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.