Back to Homepage

Bring Back the Birdsong
 
George  J. Ge
May 2025





Introduction

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
— Charles Dickens

The last three decades swept across China like a great tide — a golden age of ambition, velocity, and spectacle. For those of us born in its wake, we were both fortunate and restless: fortunate to witness our cities rising, yet restless because something quieter — something tender — was being swept away.

I was born in a hutong.
Not just a place, but a rhythm, a scent, a language woven from bricks and breeze.
Beneath the shade of an old willow, I would fall asleep on my mother’s lap, lulled by fairy tales and the distant cooing of doves. Summer passed in unhurried breaths. My friends and I chased each other through narrow lanes, our footsteps thumping on stone like tiny drums; we watched kittens nap beneath bicycles, sparrows flutter past lattice windows. Popsicles melted down our arms before we reached home. In the courtyard, elders played chess on worn stone tables, their laughter drifting like wind chimes through the stillness of noon.

And in the background — always — was birdsong.
The sound of life.
Of belonging.
Of home.

But cities change.
And ours changed fast.

The willow fell. The courtyard cracked.
The alleyways that once echoed with barefoot games were swallowed by fences and construction dust. In their place rose a gleaming silhouette — later named Galaxy Soho by Hadid, a foreign dream built upon familiar soil. It looked like the future, but felt like an exile.

What replaced birdsong was the mechanical snarl of machinery.
What replaced fairy tales were fire exits, parking podiums, glass without soul.
The poetry of place — slow, soft, human — had been overwritten by capital and spectacle.

Architecture, I believe, is not merely steel and stone. It is belief, made visible. A city’s inner portrait cast upon the land. In the hutong, that portrait was one of intimacy — of neighbour and nature coexisting in gentle cadence. In the mirrored façades and cavernous atriums of the new city, we saw instead a projection of capital: vast, untethered, indifferent.

The world applauded.
Zaha. Herzog. Koolhaas.
Their monuments rose — dazzling, foreign, fluent in the language of power.
But in their gleam, the voice of place fell silent.
And in that silence, something in me stirred.

I do not reject the new.
But I mourn what was lost:
The garden that never needed to impress, only to belong.
The stoop where an old man once watched the moon rise for the hundredth time.
The tree that grew not from design, but from habit, memory, and the quiet insistence of life.

Architecture, like poetry, must remember its origin —
Not in noise, but in quiet.
Not in spectacle, but in song.

This is why I draw.
This is why I write.
This is why I build.

To bring back the birdsong.





2. Undergraduate Study – Drawing Foundations, Searching for Soul


If childhood gave me the ears to hear birdsong, then university gave me the hands to echo it.

In 2011, I entered the School of Architecture at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture — a place perhaps unassuming in name, but quietly rigorous in its convictions. Ours was a traditional education: structured, methodical, and deeply grounded. It was not concerned with spectacle, but with substance. And for me, it was exactly what I needed.

Before we were asked to dream, we were taught how to see.

We began with the most elemental acts: pencil on paper, the curve of a wrist, the breath between vanishing points. I remember the scent of graphite on tired evenings, how my hands learned to mix gouache until the sky became believable, how colour swelled and softened under the right pressure of the brush. These were the slow rituals of observation — of learning to honour the visible world.

Architecture was not yet grand or global. It was quiet. Local. Intimate.
We studied the elegance of Suzhou gardens, the symmetry of Palladian villas, the tactility of wood, stone, and shadow. And in every drawing — whether of Ming pagodas or Miesian grids — I came to realise that buildings are not simply enclosures. They are mirrors. They reflect the beliefs of those who shape them.

Beyond history, our training moved through structure, physics, and environmental design — the rational skeleton beneath the poetry. I came to understand that beauty must stand against gravity. That form must breathe within limits. That a building must endure sun, rain, wind — and still sing.

But what moved me most was not what we were taught directly, but what hovered in the margins:
a whisper embedded in old Chinese spatial traditions — the intelligence of a corridor, the melancholy of a shadowed threshold, the breath between courtyards. There was a kind of silence in these places that spoke more than any line of code or calculation.

In my final year, I sought to understand that silence.
I created Project Arcadia, a spatial study that mapped fifty patterns from classical Chinese gardens — not to reproduce them, but to interpret their emotional essence. From concealment and reveal, to stillness and surprise, I distilled ten archetypes — tools not of style, but of storytelling.

This was when I first understood that architecture could carry meaning beyond function.
That space could be felt, remembered, even mourned.
That a drawing could be a poem.
And a wall, a threshold to memory.

And as the old Chinese saying goes, “Read ten thousand books, walk ten thousand miles.”
So I walked.

Each summer, I travelled — across loess plateaus, Jiangnan rivers, Fujian’s circular tulou. I touched earth walls built by centuries of hands, stood beneath carved beams worn by weather and time. I realised that architecture does not emerge from AutoCAD lines or form-finding diagrams.


It emerges from soil, from culture, from people who live — and die — beneath the same roof.

Those early travels deepened my belief that good architecture is not invented, but remembered.
And they ignited in me a quiet commitment:
to walk slowly, draw honestly, and always listen —
not only to clients or trends,
but to the land, to the past,
and to that soft, persistent birdsong within.






3. Apprenticeship – Between Spectacle and Substance

In the quiet that between academic years, I stepped into the world of architecture not as a student, but as a practitioner—tentatively, reverently, with more questions than certainties. What does it mean to build? What happens when a drawing becomes dust and concrete?

My first journey led me to MAD Architects in Beijing. The office was a whirlwind of ambition—fluid, futuristic, daring to dream against gravity itself. I was drawn in by its audacity, its promise that architecture could be poetry made solid.

And it was poetic—at least on the surface.
My days were filled with digital sketches of otherworldly forms, renderings of floating museums and undulating towers. These were buildings that seemed to defy context, even time.
But beneath the curves and clouds, I began to feel a quiet unease. The work was fast, the nights long, and the purpose vague. 
There was no space to ask: Who is this for? Why does it need to be this way?

What I once admired began to feel hollow. I wasn’t building meaning—I was decorating spectacle.

Craving something quieter, more grounded, I moved on to Atelier Li Xinggang, under the umbrella of the China Architecture Design and Research Group. 
The contrast was immediate. Gone were the fantasies—in their place, constraint. Code. Culture.

But here, I started to understand what architecture could be when it listened.

Our projects were scattered across continents and conditions: a gymnasium in Tianjin, a Chinese embassy in Estonia, a regeneration plan for an old temple quarter in Beijing. Each brought its own challenges, yet all shared a certain humility. 
We weren’t reshaping skylines—we were negotiating memory, use, and place.

On site visits, I learned the language of the unfinished: the way light settled in a skeletal courtyard, the sound of tools striking rebar, the smell of earth stirred by new foundations. I sketched with cold fingers, climbed scaffolding, and took notes with dusty hands.
These were not glamorous days—but they were honest ones.

It was in these moments, walking between what was and what might be, that I began to feel the weight of our role.
An architect is not a genius in isolation, but a listener at the table. A translator between desire and detail, tradition and tomorrow.

There was no grand epiphany. No one day I knew I would leave for London.
Only a slow shift—like birds returning in spring.
A feeling that perhaps, one day, architecture could be both beautiful and kind.







4. Part II – The School That Taught Me to Question
When I arrived in London, it wasn’t architecture that greeted me first — it was the sky.
Vast, grey, and still, it hung over the city like a question waiting to be asked.
Beijing had been constant motion, a pulse stitched into every corner of the day.
London moved slower, but carried an older weight — a silence that didn’t press, but pulled.
A kind of silence that invited reflection.

I chose the Royal College of Art over more conventional schools because something about it felt uncertain.
Not in a careless way — but in the way that promised freedom.

The RCA didn’t teach buildings so much as it taught positions.
It asked: What do you see? Why do you draw? And are you sure?

My mandarin trained hands felt reluctant on British tracing paper, and the first few months felt like struggle, then reassembled.

The studio became a place of discourse.
We spoke of borders, of class, of language and land.
Our drawings became diagrams of power. Our models felt more like provocations than prototypes.
I was no longer just trying to make good architecture.
I was beginning to ask: good for whom?

My final thesis project, London Non-City Airport, emerged from this new way of thinking.
It imagined a fortified terminal, designed not for the general public, but for a global elite who pass through cities without ever entering them.
Within its seamless walls, life was frictionless — conference halls, tax-free shopping, curated leisure.
It was beautiful in form, but hollow in soul.
A satire, not a celebration — a monument to a world divided by access and exclusion.
I designed it not because I believed in it, but because I needed to ask: is this the future we want?

The RCA gave me a freedom I had never known before.
But that freedom came with its own disillusionment.

We were encouraged to think critically — but rarely asked to build responsibly.
Speculation reigned, yet the tectonics of construction were often absent.
Where were the drawings that showed how the roof met the wall?
Where were the sections that made the idea real?

I began to miss the clarity of my earlier training —
the belief that architecture must not only inspire but endure.
That it must resist collapse not just in concept, but in concrete.

Still, the questioning stayed with me.
It formed a new ambition:
to design with poetry but deliver with precision.

Beyond the studio, I travelled across Europe — retracing the footprints of architects I had once studied in textbooks.
In Athens, I saw the Parthenon soften under time’s touch.
In Florence, I stood beneath Brunelleschi’s dome, tracing the ribs of its invention.
At the Secession Building in Vienna, I read the golden words above the entrance:
“To every age its art, to every art its freedom.”

But it was at the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart that something shifted.
There, in white walls and sharp lines, I saw not nostalgia — but courage.
Courage to ask: What does it mean to live now?
They didn’t all have the right answers.
But they dared to try.

I didn’t leave the RCA with all the tools I needed.
But I left with a sharper instinct.
A sense that architecture must look both ways — inward, at the values it holds; and outward, at the world it shapes.

London didn’t give me answers.
But it taught me to listen to the quiet,
to live with the questions —
until, one day, the birds might sing again.




5. Post-Part II – Designing in a House of Mirrors

After RCA, I didn’t rush.

I remember standing before the final exhibition models, watching strangers peer into them like crystal balls. 
Some nodded. Some passed by without a glance. It was over—or just beginning.

Not long after, I accepted an offer from Sybarite, a London-based studio known for high-end retail and hospitality.
Their projects were sleek, global, unapologetically luxurious.

I didn’t go because I was drawn to luxury.
I went because I wanted to understand it.

At Sybarite, everything moved faster.
We weren’t sketching poetry anymore—we were manufacturing desire.
Every curve, every fixture, every tile had to seduce.

I worked on projects across continents:
Flagship boutiques in Heathrow.
Pop-ups in Shanghai.
Department stores with glossy atriums and digital ceilings.
Each brief arrived with a brand bible, a target demographic, and an exacting vision of “exclusivity.”

The work was demanding—but clear.
We delivered. Clients were pleased.
And for a while, so was I.

It wasn’t that I disliked the design process.
I loved the rhythm of it—the logic of a façade coming together,
the satisfaction of solving a spatial puzzle no one else could quite articulate.

But something began to emerge.

Luxury, I realised, wasn’t just a material palette.
It was an ideology—an architecture of exclusion.

We weren’t building cities.
We were building enclaves—sealed, curated, controlled.
Retail became theatre. Hospitality became spectacle.
And while the architecture was beautiful, it no longer asked why.

I worked on SKP, the department store empire stretching from Beijing to Chengdu.
We crafted immersive spaces, temples of consumption where everything—from scent to sightline—was engineered to entice.
But the repetition grew louder.
Every project had a script. Every elevation déjà vu.

Sometimes I’d stare at the renderings and ask myself:
Where does my voice go in all this?
When did design stop being a dialogue, and become a monologue of profit?

Yet I learned more than I expected.

At Sybarite, I led teams.
Presented to clients. Negotiated fees.
Coordinated across time zones and solved problems no textbook prepared me for.

I became fluent in the language of real-world architecture—
where spreadsheets matter as much as sketches, and clarity often trumps cleverness.

I even helped launch the studio’s website,
led outreach for new business in Greater China, and
learned how to navigate architectural diplomacy—to listen as much as to design.

These weren’t the lessons I’d hoped for.
But they made me sharper.
More decisive.
More attuned to how architecture flows through systems, not just minds.

Still, I never forgot why I started.

In quiet moments, I’d return to the memory that had stayed with me since the hutong—
that architecture, at its best, isn’t about display,
but about presence.

Not the kind that dazzles,
but the kind that lingers—gently, meaningfully—in the memory of those who pass through.

Sybarite taught me how to survive in a market-driven world.
But it also clarified what I did not want to become.

So I kept going—eyes open, pencil steady—
reminding myself that even in a world of noise,
it is still possible to design softly.





6. Project Leadership – In a Fractured World
After Sybarite, I joined Woods Bagot, stepping into a broader stage—
one that spanned continents, crossed time zones, and unfolded in desert cities still being written.

It was no longer just about detail, but about direction.
I wasn’t just designing façades; I was orchestrating futures.

Our projects were vast in scale and vision:
A luxury island resort off the coast of Jeddah.
A palace-turned-retreat in the heart of Dubai.
Masterplans where streets and skylines hadn’t yet been born.
I designed for royalty, collaborated with planners, engineers, lighting consultants—
and sometimes found myself mediating unspoken politics more than spatial arguments.

Architecture here was not linear.
It was layered—strategic, ceremonial, and often fragile beneath the surface.

I was growing into another kind of role:
The calm in the storm.
The one who sees the whole board, not just the move.

There were tensions, of course.
Internal dynamics. Competing visions.
The pressure of deadlines clashing with the weight of cultural nuance.
And still, we built.

I led teams through shifting requirements, restructured workflows,
introduced clarity where there was confusion.
In one recent project, I proposed a radical shift on working sequencing— and it worked.
Efficiency improved. Alignment returned.
Not everyone agreed at first, but leadership isn’t always consensus—it’s responsibility.

And I began to understand something:

That the future of architecture isn’t just about parametric curves or environmental metrics.
It’s about how we hold complexity—gracefully.

In Woods Bagot, I found both constraints and possibilities.
I learned how to lead not just in design, but in strategy.
How to ask: not just what can we build,
but who are we building for, and what world will they inherit?

There were moments of fatigue.
But there were also flashes of poetry:
A well-argued design option, a resolved masterplan,
a client’s nod that said, “Yes, that’s what we meant.”

And slowly, I realised:

That leadership is not about being the loudest voice.
It’s about being the one who listens, then speaks.
The one who holds the line when no one else does.
The one who still sees the bird, even in the fractured forest.

I wasn’t lost in the house of mirrors anymore.
I had found a clearing.





7. Reflection – Bring Back the Birdsong




I used to think growth was a straight line.
You go to school, you get a job, you move forward — always forward.
But now I know: real growth is quieter.
It curls and recedes. It hides in shadows. It sings in silences.

I’ve walked through mirrored showrooms and stood in half-built cities.
I’ve sketched resort islands and negotiated floorplans.
I’ve led teams through friction, deadlines, and politics —
and found, somewhere between the screen and the site,
a self that had sharpened, but also softened.

There were years I doubted myself.
Years I felt like a ghost in London —
underpaid, overstretched, watching others speed ahead
while I quietly kept going.
But I kept going.

And now, as I prepare for a new beginning —
perhaps in Riyadh, perhaps elsewhere —
I carry with me not just a portfolio,
but a deeper knowing.

That architecture is not merely what we draw.
It’s how we notice.
It’s how we endure.

It’s the decision to design gently,
even when the world rewards noise.

I still think about that boy in the hutong.
The one who traced rooftops with his eyes.
Who saw more in shadows than in facades.
Who believed architecture could be a form of kindness.

I want to return to him — not by going back,
but by going forward more honestly.

Perhaps I’ll write again.
Perhaps I’ll teach.
Perhaps I’ll walk slower and listen longer.
But whatever comes next, I know this:

I want to bring back the bird song.
Not the spectacle.
Not the thunder.
Just that quiet, persistent song
that tells you —
you are here,
and you are becoming.








Back to the TopBack to the Homepage