Project Arcadia
Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture
2015
Tracing Memory in Garden Patterns
In the final year of my undergraduate study, I undertook Project Arcadia — a spatial research project rooted in the study of Suzhou’s classical garden Zhuozheng Yuan (The Humble Administrator’s Garden). The aim was not to replicate its physical forms, but to understand and reimagine its emotional and spatial logic.
Through field observation, measured drawings, and serial sketches, I analysed fifty recurring spatial patterns from traditional Chinese gardens. These were distilled into ten spatial archetypes, encompassing gestures such as concealment and reveal, compression and release, borrowed scenery, and unexpected turns.
From this vocabulary, I embarked on a second design stage: a speculative composition, weaving these archetypes into a new, imagined landscape. The result was neither mimicry nor abstraction, but a contemporary reinterpretation of garden thinking — one that sought not to represent, but to resonate.
Project Arcadia was my first declaration of belief:
that architecture begins with emotion,
that drawing can remember,
and that even the silence between courtyards has something to say.
曲径未尽，已闻心声。
In the final year of my undergraduate study, I undertook Project Arcadia — a spatial research project rooted in the study of Suzhou’s classical garden Zhuozheng Yuan (The Humble Administrator’s Garden). The aim was not to replicate its physical forms, but to understand and reimagine its emotional and spatial logic.
Through field observation, measured drawings, and serial sketches, I analysed fifty recurring spatial patterns from traditional Chinese gardens. These were distilled into ten spatial archetypes, encompassing gestures such as concealment and reveal, compression and release, borrowed scenery, and unexpected turns.
From this vocabulary, I embarked on a second design stage: a speculative composition, weaving these archetypes into a new, imagined landscape. The result was neither mimicry nor abstraction, but a contemporary reinterpretation of garden thinking — one that sought not to represent, but to resonate.
Project Arcadia was my first declaration of belief:
that architecture begins with emotion,
that drawing can remember,
and that even the silence between courtyards has something to say.
曲径未尽，已闻心声。
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Anonymous Sculpture
Royal College of Art
2017
This project investigates the spatial and symbolic essence of industrial architecture through the lens of typology.
Inspired by Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographic taxonomy of coal breakers, it transforms archival reference into architectural understanding by drawing and modelling a section of a now-lost structure.
The resulting piece—half diagram, half monument—stands as both analysis and homage.
Through this re-articulation, the project explores how anonymity becomes sculpture, and how type becomes a carrier of collective memory.
It was an early exercise in scale, legibility, and typological thought, echoing the silent logic of forgotten machines
To me, it wasn’t just about learning drawing. It was about listening to a building that no longer speaks.
[View Full Archive | 完整项目集]
Foxtecture Atlas
George Ge
George.Ge@foxtecture.com
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Welcome to Foxtecture Atlas, a den where architecture, memory, and emotion meet.
Here dwell essays that wander between tectonics and tenderness, travel notes drawn in graphite and wind, and reflections whispered in four tongues.
It gathers writing across disciplines and borders—spanning critical architectural theory, visual archives from travel, and lyrical thoughts on language, longing, and place.
Bridging East and West, tectonics and tenderness, this site is both an atlas and a journal—
An attempt to document what often escapes documentation:
The spirit of a space, the silence of a threshold, the voice of memory.
Foxtecture is a quiet atlas, and perhaps, a place to remember what once moved you.
Foxtecture Atlas est un recueil plurilingue de pensées architecturales, d’essais personnels et de récits critiques.
Ici se croisent l’espace et la mémoire, la rigueur du construit et la fragilité du vécu.
C’est une tentative de cartographier l’invisible :
un seuil oublié, une phrase intraduisible, une émotion suspendue.
Chaque texte est une trace—de voyage, de silence, ou d’un lieu qui nous habite encore.
Foxtecture Atlas 是一个多语种的空间笔记，收录了建筑评论、文化反思、旅行图集与情感随笔。
它试图捕捉那些难以归档的瞬间：一个空间的气息，一段语言的余温，一种未竟的情感。
在这里，建筑不是冷冰的形体，而是观念的显影，是记忆的容器。
这是一个跨越地域与语境的思辨地图，也是一位旅人写给世界的片段札记。
Foxtecture Atlas は、建築・文化・感情の交差点にある多言語のエッセイサイトです。
空間と言葉、旅と記憶、東洋と西洋——そのあいだにある「気配」を綴ります。
建築は単なる構造ではなく、想いを宿す器。
このサイトは、静かなる問いかけの場でもあります：
私たちは、どこに属し、どこに還るのか？
Profile
Professional Practice in Architecture ARB RIBA Part III
Royal College of Art
Master of Arts in Architecture ARB RIBA Part II
Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture
Bachelor of Architecture 5 years
London and Riyadh
Sybarite Architects
London
Forensic Architecture
London
Atelier Li Xinggang, China State Architecture and Research Group
Beijing
MAD Architects
Beijing
Atelier Fronti
Beijing
Registered Architect
Architects Registration Board
RIBA
Chartered Architect
Royal Institute of British Architects
MCIAT
Chartered Architectural Technologist
Chartered Institute of Architectural Technologist
PMP
Project Management Professional
Project Management Institute
FASC
Fellow
Architectural Society of China
FRSA
Fellow
The Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
Last Updated 10.07.25
Toward a Critical History of China’s Modern and Contemporary Architecture:
Chapter II: Between Silence and Search: Architecture under the Shadow of Rupture: 1962–1979
On Toward a Critical History of China’s Modern and Contemporary Architecture:
This longform essay is a personal and critical investigation into the trajectories of Chinese modern and contemporary architecture—from monumental beginnings to fragmentary presents. Spanning over seven decades, it charts shifting paradigms of space, power, ideology, and poetics, interweaving political history with architectural form, and national memory with personal reflection.
The journey began in 2017, when I was still a student at the Royal College of Art. What started as a research dissertation slowly grew, unruly and unresolved, following me from Beijing to London and to Riyadh, from studio to studio, and from one sleepless night to the next. It is not a linear account, nor a detached analysis—but rather, a map of hesitation, re-reading, and the quiet question: what does it mean to build, in a place constantly rebuilding itself?
This essay unfolds across seven chapters, each first published as a standalone short-form essay. Together, they form a multi-voiced history—one that seeks neither nostalgia nor certainty, but understanding. It is a history written by someone both within and without: a trained architect, a drifting fox, a child of the East looking at the past through Western tools, yet never fully at home in either.
On Chapter II: Between Silence and Search: Architecture under the Shadow of Rupture, 1962–1979:
This chapter traces the two lost decades in Chinese architectural history—when drawing boards gathered dust, classrooms became battlegrounds, and the very language of architecture was silenced by ideological fervour.
In the wake of famine and revolution, space was no longer a canvas for culture but a tool of control. Temples were torched, courtyards erased, and a generation of architects exiled—if not from geography, then from meaning. And yet, within the silence, two distant voices continued to echo: Liang Sicheng, whose reverence for structural grammar offered a fragile continuity; and I.M. Pei, whose spatial poetics reimagined tradition as atmosphere rather than artefact.
Their paths never crossed in person, but their visions together shaped the soul of Chinese modernity—one through the articulation of inherited form, the other through the evocation of timeless spirit.
This chapter is not merely about what was lost. It is about how memory resists ruin.
It is about how architecture, even in exile, can remember.
[Read full essay |阅读全文]
Toward a Critical History of China’s Modern and Contemporary Architecture:
Introduction and Chapter I: Party, Form, and the Monument: 1954 - 1961
On Toward a Critical History of China’s Modern and Contemporary Architecture:
This longform essay is a personal and critical investigation into the trajectories of Chinese modern and contemporary architecture—from monumental beginnings to fragmentary presents. Spanning over seven decades, it charts shifting paradigms of space, power, ideology, and poetics, interweaving political history with architectural form, and national memory with personal reflection.
The journey began in 2017, when I was still a student at the Royal College of Art. What started as a research dissertation slowly grew, unruly and unresolved, following me from Beijing to London and to Riyadh, from studio to studio, and from one sleepless night to the next. It is not a linear account, nor a detached analysis—but rather, a map of hesitation, re-reading, and the quiet question: what does it mean to build, in a place constantly rebuilding itself?
This essay unfolds across seven chapters, each first published as a standalone short-form essay. Together, they form a multi-voiced history—one that seeks neither nostalgia nor certainty, but understanding. It is a history written by someone both within and without: a trained architect, a drifting fox, a child of the East looking at the past through Western tools, yet never fully at home in either.
On the Introduction and Chapter I: Party, Form, and the Monument: 1954–1961:
The first section, composed of an introductory essay and Chapter I, opens at the very moment of China's post-revolutionary architectural formation. It explores how architecture was mobilised as an ideological apparatus—how grids, monuments, and imported styles became carriers of state power, collective aspiration, and cultural dislocation.
Through a critical reading of the “Ten Great Buildings,” Soviet influence, and the symbolic centrality of Tiananmen, this chapter argues that early PRC architecture was not merely political in content—but political in form. Beneath the symmetry of facades and the axis mundi of Beijing’s centre lies a deeper narrative of modernity forced into uniform, of history flattened into spectacle.
Yet, within the cracks of this monumental language, ghosts still flicker: erased blueprints, forgotten competitions, the unbuilt dreams of a different city. What might we learn, if we listen not only to what was built, but to what was silenced?
[Read full essay |阅读全文]
Bring Back the Birdsong
Published 05/07/25
Before architecture became a profession, it was a quiet wonder — found in the way morning light slants through an alley, or how a single line can suggest a world. This essay is not a résumé, but a peronsal reflection — of a young architect coming of age through cities, classrooms, studios, and silences.
Written as a letter to myself, it traverses childhood reveries in Beijing courtyards, the trials of design school in London, the first heartbreaks of practice, and the slow awakening to what truly matters.
It is an introspective journey — lyrical, imperfect, and tender — about how I learnt to build not just with concrete and glass, but with memory, vulnerability, and time.
To bring back the birdsong is to remember why I began. To trace the origin of a calling before it was clouded by deadlines, salaries, or titles.
It is about listening again, quietly, for the sound that first stirred the soul.
但愿久别重逢日，仍识枝头喜鹊鸣。
[Read full essay |阅读全文]
The Space Between Languages and the Emotion That Eludes Translation
Published 30/06/25
This reflective essay explores the emotional gaps between Chinese, English, Japanese, and French—where grammar fails to carry grief, and translation becomes both bridge and betrayal.
Through poetic fragments, personal memories, and comparative analysis, I interrogates how language shapes—and limits—the way we express loss, love, and longing.
What is lost in translation is not just meaning, but rhythm, memory, and ache.
语言的差异不止于词句，更关乎呼吸的节奏与情绪的余温。
翻訳できない感情は、時に言葉よりも深く心を震わせる。
Ce qui se perd dans la traduction, c’est aussi le silence entre les ligne.
[Read full essay | 阅读全文]
‘Party Space’ and the Architecture of Obedience: Landscapes under Sovereign Will and the Voices that Return
Published 10/06/25
This essay explores how architecture becomes an instrument of ideology—
where plazas are scripted like theatres, monuments stage permanence, and symmetry disciplines the body long before law ever does.
From Tiananmen to Xiong’an, from Bucharest to Washington,
this is not just a history of spaces, but of the obedience they demand.
Combining personal memory with critical geography,
the piece maps what I call party-space:
Spaces not built for living, but for staging power —
where presence becomes surveillance, and silence becomes design.
[Read full essay |阅读全文]