Sometimes you just have to say ‘yes’ and
worry about the consequences later…an email arrives saying we, G.A, have been
invited by one of our biggest clients to speak at the Asia-Pacific Hotel Design
Association’s 4th annual conference in Dalian, and am I free to do
this?
The first thought is: what would I say? The
second thought is: I have so much going on. The third thought is: where on
earth is Dalian? The third thought, after a quick bit of Google mapping, tipped
the decision in favour of a ‘yes’.
Dalian is pretty close to North Korea, a “2nd
tier” city (‘only’ 6 million inhabitants – about the size of greater Kuala
Lumpur - and everyone in Dalian refers to how ‘small’ the city is). It has an
interesting history, having been founded by Russians, invaded and taken over by
the Japanese, Russian again after WW2 then ‘gifted’ back to China as a sign of
friendship between the two Communist countries.
I had never been to a “2nd tier”
Chinese city before, and was interested to see a new part of this giant country.
The conference, coming hot on the heels of our G.A rebranding and the opening
of our Shanghai office would also be great exposure for the company. So it was
a ‘yes’ then and let’s worry about the rest when it happens – necessity is the
mother of invention, after all.
It was later I discovered there were no
direct flights to Dalian from KL. This meant flying China Southern airlines
from KL to Guangzhou (4 hours), then transferring on a domestic flight across
from Guangzhou to Dalian (3 hours)*.
'View' of Guangzhou coming into land. I have been there twice. Whenever I have been there it was covered in this soul-destroying pollution. For more thoughts on that, see Why we should be thankful for the haze
After a near-miss at customs in Guangzhou,
I arrived at Dalian at night. I was greeted with a full bouquet of flowers and
whisked off to Starwood’s 300-key Castle Hotel, part of its Luxury Collection,
designed by HBA and only opened 1 month ago – the venue for the APHDA
conference. The hotel was a reinterpretation of a French chateau, replete with
marble flooring, chandeliers, grand staircases and reproduction furniture – a
style very popular in China to denote ‘luxury’ and ‘success’, but distinctly
odd and a bit Disney-esque to my British eyes. I can understand, however, why
this kind of design is so popular in a country that has laboured under grim public/civic-minded architecture for so many years.
The Castle Hotel, Dalian
I was immediately impressed by the scale of
the event, about 1,300 delegates were in the audience – and the way it had been
set-up to include the biggest names in the industry, from across China, Hong
Kong, Singapore. Previous guest speakers had included Tony Chi, Peter Remedios
and Jean-Michel Gathy – so no pressure then. And I was one of only a handful of Westerners
in the room.
View from Dalian's main square (the biggest in Asia). The world's biggest and flattest half-pipe skatepark. And a giant unfinished bridge mid-construction in the background. Smog wasn't as bad here, but still noticeable.
The theme of the event was “Future
Hotels”. I am a fan of future-gazing,
like most people, so this theme attracted me and I wrote a speech focused on
what the hotel design of the future would be like. I won’t go into it here, but
if you are interested I will post a separate link to the video of my speech
when I have it.
The speech went down well, mainly because
of G.A’s reputation in the region thanks to our great work on projects like W
Taipei. For that I can only say again what great (and hard) work our team is doing
around the world.
It also went down well because of the
student-based audience – I suspect that not many event speeches in China
encourage the audience to think and participate in a dialogue. I was nervous
about doing this, given my experience in Asia in general is that people are
very reticent about asking questions in a public forum. However, on the advice
of Susan, my brilliant translator, we decided to go ahead and open up the
discussion.
It was only after the speech, that I
started to get a sense that ideas like ‘crowd-sourcing’ and group
participation, discussion are considered more radical perhaps in China than
elsewhere, especially amongst a large group of students (and to the back-drop
of the student civil disobedience in Hong Kong).
I sensed there was a formula which they had
been expecting – design firm principals turn-up and show their portfolio, talk
about the past, how they ‘made it’ and got to their current position etc. Given
that I am not a designer, I was reluctant to do that, so focused more on a
group session trying to define the future of hotel design, using ideas
harvested from the G.A global family and examples of our current work as
stimulus.
What I certainly didn’t expect was to be
mobbed by students, suppliers and clients alike for the rest of the conference.
One man approached me asking us to work on a boutique 60-room hotel project
apparently attached to the Great Wall of China (!)
Seemingly everyone wanted pictures,
signatures or to exchange business cards. After nearly an hour of this, it was
frankly a bit overwhelming. I suppose everyone is due their 15 mins of fame, but
it also got me thinking….is there something in Chinese culture where
role-models are held in very high esteem, perhaps without the criticism or cynicism
you would find in the UK? Or maybe our work was just that inspiring…I hope the
latter. Either way, it seems that G.A is now ‘big in China’. For all those in
our team that worked on these projects, I wish you could have been there to see
it – I am sure it would go some way to make the long hours and effort
worthwhile.
*A footnote about China Southern Airlines and
an example of the general statistical craziness of China…. I learnt this during
my days working with Malaysia Airlines on the launch of their own A380 services
from KL to London. China Southern Airlines is, I am told, the only airline in the world to
fly profitably Airbus A380s (the huge, double-decker ones). Why? Because China
Southern flies their A380s converted almost entirely into economy-class seating, more than 500 people being flown this way in one plane. But here’s the killer – they fly them exclusively
domestically. So whilst in the UK we
may have invented the concept of the double-decker bus, in China, they created
the double-decker plane. Literally bussing Chinese around their country from
city to city.
