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.