Talk at the Library: Landscape and Architecture

A Discussion With the Architects Zhang Xi and Eduard Kögel

May 18, 2021 — Zhang Xi, the co-founder and creative mind behind EXH design in Zurich and Shanghai; and Eduard Kögel, architectural historian, author, and regular lecturer at the Berlin Institute of Technology and Bauhaus University Weimar, talk about the fundamentals of architecture in Asia, how foreign concepts can be adapted to a local context, and the Eastern ideas of architecture in the West. (31 min., 59 sec.)

Zhang Xi, born in 1979 in China, holds a degree of Master of Science in Architecture from ETH Zurich, Switzerland and is a registered architect in the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects (SIA). In 2006, Zhang Xi co-founded EXH Design in Shanghai, and in 2016 expanded EXH Design to Zurich, Switzerland. EXH Design has completed various projects, such as the Roche headquarter in Shanghai (7 buildings), the Novartis office building in Shanghai, and a number of Swiss embassies and consulates in mainland China. EXH Design will soon be able to add many of the Austrian embassies and consulates to their list in mainland China, as well as the JCMK metal resources headquarter at the Bund Shanghai, and ICBC Bank headquarter in Zurich. EXH design was ranked by AD magazine as one of the top 100 influential design firms in China in 2019. In 2016, their book Swiss Quality Chinese Speed was published by Jovis Verlag, from Berlin. Zhang Xi spoke about “What is good architecture and why the world does not need more star architects” in TEDxZurich in 2018. In 2019 she founded Superlab Suisse AG, a lab real estate company. The first location of serviced lab will be opened in Biopôle Lausanne in 2021. In 2020, Zhang Xi was featured in Apple commercial ‘Behind the Mac’.

Zhang Xi is the creative mind behind all projects, companies, books and businesses. She has been interviewed and reported on by many magazines and newspapers such as Wallpaper, A+U, NZZ, Sonntagszeitung, and the Wall Street Journal. Zhang Xi believes in energy and is a promoter and influencer for Asian Architectural Philosophy and Feng Shui in a contemporary global context, and commutes between Shanghai and Zurich once a month. She speaks German, English and Chinese.

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Eduard Kögel studied at the faculty of Architecture, Urban and Landscape Planning at the University of Kassel in Germany. In 2007 he completed his PhD thesis at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. He regularly lectures there and works as Research Advisor and Programme Curator for the Aedes Network Campus Berlin. Since 2001 he has curated exhibitions on contemporary and historical Asian architecture in the Aedes Gallery in Berlin and elsewhere. Eduard Kögel has been the editor and manager of the chinese-architects internet platform under the roof of world-architects in Zurich since 2006. His recent publications include The Grand Documentation, Ernst Boerschmann and Chinese Religious Architecture, 1906–1931, De Gruyter 2015; Feng Shui in Germany: The Transculturation of an Exotic Concept by Hugo Häring, Hans Scharoun and Chen Kuen Lee, in Feng Shui (Kan Yu) and Architecture and edited by Florian Reiter, Harrassowitz 2011; EXH Design. Swiss Quality—Chinese Speed, Jovis 2018; and Modern Vernacular – Walter Gropius and Chinese Architecture, Bauhaus Imaginista Journal 2018.