From now on, I’ll be sharing some reflections on my work and career, along with excerpts from my conversations with AI. These conversations center on architecture, and for now they focus mainly on the United States, especially major metropolitan areas like the San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater New York region.
I’ve found that talking with AI has certain advantages. I can ask seemingly minor questions or explore ideas at any time—though, of course, they all relate to my profession, my industry, and the broader environment. AI adjusts and refines its responses based on my situation and our conversation history. Often, after a long and roundabout process, we finally arrive at the core of a question—one I hadn’t initially anticipated or had never even considered. It’s only through many rounds of dialogue with AI that the question surfaces, opening up another world and sparking my curiosity and desire to explore. These conversations mostly revolve around architecture in the United States—especially the single-family, custom, and high-end residential sector; residential architectural design and engineering; real estate; urban planning; planning and building law; human geography; urban economics; urban history; behavioral science; and related social sciences. I won’t be posting discussions of sensitive topics here, but I will flag them so that interested readers can pursue those lines of inquiry on their own.
It’s been more than twenty years since I first began studying architecture, and in that time I’ve moved through professional practice and eventually into running my own business. My architectural education unfolded in two phases—one in China and one in the U.S.—and for me, both were indispensable. At the time, architectural education in China placed a heavy emphasis on manual skills: hand drafting, drawing, sketching, illustration. I developed an almost obsessive attachment to paper and pen. Thinking and brainstorming were regular disciplines, especially through rapid design exercises, which were extremely demanding. Projects ranged from small architectural structures to large public buildings such as commercial centers, public libraries, and planned residential communities. Because computer applications in architectural design were not yet widespread at Chinese universities, the integration of hand and mind was developed to an unusually high level. There was also a strong emphasis on theory, various calculations, and a broad base of building- and engineering-related knowledge. During those years, I spent nearly all my time in the library or the architecture building.
After arriving in the U.S., I continued my architectural studies at SCAD. I was struck by how pervasive the hardware and technology resources were. The curriculum placed heavy emphasis on computer applications in design, and I invested considerable time and energy in learning design and modeling software—all necessary, of course. Design is an applied art; it has to be presented to society, clients, and owners for evaluation. SCAD’s interior design and residential design programs have consistently ranked among the top in their categories among American universities, and in some authoritative rankings they’ve been number one. I began to recognize something important: you need to look at the architecture industry statistically. I mean, of all the buildings designed and built each year, what percentage are of what type? This matters. Why? Because only by observing something from the macro to the micro can you grasp it systematically—not like the blind men and the elephant, which leaves you passive and reactive.
A good way to quickly understand an industry or field is to spend time in professional libraries and online archives. I didn’t spend as much time in SCAD’s library as I could have, but I can safely say I spent far more time there than my classmates and peers in the program—sometimes entire winter breaks, completely immersed. From that point on, I realized that architecture is an immense ocean. You have to confine your energy and attention to a narrower area. So I deliberately narrowed my focus to resort, hospitality, and residential work, and I didn’t devote much attention to other types of design studios or projects.
One reason was family influence. My family had been deeply involved in real estate for many years, and that shaped me in subtle ways from an early age. The other reason, frankly, reflected what many young people of that era went through. China’s residential architecture was just beginning. Legal real estate transactions only started in 1995. For the vast majority of people at that time, living conditions were harsh: small per-capita floor area, poor construction quality, unreasonable design, nonstandard construction, codes that were difficult to enforce, and building materials and equipment that were generally outdated or rudimentary. So, like many of my peers, I had a strong personal ambition to change the residential environment and raise the standard of residential design and engineering.
Actually, as early as the 1980s, the renowned Chinese architect and academician Professor Wu Liangyong—a member of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering—had proposed A General Theory of Architecture. In a series of essays and papers, he examined architecture from multiple levels and dimensions. The work is deeply philosophical, and it also introduced contemporaneous developments in Western architecture and urban planning, extending their implications to China. Unfortunately, none of my professors or mentors at the time ever mentioned this text. It was only after graduating from university in China that I came across it online by chance, and it felt like discovering a treasure.
The treatise was intended as a guiding document for China’s architecture industry and the discipline as a whole. Its core idea was to observe and examine architecture from outside the discipline’s inner circle. It drew on a large body of the latest research on European and American cities, buildings, and adjacent interdisciplinary fields—for example, the need to focus on the relationship between urban and architectural space and human behavior.
This point is crucial: people and buildings are one. Architecture is a reflection of human activity and spirit. Take a single-family house. Around it are the landscape; the street, the block, the neighborhood; then the community center; and farther out, the town center—administrative and government offices, social services, commercial areas, and so on. How do the people who use and live in these buildings and urban infrastructures actually live? What are the patterns of their daily lives—day to day, week to week, on holidays, and at year’s end? These questions are well worth studying, and they go far beyond architecture or design in the narrow sense. Around that same time, my focus began to settle on the broad residential environments of the United States. In my spare time, I used Google Earth to study the relationships among building types, streets, communities, and neighborhoods in several American metropolitan areas.
After graduating from SCAD, I worked at Disney for a time and, as I’d hoped, got to participate in the design of several Disney hotel projects, with interior design work taking the lead. But it was also during that period that I began to focus even more narrowly on single-family residential architecture and related services in the U.S. I decided to prepare for a long-term business collaboration model with boutique firms, specializing in high-end custom single-family home projects—some renovations of existing buildings, some additions, some new construction. The market values of these homes ranged from three or four million dollars up to thirty million. My scope of work evolved from initial interior design drafting to construction documents and permit sets, schematic design, preliminary design, SD/DD/CD phases, and various architectural rendering and visualization work. That model has remained in place to this day—for seven years now.
As different projects unfolded, I came to understand that the high-end custom single-family design industry in the United States—and its supply chain, both upstream and downstream—is a vast organic system, a kingdom of its own, an ecosystem almost entirely separate from other types of architectural design such as public and commercial buildings. The U.S. may have the most complete single-family residential design theory and practice in the world, the most complex residential design codes currently in existence, and the richest, most diverse range of single-family residential styles and innovations anywhere. Look at the single-family residential architecture in each state, each county, each city—especially the homes in older middle-class and affluent neighborhoods, not the mass-produced subdivisions of the outer suburbs—and it’s enough to leave you awestruck.
This extraordinarily vital approach to single-family residential design, while almost never repeating identical buildings, still manages to maintain visual cohesion and stylistic continuity and harmony. Building spacing, heights, massing, setbacks, street width, and the building-height-to-street-width ratio—these parameters define the artistic coherence and holistic character of European and American urban architecture. These are works created while “dancing in shackles” within a framework of local building regulations, sometimes quite strict ones. This tradition—or what might be called urban construction codes for architectural style—can be traced back to the Netherlands around the fifteenth century, or even earlier.
Books on single-family residential design—whether theory, architectural history, architects’ monographs, or engineering and technical references—are abundant, as are architecture magazines, especially those focused on high-end residential interiors. Add to that the powerful range of traditional media, film and television, independent media, podcasts, the internet, and now AI, and the industry’s cultural loop is fully closed.
(To be continued)
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