Interview by Andrew Thompson
From the Caracas left to the Beijing boom: Victor Ochoa has crossed and re-crossed continents, business activities, and cultures. The son of a Venezuelan Maoist who left the country on the run in the late 1960s, he remembers a year spent in the swinging London of Carnaby street and The Beatles (“it seemed like the epicentre of the world”) before the family moved to the stark contrast of Mao’s China, then beginning the massive upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. His father was an official guest of the revolution, a “foreign specialist” working for Xinhua, the official news agency. This was a key period for the young Victor, because he began to learn Mandarin Chinese, laying the basis for a very special insight into the country’s culture. But there was much criss-crossing yet to come. When Rafael Caldera won the Venezuelan Presidency and began the pacification policy designed to bring the guerrillas back into peaceful politics, the family returned to Caracas.
Having dabbled with the idea of becoming an oceanographer, Víctor enrolled instead to study architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, doing two years of the course under Professor Jesús Tenreiro-Degwitz. But he had itchy feet (“I was 21 and wanted to liberate myself” he says), and was soon applying for a scholarship to go back to China. This was awkward, as the Chinese authorities didn’t particularly want foreign architecture students, but in the end they relented, allowing him back in, to perfect his language skills and to enrol at Tsinghua University. “I was able to pick up Chinese again quite easily because I remembered the words of all the revolutionary songs praising Mao” he says. He was back in another year of upheaval - 1976 - marked by Mao’s death and the beginning of the struggle against the “gang of four”. The 1976 Chinese university enrolment were the first in many years who actually took exams to get in: before, only the selected children of “workers, peasants and soldiers” were allowed into higher education. What that meant, says Victor, is that a lot of it was down to guangxi - who you know - or to put it in more familiar language - palanca política. Now, he is philosophical - he notes that some of his fellow students of humble origins have worked hard and made good - one is a ministry director - while he knows of others who never put their university years to use and are probably washing plates somewhere.
The conversation takes a sudden turn into the shape of today’s Beijing. “What you have to realise” says Víctor, “is that Tianamen Square was deliberately created as a space for massive political demonstrations, Workers day on the 1st of May and Revolution day on the 1st of October”. To achieve this everything in the way - in one of the most historically rich cities in the world - was destroyed. The Maoists deliberately pulled down the walls around the traditional city, walls which had been in place for centuries. They also built ten massive Soviet-style new buildings (including the Peoples’ Congress), to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in 1959. “It was an act of sheer architectural vandalism, to create that massive square without any trees at all, right beside the Forbidden City” Victor says, “all undertaken as a symbol of a new beginning for the Chinese people”. Yet he also points out that most of China’s dynasties have done just that - started out by ripping out the symbols of the previous regime. So in some ways the Maoists were themselves following a long tradition.
After graduating there was another return to Venezuela, looking at ways of bringing Chinese design ideas to his home country, and yet another trip out to China, working for China Film, and then using his inside take on Chinese society to become one of the early foreign bank representatives, signing a two year contract to represent Banco Exterior de España. Those two years turned into 14, representing the bank as it metamorphosed into Argentaria (“because that is a difficult name to translate into Mandarin, many Chinese were convinced I represented an Argentine bank”) and then finally into BBVA. At the end of that process, as part of a managerial restructuring, Víctor left with a generous package, which he invested back into his architectural passion, setting up a small design house with Chinese partners - some friends from his university days, and one an old Red Guard leader. One of the things he did was invite his younger brother Antonio, who had just graduated as an architect in Venezuela, to come and join them.
Víctor says that “until 1985 the party line was pretty deadly for architecture in general”. Few architects were trained, there was a war economy, the same basic and badly-designed buildings were reproduced many times over, in slab after pre-fabricated slab. Architecture was seen as being about square metres, bricks, and mortar, mathematics. Víctor, who as a student used to wander around the Summer Palace meditating on shape and form, argues Latin-style that architecture is also about psychology, culture, and the soul. “They saw me as different” he laughs, “maybe someone to be tolerated”. From the mid 1980s onward, the economic boom has opened things up, and the environment has become more receptive to Víctor’s ideas, but there are new and old problems. Now there is a tendency to go for massive prestige buildings. “The developer doesn’t give you a free hand - he tells you what to do , and he usually wants a gold and glass tower, he wants it to look expensive. Or a big international design house is brought in, without developing local talent”. An oddity in Beijing’s booming skyline is that many of the big towers are much “thicker” than their equivalents in New York - they have a lot more floor space, but this is not necessarily well-arranged. In residential blocks, because the developers presume that everyone wants a south-facing view (to benefit from good feng shui and more sunlight) they cram in as many as 20 long, awkwardly shaped apartments on each floor. And then there is the bureaucracy. To get a building erected, various stamps of approval are needed, known as “chops”. Some approvals can require as many as 23 separate chops. Even though Víctor has lived for two decades in China, and has an architectural degree from a Chinese University, his partnership often cannot work with a client directly but has to deal via “a big chop”.
But there are some success stories. Antonio, for example has “clicked” with a developer that appreciates good design - Redstone Industrie, working on the SOHO and SOHO New Town projects in eastern Beijing, involving a total of ten tower blocks. This started out as the conversion of an old tower block that had housed a spirits factory into residential units. Antonio says his concept was to cater for the rising middle classes - graphic artists, software developers, self-employed professionals, and others in similar roles who needed compact and well-designed spaces to live and work. SOHO stands for Small Office, Home Office, and what he has done is to create duplexes, and a small internal courtyard on every fourth floor, so that there is some public space and a sense of community. He has also invited artists to decorate the courtyards with sculptures. The project has been wildly successful - it sold out in record time. Antonio is also involved in the Great Wall project - 12 different prestige houses built by 12 different Asian architects (from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere) north of the city near the Great Wall. Antonio’s entry - a structure perched on the hillside with spectacular views and two balconies (one glassed in to appreciate the view during the cold winters and another open, to do the same during the hot summers) is officially classified as a “mainland China” entry.** The repressed demand for better living space, now that there is money on the streets, is massive. As we drive to a restaurant amid a mass of glittering night lights and pulsating traffic, Antonio says “when I arrived here in the early 1990s Beijing would just shut down at 7 pm every night. People used to work a six-day week, but then the authorities made Saturday a holiday, mainly to try and kick-start some consumer spending. At first people didn’t know what to do - they’d still go into work on Saturday and sit about playing cards”. But now, he acknowledges, the boom is rolling and everyone wants to get on board. That has changed the nature of the game for architecture says Victor. “In China we have not had good buildings for the last 50 years. Now at last we can afford them, everyone wants them, and there is a really big building boom in progress”.
Victor clearly loves China. “The difference between us” says Antonio, “is that Víctor learnt Mandarin here as a child and I didn’t. That means in every conversation he understands three or four subtleties that completely pass me by. He has a much deeper insight”. But as Víctor himself acknowledges, Chinese society still finds it difficult to accept foreigners. Fan Haoyi, one of his Chinese partners says “I met Victor in 1978, and have known him for over 20 years. He thinks differently, and has a different approach to architecture. We can take than on board, but for all his years in China I have to say, he is not really Chinese”. And they both laugh, as if they are referring to secret codes and private jokes.
** There are two other Mainland China entries
From the Caracas left to the Beijing boom: Victor Ochoa has crossed and re-crossed continents, business activities, and cultures. The son of a Venezuelan Maoist who left the country on the run in the late 1960s, he remembers a year spent in the swinging London of Carnaby street and The Beatles (“it seemed like the epicentre of the world”) before the family moved to the stark contrast of Mao’s China, then beginning the massive upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. His father was an official guest of the revolution, a “foreign specialist” working for Xinhua, the official news agency. This was a key period for the young Victor, because he began to learn Mandarin Chinese, laying the basis for a very special insight into the country’s culture. But there was much criss-crossing yet to come. When Rafael Caldera won the Venezuelan Presidency and began the pacification policy designed to bring the guerrillas back into peaceful politics, the family returned to Caracas.
Having dabbled with the idea of becoming an oceanographer, Víctor enrolled instead to study architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, doing two years of the course under Professor Jesús Tenreiro-Degwitz. But he had itchy feet (“I was 21 and wanted to liberate myself” he says), and was soon applying for a scholarship to go back to China. This was awkward, as the Chinese authorities didn’t particularly want foreign architecture students, but in the end they relented, allowing him back in, to perfect his language skills and to enrol at Tsinghua University. “I was able to pick up Chinese again quite easily because I remembered the words of all the revolutionary songs praising Mao” he says. He was back in another year of upheaval - 1976 - marked by Mao’s death and the beginning of the struggle against the “gang of four”. The 1976 Chinese university enrolment were the first in many years who actually took exams to get in: before, only the selected children of “workers, peasants and soldiers” were allowed into higher education. What that meant, says Victor, is that a lot of it was down to guangxi - who you know - or to put it in more familiar language - palanca política. Now, he is philosophical - he notes that some of his fellow students of humble origins have worked hard and made good - one is a ministry director - while he knows of others who never put their university years to use and are probably washing plates somewhere.
The conversation takes a sudden turn into the shape of today’s Beijing. “What you have to realise” says Víctor, “is that Tianamen Square was deliberately created as a space for massive political demonstrations, Workers day on the 1st of May and Revolution day on the 1st of October”. To achieve this everything in the way - in one of the most historically rich cities in the world - was destroyed. The Maoists deliberately pulled down the walls around the traditional city, walls which had been in place for centuries. They also built ten massive Soviet-style new buildings (including the Peoples’ Congress), to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in 1959. “It was an act of sheer architectural vandalism, to create that massive square without any trees at all, right beside the Forbidden City” Victor says, “all undertaken as a symbol of a new beginning for the Chinese people”. Yet he also points out that most of China’s dynasties have done just that - started out by ripping out the symbols of the previous regime. So in some ways the Maoists were themselves following a long tradition.
After graduating there was another return to Venezuela, looking at ways of bringing Chinese design ideas to his home country, and yet another trip out to China, working for China Film, and then using his inside take on Chinese society to become one of the early foreign bank representatives, signing a two year contract to represent Banco Exterior de España. Those two years turned into 14, representing the bank as it metamorphosed into Argentaria (“because that is a difficult name to translate into Mandarin, many Chinese were convinced I represented an Argentine bank”) and then finally into BBVA. At the end of that process, as part of a managerial restructuring, Víctor left with a generous package, which he invested back into his architectural passion, setting up a small design house with Chinese partners - some friends from his university days, and one an old Red Guard leader. One of the things he did was invite his younger brother Antonio, who had just graduated as an architect in Venezuela, to come and join them.
Víctor says that “until 1985 the party line was pretty deadly for architecture in general”. Few architects were trained, there was a war economy, the same basic and badly-designed buildings were reproduced many times over, in slab after pre-fabricated slab. Architecture was seen as being about square metres, bricks, and mortar, mathematics. Víctor, who as a student used to wander around the Summer Palace meditating on shape and form, argues Latin-style that architecture is also about psychology, culture, and the soul. “They saw me as different” he laughs, “maybe someone to be tolerated”. From the mid 1980s onward, the economic boom has opened things up, and the environment has become more receptive to Víctor’s ideas, but there are new and old problems. Now there is a tendency to go for massive prestige buildings. “The developer doesn’t give you a free hand - he tells you what to do , and he usually wants a gold and glass tower, he wants it to look expensive. Or a big international design house is brought in, without developing local talent”. An oddity in Beijing’s booming skyline is that many of the big towers are much “thicker” than their equivalents in New York - they have a lot more floor space, but this is not necessarily well-arranged. In residential blocks, because the developers presume that everyone wants a south-facing view (to benefit from good feng shui and more sunlight) they cram in as many as 20 long, awkwardly shaped apartments on each floor. And then there is the bureaucracy. To get a building erected, various stamps of approval are needed, known as “chops”. Some approvals can require as many as 23 separate chops. Even though Víctor has lived for two decades in China, and has an architectural degree from a Chinese University, his partnership often cannot work with a client directly but has to deal via “a big chop”.
But there are some success stories. Antonio, for example has “clicked” with a developer that appreciates good design - Redstone Industrie, working on the SOHO and SOHO New Town projects in eastern Beijing, involving a total of ten tower blocks. This started out as the conversion of an old tower block that had housed a spirits factory into residential units. Antonio says his concept was to cater for the rising middle classes - graphic artists, software developers, self-employed professionals, and others in similar roles who needed compact and well-designed spaces to live and work. SOHO stands for Small Office, Home Office, and what he has done is to create duplexes, and a small internal courtyard on every fourth floor, so that there is some public space and a sense of community. He has also invited artists to decorate the courtyards with sculptures. The project has been wildly successful - it sold out in record time. Antonio is also involved in the Great Wall project - 12 different prestige houses built by 12 different Asian architects (from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere) north of the city near the Great Wall. Antonio’s entry - a structure perched on the hillside with spectacular views and two balconies (one glassed in to appreciate the view during the cold winters and another open, to do the same during the hot summers) is officially classified as a “mainland China” entry.** The repressed demand for better living space, now that there is money on the streets, is massive. As we drive to a restaurant amid a mass of glittering night lights and pulsating traffic, Antonio says “when I arrived here in the early 1990s Beijing would just shut down at 7 pm every night. People used to work a six-day week, but then the authorities made Saturday a holiday, mainly to try and kick-start some consumer spending. At first people didn’t know what to do - they’d still go into work on Saturday and sit about playing cards”. But now, he acknowledges, the boom is rolling and everyone wants to get on board. That has changed the nature of the game for architecture says Victor. “In China we have not had good buildings for the last 50 years. Now at last we can afford them, everyone wants them, and there is a really big building boom in progress”.
Victor clearly loves China. “The difference between us” says Antonio, “is that Víctor learnt Mandarin here as a child and I didn’t. That means in every conversation he understands three or four subtleties that completely pass me by. He has a much deeper insight”. But as Víctor himself acknowledges, Chinese society still finds it difficult to accept foreigners. Fan Haoyi, one of his Chinese partners says “I met Victor in 1978, and have known him for over 20 years. He thinks differently, and has a different approach to architecture. We can take than on board, but for all his years in China I have to say, he is not really Chinese”. And they both laugh, as if they are referring to secret codes and private jokes.
** There are two other Mainland China entries
