Cultural cornucopia

As a director of engineering conglomerate Arup in China, Rory McGowan has collaborated with some of the world’s leading architects to reshape the Beijng skyline in the build-up to the 2008 Olympics. When growth in new projects plateaued last year, he took on work in Mongolia, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and Thailand. McGowan, 45, his Russian wife, Varvara Shavrova, and their two children moved to Beijing from London five years ago.

Early in my career I discovered that successful engineering solutions are rooted in honest communication between people that often have different cultural backgrounds, political perspectives, and/or business agendas. Developing Arup’s winning bid for the China Central Television Headquarters competition in 2002 forced me to come to terms with the issues confronting China’s capital in its quest to develop iconic new-built spaces at a breakneck pace. Learning what to listen out for from clients, technical advisers, policymakers and staff required me to attune my ear to what wasn’t said – as well as the discussion around me.

Project meetings in China are conducted in English and Mandarin. Studying with a private Mandarin tutor twice a week for three years gave me the grounding to understand the gist of most discussions.

Helping the new generation of Chinese architects climb a vertiginous learning curve has been satisfying. The principals of firms such as Mada in Shanghai and Mad and Urbanus in Beijing studied and worked abroad, so we share a common design language and reference points.

Design, development and construction takes 5-10 years. I’ve been privileged to form enduring friendships with local business partners. Casa da Música, Porto’s cultural landmark, took eight years to realise. Rui Furtado, the head of the Portuguese firm AFA, our local partners, introduced me to his country’s treasures. I particularly enjoyed the Boa Nova Tea House, designed by Portugese architect Alvaro Siza, and the fantastic seafood.

My first voluntary project was designing and building a 400ft cable suspension walkway into a Cameroon national park. The site borders Nigeria. Working with the World Wide Fund for Nature, we designed the bridge in London. I then took a four-month leave of absence to lead a team of volunteers and local professionals to complete the project. Learning how to motivate volunteers and how to be a contractor were new experiences for me. I have been back a few times to do other work for the park.

In 1994 I spent eight months in Tanzania working as an assistant to one of east Africa’s most prominent social anthropologists. We conducted an appraisal of the healthcare needs of the 1m desperately poor people living in the region. This project brought home the human side of engineering. One of the greatest lessons learned was that the presence of a new well or clinic in a remote village was not nearly as important as understanding the process by which it came to be there.

Doing a work placement at the Budapest Technical University in 1986 made me realise that the on-the-ground reality in foreign countries often differs from what is reported in the media. When I wanted to exchange money I would open my dormitory window to announce my intentions and students from Cambodia, Cuba and other communist regimes would show up and offer me competitive rates on Hungarian forint. On my budget of a few pounds sterling per week I lived like a king, enjoying the city’s fantastic thermal baths (a national health system perk) and drinking fine Tokai wine. The craic got going early.

My family and I are exploring our next international move. Everyone gets to vote once my firm and I agree on a shortlist of possible locations. My wife is an artist who shares my enthusiasm for adventure and challenging environments. She left Russia as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev lifted the curtain and hasn’t looked back.

Our children started their lives with blended cultural expectations. We named Fionn Alexander after a mythological Irish hero/pagan and a Russian saint and Kirill Barney Patrick after the monk who established the Cyrillic alphabet. They spend summer holidays at our holiday cottage in Mayo [Ireland] sometimes with my extended family. This has given them a strong connection to Ireland.

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Mandarin and mahjong

Fionn, 12, and Kiril, eight, study at a prestigious Chinese national school where they have become fluent in reading and writing Mandarin. Fang Cao Di is a highly competitive academic school, drawing students from numerous countries. Students born on the mainland have to wear red scarves and recite Communist party slogans in the classroom. Foreigners are exempted from these sessions. A Chinese teacher helps my children with their homework and an English tutor from London ensures their first language proficiency doesn’t slide.

When we first arrived in Beijing we enrolled them in a bilingual school operated by Hong Kong Chinese educators. We transferred them because we feared they were falling between two stools. The private school fees were eight times the cost of the state school.

Buying residential property was not straightforward when we moved in 2005. We were interested in an old courtyard house in a Beijing hutong, because we enjoyed the vitality of street life. People playing mah-jong or sleeping on a cot in the street was the antithesis of the individualistic societies we had come from. But we ran the risk that any courtyard house we bought might be demolished and we would receive below-the-market compensation from the government. At the time we were looking, a hutong house cost about $500,000. Prices have since rocketed to five times that. It was impossible to get a mortgage and it would have been difficult to get the money out of the country once we sold. Rich Chinese families have bought these architectural treasures as an investment. Typically, they have the connections, or guanxi, to ensure they won’t suffer traumatic financial loss if a hutong is redeveloped.