Guangzhou Design Week Interviews BAM

International design dialogue, part of the 2022 Guangzhou Design Week (12.09-12.12) spoke with BAM co-founder Daniel Gass on values of design, landscape vision and evolution of BAM.

What is the relationship between design and life in your daily routine?

I founded BAM with two of my best friends from Cornell’s architecture school. Our working relationship grew out of us making art installations together in public spaces on campus. Everything kind of blended together outside of studio classes, it was a form of making parties or events for us to create installations. So in this sense design as ‘work’ or something that pays the bills came after design as us being poor students who would hang out and make things and think of interventions for public spaces.

At a certain level these early installations were a huge amount of work, but they were always fun. For an installation for Martha Schwartz’ lecture I remember at that point we had a whole group of student friends who would regularly join in and help us put things together, at that point we worked for a few nights in a row to get the room set up and avoid getting in trouble for rearranging parts of the campus.

Nowadays around BAM studios we organize things to keep this sense of discovery of play, of hanging out as the basis for working. Of course, when we need to buckle down and deliver a professional drawing set or whatever we do that too. But for us good ideas come from play and creativity comes from working with the materials at hand.

Besides your design career, do you have any other interests or hobbies that you would like to do in your spare time?

I sailed competitively since I was a child. Jake also has experience sailing. After looking for opportunities to sail in China we organized BAM Racing team, and we are invited to compete at regattas around China from time to time. It is great to get out on the water and see the sport growing here.

What triggered you to move your base to China and set up your business in Shanghai after graduating from Cornell?

I studied Chinese in high school and in college I organized a summer trip with our then-Chair Nasrine Seraji for a traveling studio in China. Jake, Allie, and I were all immersed in China at that time and we also started making art installations around the country as part of the travelling studio. We would find public spaces and set up temporary things from materials we found while travelling. I think we were interested in everything going on and it was only a matter of time until we came back to set up our first studio in Beijing in 2009.

BAM started with an office in Beijing. For us Beijing was an ideal starting place because it was less westernized than other cities in China. Given that our work is fundamentally about the public realm, there exists an important socially progressive message in our work. We therefore believed that placing ourselves in a more art oriented and political milieu versus an environment focused solely on business would be critical to upending typically held views about the value of landscape.

We opened our Shanghai studio later, in 2018, mostly because our team was growing. We had some great people from the South or other parts of China and we wanted to keep them around, and grow. So we began our Shanghai studio.

You graduated with a degree in architecture but focus on landscape in your design career. What made you shift the pathway and what is the most crucial point in landscape design from your perspective?

BAM believes that in China, Landscape is a better design field than in the United States because the Chinese culture developed from a garden culture. Historically in China, the garden is the place where people would make paintings, write poems, it’s where governors would reflect on social orders, and scholar would contemplate. Then and now, the garden is intertwined and linked Chinese cultural expression. By extension, the landscape is understood as a place that should be designed, a cultural medium. In the United States the landscape is not viewed with the same cultural lens. In the United States, it is commonly believed, even by practitioners and academics, that the Landscape is not a place for cultural expression. American culture in comparison to the Chinese culture is in its infancy and may never blossom to the belief that the Landscape is something that represents culture. In China, that idea is ingrained in what we do; people see the Landscape as critical to culture.

Furthermore, BAM feels Landscape is the most important field of design in China, not only because China already has great architecture, but more so that when observing the urban public realm it is clear that architecture isn’t really helping the city. The design of the landscape is much more important to the city, because it deals with everything outside of and between the buildings, a realm which not only has the ability to diminish the adverse effects of rampant architecture and robotic urban planning but provides humanity with something which cannot be gained through the design of buildings and infrastructure alone.

Humans have an internal drive to connect to nature, even simply evoking the idea of nature has a positive effect on people’s state of mind and sense of wellbeing. Apart from personal wellbeing spending time outdoors, in the landscape, encourages social interaction, which is nowhere more comically observable than in the Chinese urban landscape which is far more heavily used than the American counterpart. Parks, streets, plazas, and nooks between buildings, inevitably almost all spaces of the landscape, like the ancient garden, are used for socializing, debate, and play, all times of the day and night, across all regions and climates.

Every region and every culture create different habits and customs. In your projects designed for clients that come from different backgrounds, what do you think are the biggest commonalities and differences? Can you give an example or two?

Culture is a tricky thing. Often times local people do not want to address their own culture. In many cases BAM is much more sensitive and interested in local cultural than the clients or local governments. Often developing places want to forget their local history and prefer to imagine a more aspirational future in which it is incorrectly assumed that a break from the past or current situations will give rise to a better future. However, the problem with denying one’s own local history is that when the eventual development does occur, a place which was once unique then begins to look like every other new development across China. Daxing is known for its watermelons, and to us this is a very interesting fact. Where BAM’s park is now was at one point in time watermelon fields, yet far too often, this kind of history and this kind of culture is not what people want to be reminded of. The Jiugong project is directly adjacent to what once was the imperial hunting grounds with a very unique type of Deer called a Milu, or David’s Deer. These are ideas that BAM played heavily with in earlier stages of these projects. Yet as they go through the process of becoming realized the very things that can make a place unique are often the first things to get removed.

People often link "landscape" and "green" & "environmentally friendly" up. How do you imply sustainability perceptions into your design practice since it has been a heated topic among different industries?

Most people’s idea of sustainability in landscape is linked with a nostalgic Garden of Eden mentality. They expect a beautiful ‘natural’ landscape to be ecological and love to create diagrams about water edges and birds and things like that. The urban landscape is much much more than this nostalgic idea of nature. Your trash, your feces, your pollution, your electricity, your parking spaces, all of these things pass through or they are hidden by the landscape. ‘Sustainable’ landscape for most people avoids confrontation with all the realities of how a city needs to function and attempts to create this nostalgic ecological aesthetic which completely misses the point that urban landscapes are first and foremost about servicing humans. Coding them in ecological patterning is fine, but it is also just as green and maybe more sustainable to express the organization of the landscape functions, to show the landscapes for what they often are, as technical factory like organizations of functional elements.

The amazing thing today is that we no longer have ‘landscape’ in the nostalgic sense. Every bit of landscape is in a way supported by humans to an ever-growing extent. So the traditional ideas that a landscape provides ecological functions apart from humans is finally something we can move past. A great example is BAM’s recent campus design for the factories and offices of the world’s largest environmental equipment producer. To make this factory function, the landscape provides sewage filtration, heavy metal uptake, and runoff recapture.

What ‘s your belief and basis in design? What kind of living belief and basis do you intend to tell people via design?

Nature is an Idea. In a sense BAM attempts to utilize the ecological or nature aesthetic to code functional aspects of our urban centers to improve the performance of our cities. The Boashan Waste to Energy Plant is one example of us using architecture and landscape as a tool to actually make something like a Waste Plant interesting and acceptable. If we can make people more comfortable in the future to bring these plants closer into the cities and greatly reduce the carbon created in the transport of garbage.

How do you define the word 'leading' in the design context?

We call ourselves Machine because the idea is that good ideas come from everyone. I’d say leading is about creating teams that have the tools, skills, and confidence to run themselves. Anyway leadership is really about facilitation and encouragement. It is not about ego, about ripping out sketches and being proud that teams of people are building napkin wads into large buildings.

Can you recommend a couple of “leading” design projects or “leading” celebrities in the industry that we can learn from?

Peter Walker is a great leader. He is the guy that has in many ways shaped the field through inspiring so many offshoots. Our firm is like the third or fourth generation of branches from his original push into art and landscape and modernism. If you do not know his work then you can visit his Finite/Infinite garden completed with us in Beijing.

What kind of topics or fields that you plan and wish to explore in the future?

I have so many ideas about things to keep studying in the future but one of the most recent is kinetic elements. We created revolving pieces before, and for a new project at an Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Shanghai we are developing wind activated elements for our landscape. I think there is a lot of room for development of these things, and the design and art community look down upon these things as kitschy so I think there is a lot to potentially uncover there. Ned Kahn has obviously done a brilliant job but I think there is still a lot to do.

Any suggestions for the younger generation in the design industry?*Especially for architecture students?

The best advice for someone starting in the design industry is that we are always looking for someone who can take a simple job and do it well. We make design problems so complex that they must be broken down into pieces. Who cares if you can think through how to break it down if you cannot do the simple steps? Our office is always looking for people who can do a simple task all the way on their own, and proudly pin it on the wall and schedule feedback to move onto the next thing.