2. Undergraduate Study – Drawing Foundations, Searching for Soul
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.