John Van de Water at work. Photo: Courtesy of John Van de Water

Many foreigners come to this big, developing country with ambitious aspirations: They want to change China.

But John Van de Water, a Beijing-based partner at Dutch firm NEXT Architects, deters that kind of thinking through his book, You Can't Change China, China Changes You.

The Chinese version was released in June, two years after the original Dutch copy came out in 2011, and after an English edition was released last year.

Detailing what Van de Water absorbed from his first five years of work as a Dutch architect in China from 2004 to 2009, the 39-year-old said that his time in the country has greatly influenced his current approach to design.

"What I've learned in China is that there's no absolute truth in design, and that logical thinking is not always the right way of thinking," he told the Global Times from his office in central Beijing, where he sits inside a spacious glass-walled cubicle. "Western orientation originates from the brain, whereas a Chinese approach comes from the heart."

One of the youngest from his country in his field to publish a semi-biography, Van de Water said that his book is meant to give people insight into cross-cultural designs rather than serve as "an industry manual or anything like that."

"As a foreigner in China, you need to try to understand everything that you don't understand and will probably never understand. This book is really about how to deal with uncertainty in your designs," he said.

Xidan Lafayette department store, designed by John Van de Water's team. Photo: Courtesy of John Van de Water

'Nothing is easy'

After graduating from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands with a master's degree in architecture in 1999, he and three other students, now the partners of NEXT, spent four months documenting 26 major cities around the globe to study of the status of the world's metropolises.

After the journey, Van de Water co-founded NEXT architects in Amsterdam. By 2004, he was invited to China to present the findings of their study through a photo exhibit "Image of Metropolis."

After traveling to Beijing's Tsinghua University and Shanghai's Tongji University with just his laptop and a backpack, he realized the architectural potential of China, and was persuaded to form NEXT'S Beijing office later that year.

His office has since been involved with dozens of projects in China, with the most notable in Beijing including IBM China's R&D headquarters, Xidan Lafayette department store and Chaoyang Urban Planning Museum.

For the firm's work at Meixi Lake in Changsha, Hunan Province, where it constructed a bridge meant to refer to a Chinese knot derived from an ancient decorative folk art in China, the company won the bid to build the 180-meter-long crossing earlier this year.

When asked by a fellow architect for his secret to accomplishing so much in China, Van de Water replied, saying "there is no secret." Quoting the words of one of his wise Chinese friends, he said that, "In China, everything is possible, but nothing is easy."

And above all, he said, it's crucial to keep an open mind when it comes to managing the unexpected.

"Change can change quickly in China; the function or scale of a building can change at any time," he said. "As an architect, you should be much more flexible - you need to design smarter (here) than in Europe."

A computerized display of Meixi Lake Bridge in Changsha. Photo: Courtesy of John Van de Water

Powerful clients 

Van de Water remembers a project dispute between an Austrian architect and a Swiss multinational firm when he was still living in Amsterdam. The company wanted to change a color in the design mid-way through, but the architect refused, forcing the two sides into a court battle.

He recently told this story to one of his Chinese clients, who responded imperturbably, "Change is no problem, this is China. What the client wants is always most important."

Unlike some architects who are unwilling to bend to make changes to their designs, Van de Water said he and his team are willing to take clients' suggestions into consideration.

"I hope my designs can be capable of facilitating change," said Van de Water. "In China, the client decides everything."

He said that even his Chinese co-workers point out that Chinese clients can be most demanding at times. But because they don't know what they want until they see it, Van de Water and his team always prepare several complete concepts, even for just the very first presentation, he said.

The need to understand Chinese clients' concerns brought Van de Water into the world of feng shui, an ancient Chinese practice developed over 3,000 years ago, which aims to balance energy by arranging pieces in a room or building to usher in good fortune for the people inhabiting the space.

He said that his designs have been turned down before because of "bad" feng shui, a result that used to be difficult for Van de Water to wrap his head around - and despite his efforts to learn the "very delicate" Chinese practice as he was told by a feng shui master, its rules remain a mystery to him every now and then.

But the feng shui of a building is not the only thing that matters to people in China. The public commonly gets caught up in a structure's resemblance to a random object, as seen with the way that local residents poke fun at architectural works across the country.

The China Central Television headquarters in Beijing, for example, is hilariously linked to "boxer shorts" for Chinese people, who see the shape of the building distinctly as men's underwear.

"People are much more outspoken in China than in Europe when comparing buildings to certain shapes," said Van de Water. "It makes me very aware of the importance of association as once the building or design is nicknamed by Chinese people, it's almost impossible to get rid of it.

"But that's a good thing, too, since we don't build things for ourselves," he said. "As architects, we can't give any meaning to a building, but people can."