{"id":5625,"date":"2019-02-19T00:08:22","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T00:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alphamen.asia\/?p=5625"},"modified":"2019-09-02T06:54:02","modified_gmt":"2019-09-02T05:54:02","slug":"ben-wood-fighter-pilot-turned-entertainment-visionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/ben-wood-fighter-pilot-turned-entertainment-visionary\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fighter Pilot Turned Entertainment Visionary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mark Andrews<\/strong> meets martini maestro and design guru Ben Wood<\/strong>, who is on a mission to empower – and imbibe – the next generation of middle-class Chinese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ben Wood is a modern day renaissance man: a former fighter pilot now on a mission to bring the joys of flying light aircraft to China; a long term bar owner who claims to do the best Martini in Shanghai, he will always be best known as the architect behind the city’s entertainment enclave Xintiandi. Design runs through his veins and into the Nehru collared shirt he wears for the interview, another of his creations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You got into architecture relatively late, can you explain what attracted you?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I really fell into it. Perhaps the early influence was from my childhood. My father\u2019s most interesting friend was an architect and had this amazing house he had designed but I always thought to be an architect you had to have an innate talent of being able to draw, I didn\u2019t know you could be taught it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I moved back to the US after the Air Force I opened a ski mountaineering school in Colorado, having learned to be an instructor in Switzerland. There wasn\u2019t a lot of money in it so I opened my own bar, restaurant and B&B, which I designed myself. Then the guy who sold me liquor asked me to design a house for him, and it really started from there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day a former Berkley architecture professor walked into my office, looked into me and my designs, and said that I had to go and study architecture or that one day I\u2019ll regret it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did the Xintiandi project come about and what is its legacy? <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Vincent Lo, the sole developer, had a non-executive board of five directors. They all objected to him making me the architect as I was a small company and the least corporate. The design I presented kept the existing buildings, whereas they were expecting a brand new shopping mall. I don\u2019t believe in preservation but if there are existing buildings that represent a certain period of history, then they are worth saving. The board, however, didn\u2019t believe anyone would go into the old buildings and eat a single meal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mark<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Vincent had recently been on holiday to Tuscany and I had asked him if he had visited San Gimignano.  He answered that he had and I said to him ‘you just bought a neglected San Gimignano like it was 50 years ago, don\u2019t tear it down’. When I looked at Xintiandi I saw beautiful old two storey buildings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one had ever done anything like it. It marked the first time in China where there was leisure space for the people, and it coincided with the meteoric rise of the middle class. When I arrived in Shanghai, the only decent restaurants were in hotels, and people generally didn\u2019t eat out. Now everywhere wants a space to celebrate middle-class Chinese<\/g> people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My DR Bar was the third place to open in\nXintiandi. I had been so intimidated by all these cynics that I wanted to prove\nto them that not only was I the architect but I was going to put down some\nserious money to open my own bar to show how much I believed in this place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You currently have a project to build a light aircraft in China, can you explain more?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s actually related to an architectural project \u2013 The Campus – I\u2019ve been working on. This brings new educational opportunities to China where people can learn things they never thought they could learn. I convinced the client to put a flying school into the building. The intention is to introduce young people to the experience of flying an aeroplane because the range of skills you need to be a private pilot are enormous. What it does most though is give you extraordinary confidence and that\u2019s what\u2019s needed in China; these kids are not told they can do anything in the world. It\u2019s one thing to fly in an airliner and have a few cocktails but it\u2019s another to get into a small aircraft and fly into the middle of a thunderstorm and survive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mark<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

About a year and a half ago the CAAC adopted near-verbatim the FAA rules on light aircraft, so now for the first time, you can build a light aircraft or assemble one from a kit in China,\u00a0whereas before you could import with difficulty a complete one. The flying school and building the aircraft are about putting in the resources for this and sharing my love of flying \u2013 I don\u2019t expect to make any money from it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more <\/em>Society<\/strong> stories click here<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Andrews meets martini maestro and design guru Ben Wood, who is on a mission to empower – and imbibe – the next generation of middle-class Chinese. Ben Wood is a modern day renaissance man: a former fighter pilot now on a mission to bring the joys of flying light aircraft to China; a long<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":5626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[110,2644,178,128,1124,260,2645],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphamen.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}