California Architects Establish Strong Presence in China

By Richard Horgan

Joseph Wong and Herb Nadel, two prominent California-based architects, have slowly built a strong presence in China despite some initial live-and-learn experiences.

Over the past 10 years, Nadel has established his West Los Angeles-based firm, Nadel Architects Inc., as a preeminent American design industry partner in China, working on approximately 120 different projects.

But he said a recent project, the Fu-Tien Athletic Park in Shenzhen, a city 20 miles north of Hong Kong, is proving to be his most incredible Chinese assignment yet. The $100 million development is one of five approved Nadel projects that are currently under construction in China or scheduled for groundbreaking later this year.

“The Chinese government had a design competition that allowed us to only cover up about 20 percent of the site,” Nadel said. “In other words, they had this rather large piece of property, about 17 acres, but they wanted a very small footprint of visible buildings.

“We wound up getting 22-percent site coverage, so they let us fudge a little bit. The reason the government wanted to cover up only part of the site is that there are a lot of high-rise apartment buildings around the perimeter and they wanted to retain the open space.”

Another southern California architectural firm making headway in China is Joseph Wong Design Associates Inc., a San Diego-based firm with an allied office in Shanghai.

Over the years, the company has been involved in about 25 Chinese projects, including the Zhang Shan Towers, a high-end residential mixed-use project in Hangzhou with retail and recreational facilities at the first three levels of both high-rises. The 600,000-sq.-ft. development is scheduled for completion by the end of next year.

In the Nadel project in Shenzhen, the architect said he and his colleague, Michael Hwa, had to adhere to the design competition constraint and still make room for a wide assortment of requirements such as swimming pools, a 3,000-seat basketball arena and a 500-space parking facility. He added that they came up with the idea of hiding many of the structures under 25-ft.-high arched concrete decks, which will eventually be covered with natural landscaping.

A 5,000-seat outdoor soccer stadium and running track are currently under construction while drawings for the balance of the project are near completion. The complex, which is contracted to Shenzhen First Construction Co. and scheduled to be completed by the end of next year, will also include a high-rise tower above ground at the center of the property, providing dormitory and hotel facilities for visiting athletes and dignitaries.

“We’ve done the conceptual, schematic and design development drawings, while the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design and Research is doing the actual contract documents,” Nadel said. “They’re doing a fabulous job and I’d rate the working drawings we got for the soccer stadium equal to damn near any firm in the United States.”

Like Nadel, Wong was initially driven to China by the southern California recession of the early 1990s and along with the San Francisco office of SOM Architects and Atlanta-based John Portman & Associates has done well.

“The city where we do pretty much all of our work, Shanghai, has come a long way in the past 10 years,” Wong said. “Soon it will be just as mainstream as other places where we do work such as Japan, Korea and Canada.

“Shanghai clients used to look at architecture as a beauty contest and really forgot about the technical aspects or engineering value of a building. But they’re learning fast. At a recent interview for a project in China, they actually asked me for references.”

For Nadel, it all began rather inauspiciously in Shanghai in 1991, when a project in Pudong that sounded too good to be true turned out to be just that. After much time and expense, Nadel discovered his partner on the project did not have control of the land and was in fact embezzling money in connection with another commercial real estate project.

Thanks to his legwork on this failed project and the reams of drawings with Chinese lettering that it generated, Nadel was able to make good on a subsequent referral by general contractor Swinerton Builders. That led to Nadel’s first real job in China, the construction of a sprawling Gemstar manufacturing and administrative facility.

“It’s very hard to be profitable in China when we take into account our marketing, travel expenses and then trying to collect all the money,” Nadel said. “We now require at least one third of our fee up front as a retainer, another third as we move forward and the final third before we surrender the drawings to the client. It’s not wildly profitable work, but it sure is fun.”

Meanwhile, Wong said there is little advantage that comes from having been born in China, despite the perception of his industry colleagues.

“When I go back and say I’m the American architect, they look at me kind of funny and say, ‘But you’re Chinese?’ he added, laughing.

“But I believe with any culture, you can be successful if you do your market research. I mean look at Herb Nadel. I envy him. He seems to be in every city in China.”