Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, 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.
Lyndon Neri is a Founding Partner of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an inter-disciplinary international architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. In 2014, Wallpaper* announced Neri&Hu as 2014 Designer of The Year. In 2013, Mr. Neri was inducted into the U.S. Interior Design Hall of Fame with his partner Ms. Rossana Hu. The practice was the 2011 INSIDE Festival Overall Winner, won AR Awards for Emerging Architecture 2010 by Architectural Review and was selected as one of the Design Vanguards in 2009 by Architectural Record. Mr. Neri received a Master of Architecture at Harvard University and a Bachelor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to starting his own practice with partner Rossana Hu, he was the Director for Projects in Asia and an Associate for Michael Graves & Associates in Princeton for over 10 years, and also worked in New York City for various architectural firms.
Rossana Hu is a Founding Partner of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an inter-disciplinary international architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. In 2014, Wallpaper* announced Neri&Hu as 2014 Designer of The Year. In 2013, Mr. Neri was inducted into the U.S. Interior Design Hall of Fame with his partner Ms. Rossana Hu. The practice was the 2011 INSIDE Festival Overall Winner, won AR Awards for Emerging Architecture 2010 by Architectural Review and was selected as one of the Design Vanguards in 2009 by Architectural Record. Ms. Hu received a Master of Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Music from the University of California at Berkeley. Before establishing Neri&Hu with her partner Lyndon Neri, Ms. Hu worked for Michael Graves & Associates, Ralph Lerner Architect in Princeton, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York City, and The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in San Francisco.
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Neri & Hu's proposal was the winning entry in a competition for Schindler City. The multiple office blocks were a given part of the initial brief, due to planning approvals already in place when they took on the project. The architects decided to avoid designing a complex of isolated structures by combining the office towers with a special podium to create a "unified whole".
The 32,400-square-metre complex comprises open office spaces for 800 people, including meeting rooms, lounges, a showroom, a training center, factories, warehouses, and a research facility. This aided by the surrounding landscape and several courtyards both inside and outside the complex, also ensures that the blocks are unimposing and human in scale.
At the north-east end of the site, opposite the office towers, the podium rises in height to create a "fortress-like" boundary that contains a research facility. Its impermeable look is intended to reflect the private work conducted there.
Other notable elements in the Schindler City campus include a tall, slender white tower, which functions as a lift shaft to test the company's new elevators.
Schindler City Headquarters by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Annika Feuss.
Project description by Neri & Hu
Neri&Hu envisions a 32,400 sqm headquarters for leading elevator manufacturer Schindler, as part of a new corporate master plan including offices, showrooms, factories, warehouses, and research facility. Situated in the developing industrial area of Jiading, just outside of Shanghai’s city center, Neri&Hu sought to overcome the sense of isolation and vastness that characterizes industrial facilities by emphasizing the integration of human-scale landscape elements and public spaces throughout the project.
The resulting architectural proposal is two-part, a continuous base at ground level and floating lightboxes above. Challenging the typical office block typology of individual buildings loosely bound by greenery or paths, the architecture absorbs these elements into a unified podium that not only inextricably ties architecture to the landscape but makes seamless connections between all the various programs. These functions include shared amenities such as a 600 pax capacity canteen, an auditorium seating 200, several lounges and cafes, over 7,000 sqm of occupiable gardens, and a 300m long passageway featuring Schindler’s own moving walks to link it all together.
Schindler City Headquarters by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Annika Feuss.
At the north-east end of the site, the base podium rises and grows in height to form the Research & Development facility. This fortress-like enclosure, with its shifting volumes, is dynamic yet solid, representing the innovative if not private nature of the work conducted here. At the opposing end of the podium, within three glass boxes, 800 employees occupy office spaces on four levels above, including meeting rooms, lounges, archives, a showroom, and a training center. Each of the three buildings features a multi-story atrium that encourages visual and physical interactions between the different departments on each floor.
The two architectural elements that comprise the project are not only functionally unique but expressed in vastly different material palettes. Aligned with the client’s mission to engage with local cultures, the podium featuring gray brick, common building material in China, is a nod towards the material heritage of the project’s locale. For the glass boxes above, translucent channel glass sections, interspersed with white metal-framed window slots, compose a building façade that is bright, minimal, and elegant – a subtle reference to the company’s Swiss background. The resulting design is both firmly grounded in local cultures and building traditions while celebrating the innovative and forward-thinking corporate culture of Schindler.
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The objective of the project was to improve the east entrance of the museum, making it more attractive and unique. The result, a spectacular terracotta-coloured structure, in red travertine, was baptized as an "Urban Monument" by the architects.
The project was inspired by the idea of a traditional circular-shaped clay lantern, capable of drawing visitors' attention to the new cultural and commercial facilities offered by the museum, as well as a point of reference in the surrounding urban fabric. The structure minimizes the impact of the new building through careful consideration of mass and architectural details.
The top-placed "Monument" contains a series of publicly accessible areas – an outdoor terrace. Inside the cylinder grows an amphitheatre as a small space for cultural presentations, while a generous round skylight opening at its heart brings the sun into the corresponding ground floor patio area below. The delicate stone textures sit on top of a solid, concrete base.
From the plaza to the ground floor, a series of sculptural escalators, playing with space through compressions and expansions, leads to the real underground museum, topped off with a three-story light well at the bottom of the sunken piazza, creating a dramatic atmosphere.
The Platform, which houses the commercial spaces, follows a composition language that clearly differs from the rest of the building, a structure in red travertine.
Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Runzi.
Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Runzi.
Project description by Neri & Hu
XThe 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 for the architectural massing and detailing.
The building is composed of four parts: the partially sunken Base, the Sculptural Walk circulation enclosure, the elevated podium Platform, and lastly the Monument. The entire base is finished with cast-in-place concrete. Partially sunken from the level of the existing plaza, the base is conceived as a continuous ground for the public. At the entry to the first floor, Neri&Hu has partially retained the original wide steps. The steps descend down to connect to a sunken piazza. The solid concrete base contains the former museum spaces and restaurant which have been retained, along with newly inserted functions such as retail spaces and public restrooms. These inserted functions complement the activities of the adjacent pedestrian street.
Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Runzi.
From the ground level plaza, a series of escalators lead to the underground museum on the B2 level. The escalators are concealed within a sculptural form, featuring spaces of sectional play between compression and expansion, capped with a triple-story light well at the base of the sunken piazza, providing a sense of drama and intrigue.
Hovering just above the sunken base, is the Platform which is expressed as a post and lintel construction; a grid of stone columns and glass curtain walls supporting a floating roof house retail spaces. This retail level is intentionally expressed as a curtain wall to highlight the separation between the carved language of the base, and the circular sculpted massing of the civic potency above.
Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Runzi.
Capping the new building is the Monument, which houses a lounge on the second floor and an outdoor amphitheater above. The elevation is composed of diamond-shaped red travertine masonry units arranged at intervals to accentuate the transmissivity of light. On the northwest end of the existing museum building, a passage leads directly to the second-floor outdoor terrace, conceived as a hollowed-out bowl shaped amphitheater. The terrace acts as a grand extension to the dining and entertainment programs of the lounge. This space acts as a forum which is open to the public as a venue for various activities, while also serving as a platform for private performances and catwalks.
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The café project seeks to generate a dialogue between Shanghai's history and contemporary urban social value. The architectural studio tries to capture the spirit of the local urban fabric and create a narrative journey, starting from the traditional scene of the daily hustle and bustle in contrast to moments of leisure.
Inside, a primitive shelter is placed as the circulatory focal point of the space, where coffee is prepared and served. In contrast to the existing heavy architecture, the interior stainless steel structure was made as light as possible, inspired by the extension structures used in the past to extend the private space to the street.
Blue Bottle Zhang Yuan Cafe by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Runzi.
Blue Bottle Zhang Yuan Cafe by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Runzi.
Description of project by Neri&Hu
At the end of the 19th century, Zhang Yuan, the most famous garden of Shanghai, developed into one of the earliest public and commercial spaces in modern China, exemplifying and leading the emergence of a new Chinese urban lifestyle. In 2022, as Zhang Yuan reopens to the public after a complete rehabilitation of its historic buildings, Neri&Hu was commissioned by Blue Bottle to create a retail space in one of the old Shikumen typology residences. Coffee initiates a dialogue between Shanghai’s rich history and the contemporary urban social realm.
Amidst the architectural relics of Zhang Yuan, where the city’s collective memory resides, one could envision this scene described by Chinese writer Mu Xin – like tiny crabs scuttling in and out of their sandy shelters, people scatter about in the shadowy lanes of Shanghai at sunset. Within this vast network of alleys, people would go about in their daily hustle and bustle, but the Shanghainese could always appreciate a moment of leisure. Neri&Hu hopes to capture the spirit of the local urban fabric and weave a narrative journey for both locals and visitors to appreciate.
Due to historic preservation guidelines, the existing brick walls, doors, and windows of the original architectural façades and atriums are left untouched, and become a continuous backdrop for the insertion of new design elements. A primitive shelter, symbolizing a return to the origin of architecture, is erected in the center of the space; it is where the coffee is prepared and served, and forms the visual and circulatory focal point of the project. Along the exterior wall of the old building, an elongated space connects the main street to the atriums. This alley-like space within the building accommodates several benches and small tables against the windows and walls, a nod to the leisurely social moments of life in the Shikumen.
Blue Bottle Zhang Yuan Cafe by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Runzi.
To contrast with the heavy palette of the existing architecture, Neri&Hu meticulously studied the structure and its tectonic joinery, to make it as light as possible. The roof structure is built with brushed stainless steel while the roof surface is made of perforated and bent steel, materials that reflect the surroundings in a subtle and fuzzy manner. Neri&Hu was also inspired by the informal construction and simple attachments that people once used to extend their private spaces into the alley, the existing structural columns are thus commandeered with added metal rods and small platforms to function as light rails, side tables, benches, and object displays. Other than brand furniture, the project features a selection of repurposed traditional old furniture, on which the traces of time bestow a sense of warmth and familiarity, merging old and new, Blue Bottle and Shanghai.
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The industrial area is undergoing a renovation process, of which Neri&Hu is already a part for the refurbishment of this former warehouse used in the past for cotton textile production and which will now be the headquarters, offices, and retail concept shop of the Lao Ding Feng pastry brand, founded in 1911.
The area created between the new object and the original shell allows for flexible spaces for a cafeteria and a multi-purpose foyer. The ground floor will house the exhibition area, the flagship shop, the garden, and the café, while the first floor is mainly the headquarters and offices.
Lao Ding Feng Beijing by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Rhunzi.
Lao Ding Feng Beijing by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Rhunzi.
Description of project by Neri&Hu
Near the Northeast 5th Ring Road in Beijing, the project site is part of a once thriving industrial area with its own train depot called the Langyuan Station. In the past, it was used for transporting goods in and out of Beijing.
Today the neighborhood is undergoing a transitional phase, and Neri&Hu was called upon to design the adaptive reuse of an old warehouse building once used for cotton textile production for the main office and retail concept store for the historical Beijing pastry brand called Lao Ding Feng founded in 1911.
The original brick structure is composed of a main warehouse and three annex buildings, plus a courtyard garden. For projects like this, Neri&Hu’s strategy always begins with a thorough investigation of what parts of the building at present may be kept and restored, while any new additions should not only respect the existing, but also stand in contrast to it, so that a clear distinction may be drawn between old and new.
Lao Ding Feng Beijing by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Zhu Rhunzi.
The design concept is inspired in part by the client’s main product, traditional Chinese style pastries often formed in a decorative mold — the notion that a container may hold or form the shape of its contents within. Here, a new cast concrete object is molded into the old brick shell, its various openings and negative spaces form the main retail, gallery and office spaces. After pouring the concrete and allowing it to cure, specialized craftsmen then bush-hammer it for a soft textural quality that both contrasts with and also compliments the old bricks. In certain moments, the new inner concrete will seep out and appear on the façade to fill in the voids or indicate new access points. The gap spaces between the new object and the original shell become flexible areas for a café and multipurpose lobby. The ground floor contains the exhibition area, the flagship store, the garden and the cafe while the second floor is mainly the head office.
Traversing through the new concrete object and experiencing the interstitial spaces between the new insertion and the old building brings a sense of connectivity between past, present, and future and gives this historical Beijing pastry brand a new home.
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Neri&Hu was commissioned to design a house for three siblings that wanted a new, larger residence that recalls the typology pitched-roof form of their childhood home. The architects proposed a design based on traditional siheyuan residences, which typically accommodate multi-generational families in buildings with a central courtyard.
In this project, Neri&Hu have explored how the notions of community life and collective memory can be expressed spatially. The original site featured a lush green border that formed a natural green buffer along the perimeter, a feature the architects have retained.
The form of the building references the previous house, with elements such as deep eaves borrowed from traditional Malay houses. The building is organized on two floors, placing all the common spaces around the central garden, which occupies the space of the patio and serves as a garden to remember the mother of the family.
The large roof contains private areas including upstairs bedrooms, while from the outside the building retains the appearance of a single-storey hipped-roof bungalow.
The House of Remembrance by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Fabian Ong
Project description by Neri&Hu
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.
The previous house was built in the style of the British colonial bungalow, with hybrid elements of traditional Malay houses such as deep roof eaves for rain sheltering, as well as Victorian details. Understanding the functional importance of the roof and the client’s emotional attachment to its form, Neri&Hu embrace the symbolic nature of the pitched roof and combine it with a reinterpretation of the courtyard house.
In this project, Neri&Hu have explored how notions of communal living and collective memory can be expressed spatially. The original site featured a lushly vegetated edge that formed a natural green buffer along the perimeter, a feature that architects have retained. The new two-story house organizes all communal spaces around a central garden, which occupies the courtyard space serving as a memorial garden for the family’s matriarch.
The ground level is extroverted in nature, with expansive glass walls to connect all spaces to the gardens along the edge of the site. Neri&Hu aim to maximize visual transparency from the communal areas – living room, open kitchen, dining room, and study, so that from the ground floor the inhabitants may look into the central memorial garden while cocooned by the dense vegetation surrounding the house. Large glass doors can slide open so that in optimal temperate conditions the house can take advantage of cross ventilation and direct access to the gardens.
For the upper level, Neri&Hu pursue the idea of the pitched-roof form as not only a signifier of shelter but also an element that both unifies and demarcates the public and private realms. All private bedrooms, located on the upper introverted level, are housed within the roof’s steep gables so that when seen from the exterior, the house retains the appearance of a single-story hipped-roof bungalow. Skylights and large glass walls connect to bedroom balconies where views are oriented outwards to the perimeter garden spaces. Through sectional interplay, the design team introduce three double-height areas to connect the communal functions and the corridors above. These spaces of interpenetration create vertical visual connections to allow one to peer into the public realm from the private.
One can see a carved void in the roof volume, which frames a small tree before arriving at the central memorial garden. On the exterior, where balconies and sky wells are carved out from the volume of the pitched-roof form, the walls transition from smooth to board-formed concrete to take on the texture of wooden planks.
The circulation on the ground floor is based on the shape of the circle to reinforce the ambulatory experience of walking in the round and to define the memorial space as a sacred element. Since the circle has no edges or terminating vantage points, it allows one to always find a return to the center both spiritually and physically. The garden symbolically defines the heart of the home as an ever-palpable void, persisting as the common backdrop to the collective lives of all inhabitants.
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The project is the result of a competition organised by Pernod Ricard for the design of its first whisky distillery and the brand's headquarters in the country. The whole concept of the project is imbued with a deep sensitivity to the local nature and to the historical traces of the events that took place there.
The main idea was based on the construction of a work that would have a physical permanence beyond the passage of time, that is, a timelessness was sought that would manage to maintain and continue the cultural heritage inherited from the place.
The duality "mountain-water", known as "Shan-hui", appears through the intention of temporal stability of the work but at the same time through a process of formal metamorphosis of the building.
This can be seen in the bases of the outline of the administration buildings, whose traces are the circle and the square, representing the sky and the earth respectively. The northern part of the building, on the other hand, is made up of three longitudinal volumes whose programme is intended for the production of the whisky itself. They try to imitate and reinterpret the vernacular architecture with clay tiles and, in a certain way, to give it modernity with a concrete structure, returning to this idea of contrast.
The Chuan Malt Whisky Distillery by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Hao Chen
The Chuan Malt Whisky Distillery by Neri&Hu. Photograph by Hao Chen
Description of project by Neri&Hu
For over a thousand years Mount Emei has persisted as one of the most deeply spiritual places in China and was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. The revered ground upon which our site sits has a rich history itself – through the centuries, this land was once an impressive monastery, the site of several historic battles, and a stopping point along many pilgrimage and trade routes. While any built remnants of the past no longer remain on site, its very emptiness is powerfully suggestive of all of its fabled memories. Three years ago, Neri&Hu won the design competition and took up the challenge of designing a distillery and home for Pernod Ricard’s first whisky in China, an opportunity to create a timeless architecture that speaks to the core values of a visionary new brand as well as the material and cultural heritage it aspires to sustain.
Surrounded on three sides by a winding creek, and with the majestic Emei peak as a backdrop, the site for this project is an exemplification of the Chinese notion of the duality of natural elements which make up the world we live in. Shan-shui literally means ‘mountain-water.’ While shan represents strength and permanence, shui represents fluidity and transformation; they are two opposing yet complementary forces. In the spirit of this philosophy, the position of the proposal is to conceive a gesture whose very strength lies in its humbleness and simplicity, by its profound respect for nature. This paradigm is also manifested in the shan shui painting, one of the three genres of traditional Chinese painting, in which the integration of two elements leads to another dimension of the picturesque. The architecture itself manifests this balanced duality in many ways, with the industrial buildings as a modern interpretation of vernacular Chinese architecture, and the visitor buildings as elemental geometries grounded in the terrain. 
Sketch. The Chuan Malt Whisky Distillery by Neri&Hu.
Three long buildings housing the whisky production facilities are situated at the north side of the site; parallel in formation, they are tucked into the natural gentle slope of the land with gradually descending rooflines. In an interpretation of vernacular architecture, reclaimed clay tiles give a humble texture to the pitched roofs that rest upon a modern concrete post-and-beam structure. The infill of rock walls is made from the very boulders extracted from the ground during site leveling, so that the cycle of destruction and recreation may continue in permanent evolution.
In contrast to the vernacular roots of the industrial buildings, the two visitor experience buildings are built upon fundamental geometries: the circle and the square, which in Chinese philosophy represent heaven and earth, respectively. The round tasting experience building is partially submerged in the ground, with five subterranean tasting rooms surrounding a domed courtyard that contains a cascading water feature in the middle. The upper part of the dome reveals itself out of the ground slightly; with three concentric brick rings perched atop, it subtly mirrors the silhouette of Mount Emei. This sculptural landform becomes an iconic presence that can be seen from every part of site, and meanwhile, acts as a culminating destination from which visitors can enjoy a full panoramic vista. The square restaurant and bar building is located further down the topography, cantilevered on two sides with one corner hovering over the river bank. While the dining space is organized along the building’s perimeter for open views, at the core an open-air courtyard is oriented to frame the Emei peak as a borrowed scene.
Besides a deep appreciation for the site’s natural resources, the project is also an embodiment of the refined sense of artistry embedded in whisky-making and blending, which is in dialogue with traditional Chinese craftsmanship and knowledge of materials. A variety of concrete, cement, and stone mixtures form the base material palette, finding resonance in the strong mineral presence of the site. Accent materials are drawn from those used in whisky craft, such as the copper distillation pots to the aged oak casks. Throughout the project, Neri&Hu tries to embody the Chinese concept of the dichotomy of two elements that exist in opposition yet complement each other, and to strike a harmonious balance between architecture and landscape, between industry and visitor experience, between mountain and water.
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