Design for Good by John Cary

Author:John Cary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Aerial view of Mulan Primary School.

Architect Joshua Bolchover, a native of Manchester, England, grew up surrounded by the process of design. “My parents are architects, and they work from home, so my home was literally a living, working office when I was growing up. They were always dealing with problems associated with buildings,” explains Bolchover. “I was fascinated by all the tools that surrounded me—scale rulers, Maylines, and all this kind of stuff.

“I always say that my biggest act of rebellion was actually becoming an architect, because it was something I swore I would not do,” Bolchover continues. “My parents would always say, ‘Whatever you do, do not become an architect.’” They had seen the social ambitions of architecture erode over the years. However, after exploring a career in medicine, Bolchover ultimately decided to pursue architecture, pledging to do it in a very different way from his parents, who had focused mostly on health-care architecture in Manchester.

Bolchover landed in Hong Kong after studying architecture and working in Cambridge, San Francisco, and London. The move to Hong Kong came when Bolchover was living in London, teaching, and doing multiple other things. “I was basically working three jobs, getting paid nothing, and thinking it was amazing,” he explains. “Then we moved to Hong Kong, and I got a job working at the University of Hong Kong in a quite junior role. I remember this moment when they gave me the keys to my office and said, ‘Okay, there you go.’ I asked, ‘Well, what do I have to do?’”

The implication to Bolchover, he tells me, was “‘Just do what you do. Just decide what you do.’ But they didn’t even say that; they didn’t give me any guidance whatsoever. It was a real moment of liberation, and I began wondering, ‘Okay, what am I going to do here?’”

Bolchover soon met architect John Lin, whom we met in chapter 3. Lin was building a school in rural China and invited Bolchover to make the eight-hour car trip with him to visit it. As they talked and observed the transition from their urban lives in Hong Kong to the rural context where Lin was working, the two hatched the beginnings of their practice together, Rural Urban Framework, a research program of the University of Hong Kong.

As work on Lin’s original school project concluded and under the auspices of Rural Urban Framework, Bolchover and Lin reached out to other nongovernmental organizations that they thought might need design assistance. That outreach connected them with a Hong Kong– based NGO called The Power of Love, which for nearly two decades now has been building schools across rural China. Purely by coincidence, it also had a tie to the University of Hong Kong.

The NGO was created by Ivy Lam, a Hong Kong native who was educated in Canada and returned to become an administrator in the Department of Medicine at the university. Grateful for the opportunity she’d had to study, and aware of the limited educational opportunities for most children in rural China, Lam established the NGO in 1998.

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