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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES |
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 Founded in 2004 by partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. Neri&Hu works internationally providing architecture, interior, master planning, graphic, and product design services. Currently working on projects in many countries, Neri&Hu is composed of multi-cultural staff who speak over 30 different languages. The diversity of the team reinforces a core vision for the practice: to respond to a global worldview incorporating overlapping design disciplines for a new paradigm in architecture.
 Neri&Hu’s location is purposeful. With shanghai considered a new global frontier, Neri&Hu is in the center of this contemporary chaos. The city’s cultural, urban, and historic contexts function as a point of departure for the architectural explorations involved in every project. Because new sets of contemporary problems relating to buildings now extend beyond traditional architecture, the practice challenges traditional boundaries of architecture to include other complementary disciplines.
Neri&Hu believes strongly in research as a design tool, as each project bears its unique set of contextual issues. A critical probing into the specificities of program, site, function, and history is essential to the creation of rigorous design work. Based on research, Neri&Hu desires to anchor its work on the dynamic interaction of experience, detail, material, form, and light rather than conforming to a formulaic style. The ultimate significance behind each project comes from how the built forms create meaning through their physical representations.
Neri&Hu has been featured widely by the press around the world, including Architectural Review, Wallpaper*, Architectural Record, ARCHITECT, FRAME, MARK, Abitare, area, Diseño Interior, Interior Design, I.D., Travel+Leisure, MARU, Perspective Magazine, ELLE Décor Italia, ELLE Deco China, Vogue China, Red Dot Year Book, Dezeen.com, Archidaily.com and countless more print and online media, as well as TV programs. Neri&Hu and their design have been recognized by a number of prestigious international design awards. Neri&Hu are the Overall Winner of The Blueprint Award for Design 2019 and The PLAN Award 2018. Founding Partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu are named EDIDA Designers of the Year 2017, Interior Designers of the Year of ICONIC Awards 2017 by German Design Council and Maison&Objet Asia Designers of The Year 2015. UK Wallpaper* announced them as 2014 Designers of The Year. They were inducted into U.S. Interior Design Hall of Fame in 2013. They were selected as one of the I. D. Magazine I.D. Forty and one of the 40 under 40 prominent designers shaping Hong Kong and Greater China respectively. Neri&Hu’s design has been awarded by INSIDE Festival, AR House Awards, AR Awards for Emerging Architecture, World Architecture Festival, D&AD Awards, Design Vanguard, Interior Design Magazine Best of Year Awards and Gold Key Awards, Chicago Athenaeum Good Design awards, I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review, Red Dot Awards, Contractworld Awards, The Great Indoors Awards, Design For Asia Awards, Perspective Awards, Taiwan Interior Design Awards, etc. |
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BUILDINGS |
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EXHIBITIONS |
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Reflective Nostalgia, Berlin (Germany), Aedes Architecture Forum, 15 october / 30 november 2022
 With Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, the Chinese avantgarde in architecture, research and teaching, product and interior design has arrived in Europe. In the exhibition Reflective Nostalgia, Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu are convincing in the way they examine the historical and the contemporary as well as the listed and the everyday and to transform them into new uses in a respectful and future-oriented manner. In addition to their numerous conversions and new buildings in Asia, such as residential and office buildings, theatres, shops or, for example, a chapel and a whisky distillery, the exhibition also shows projects from Europe, including a restaurant in Paris, a hotel in London and the expansion of the creative quarter Cologne-Ehrenfeld with an office building. Neri&Hu also design products and showrooms for international companies, thus demonstrating their diverse skills and the quality of their work in all scales and disciplines. With design confidence, they create exciting, sometimes surprising spatial constellations – from found and recycled materials or building parts of the respective location and by adding new elements. Historicising set pieces are omitted, while the charm and character of the 'old' remains legible and tangible and thus identity-forming in Neri&Hu's positive reinterpretation of the nostalgic. Their transdisciplinary design approach is in the DNA of the studio. As early as 2004, they were co-founders of Design Republic, a multidisciplinary design platform in Shanghai. The success of the broad spectrum of their work is reflected in numerous international awards. They currently teach at the Yale School of Architecture and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Rossana Hu was also appointed Chair of the Department of Architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai in 2021. The exhibition installation features architectural models, photographs and videos, as well as a selection of furniture. Neri&Hu's alternative reading of historical contexts, including all the contradictions and details, as well as the unexpected spatial compositions with which they respond to them in a magnificent way, can be experienced.
After more than two decades in which the Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin has dedicated itself with great continuity to Chinese architectural culture, it can now be observed that an extremely exciting spectrum of architecture and design studios has developed since then that belong to today's Chinese avantgarde. Neri&Hu are outstanding representatives of this group, who have developed their own specific approaches and have been able to position themselves with multifaceted projects in the context of resource-saving construction and sustainable transformation of architecture and urban spaces.
 The discussion about how to deal with buildings and neighbourhoods of past times is shaped by different interests in terms of building culture, society, ecology and especially economics. In times of increasing sustainable planning and building worldwide, however, the congenial couple set new standards early on, especially in China. A growing awareness of the values of past Chinese building culture and craft techniques as well as the realisation that resources are finite led to a rethinking process in which Neri&Hu played their part. Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu demonstrate their conviction to intensively study and reflect on the historical and the contemporary, including the everyday, and to enable new uses for it in a respectful yet future-oriented manner, both practically in their buildings, interiors, product and graphic design as well as in research and teaching.
 With their approach, Neri&Hu respond to a global and above all Asian trend in urban development and urban design: the disappearance of perceptible differences and characteristics of places and cities. They work
"... apart from the polarised development between technological progress and kitschy historicism, which globally but especially in the Asian region blur the differences between cities that are otherwise culturally unique and highly diverse, giving rise to vast landscapes of anonymous, characterless cities." Neri&Hu
Neri&Hu use Reflective Nostalgia as a method, a productive lens through which they have discovered an alternative reading of historical contexts as well as a new design process within that context. They take away the negative meaning of nostalgia and see it as a value. Inspired by the Russian-American scientist Svetlana Boym, Neri&Hu show that nostalgia has the potential to be constructive and not just reductive.
“Reflective nostalgia thrives on algia (the longing itself) and delays the homecoming— wistfully, ironically, desperately. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols.” Svetlana Boym
The studio's projects are expressions of the fascination of Reflective Nostalgia and are characterised by similar strategies such as the use of material contrasts, structural diversity and combinations of forms. However, each project has its own unique themes, for example in relation to dealing with the heritage from the French concession period in Shanghai (1849 to 1946), resistance to the commercialisation of false historical relics, or the role of representation in the polarity between past and present. In the works presented, one can sense the delicate balance between the contrasts of new and old, smooth and textured, refined and raw. Neri&Hu take up the challenge of Reflective Nostalgia by dealing with concepts and themes such as context, the role of the monument and the duality of destruction and development.
 The exhibition As diverse as Reflective Nostalgia appears in their projects, Neri&Hu also take diverse paths in their communication. Inspired by the warehouse or archive and the historical idea of the forum, the exhibition offers visitors various ways of approaching and understanding the concept of Reflective Nostalgia. The exhibition will feature around 30 projects, both completed and in the planning stage, from the fields of architecture, interior design, product design and graphics. Videos, numerous architectural models of various scales, photographs and a collection of chairs narrate the new and existing development projects and their connection with Reflective Nostalgia as a philosophy and method.
The projects
Among the projects presented from more than 20 cities worldwide are:
- The Waterhouse at South Bund, Shanghai, China
- Design Commune and Commune Social, Shanghai, China
- Rethinking The Split House, Shanghai, China
- Aranya Art Center, Qinhuangdao, China
- Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat, Yangzhou, China
- Suzhou Chapel, Suzhou, China
- Fuzhou Teahouse, Fuzhou, China
- The Chuan Malt Whisky Distillery, Emeishan, China
- Nantou City Guesthouse, Shenzhen, China
- Singapore Residence, Singapore
- Bow Street Boutique Hotel, London, UK
- Papi Restaurant, Paris, France
- Creative Office in Cologne, Germany
The Camerich Haus in Beijing, which Neri&Hu are currently planning, is also part of the exhibition. The Chinese furniture manufacturer Camerich has been an Aedes Cooperation Partner since 2019. |
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Neri&Hu, Neri&Hu: Traversing Thresholds, Roma, MAXXI. Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, 19 november 2021 / 6 february 2022
 Compie 10 anni il felice sodalizio creativo tra Alcantara, eccellenza del made in Italy e MAXXI, il Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo.
Curato da Domitilla Dardi (curatrice per il Design del MAXXI), dal 2018 il Progetto Alcantara-MAXXI si è evoluto nel format Studio Visit, che pone in relazione i Maestri del passato e quelli del presente, chiamati di volta in volta a dare una personale interpretazione delle opere dei grandi maestri in Collezione MAXXI Architettura, utilizzando Alcantara® come mezzo principale.
 L'edizione 2021 vede lo studio internazionale Neri&Hu confrontarsi con uno dei massimi autori presenti in Collezione: Carlo Scarpa.
Con Traversing Thresholds (letteralmente Attraversare soglie) quest’anno lo studio di progettazione architettonica interdisciplinare, con sede a Shanghai, getta un ponte culturale tra occidente e oriente, tra sensibilità e visioni.
A identificare la lettura scarpiana da parte degli autori è la nozione di ‘soglia’ - concetto presente sia nel cinese ‘jian’ che nel giapponese ‘ma’, traducibili con ‘spazio’ o ‘pausa’ - intesa in senso architettonico come mediazione fisica tra due ambienti spaziali contrastanti, interiorità ed esteriorità, pubblico e privato, e ritrovata nei passaggi spaziali del maestro italiano.
 “Riflettendo sul concetto di “soglia”, questa idea di “jian” può essere intesa come spazio, oppure come elemento mediano, o ancora come tempo”, spiega Lyndon Neri.
Aggiunge Rossana Hu “È lo spazio di un intervallo, ma anche una pausa se si pensa al tempo; quindi, non si tratta solo di uno spazio ma di una sorta di concetto astratto tra lo spazio e il tempo o tra due elementi strutturali. Un non so ché di vuoto contrapposto a qualcosa che va riempiendosi, quasi come il silenzio tra le note musicali”.
L’installazione pensata da Lyndon Neri e Rossana Hu rilegge la visione di Scarpa nei suoi nodi centrali: l’invenzione del dettaglio, il dialogo tra pieno e vuoto, l’accostamento creativo dei materiali.
Attraverso i punti focali di questo progetto vengono ripercorsi sei passaggi chiave dell’architettura scarpiana – Pivot Plane, Eroded Corner, Inserted Landscape, Floating Datum, Slit Window, Off-Axis – che riflettono su alcuni studi del Maestro: la sottrazione del pieno, il dialogo tra i materiali, la sospensione antigravitazionale, la progressione prospettica dello spazio, lo slittamento degli assi strutturali. Lezioni di architettura che nella lettura di Neri&Hu generano nuovo spazio attraverso una maglia regolare di pareti che si intersecano, dove le sei soglie sono occasione per chiamare il visitatore all’azione e al disvelamento delle fonti scarpiane.
La presenza di Alcantara, straordinario “materiale da costruzione” delle grandi idee progettuali, con tutto il suo potenziale di versatilità, tattilità ed eleganza, rende l’opera un vero punto di connessione tra passato e presente. Impiegato nelle varianti a pieno colore, oppure in differenti texture – da goffrate a laminate – il materiale si fa elemento cardine dell’architettura disegnata da Neri&Hu e accoglie il pubblico con la sua innata sensorialità.
"Rossana Hu e Lyndon Neri ci hanno dato un punto di vista diverso dell'opera di Carlo Scarpa, una delle più preziose degli Archivi di Architettura del MAXXI. " - commenta Domitilla Dardi, curatrice della mostra - "Tramite il concetto di "soglia" il senso dello spazio come percorrenza e passaggio si apre ad una sensibilità progettuale orientale, presente "in nuce" nell'opera di Scarpa ed esaltata nella lettura installativa degli architetti contemporanei".
Per ogni edizione di Studio Visit gli autori (Nanda Vigo, Formafantasma, Konstantin Grcic e ora Neri&Hu) sono stati invitati a dialogare con l’opera di uno o più Maestri della collezione di Architettura del MAXXI per restituirne una propria visione. Ogni progettista ha dedicato un periodo di ricerca agli archivi lavorando con la massima libertà nella scelta dei temi e delle opere. Il risultato di questa riflessione è stato di volta in volta esposto negli spazi del museo come una sorta di “stanza di lavoro”, uno “studio” aperto al pubblico e restituito sotto forma installativa.
Alcantara, in ognuna delle mostre, ha messo a disposizione le sue eccezionali doti di flessibilità e interpretazione della forma, qualità necessarie anche quando si compie una ricerca concettuale. Sperimentazione materica e materiali di studio hanno così trovato un’analogia stretta e generatrice di nuovo pensiero. |
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CREDITS |
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Photos © Neri&Hu
Text edit by Neri&Hu
Courtesy of Neri&Hu | v2com Newswire | MAXXI |
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China [Zhōngguó/Zhōnghuá]
» Xiwengzhuang [Xīwēng Zhèn] 
