Common Ground: The Gaudi of Emeryville

February 2006

The Gaudi of Emeryville

Visionary architect Eugene Tsui melds the natural with the futuristic. His sketches resemble set designs for Star Wars, and he just may be the Bay Area’s most innovative and iconoclastic designer.

By Traci Hukill

Eugene Tsui is an architect and designer who likes to go out on a limb. His latest proposal is for a half-mile-high tower he would like to see rising from downtown Oakland. If the city were to approve the project, and if someone were to pony up the $600 million to build it, the Eye in the Sky would be a tourist attraction to rival anything in San Francisco. From the five-story observation deck 2,300 feet up, people could see all the way to Santa Cruz and the Farallon islands. The slender, twisting tower would host 92 eggbeater windmills and 700,000 square feet of solar panels, making it a marvel of self-sufficiency. It would be structurally sound, strangely beautiful, and ecologically elegant. In short, it would be a classic Tsui creation.

Tsui knows his form of visionary design, a melding of the futuristic with the natural, is not appreciated by all. Some of his drawings look like set designs for a Star Wars movie — huge, with moving parts, like the unbuilt giant lotus flower-inspired tower with opening “petal” walls that he designed for an eco-park in Shenzhen, China. Or the Strait of Gibraltar floating bridge he envisions connecting Europe to Africa via a partially submerged span. The projects that actually reach completion are less grandiose. They hunker close to the earth, organic forms curved into themselves, like seashells set in soil.

Both the fantastical and the humble are part of Tsui’s personal protest against what he considers an insidious and pervasive failure of imagination. If architecture is the material record of a culture, Tsui sees in contemporary society’s preference for big boxes a legacy of stifled creativity and a pathological conformity bred by fear of deviating from the group.

“If I build a seashell house, what’s the resale value? What will my relatives say? How can I possibly live in a place like that?’” he says in the voice of a nervous buyer. “It all comes down to this sense of fear that really combats the need to be an individual. Daily we wake up, and we’ve accepted our fears. Instead of being innovators and creative individuals, we’ve become fearful conformists. A lot of sickness, despair, sadness and anger comes from a lack of self-expression.”

Tsui believes his task is to make a better-built environment, and, through that, to foster more creative and empowered individuals who, in turn, will create a better culture. He finds inspiration for this in the tension he sees in nature.

“I don’t find nature to be a calm, peaceful environment,” he says. “It’s an invigorating environment. It makes me want to do things. And my personal challenge in architecture is to find ways that the built environment can give you the same feeling, the same sense of energy and push and, of course, beauty and diversity.”

Some have dismissed Tsui as a crackpot. He was expelled from Columbia University and the University of Oregon before going on to complete two master’s degrees and a doctorate at Berkeley, and he has come in for ridicule by professors and colleagues for his far-fetched designs. His working style is an odd mixture of the methodical and the disorganized.

He has the youthfulness commonly found in innovators and iconoclasts. At 51, he looks and moves like a fit 30-year-old (Last August, he won the Super Middleweight Masters title at the Ringside World Boxing Championships for amateurs in Kansas City). And his quirks include a penchant for wearing capes and other Jedi-like wear that he designs himself.

He also has a powerful gift of focus. As we talked, seated cross-legged on an oriental rug in the middle of a cavernous workspace in industrial Oakland — the office had not yet moved to its permanent home in Emeryville — the telephone interrupted several times. At one point it rang 23 times, but Tsui finished what he was saying before he walked over to answer it.

Tsui’s ideas and demeanor mark him as different, and his sketches reveal the mind of a dreamer, but he is neither a wild-eyed proselytizer nor a paralyzed visionary incapable of action. He is present and relaxed. He smiles a lot. This easy, lucid communication style makes him a sought-after speaker at universities and forums like the Green Festival. And his ideas make their own kind of sense.

“Why don’t our buildings have the same sort of intelligence and beauty and economy and structural strength found in nature?” he asks. “Here is a source that’s been around for 5 billion years. And I realized it’s because humanity has tried to conquer [and] seal itself off from nature, and architecture became a means to do that. Our built environment is really devoid of all the principles of nature.”

In addition to the expected volumes on architecture, the bookshelf at Tsui Design and Research, Inc. is crammed with books on insects and plant physiology. Tsui regularly looks to nature to solve architectural problems, whether in the nest constructions of the weaverbird and the termite or in the anatomy of a dinosaur. When designing an addition for an East Bay house, Tsui modeled a flat solar wing off the plates on the back of stegosaurus, mimicking the arterial structure that paleontologists believe warmed and cooled the creature. When it came time to build a house for his parents, he modeled it after the tardigrade, a microscopic insect that dwells in moist environments and is considered one of the most indestructible animals on earth. Needless to say, it’s a striking addition to their suburban street.

A few key natural principles guide Tsui’s designs. One is curvilinearity. A curved interior, he says, is easier to warm and cool because air circulates instead of getting trapped in the corners of the ceiling. A seashell’s curvature helps it to dissipate the stress of waves. If a fire is raging nearby, a flat exterior draws fire to itself by creating a vacuum, he says, whereas a rounded one lets the air flow around it, which keeps a vacuum from forming.

Another critical part of nature’s design intelligence, Tsui says, is economy: “Minimizing the materials you’re using and maximizing what those materials cover and how much they can resist.” Tsui points to a tall structure in his warehouse made of sticks and string. It stays upright because of the forces of tension, or tensegrity, rather than the forces of solidity, or compression.

“There’s a lot more string than sticks, but that very lightweight column can support many times its own weight,” he says. Tsui says that most living things consist of about two parts tension to one part compression. In human bodies, for example, bones make up a third of our weight, and the rest is tension.

The practical considerations make a good case for Tsui’s version of ecological design, but he says something else is at stake: When our designed environments ignore nature, we lose its lessons. We lose an innate understanding of cause and effect and the empowerment we feel when we’re in nature. We also lose our recognition that diversity in human society, as in natural communities, is crucial for survival.

And that’s what drives Tsui more than anything else: The nurturing of individual expression and passing on one’s passions to others. Architecture is but the medium for Tsui’s urgent message that we allow each other to flourish as individuals. “That to me is one of the most important responsibilities we have for each other, if not THE most important. Because that in itself breaks apart the chains of conformity, the chains of conservatism, of fitting in. That really is the most debilitating aspect of being alive.”

Traci Hukill is a regular contributor to CG.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: