I talked with my childhood friend Tian Yang and his spouse today. We had not really talked for many years, but once we started, it became a three-hour conversation that felt strangely short.
They live in Genova and run a studio together, as partners in both life and work. I joked that both of us are architects, just in totally different areas. They thought that was pretty funny. Apparently they had never thought about “chip architects” before.
What surprised me was how much overlap there is between what they do and what I do. Architecture, in their sense and in my sense are obviously different, but the way of thinking is not that different. You need to hold the whole picture in your head while caring about countless details. You need to communicate with many people. You need to make trade-offs constantly. That part felt unexpectedly familiar.
Their studio does not only do architecture, but also interior design, furniture design, and more. Yang clearly has a very high standard for art and aesthetics. I know almost nothing about aesthetics, so I asked him a question I had always vaguely had: are commercial success and artistic pursuit contradictory?
He said yes, in some sense, but in the long run they should align. Because in the end, whether it is architecture, interior design, or furniture, the work still has to be functional. It has to serve people. It should be beautiful, but not in some empty or self-indulgent way. Beauty is not separate from use.
One example they gave was a dumpling restaurant they designed. Of course it should look beautiful. But that is not just for artistic vanity. It also helps the restaurant attract customers. It shapes how people feel in the space. It creates value. So beauty is not separate from function. It can be part of function.
In Italy, aesthetics seems embedded in culture at a very deep level. Maybe so deep that people there do not even consciously notice it. They need to live in beautiful environments, to visit beautiful places, to have beauty in ordinary life. It is just part of being human to them, almost like eating good food.
That struck me, especially when I compared it to the Bay Area. They asked whether we go to concerts or exhibitions, and I laughed and said there is basically no such thing here. Their life in Genova sounds full of music, exhibitions, historic spaces, and conversation. Life in the Bay Area feels much more practical, much more work-driven, much less rooted.
History matters here. Yang lives in a house from 1544, which is an absurd thing to even imagine from an American perspective. Centuries of continuity do something to a place: they shape not just architecture, but also people’s instincts about beauty, daily life, and what kind of environment feels worth preserving. The Bay Area, by contrast, feels culturally young. It has enormous vitality, but not the same historical depth. Immigration adds another layer. Chinese, Indians, and countless others come mainly to work, survive, settle down, and build a life. That naturally creates a certain atmosphere. Useful, ambitious, practical, but not necessarily aesthetically rooted.
China is more complicated. We do have a long history, obviously. But maybe Yang is right that the continuity of culture and aesthetics has been broken for a long time, maybe since the end of Qing dynasty or even earlier. The chain was not carried all the way into modern life in the same way it seems to have been in parts of Italy or Europe. So unlike in parts of Italy or Europe, where aesthetics still seems embedded in daily existence, in China the thread often feels fractured: not absent, but no longer fully continuous.
Perhaps that is why this conversation unsettled me a little. I had always assumed aesthetics was something extra, something optional, something that only mattered once more practical needs had been met. But now I am no longer sure. Beauty does make people happier. It does make life better, just as better food does. You do not need to live in a mansion before you can care about art, design, or the quality of the space around you. These are not luxuries that only belong to a small elite. They are part of an ordinary human life, and in that sense, something everyone can and should equally enjoy.
Maybe aesthetics is not a luxury for people who have already solved life. Maybe it is one of the things that makes life worth solving in the first place.