It is my great honor to invite Mr. Chi to visit Shanghai to have an open class for us. He spent two precious days to share with us his 40 years of experience, understanding and insights from interior design, as well as what a person has done in this industry for 40 years and his own thinking. I believe that these two days with Mr. Ji will also become an unforgettable memory in our life. At the same time, it triggered our own reflection on the design industry.

Intangible design "What does it mean to make design invisible?"

When Mr.Chi first threw out this core issue, he said that for him, whether you are an interior designer, an architect or a landscape architect, you all need to do the same thing, that is, to cultivate the same goals and hopes of humanity. This is the ideal state that every designer wants to achieve in the design process. Because of this, at the same time, he actually hopes that the scale of his design can be smaller and smaller, different from the scale of architecture, different from the scale of the city, he wants to be able to achieve a 1:1 scale like industrial design, so that he can more deeply explore the previously mentioned state.

Before going back to the question he initially raised, he was actually very clear that there would be many questions for everyone to consult him, but what Mr. Chi really hoped in this line of class was that his sharing could affect everyone's thinking, and some questions were actually unanswered. In his opinion, the design that can have a standard answer will not be a very mature design. So "What does it mean to make design invisible?" Mr. Chi's answer is: "The most important thing is to do integration, integration is easy but integration is difficult." 

He will meet many people on the way to design, and he will also meet many people in the process of integration. It is also about choice, whether to coordinate, but is coordination a compromise? At the same time, society is changing dramatically, so how do you go in parallel with this society? When you encounter discrimination and you know that discrimination is also a form of protection of the territory, how do you integrate? Mr. Chi has raised many questions, which is also his response to invisible design, but also a deeper reflection, which is something for us to ponder together.

Mr. Chi took hotel design as an example, in the process of hotel design, who has carefully considered the space of the staff? in fact, for a hotel, the staff inside is the actual owner of the hotel, each hotel is a guest. This will lead to another question, the biggest problem of hotel design, for different classes, how to lead a design spirit? So the problem of integration comes again, how to integrate the problem of various classes in the hotel design? In fact, starting from the staff to stimulate the spirit of a hotel, can let the staff feel from the heart that working in the hotel is a pride, in fact, for a hotel also has an invisible power.

So how do you coordinate a collective in space? How do you make it hard to forget the memories he places in space? This leads to another topic for the meaning of intangible design, that is, space and people, and the combination of people and space can stimulate the spirit of the space itself. The combination of man and space can stimulate the spirit of space itself.

"Emotion, space, the art of experience in the intangible design of a good life."

"What do you see when you look out of the window? "If someone told me his answer was glass, I think I'd ask him to leave..."

Chi made a joke, if people do not think about what can be seen through the window, what can be enjoyed by the eyes, then the existence and design of the window here will lose its original meaning. The space that allows people to stay more is fuzzy, and if the defined functions are placed in the undefined space at the same time, and the boundaries between them are blurred, Mr. Chi thinks that such a space is more likely to allow people to stay. He suggested that people should not be defined by fixed functions when designing

"Intangible design focuses on the mood of the space rather than the physical material of the space itself. "

Just like the window joke that Chi mentioned before, in fact, wherever the vision goes, it will be part of the design. At the same time, only the entry of people is an important factor that can make the artificial space fresh. Because of this, it is necessary to take into account both the inside and the outside, whether it is architectural design or interior design. So back to the question, how do you blur a space? In fact, the user is passive, but the designer is active, and the result of the design has the energy to drive the user's behavior, so the designer himself has to think about where the fuzzy boundary is.

"What is the true nature of materials"

When it comes to materials, I feel that Mr. Chi is touched by emotions. He believes that materials themselves are alive, and designers have the energy to make them live and breathe, and to stimulate the inherent beauty of materials. But the foundation of all this is to understand the nature of the material.

Here is mentioned a very deep memory of Mr. Chi. In the hot summer days of the Northern hemisphere, he liked to live in the cool southern Argentina to spend time in the hot climate of the northern Hemisphere. Once, when he rode through the villages on both sides of the Argentine mountains, he found that the Catholic churches in the small villages on both sides used the same but completely different materials. From west to east, silver was used on one side, and gold was used on the other side of the mountain. The silverware village says that God is tired for us and his tears are silver, but the other side of the mountain tells him that God is tired for us and his sweat is golden." This memory sparked Chi's desire to preserve and sustain the village, and he later used the material in the design of Andaz Hotel Tokyo and other hotels, while sustaining the entire village for seven years. This is what triggers the inner soul of the material.

Studio life

Mr. Chi then talked about his studio life, the smile on his face is warm and kind, you can feel that this is a very warm memory for him. His office has people of 18 nationalities, and how he knew that was due to a colleague who was adamant about not letting anyone touch his phone screen, writing a warning sign on his desk in 18 languages, he said with a laugh. For Mr. Chi, his ideal state for his studio is a perfect and complete "one", "one" is very important, is a very important part of a perfect, even if the current studio has not completely achieved a complete "one", this is also his core ideal for his studio.

When it comes to how to educate a younger designer, in the studio, for those with less experience, Mr. Chi wants them to circle the points they don't understand, learn to ask questions, and discuss and solve them together. Of course, the problems caused by this will cost more time, but it is a long-term training investment. Everyone will have the opportunity to enter the office library, to imitate and decompose the previous projects, and to combine and try to use the same language, which is the way of Mr. Chi's studio to educate people.

For the future, Chi will focus more on residential projects, because in his view, he can learn more on the residential project, because the family involves inheritance, there is a chance to explore the treasure of the big family. If design can become part of this family heritage, for Mr. Chi, it is also significant.