AMERICAN MASTER BUILDER Philip Johnson thought Mies van der Rohe's plans for a glass house wouldn't work. You needed solid walls running up against the glass, he said, which would ruin the whole idea. Farnsworth House, van der Rohe's transcendent glass wonder in Plano, Illinois, however, showed that glass houses can work (and changed Johnson's mind). More a temple than a house, its consistency and its relationship with the nature around it made it a success, an important one in the history of architecture.
American-Chinese lawyer, gallerist and restaurateur Handel Lee was inspired by this purity of form when he decided to build his house near the satellite town
of Huairou, northeast of Beijing. Lee already had a house out by the Qing tombs, but it was too far from the city.
In 1998, a friend introduced him to this area. And, although he was immediately taken with it, it took two years of negotiations before construction of his house could begin. Lee is no stranger
to renovation - previous projects include the Shanghai retail and dining emporium Three on the Bund, the Courtyard restaurant, RBL in Beijing and the forthcoming revamped embassy compound, the Legation Quarter.
Lee enlisted the help of photo artist and designer Gao Bo and asked him to look at Mies van der Rohe's building, the work of architect Shigeru Ban (he particularly liked Shigeru Ban's Curtain Wall House in Tokyo) and the art of painter and calligrapher Pu Xinyu (1896-1963) . 'It took a year-and-a-half of sitting around talking and drinking just to come up with the conceptual design,' he says. The house they came up with is self-consciously man-made, angular and minimalist; a stark contrast to the surrounding countryside.
Lee was most inspired by Pu Xinyu, best known for his elegant landscapes. (Lee's mother, an artist, studied under Pu.) 'There are pine trees right behind the house that look like a traditional landscape painting from the Northern Song dynasty - rocky, not overly green,' Lee says. 'That mountain looked just like those paintings and I wanted to build a house like that - where you have the little guy within
