‘In China, builders don’t look at drawings’: the architect challenging his country’s rampant urban obsession

China is moving mountains and flattening neighbourhoods. But Dong Gong is sparking a revolution – by working slowly with what’s already there. As a book of his great projects appears, he shares his philosophy

Artificial boulders fill the studio of Vector architects in Beijing, like the result of a dramatic landslide, their craggy polystyrene surfaces rendered with chalky grey plaster. One rock has a striking house sprouting from its summit, a group of intersecting cubic volumes crowned with a curving barrel-vaulted roof. Another has a cluster of industrial looking buildings nestled at its base, connected by an intricate colonnade. A third features a series of momentous terraces and rectangular pits carved into a gulley, with the air of an ancient burial site.

These are the enigmatic visions of Dong Gong, an architect who has risen to prominence in China as a conjuror of mesmerising spaces, crafting libraries, schools and museums that feel grown out of, or hewn into, their sites, built with extraordinary attention to detail. His seashore library in Aranya feels like a miniature jewel-like version of Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery, marooned on the beach, where daylight pierces through angled shafts and plays across the sculpted concrete walls.

His courtyard elementary school in Shenzhen is a protected oasis, its classrooms and running track wrapping a grove of mature banyan trees in the middle of the bustling high-rise metropolis, a world away from the usual state-mandated educational barracks. While Chinese cities continue to build at relentless speed, moving mountains and razing neighbourhoods overnight, Dong’s approach is to slow down, and draw on the value of what is already there.

“China’s current economic slowdown has actually been helpful,” he says, sitting in his office in Beijing, where a framed drawing of La Tourette leans against the wall. “It means we can slow down too, and rediscover a kind of thoughtfulness.” While big commercial offices that worked for the country’s major real estate developers are struggling, the likes of Vector architects see the current moment as a chance to take stock, recalibrate, and encourage their clients to approach things more carefully. Where demolition was once the default, the economic lull has given more currency to the option of retaining and reusing existing structures – a boon for both heritage and the environment.