Articles by Collin Chen

When “in the PARK” reached out to us, their multi-brand boutique on Anfu road had been in operation for three years and a half. While their brand identity and architecture had become increasingly coherent, they encountered some functional issues in the physical store space. They planned to, within the shortest timescale and leanest construction manageable, extract as much productive potential of the store as possible: maximize the overall quality of the space, diversify the modes of display, expand the storage capacity, improve shopping routes, optimize the lighting, and so on. Picture the store at the time as a back alley in the urban center of a rapidly modernizing city: limited land (store floor plan) faced with continuing population (SKU) boom and increasing needs (diversifying brands and products) of its citizens. With misplaced items like packaging materials all over the space, the storage and merchandising were eating into each other. The brands, yet to be integrated, competed for limited display capacity.

B&B and Games – At the end of 2020, near the Great Wall at Shuiguan in Huairou, Beijing, we designed three projects for Xiaoxi B&B simultaneously, perhaps it is more appropriate to call them rural hotels than B&Bs. I have designed and run such hotels before, and I would love to have a unique living experience of “breaking away from daily life” and a lifestyle of “here and now”. Architecture, as a carrier of this conception, is not a “home building” in the first place, for it holds little real life and memory of the owner, instead it resembles a “theme park” with the characteristics above, a reciprocating game between reality and fantasy. Since it is a game, there must be rules. The owner’s requirements are simple: to keep the characters of the three existing houses. And we will make up the rules.

The Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts is located at the beginning section of Xi’an’s Datang Everbright City, south of the famed Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. The client asked for a new architectural icon at the East Entry of the museum. In response to the brief, Neri&Hu’s proposal takes the idea of a monolithic urban monument as the guiding concept to not only satisfy the museum’s newly expanded cultural and commercial functions but to also serve as an anchor and a durable symbol of social history for the surrounding urban fabric. Since the vicinity of the site is occupied by existing galleries, the design intervention minimizes the impact of the new building through careful consideration of the architectural massing and detailing.

The traditional Chinese courtyard house or siheyuan is a typology well-known for its illustration of Confucian ideals, accommodating extended family units wherein many generations live under one roof. To live under the same roof means to live together, and this metaphor is the nexus that ties the notion of community, especially in an intimate context, to the form crafted for this project. For this private residence commission, Neri&Hu is given a set of unique requests by the client: the new house constructed in place of the previous one should accommodate all three siblings, who as adults have outgrown their shared house; it should include a small memorial space in the form of a garden for their late mother; lastly, the new construction should retain the memory of the pitched-roof form, a defining feature of their childhood home.

Sitting at the Lijia Intelligent Park in the municipality of Chongqing, the 15,000 square meters Lijia Smart Hall is expected to become a central stage for the annual Smart China Expo, a professional event to encourage global exchanges of smart technologies and smart industry. Envisioning an iconic architecture piece that both lives up to its role and is fully integrated with surrounding lavish vegetation, the Gensler team developed the design focusing on eight principles—simplicity, relevance, timelessness, distinction, scalability, technology, experience, and connectivity.