(Note: This is a guest post by Hilary Flannery)
Dwight Law didn’t come out to Asia because he was enraptured with the culture of the
Law’s undergraduate days in the U.S. stretched out longer than expected. He was ready to wrap up a degree in landscape architecture from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo in 1993 when a planned study trip abroad was scrapped because of political tumult in South America. Law’s extended college enrollment landed him a seat on a study trip the following year to a different part of the world: Asia. “I never planned to stay,” he recalled in an interview.
Yet Law changed his mind about leaving. The Kansan took a job at U.S. landscape architecture design firm Belt Collins in Singapore. When the Asia financial crisis hit in 1997, his layoff in 1998 became a career turning point. Law took the plunge as an entrepreneur, co-founding a company in the Southeast Asian financial hub that added 30 landscape architects in three years. “The work kept coming” as rivals squeezed by Asia’s economic pain closed.
His success put him on the radar of Hong Kong businessman Vincent Lo. Best known back then as a cement supplier , Lo was launching a historically flavored nightlife real estate project in Shanghai, Xintiandi, that many saw as misguided at a time when fast money was to be made in packed-in residential towers. Today, Xintiandi is a city icon visited by thousands daily that has helped turn Lo into a billionaire, ranking No. 1,118 on the 2015 Forbes Billionaires List with an estimated fortune worth $1.7 billion. Law, through his landscaping architecture help at Xintiandi, was eventually offered more work in China by Lo. That led to a life-changing decision to relocate to Shanghai.
It was the first in a career of enviable twists in China: Law has consistently found work from businesses owned by Asia’s richest people. Besides Lo, he has done four Shanghai projects for Malaysian billionaire Robert Kuok’s Kerry Properties, as well as another commercial project in the city for trend-setting Soho China, owned by Beijing billionaires Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi. Among others, Law has also worked in China for Hong Kong billionaire Peter Woo’s
Marco Polo Hotel chain. Law’s successes for business elites has also helped him win high-profile Shanghai government projects, including the redesign of the garden at Xujiahui Church and creation of Donghu Park in front of a home of the city's famous pre-revolution city gangster Pockmark Tu.
“He is comfortable designing great public places in uber-urban Shanghai, and equally at home working on a resort deep in a bamboo forest and tea terraced mountains in rural China,” says U.S. architect and frequent Law collaborator Ben Wood. The two have been fortunate, Wood says, “to be on a yellow brick road to fame and fortune in a country undergoing the greatest urbanization in the history of mankind.”
Wood isn’t exaggerating. About half of China’s 1.3 billion denizens live in cities. That’s up from only 20% at the start of China’s economic reforms at the end of the 1970s. The movement of hundreds of millions of people has brought a boom in real estate prices and a demand for new thinking in urbanism and architecture among property owners, developers and the Chinese public, which in turn has created opportunity for Law.
Law runs his China business Design Land Collaborative, or DLC Design, from a third-floor perch above the soil from which his China wealth was spawned, Xintiandi. He sits at a desk covered with hand-drawn sketches. Model airplanes are parked atop shelves that line his work space. Books that reveal an interest in aviation occupy his desk, too: “The Art of Flying,” “Air Crashes,” and “Killing Zone.”
You wonder when he reads. He works seven days a week and exudes a huge passion for landscape architecture. “People think landscape architecture is just gardening. I hate that,” he snarls. Chinese associate landscape architecture with gardening in part because that’s how it’s sometimes translated in Chinese: “garden architecture.” Shanghai Book City, the city’s biggest bookstore, doesn’t have a section for landscape architecture. The scattered relevant titles among a larger architecture area also cover a broader landscape category, “jingguan jianzhu.” Landscape architecture is also historically linked with gardens in China because the country boasts some of the world’s most famous groom green space. The eastern city of Suzhou, for instance, is home to Chinese imperial gardens that wowed Marco Polo and are still the backbone of its tourism industry.
Shanghai, by contrast, has long been a place where foreign designers of commercial buildings and residences have made a mark. Structures along the city’s historic Bund area designed more than a century ago by enduring firms such as Palmer and Turner still stand. All types of design– architecture, interior and product - went downhill in the country during Mao’s socialist heyday.
China’s reforms meaningfully kicked off in the 1980s as Law was working his way through college. The son of the dean of the College of Architecture Planning and Design at Kansas State University, Law originally didn’t plan to follow his dad. “I had an independent streak,” he says. He spent two years as an undergrad in his father’s school, but dropped out. “There I was in Manhattan, Kansas my whole life. I tried the dorm but my mom unknowingly put me into the ‘quiet study building.’”
That – followed by a subsequent move back home– weren’t for Law. He took a job pouring cement in Los Angeles for two years “trying to figure it all out,” before recommitting to his father’s field, landscape architecture. He then resumed his study at California Poly San Luis Obispo, and that eventually landed him with a degree and his own business in Singapore.
At the time of Law’s relocation to Shanghai in 2001, the city barely had any specialized landscape architects, leaving room in the market for Law designs. His first job after setting up shop: Vincent Lo’s follow-on project to Xintiandi, Xihu Tiandi in the nearby city of Hangzhou. There, he worked closely with Wood, a U.S. architect who had also worked with Lo to bring Xintiandi historically inspired design to China. That kicked off a decade and a half of close collaboration in China between the two.
For Xintiandi’s first progeny, Wood and Law came up with a design that fused buildings with folding glass canopies in a park. When the weather is warm, the canopies open, and vice-versa when cold. “The idea here was to have these glass canopies that allow indoor and outdoor interaction with the park,” Law said. “What it did was to allow transparency for people who are using the space and extend the space and use it year-round.” That design helped fuel Shui On’s investments in several other “Tiandi” projects including the best of the lot, located in the southern trading city of Foshan.
Though Shui On’s business helped kickstart Law’s China operation, it wasn’t an easy beginning, Law recalled. Getting clients to think more open minded about the arrangement of outside space wasn’t always a quick sell. “The biggest battle we had was clients who didn’t want trees because they blocked the facades,” he said. “The officials and the clients were like, ‘Chinese don’t drink coffee. Why would you sit outside and drink coffee?’” he said. “So, there was an amount of education you had to do.” Another obstacle: A continuing fondness for large structures with limited outdoor space. Many clients, Law said, “think big is better. But it’s not. Big is terrible. Big is empty. It’s cold and hard.”
But times and tastes have changed, too, he said. Increasingly, clients appreciate landscape design as “as an affordable way to give value” to a project, Law said. Today, he said, “My number one challenge is working with people who don’t have travel exposure, who’s never been around the world to see how people work and interact.”
Even though clients are better traveled and more sophisticated, a lot of Law’s presentations still include diagrams and images of projects from other countries that stand erect behind street-level trees. That includes images of Italian courtyards with flower pots and graded surfaces, and even Lincoln Road in Miami. “For us, the natural environment is the key to design, not creating fancy patterns.”
Connections that link different sections of outdoor areas are key to Law’s designs and success, he said. “What we try to do is create a landscape where everything connects spatially and you can decompress, but it’s still one project.” Good examples, he said, are his work for Robert Kuok’s Kerry Center and Kerry Parkside in Shanghai.
Although Law’s business is good today, the local competition is coming on strong. His own office is almost fully staffed by Chinese land architects, mostly from Shanghai’s elite Tongji University.
Law hasn’t lost the independent streak of his youth. In particular, he said, success over the long run in China means avoiding copying the work of others. “I think one trend should be to stay the hell away from trends,” he said. “You can design without being trendy in a ‘trendy’ way, without knowing it.”
-- Follow me on Twitter @rflannerychina
