. Even if you are designing for solar orientation, you have to take feng shui into account.

“You call in a feng shui priest. Taking into account personal details of the company director and the company business, he will say things like, ‘the financial person has to sit in this corner,’ and you can’t fight it,” he said.

One US-based financial reporting company, for example, has a fish tank in most of its offices in Asia, he said, because “ a fish tank brings good feng shui.”

Another difference is in the use of “green” or sustainable products.

“One sustainable product we use in America is bamboo. In Hong Kong it has a bad reputation. Hong Kong is one of the last places where construction scaffolding is built out of bamboo. You’ll see 60-story scaffolding built of bamboo and what are basically zip strips tying it together. So, bamboo there has a connotation of being a construction material. At first I couldn’t get it, and then I realized that asking a Chinese company to put bamboo on their floors or walls was like asking a corporate client here to cover their board room walls with strand board.”

Even global standards for workplace planning have to bend a little for Asia.

“Real estate is much, much more expensive in Asia, so work stations, offices, etc., are all smaller,” he said, but at the same time hoteling, which is a popular space-saver with many western corporations, “is not easily transferred to Asia because people don’t have the space to work at home,” he said.

In addition to corporate work, HOK was involved in the master planning for the Olympics and the company’s Sports Group consults with the Olympic committee and the Hong Kong Jockey Club on the games’ equestrian events.

“Some of our biggest interiors projects are the interior design of government offices in Hong Kong and for Beijing offices for the fourth largest insurance company in the world,” Wing added. “A large portion of our projects are in India right now, and we also approached for projects in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.”

Wing’s advice to anyone going to work in Asia: “fasten your seat belt.”

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