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USC’s American Academy in China takes it East

By Sam Lubell

Last year, well-known Chinese architect Qingyun Ma, founder of Shanghai firm MADA s.p.a.m., moved to Los Angeles to become dean of the USC School of Architecture. Now he’s bringing USC back to China.

Photo courtesy USC

AAC students visit ARUP's Beijing headquarters, including an insider's look into the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium and a view of the CCTV

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This spring, Ma and USC announced the launch of the American Academy in China (AAC), a research institute based in Shanghai. The program will host four-week and semester-long study-abroad programs for undergraduate and graduate planning, urban design, and architecture students from USC and other schools in the U.S. and Asia. It will eventually provide an academic base for visiting scholars.

“This idea has been terribly delayed,” says Ma. “In the past 20 years, almost all universities have had programs that focused on Asia or China. But the learning curve has been from 0 to 1 — never beyond that.” Some USC architecture classes, for example, focus on new Asian architecture, but generally from classrooms in Los Angeles.

During the program’s initial four-week sessions, which ended on July 16, about 30 undergraduates from USC, Columbia University, Seoul National University in Korea, Qinghua University in Beijing, and Tongji University in Shanghai traveled from a base in Shanghai to satellite stations in Beijing, Lijiang, and Xi’an, setting out on research projects specific to these wildly different places. Initial topics, says Ma, included explorations of urban density and landscapes in Beijing; graphic media and architecture in Shanghai; the positive and negative effects of heritage in Lijiang; and the relationship between agriculture and urbanism in Xi’an. Such four-week sessions will take place about three times a year.

“The paradigms of the West are not working for China. We’ll try to develop some creative new models,” says Ma. This ambitious goal, he adds, could include alternatives to our pervasive automobile culture, our divisions between agricultural and urban landscapes, and even our perspectives on individuality and democracy. “In a future of limited resources, things will be much different,” he says.

The program will also feature lectures and forums given by professors from the program’s participating schools in the U.S. and Asia, and an impressive list of architects and urbanists, such as the Beijing Olympic’s planning director, Yan Huang; renowned Chinese artist, architect, and curator Ai Weiwei; Chinese architect Xu Tian Tian; and architects from the China Architecture Design Institute, who codesigned the Beijing Olympic Stadium with Herzog & de Meuron. Others invited for talks include Thom Mayne and Rem Koolhaas.

The AAC’s spring semester abroad, for graduate students, is still being formulated. But Ma says that it will be based in Beijing or Shanghai, and it will include an architecture studio as well as courses to put the studio in the context of Chinese architectural developments and general architectural history and theory. Trips will likely include visits to some of the four-week program’s destinations and other cities, such as Chengdu, recently devastated by major earthquakes, and Dalian, near Korea, a major Asian cultural crossroads. Other schools will likely be added to the AAC in the future. Once a permanent base location is secured, the program will serve as a resource center for visiting scholars to work on substantial research projects, similar to the American Academy in Rome (the AAC derives its name from the Rome program).

Such a center for study, says Ma, is particularly vital because, while focused on political and economic engagement, the U.S. government and its institutions have devoted little time to the study of contemporary Asian culture. “The U.S. consulate is not doing this. The U.S. State Department is not doing this. So it’s left to universities. The world will suffer if we don’t find common interests and common goals,” said Ma.

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