The design of the project began early in April 2018. Most of the meeting took place on the WeChat, a very common web chat in China. As the client was present in Changchun it was much easier this way. The project was low budget one as it is intended to be removed in 6 months.
To convey the design intentions to the site contractor and engineer I visited the site. I have no knowledge of Mandarin which made this situation interesting. thankfully the client cooperated and with a little help of Google, the drawings were translated. Most of the communication between me and the engineers/workers was via WeChat using Google translate, errors occurred due to gaps in the translation and things got interesting.
The site construction was even more interesting. Initially, we were supposed to use the onsite existing trees and landscape. But as it was too tedious to fix it the client found it easier to wipe it out completely and redo it using transplanted trees. The trees were all bought online on taobao.com the eBay of China. I helped the landscape architect select them on screen and lo and behold a truckload of them arrive the next day with a crane to fix them. All these trees were 5 m high. Next, we needed scaffolding. Again taobao.com to the rescue. And 3 days later you have the entire lot delivered to the site. This how most of the time you buy stuff in China. You save a lot of time this way. Even the landscape blocks and other small things came via the great taobao.com.
The structure was designed by an engineer used to doing large-scale steel structures but even then he had no confidence in this structure. All the cantilevers and large spans were actually first built solid and then the scaffolding removed one by one to check stability. Changchun is extremely windy most of the year with wind speed going up to 30-40kmph. So luck would have it the day we completed the structure it began to sway in the 32kmph wind. So in the end to stop the; sway ropes were tied on one side to anchor the structure to the existing building.
— Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi
