To reflect in just so many words on our experience of working in China is to give a personal, biased view, not a generic report on the situation of the country. From what we have seen we can say that every commission is a unique, unrepeatable experience. The moment, the city, the place, the type of client, and even a timely lunch meeting, indeed a complexity of variables and events all have a bearing on it, determining an uncertain and totally singular outcome.

Far from supplying a panorama, our intention is to take a retrospective, on occasion meticulous look at the work we have done in the past three years, in the course of six projects of different characteristics, in China, mainly the Shanghai area.

From the start we made it our concern to detect the variables that would affect each project, then decide how to address them. This chance to work in China – neither forced upon us nor previously contemplated, having come about through an invitation, issued in December 2000, to take part in a competition for a Shanghai district – has either reinforced or transformed many of the ideas we have formulated in over twenty years of academic and professional activity... [+]